BY JM HOLLWIG
Copyright is held by the author.
I KNOW what it’s like to fly. Once, like a human cannonball, I soared in the night sky, tumbling and twisting, then slowly arcing downward to earth. It was no circus act. And in the end there was no safe landing in a net or roar of the crowd, no encore or bow. Few witnessed the show. I’d simply gone out, that day 12 years ago, for a midnight ride and a cup of coffee.
Five months later I came home.
***
Once or twice before I’d laid down my motorcycle, but always I had gotten up and walked away with nothing worse than bruises, scratches, and false machismo. You’re not a road warrior until you kiss asphalt. In truth, though, I was no road warrior and my bike — it was a moped. But almost the real thing: big and fast, a Yamaha 270. To ride it the State of California told me I needed a motorcycle license. They also told me I needed to wear a helmet — and that saved my life. On the night I flew.
It was a beautiful scooter. Electric blue and nicely balanced, flowing with sexy curves and aerodynamic contours, it was by far the coolest thing I’d ever owned. Like a ’57 Corvette. And riding it — especially at night, especially going fast — I felt cool. This was an illusion I relished. Sometimes I zipped through the cobble-stoned streets of Rome to make a midnight espresso date. Sometimes I was James Dean in his Spyder. Sometimes I rode with Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper, a rebellious sidekick, on their trek across the land. But mostly, illusion aside, I went to the diner to read.
I called it the Blue Spark. Here’s why: My best friend’s car, low-slung and elephantine, a hand-me-down Plymouth he drove in college, years earlier, was called — what else? — the Blue Flame. What a beater! No radio, no A/C. Upholstery shot to hell. In it we’d roll through Riverside on swampy nights, sometimes after a pitcher of beer at the Barn, loopy on riffs and what-ifs, one o’clock in-the-morning philosophy, heartfelt non sequiturs, the air in the car a Marlboro haze, eager to be nowhere, restless and book-smart and lost, looking for King Tut Burger or the Oasis, Maxwell’s Pizza or Taboo’s. Anyplace but home.
***
Before I flew, I fell. On a test ride, the first day I saw it, I laid down the Spark half-a-dozen times on the pavement, scoring its neon surface with scars. After I’d marred the owner’s shiny blue toy she glared at me and I knew I had no choice. Eight hundred dollars changed hands. Later the young woman rode the bike to my house. Conscientious — or wary of a lawsuit — she wouldn’t let me touch the scooter again until it was on my property and she was gone. With a troubled expression, but cash in pocket, she wished me good-luck.
How to ride the thing? With a bike, learning is falling — often, unreservedly — a necessary prelude to speed. Straightaway I set about teaching myself and soon I had the knack. Next I got a helmet, gloves, and a license. And then I was free, rambling, racing, zipping on city streets and mountain lanes, alone and exhilarated. Flying. The Spark could top fifty. Always I signaled my turns and studied the road for hazards. And one summer night I spotted one coming my way.
***
In Upland a year and a half later — on Route 66 — I took my last ride. The destination was Denny’s; I had an Art History paper due the next day. So I needed coffee. Thank God for all-night diners! At a quarter-to-twelve, I stuffed my books into a knapsack, tossed it into a milk crate bolted behind the wide rubbery seat, and secured the bag with bungee cords. And then I raced, under a half-moon, cutting corners hard and accelerating on side streets. How to describe Route 66? Six-lanes wide, serpentine, choked with harried, speeding motorists. Here accidents happen and people die. But some limp away — or roll away in a wheelchair, months later, hurt and unlucky and old. Haunted by a memory of flight.
On the road that night — July 14, 1994 — I relished the calm, the sultriness, the whirr of my Yamaha. On it I’d traveled many miles and seen many sights, always with a Southern California landscape slipping hurriedly past a side-cast glance. And so I rode on. Lost in a biker’s watchful trance, alert yet adrift, I thought that night of what was ahead. A ten-page essay. In silence I half-composed it, trying out phrases and arguments, my mind filled with colour and pattern, line and abstraction. Klee. Miro. Kandinsky.
Elated, I knew all at once how it would turn out and I knew it would be good.
***
The headlights looked wrong. In dread I tracked them like an incoming mortar round. Why the unexpected slide? Then I knew and gulped hard, having no chance to swerve from what I saw coming. Geometry was against me. Into my skittering, evasive slide the Ford’s trajectory came fast. In the head-on crash our combined speeds clocked ninety miles an hour.
I felt nothing.
I saw the car, we met, and I was airborne. In the night sky I soared and tumbled, out of control, hurtling like a comet. Or a cannon ball. How to describe it? I was lost for a time in someone else’s dream. In a circus act. In a baffling, dark windstorm. Chaotically, the stars spun below, above, around me, coming close and then falling away, as I arced and cart wheeled and flew. An E ticket ride! Then I fell, hitting asphalt, skidding into the gutter. Remarkably, I didn’t lose consciousness. But my ground-evolved brain couldn’t make sense of this sudden flight — the horror and strangeness, the violence, the joy.
It lasted mere seconds. Once down, on my back, bleeding on the road, I lifted my head and looked at the wreckage. Confusion. Where was the Spark? My left leg, I saw, was mangled and curiously bent. Quickly, I did a self-check, wiggling fingers and toes. No paralysis. Content, I laid back, watching the sky, and let the rest of the ordeal unfold. Why not? I could do no more than shift my arms, turn my head — and wait. Endorphins kept me strangely serene. Truly, a Zen-like moment: timeless and surreal.
***
In time help came — the driver who hit me, a scared teenage girl holding an ice cream cone, who ran into the night sobbing; a good Samaritan who stopped and parked his car to block oncoming traffic; and then the paramedics. At the hospital over the next three weeks I underwent half-a-dozen operations. Surgeons fixed my shattered femur with an eighteen-inch titanium rod; stitched together my nearly-severed calf, swaddling it in a heel-to-knee skin graft; and mended my broken ankle with a handful of screws. That was the butcher’s bill. I got off easy. But both legs, years later, still look as if they’d been used once as bait in a shark tank.
In a hospital bed in July, tethered to a morphine drip and numbed by round after round of anesthetics, I suffered hallucinations. In and out of consciousness I spun, awake one moment, adrift the next in a ghoulish, Byzantine nightmare, reeling day after day for a month. Wrists bound to a bed frame. Gibbering. Blind to visitors who brought flowers and books.
In August I was moved to a nursing home to rest as bones mended and grafts meshed — the injuries took months to heal — and then in November to a rehab facility.
***
All three hospitals, as luck — bad luck — would have it, were located in San Bernardino. This is arguably America’s worst city. Today San Bernardino’s bankrupt; then it was merely wretched. Here I spent five nearly solitary months. What friends, what family I had nineteen years ago lived some hours away.
***
August, September, October, these are the three months in which I laid on my back in a bed in a convalescent hospital. This hospital, a nursing home, really, was blandly rancid. A place both tedious and loathsome. Here my broken body at first began to mend but then atrophied, ossified, rotted. Here I sank into a prolonged neglect. Here I was forgotten. Something had gone wrong. Why was I left three months alone in this funeral parlor’s antechamber? That summer was ungodly hot. Every summer in Southern California, though, it seems, is ungodly hot. In this nursing home in San Bernardino there was no air conditioning. Instead, the windows in the rooms were kept open night and day. Once a lizard scrabbled into my room. This was a surreal tropical horror. I watched alarmed from my hospital bed as this green scaly thing clambered in and scuttled across the tiles. A primeval revulsion shook me. I cried to go home. I hit the call button in vain. Why complain though? At least this Gila monster had come to pay a visit.
***
Each day a nurse’s aide would set up a heat lamp to try to dry out my skin graft donor site. This was my upper right thigh. A raw livid oozing wound. Its healing took many months.
***
I had now been so long bedridden that my knees had locked stiff. I’d lost all range of motion. I was fast becoming a cripple. A doctor, whose name I never learned, dropped by every two weeks. He struck me as uninformed and unconcerned. His checks, though, I’m sure, kept on coming.
***
I managed to write a brief inarticulate letter to a friend in some cheap cat stationary. Holding the pencil hurt. I would write no more.
***
Mine was a three-bed room. I occupied the middle bed. To my left was a stocky, illiterate Mexican who spoke no English; he’d apparently been hurt in an auto accident and was now recuperating alone in Norte America. He said little. He’d suffered head trauma. Here he often got up and with crutches would pace the hallways. He gave me no trouble. The room’s other occupant, who had the bed to my right, mere inches from mine, was an incontinent senior who grumbled, cursed and stank. This loony geezer befouled his bed-sheets each day with spittle and urine. A colour television set that my parents had brought me and some paperbacks, magazines and crossword puzzles kept me sane. I avidly watched daytime television: Maury Povitch, Montel Williams, Judge Judy, Morton Downey, Jr. All these shows shared a lurid, shameless, sanctimonious tone. I couldn’t get enough. And the commercials! Everybody watching daytime television, apparently, wants easy money. Easy money and a lawyer. That’s what I wanted too. Aside from staring at the tube all day, I’d thumb cursorily through Star Trek pulp novelizations and Entertainment Weekly back issues. The buzz that summer was all about Quentin Tarantino’s breakthrough film. I had also asked my parents to buy me a bestselling hardcover thriller (The Alienist, by Caleb Carr). They said no. A hardcover book cost too much. I’d have to wait then for the paperback to come out. But when would that be? And where would I be then? Tomorrow was simply a fearful murk.
***
In this nursing home in mid-September, some two months following my scooter accident, I took my first hesitant steps. An aide took it upon herself to help me to learn to walk again. She took me, almost against my will, to the facility’s small little-used physical rehabilitation room. It was about the size of a janitor’s storage closet. But inside there was a pair of parallel bars. This aide made me reach for them, then lift myself from my wheelchair and haul myself painfully down the length of the bars. This was frightening. After two months in bed, the floor, from a now standing position, seemed immensely far below. I knew that I’d fall. I wanted instead to return to my room. I wanted to give up. But I at least had to spend more time out of bed. I had to learn how to transfer myself into a wheelchair and roll about a bit. And soon I found a mouth-watering motivation: a vending machine at the hallway’s end. I’d put myself in the chair, push the wheels, and drop coins in this machine to obtain a Snicker’s bar. This was now happiness.
***
Inside the next hospital, the Ballard Rehabilitation Center — hushed, all chrome and walnut — it looked like the starship Enterprise. I felt safe. And here for the first time I took a few weak and clumsy steps alone, learning once more — really learning, this time — to walk. It’s harder than flying. Then in December, a week before Christmas, finally, I came home. The wheelchair just fit in the doorway.
I never had that cup of coffee or finished that paper. And I never rode again.
***
JM Hollwig attended Brown University, in Rhode Island. He lives in the San Bernardino Mountains in Southern California. He has studied creative writing at The
Iowa Summer Writing Festival and at UCLA Extension. His work has appeared
in Danse Macabre and the Santa Monica Review.