Two weeks ago, Jane fell and broke her patella (for those of you who don’t know me personally, Jane is my wife of 29 years). Tuesday, she had surgery. While she was in surgery, I sat outside Methodist Hospital in suburban Minneapolis on a white plastic chair at a white plastic table chatting with Michael Bartholomew, he was wearing a hoodie and had a 12-sprout goatee and a cross tattooed under his right eye. He was there for his grandmother’s knee surgery. He sat under the No Smoking sign chain smoking Kools and throwing the butts into the hydrangeas. It was a seventy-degree, blue sky morning. It was his birthday. He was 23.
We were bored so I told him stories of my travels, wandering Europe and north Africa when I got out of the army, of sleeping on the beach in Spain, of being attacked on the beach in Morocco and the next day being asked to marry a slim, dark-eyed Moroccan teenager by her father. I told him about living in Tokyo and riding a motorcycle around the world; SE Asia, Australia, Nepal, India, the African continent. He listened rapt, his eyes fixed somewhere distant, ignoring the cigarette between his fingers. His geography was quite good, particularly countries on the African continent. He wanted to know what continent I liked best. He said if he had $10,000, that he’d disappear into the world.
Michael had ridden the bus from Seattle for the surgery. The trip took two and half days. When he got here, he took another bus from his grandmother’s house to the Minneapolis Institute of Arts (MIA) and spent the day at the Van Gogh exhibit. In elementary school, Michael read at the college level. I asked him what his favorite book was; Harry Potter, he’s read them all many times. There’s a library within walking distance of his grandmother’s house, he told me that. He didn’t graduate from high school and doesn’t have a GED. Or a driver’s license. He has an expired Georgia ID card.
Michael went to jail for the first time when he was fourteen. Since then, he’s spent almost five years in detention or jail. The girl he had a crush on when he was a freshman in high school was shot in the face with a shotgun at a house party. He cried for her when she was killed, he was crying when he told me the story.
He talked about his friends in Seattle and Baton Rouge and small towns in Georgia, friends he did drugs with and whose spare beds, couches and porches he slept on, about a cellmate who ratted him out for stealing a guard’s lunch, a crime that got Michael sixty days in the hole. He’d shared the guard’s lunch with the cellmate. He was in a gun battle with another friend over a stolen car, Michael had a 9mm with a laser sight, they shot at each other until they both ran out of bullets. Nobody was hurt.
He wanted to join the Army, he’d spent time at an ROTC high school. But with his criminal record and face tattoo, he’s not eligible. He works as a construction laborer. He’s installed tile and crown moldings, maybe that’s a career.
His mother’s a devout Catholic. She’d flown up from Georgia for the surgery. He told me a story about her refusing to let him out of the house and when he snuck out, chasing him in her van. He asked some “hillbillies” hanging around a shack, a confederate flag on the wall, to hide him, told them that it was his girlfriend’s mother in the van. When she stopped and asked if they’d seen her son, the hillbilly’s threatened her with a shotgun until Michael came out of hiding and begged them not to shoot her. They cussed him for lying. He doesn’t know his father.
He’s on a prescription drug for his chemical dependency. He stood and vomited into the trash can beside our table three times during our conversation. He complained about the drugs and said he was fine.
Jane’s surgery went very well. She’s home and comfortable and recovering nicely.
John walked up to me in the Best Western parking lot to tell me that he liked the Revival. Small talk, he traded his Ford pickup for an Indian motorcycle, he liked state government but not the federal government and he shouldn’t have to pay federal taxes, soon we’re going to send troops to Ukraine and their deaths will depopulate the United States.
A year ago his wife found him unconscious on the bathroom floor covered with blood and feces, she turned him over and gave him CPR until the ambulance crew got there. He talked about his three daughters under six and his wife at home, about the intermittent pain, overwhelming and unpredictable, about not wanting to die. He’s 30 and delivers medical oxygen tanks for a job. He didn’t tell me his diagnosis.
I chanced upon the Everwild Music Festival at Legend Valley, an outdoor venue of rolling grassy hills surrounding a little valley, stages at the bottom facing an open area for audience and dancing and further back a crescent of food trucks and vendors hawking beer, swag and grease. The Grateful Dead (and pretty much everybody else from the seventies and eighties) played there. The hair, the tie dye, the dirt and dust, the incense and pot smoke, the tents and sleeping bags, the costumes and clothes (and lack of clothes), the music, the energy, the raw sensuality; it was 1973 and I was just seventeen.
The lineup included a dozen or so bands I’d never heard of; Madison Pruitt rocked the hell out of her guitar all by herself in an off-stage tent, wonderful, gravely voice and missing the high notes (she needs to lay off them and celebrate the grit). Gabe Reed fronting for Mooky rocked the main stage with a hip-hop alt-rock theme with no regard for costumery, making the crowd shimmy and stomp in baggy shorts and painfully north European skin tones. Artikal Sound System was a well oiled machine presented under a dazzling light show led by fuck-bomb spraying frontwoman and vocalist Logan Rex. I kept thinking that it would suck to have to follow her onto the stage….
Yesterday I rode past the Shawnee Mission Church, there were cars in the gravel lot. I yanked on the doors at the top of the steps, they wouldn’t open and I turned to leave and someone unlatched them from the inside. Helmet hair, riding jacket, jeans and boots, I walked in at the front of the congregation. The Reverend Clifford Burgess stopped his sermon, shook my hand and welcomed me. Before I could sit, I had to shake the hands of all ten parishioners.
After the sermon, Reverend Burgess and I chatted. He’s married and has a daughter, “the loud one in front,” he trained to be a car mechanic, worked as a carpenter and then spent four years in ministry school. For a while he owned a Gold Wing motorcycle (Honda’s big touring bike). He had the closest shave and best-trimmed mustache I’ve ever seen (except maybe in the movies). He described his religion as non-denominational, an intersection of Baptist and Nazarene. The church building before it was a church was a soda pop bottling factory, the handicap ramp is where the loading dock used to be.
I rode on wet roads all day and didn’t get rained on. Pays to go to church.
This is getting long but before I get on the motorcycle, I want to tell you about Taylor and her new husband Bonanza Marco Polo Napoleon Cummings. Married last week, they’re honeymooning in Logan Ohio. Bonanza is from Jamaica, accepted on an athletic scholarship to the University of Detroit (track and field, he’s a sprinter). He’s working on his MBA. Taylor is an architect, commercial and residential, she particularly likes the fact that their hotel is across the street from Hocking Hills Moonshine where shots are a buck apiece.
My son, Eli, works in Bethesda, MD. This morning he texted me an invoice from a towing company for $519.75 to tow a garbage truck eight miles. I know something about that.
When I was an undergraduate studying Chinese at the University of MInnesota (1978-1982), I drove a wrecker for Rice Street Towing in east St. Paul. I drove from 3:00 to 7:00 in the evening during the school year; rush hour in the winter in Minnesota. The job paid $7.50 an hour, big money in those days (tuition was $180.00 a quarter).
The company was owned by Dick and Peggy Berget. He ran the shop, maintained the trucks and drove a truck when needed; she took the calls, dispatched the drivers and took money from customers who came to pick up their cars from the lot. There were bars on the window of her office and she kept a .38 revolver in the cash drawer. At all hours, the place, was cloudy with smoke, Marlboros in the shop, Kool menthols in the office. They had a mutt, I can’t remember its name. The dog ate burgers and fries tossed on the oily shop floor by drivers cleaning out their cabs. Dick and Peggy were divorced and hated each other.
They had the Highway Patrol contract so we worked everything from jump starts to semi rollovers. It was a dangerous job; lying on my back dropping the driveshaft or backing off the brakes on a semi-tractor in sub-zero weather while rush hour traffic raced past on black ice a few feet from my face was, well, something.
Garbage trucks (we called them “packers”) break all the time and we towed them routinely. They’re heavy. One afternoon, I picked one up, the truck was full and I had to pull it to the dump to empty it before taking it to a repair shop. The driver was sitting next to me as we exited the long down grade on southbound Interstate 35W onto the exit at Black Dog Road. The exit is a sharp downhill curve and the wrecker brakes weren’t slowing us down, air brakes give you what they give you. And of course, all that weight on the rear means very little weight on the front tires of the wrecker, very unnerving when the steering wheel of a big truck goes soft in your hands and the truck isn’t turning and the weight on the back is shoving you forward and the bar ditch is getting close and you’re working the hell out of clutch, throttle and shift lever looking for a lower gear. We made it, although I’m not sure how, I must have found that gear, but I am pretty sure that poor driver is still losing sleep.
An experience like that is worth at least five hundred and twenty bucks.
Sorry about all that. What I planned to write about this morning was Cody and Justin, second marriages for both, three kids, nine, six and two, one from her previous, two together. He’s from Detroit, a history major at the University of Michigan and an Army medic in Fallujah, they met playing World of Warcraft on line. She drove to Detroit to meet him for the first time. He works second shift at the front desk at the Best Western, she works first shift at the breakfast bar. His politics are hard left and we had that conversation.
Cody and I chatted this morning. We talked about Cole Porter. Cole Porter is from Peru, apparently the town is reluctant to celebrate its most notable son because he was gay.
There’s a lot to say about Cody and Justin, and Denise who owns Club 14 where I had dinner and her waitress Katie but I need to take a shower and get on the motorcycle.
Yesterday I promised I was going home and that I’d leave you alone.
My apologies but before I do, I want to talk about Ursula again. (I wrote about her a few days ago, the post is still up.) A friend messaged me and asked me if I liked her. He shouldn’t have had to ask. That he did is my fault. My bad writing. I wanted readers to like her. I like her very much. More than that, I admire her.
Ursula is not a victim but she is a sympathetic character. Her father abandoned her when she was in high school, married her off when she was sixteen. The first marriage went bad and she kept trying. In her third marriage, she was physically beaten. Using nothing but wits and grit (those quintessential American values we all pride ourselves on), she’s assembled an enviable life, a life of tranquility and peace surrounded by the animals she loves and trusts in a beautiful place. Finally, she’s safe.
She’s a born-again Christian and has those insufferable beliefs. But why wouldn’t she? The Christian right has aggressively courted her. They’ve given her difficult life context, a belief system, they’ve made her important. What have we, the liberal left, done for her? We’ve been failing for decades, abortion is irrelevant to her life and we lost that one anyway. Guns, she’s a woman who lives alone in the country, she has guns. Minimum wage, we haven’t touched that since what, 2007? What good have we done Ursula?
We don’t even talk to her. Remember, we’re democrats, we’re the “professional class” (thank you Bill and Hillary). Too bad there are not enough of us “professionals” to win elections. But no, Ursula is not our type and we’re going to criticize and belittle her until it’s we who are no longer relevant. Because Ursula is much of America today. She’s looking for a belief system because she needs one (we all need one). And because we on the left failed to provide one, she looked elsewhere. And we have the gall to call her a hypocrite for taking a few dollars a month in disability? That’s the least she deserves. After all, it’s we who abandoned her.
In our condescension, we imagine ourselves to be the intellectual elite, the smart people calling the shots and charting direction for the good of the little people. And the little people are sick of it. Because we’re not good at it. We don’t honor them or value them or, as I wrote above, even talk to them. We don’t provide aspiration and vision, we don’t project optimism and hope, we don’t paint a picture of a better tomorrow. And worst of all, we don’t deliver on whatever modest aspirations we do articulate. We’re losers. And nobody wants to be associated with losers, no matter how smart we imagine ourselves to be.
Reconsider your thoughts on Ursula. I’ll try to be a better writer.
Headed home. Before I do, I want to talk about my motorcycle, the Revival.
The Revival is a 2021 Harley Davidson motorcycle, a remake of the iconic 1969 Electra Glide, the classic Hog. Harley Davidson made 1500 of these bikes. Mine is number 1307, Lucky 13.
It’s a horrible touring motorcycle, it’s astonishing how bad it is. The seating position is that of an old-fashioned wooden school desk; feet flat, back straight, 90-degree angles at hips and knees. The impact of any and every pothole, expansion joint and lousy bit of asphalt is transmitted directly up your spine. And because your feet are forward of your hips, you can’t use your legs to protect your back. Bumps hurt.
It weighs 864 pounds. (roughly twice the weight of my BMW touring bike). Maneuvering the bike in and out of Waffle House parking lots and around gas pumps is risky and slow (and they’ve got those big plate glass windows at Waffle House so you’ve got an audience). And you can’t get off and push it around, as I routinely do with other motorcycles, because once that 864 pounds starts to shift from vertical, it gets heavy fast and you want a leg on either side to catch it.
It handles like the hog that it is; as you set up for a turn — freeway on-ramp, one of Tail of the Dragon’s 318 curves, whatever — you’re on the brakes early because slowing down takes a while, it tips into the turn slowly and reluctantly and waddles you up to the apex. As you pass the apex and try to straighten the bike up, it resists the pull on the bars and you struggle with it, you struggle until the double yellow line and oncoming traffic are getting uncomfortably close and the bike is again vertical, you then exhale and start getting ready for the next one. It’s got very little ground clearance, so you can’t lean it very far without dragging hard parts on the pavement.
It has 97 horsepower. For an 864-pound modern motorcycle, that’s way, way, way underpowered.
The Revival is the best touring bike I’ve ever owned. By far. It represents America at one of its finest hours, 1969, Neil Armstrong, Civil Rights, color TVs in walnut cabinets, shag carpeting. It’s good union jobs and a livable minimum wage. It’s the Camaro, the Mustang and the Coupe DeVille with white wall tires. It’s Janis, Grace, Jimi and John Fogerty. It’s Nixon before most people knew he was Nixon. Sure, we had Viet Nam, but the tide was turning and Walter Cronkite was on it. The Japanese motorcycle invasion had started but we didn’t know it, all we knew about Japan was that we’d beaten them in The War. America sat astride the Harley Davidson Electra Glide and the world with pride.
Fifty years later, people of America love the Electra Glide’s revival, the color, the lines, the stature, the heft, the Americanness of it. It can’t be defined by numbers or feel at the handlebars and butt, it’s defined by the woman in the parking lot who wants a picture, the black kid on the horse, the Iraqi immigrant, the woman with the prosthetic leg. The Revival is flawed and ridiculous and it’s us. And everyone wants to talk about it. And about themselves. Wandering these United States talking to people and retelling their stories, the Revival is perfect. The Revival is a celebration of us…
Two nights ago, I slept at Ursula’s house in Niota, Tennessee.
Ursula is a friend of a friend, she’s fifty-one, a thrice divorced born-again Christian who rides a Harley and has a prosthetic leg, she lost the leg in a motorcycle accident nine years ago. She breeds and raises birds; chickens, ducks, quail, song birds; pretty birds in an enormous variety of sizes, colors and plumage that strut and peck and cluck around her big fenced backyard. She’s also got three small dogs and a son who lives in Chicago.
Her first marriage was to a Navy man when she was 16. Her father was career Navy, divorced, and reassigned to Guam. She was going into her senior year in high school, she married so that she could stay in the States and finish school. They had her son. Her divorce two years ago was from a psychopath who beat her. I asked her about relationships, she adamantly has no interest.
Ursula
Ursula’s birds all have names and personalities that she describes with annoyance and affection. They come when she calls, they sit in her lap, take food from her hand, follow her around the yard. Lucky sits on her shoulder as she does chores. Her love is obvious, her conversations about them have the intelligence, confidence and syllables of science.
More beer and some colorado and our conversation changed from ducks to people. The sky is black, the stars bright, she’s got tiny lights strung on the coops and cages that twinkle, the air has cooled and has a soft touch. We argued about the nature of humans. I told her about friend of mine, Ron, who a few winters ago got a job as a union roofer. Ron was homeless, he didn’t have a vehicle or vehicle insurance or cold weather clothing or the most basic tools or money for lunch. And his cellphone was failing. But the job paid well and I lent him money and sold him an old company truck on credit. (Ron was killed a couple of years later by St. Paul Police.)
She argued that the help I gave Ron was crippling, that he needed to make his own way, that the lord placed a premium on personal endeavor, that any help, particularly government help, creates dependency and weakness. Ursula was defending her god. I’m an atheist.
Our argument approached vitriol and I began to worry about where I was going to spend the night. I was tired and I’d been drinking and I really didn’t want to get back on the motorcycle. Also, this is supposed to be a listening tour. I started talking about the beauty of the night sky and the colored lights on the cages, a change of subject she accepted without hesitation, and we went back to talking about birds and motorcycles. For breakfast, we shared an Amish-grown cantaloupe. The birds got the rinds.
Ursula receives SSI disability payments for her leg.
