Demo Chapter.

(Parts may not have the effect I want them to, as this is the eighth chapter and refers to previous chapters at times. I chose this one mainly for the dialogue.)




“We were just wasted bro.”
“Yeah, I hope so.”
“I’m telling you, that’s all it is. So we have to work the rest of our lives, so does everyone else.”
“Yeah dude. But isn’t that the problem?”
“Fuck, I don’t know. I need to ride.”
It’s a new day and last night was just a bad dream, I tell myself. Two hours after we wake up, we’re still sitting by the smoking campfire and waiting for the rest of the alcohol to leave our bloodstreams, for the sense of balance and life to return. It was just the alcohol talking, making bad shit into something much, much worse. It was the beer, Eric says. I hope he’s right; god, I hope he’s right.
Today there is no crippling sense of emptiness, no insane laughter, nothing. It was the beer. It was just the alcohol, that’s why alcoholics are so fucked up, the shit will make you crazy. Today is a new day, today is a good day. Today we ride, it will all be okay today.
Even if we do have to work the rest of our lives, what about all the possibilities, the things to do, the people to meet, a thousand, a million, countless moments of life ahead of us. There are still so many things, so many ways to live, so many ways to escape the wheel, escape that daily chore of living and turn it into a beautiful existence, that parallel universe of vitality that is so hard to grasp. Reach for the sky, because tomorrow may never come.
But I don’t feel today. I have come to accept what I felt last night, accept that yes, I am on a set path now. My choices are still there, what kind of job would you like to take, who will you fall in love with, if you can ever love again, how will you spend your scant free time, but I can’t create the choices. I’ve realized that life isn’t an open-ended essay. Life is a sheet of ABCDs waiting for me to fill in the circles.
I’m finally feeling sober again, feeling almost human again. The last of the poison has left me, not the alcohol, the poison inside me, the bitter half of me that rose up last night and burst forth, cursing life. The bitter side of me, the poison in my soul, is gone for now, where, I don‘t know. I don’t know if it was the alcohol that triggered it, or if all these things in me and all these things in Eric had to be said, had to be let out before we both burst, but it is gone now. It is gone for a while. And last night I had no dreams of Melissa. Last night I fell asleep spinning and tumbling in the blackness of my mind, whirling down a giant drain, sick to my stomach, sick in my heart, and I didn’t dream of Melissa. And I wish I had.
I wish I had, wish I felt pain right now, because while I am at peace with what Eric and I expelled from ourselves last night, I feel nothing. I feel no hurt, no pain, no happiness, I don’t feel right now. I just am. I don’t feel empty, even, not numb, either. It’s just complete lack of feeling. Apathy, some people call it, but that too sounds like a feeling.
But I still have my bike; I have my bike and there are so many things out in the desesrt awaiting our discovery, so many little opportunities to feel something, fear, excitement, temporary insanity, whatever it is. Maybe it will make me feel again. I get on the bike, put on my helmet, kick it over, and head out into the quarry, a huge plane dotted with mounds of dirt and gravel sticking up from the land, all this raw material waiting for my shovel and my creativity to sculpt it into something purposeful.
Eric and I first go to the jump I found last year, a long gravel hill, packed hard by years of tires rolling over it, by years of compacting forces crushing it into a solid mound. On one side is the lip we shoveled long ago, now blown out with holes in the face of it, on the other side a rounded landing. Eric and I stop on top of the gravel hill, drop our clutches in 1st gear and burn out until our back tires are buried in the rock and our bikes stand rooted when we get off of them. I start shoveling in silence, Eric scraping dirt into the holes, patting it down.
“All right, It wasn’t just the beer dude, we’re right about some of that shit. But I’m not giving into it, I’m not going to fucking pity myself, I don’t care. I’m going to enjoy the time I have.” This is the old Eric, the Eric that sees the good in everything and every one. Just hearing from him again makes me feel something, a little twinge, a little moment of rememberance, a moment of silence for our old selves. I nod.
“You’re right. We can’t just fucking give in. We can’t give up, there’s too much to live for dude. So we have to work the rest of our lives, so what, we‘ve gone to school up until now and still had some good times. We’ll find a way to make it right.” I sound a lot more confident about this than I feel.
Eric smacks the dirt hard with the flat side of his shovel, packs it down again and again and again. “Yeah, we will. There’s hope. There’s always hope man, and there’s always good people. There’s always times like these to feel alive again, there’s always going to be times like these.”
We finish the lip in twenty minutes, and I volunteer to be the guinea pig. I come off in fourth gear, whip the bike out flat and turn a little in the air, land on the right shoulder of the rounded landing. There it is. That spark. That excitement, it’s there. I was so afraid that it would be gone, so afraid that I would lose this. The spark is still there. Riding hasn’t become dead to me yet, there is always hope.
Eric flies off next and whips hard to the left; he’s left handed and he just throws them that way. We session the lip until it’s blown out again, going off only a bike length apart and landing 60 feet from the lip on opposite sides of the hill. The spark ignites a little fire in me, a little flame of passion that burns stubbornly away at the blackness of last night. I hit the lip one last time, hit it and throw the bike out sideways and look back at Eric behind me, his bike flattened out the opposite way. We both land smooth and roll off to explore another hill, ride around it, examine it from every angle. We bury our tires deep in the loam of this bigger dirt pile and get off the bikes again, shovels in hand.
“What do you think?” I ask, motioning to a sharp mound of dirt fifty feet or so away from the big, flat topped hill we’re standing on.
“Pretty big step up dude,” says Eric, looking down at the hill below. “But I’m up for it, let’s get to work. This one takes a while, a full hour of shoveling, scraping, examining, reworking. We dig up the bushes on the top of this little hill and throw them aside, fill in the holes along the edges, scrape out a smooth, flat lip down to the harsh transition to the flat at the base of the hill. We dig a hole next to the hill and pack dirt into the base of it until the flat curves smoothly upward into a lip.
At last we are ready.
“I’ll hit it first,” says Eric. I watch from on top of the flat hill as he comes rocketing into the takeoff ramp and springs off the lip, 20 feet straight up and 50 feet forward to touch down just barely far enough onto the flat hilltop to a smooth landing just feet from me. He rolls up next to me, eyes wide, and kills his engine. “That’s fucking intense, dude, try it!”
The spark is still there. Eric is alive again, Eric is animated, vibrant, breathing hard. I kick over my bike and head out 100 yards past the lip, lean and twist the throttle, and bring the back end around in a slide that sprays dust and gravel high into the air. I race towards the lip in 4th gear, brace myself, and launch. I underestimated the angle of this takeoff; it’s as if a giant, invisible hand grabbed the bike and flung it straight up. My bike is vertical, and I’m leaning hard over the bars. My visor almost scrapes the front fender as I throw all my weight forward and the bike finally levels out again. I touch down fifteen feet past the edge of landing, splat into the middle of the flat and skid to a stop just inches from going over the far edge of the hill, then ride back to where Eric’s watching. “That’s a booter dude, It really throws you up there. Let’s ride it ‘til its blown.”
And we do. Again and again, Eric and I go flying off the hill, up and out, but mostly up. As I get the correct speed memorized for the jump, I start throwing whips off of it, big flat whips that I can only throw off of something steep like this. Eric and I are in a frenzy, landing, siding to a stop, racing off of the edge of the flat topped hill and back to the runway, racing into the lip again. We smash into the lip for 45 minutes until there is a huge hole in the base of it, the transition we built is blown out, and a deep rut has formed in the face of the lip. It’s done.
Eric takes off his helmet and he’s grinning again. Not a twisted grin, no irony, the real thing. “See dude, it was the beer. Shit, as long as I can ride, I think I’ll survive.”
“Yeah dude, but we gotta find other things too. We can’t ride all the time like we used to anymore, you know? But this is it, this is what it’s about. This is what we gotta look for, something like this to feel alive again.” I do feel it now. The hope, the desire to do something, the ever-present ache Melissa left me with.
Eric nods. “Yeah dude, and it’s there. There’s always hope, this is proof right fuckin here.”
I’m grinning now too. Maybe I’m manic depressive, last night I was sick of life, now I’m craving it again. “You got one more hill in you man? I want to find a hip.”
Hips are jumps that require a smooth turn throughout the air, jumps with the landing set 45 degrees or even sharper to the takeoff. We scour the quarry end to end, searching everywhere, and at last we spot it. An enormous dune with a sharp lip and a big, rounded slope 90 degrees to it. I can visualize it: come off that sharp lip, turn a 45, and land sideways on that long downhill slope The hill rears high up into the sky, a giant mound of earth and sand and gravel. Eric and I ride up the face of it and park on top. “No shovelin required, dude, this thing was made for us,” I say.
Eric looks worried. “Made for you dude, you gotta whip right to land on that, and I whip left.” With practice people can learn to whip opposite of their more comfortable direction. Think writing with your non-dominant hand, but riskier.
“Well dude, you don’t have to hit it. I’m goin for it though.”
I coast down the hill in 2nd gear and drop the clutch, starting the bike by compression, and start riding out to get a run at the side of this dune. I turn and face it, visualize my line, my path through the air, and race up the side of it in 3rd gear, fly off the top and whip hard to the right, then turn in a graceful arc as I float down the hill. I land halfway down the enormous dune, ride to the bottom, turn around and ride back up to where Eric sits parked. “I can go further dude, I’m hitting it in 4th this time. Want to follow me off? Just hit it slow or something?”
I can almost hear the gears turning in Eric’s brain. “I’ll go off it slow I guess. 3rd gear boggin.”
I grin, grab Eric’s gloved hand and shake it. “Yeah bro, I knew you’d be good for it.”
“I just hope I don’t regret it dude.”
We kick our bikes over and roll out to the runway, turn, and blaze off. I click 4th and suddenly I’m the savage again, all last night boils up around me and in me and unexpectedly, and I say fuck it all, fuck it all, I’m going to fly off this thing, I’m going to land as far down as I can, I’m going big. Reach for the sky, because tomorrow may never come. I rev 4th gear out, twist until the rev limiter kicks in, and launch off the top.
It happens in slow motion. The dune drops away below me and I’m sailing high over the top of it, high, high, high up. I’m turning slowly, a gentle curve 20 feet above the hill, 25 feet, 30 feet, soaring over the dune that is now ridiculously far below me. I’m done with my turn, angled towards the very farthest downhill spot on the dune, the edge of the dune’s far shoulder, and it’s all wrong. I’m much too high. I pull in the clutch, panic rising in my chest, tap the back brake and dive towards the flat ground, trying to at least tag the downhill with my back tire, but I dive right past the slope and slam front-end first into the hard-packed gravel below like a 747 smashing to earth.
A crash is impossible to accurately describe. It’s like that same giant hand picked me up and whipped me into the ground, I’m a baseball flying 90 mph and stopping in an instant with a stiff thwack in the pitcher‘s glove. There’s the split second between when I realize it’s all gone wrong and the moment of impact, a split second that stretches out into an eternity, the ground rushing up to meet me, a brick wall accelerating at my soft body, a brick wall about to shatter around me and snap whatever parts of me are most vulnerable. The front tire didn’t hit right, the suspension doesn’t help here, not when the bike comes down 45 degrees to the ground like a hurled javelin. I feel the front rim crumple and push off the footpegs with my feet, trying to jump over the bars, tuck and roll, but already the force of the impact has slingshotted me and I don’t jump gracefully, I rocket over the bars as if shot out of a cannon.
I fly over the bars and the momentum from the slingshot affect is absorbed brutally by the gravel and rocks, and in a flash, a snap, a split second of brutal confusion, I smash into the earth and the breath is driven from me as I bounce and spin. Everything crumbles inside me, everything is shocked agony. The bike cartwheels towards me and I feel something jagged rip a hole in my side, I feel the metal carving through flesh as the bike takes a chunk of me with it on its way by. I’m jolted by this second impact and it rolls me over, over, over, until I come to a stop with everything fire and pain and twisting.
I can’t talk. I can barely breathe. My ribs are racks of pain, scraping the inside of me, my legs are useless as I lay panting in the powdery dust, gasping, aching in every inch of my being, as my bike’s engine slowly idles to a halt and dies. The world spins. I push myself up onto my hands and knees, my knees are ripped open, I feel the earth clawing at the exposed nerves as I sit there, my head sagging between my shoulders in the suddenly claustrophobic helmet. Something warm is dripping down my side, running in a wet, sticky stream.
“Eric,” I gasp. “Help.” Nothing. No hurried footsteps, no shocked voice, nothing. “Help,” I say again. Everything is fire and needles. I am a wounded animal. Blood trickles down my forehead and into my eyes, pools in my goggles, and I can’t see. I’m blind. I rip off my goggles with one shaking hand, undo my helmet with the other, and blood drips in a steady stream from my nose and onto the ground in front of me, pools there in the dirt. My life is leaking out of me.
I don’t know how long I was in that spot, on hands and knees, unable to rise to my feet, still calling for help again and again as the blood pooled in the dirt beneath my nose, under my kneecaps, ran slowly down my side and soaked my boxers. I crouched in the middle of this empty wasteland of unused fill dirt and recycled asphalt chunks, crouched and bled and panted for what felt like hours. After what felt like an incredibly long time, I got to my feet, and I was shaking, shaking and dripping and groaning. I looked back to the hill, and saw the last thing I’d expected: Eric’s Honda lying on its side, and Eric thirty feet down the hill from it, head downhill, lying there, not moving.
Nothing but that sight could have convinced me to stagger up that hill, every step sending burning knives through my ribs, making me gasp out loud, the blood dripping into my mouth and making me spit and retch every few feet. I focus on Eric, still lying there as if asleep, and continue to stumble, crawl, and drag myself up the hill.
It seemed like another torturous hour had passed before I reached him. I fell down next to him and tap on his helmet. “ERIC…wake up bro… are you okay? ERIC?” Talking hurts, everything hurts. Eric’s breathing, his chest rising slowly up and down, but his eyes are closed and there is a 4 inch deep gouge out of his helmet. “Come on man, wake the fuck up, wake the fuck up!” I undo the strap under his helmet and pull it off slowly, afraid of the every rider’s worst nightmare: spinal damage. I slap his face lightly. “WAKE THE FUCK UP!”
Eric’s eyes open slowly, very slowly, he’s squinting like he’s staring into the sun. “Uuuuuuuuh…. my head…. fuuuck dude, my head….”
“What happened man, what happened?”
“Can’t whip to the right man…. I was leaning hard off the side but nothing was happening, and when I hit I got flicked down the hill, and then I hit something hard, and that’s all I remember….” There’s a huge blue-black lump on Eric’s temple.
“You’ve got a concussion dude… fuck…” I hold up three fingers. “How many?”
“Three.”
I let out a long, slow, breath. That hurts, too. “At least you’re seeing straight man.”
Eric rolls over and pukes. “Fuuuuuck…. Fuuuuuck…”
I lay there and pant a while longer. I don’t think anything is broken, at least nothing serious, or I couldn’t have made it this far. Everything is bleeding though, everything is bruised and torn and ripped. Just signals, I tell myself. I know, there’s damage done. That’s all it is, just signals telling me where the damage is. Nothing more. I make an effort to breathe slow and deep, bite my lower lip, close my eyes, and feel myself stop shaking just a little bit.
“Come on dude….. We have to get back to camp…. I’ve got a first aid kit in the ‘Yoda….”
Eric groans. “How’s my bike?”
I crawl up the hill to the Honda. The bars are bent beyond repair, the clutch lever’s end is snapped off, and the front brake lever is hanging limp, bleeding brake fluid in a slow drip. The rear fender is lying ten feet away. “It’s not as bad as my bike, man.” I don’t even want to think about it: the front rim crumpled into an oval, the bars wrenched back into a pretzel, the forks twisted and bent, and god knows what else.
With an enormous effort I force the Honda upright and climb on, overbalance, and fall over. Agony shoots through me as my knees dig their exposed flesh into the dirt again. “FUCK!” I lay there for a while, curse some more, then push the bike up again and jump on as well as I can and coast it down the hill. I drop the clutch in 2nd gear, and it snaps to life with a deafening backfire. I put it in neutral and wait at the bottom of the hill as Eric slides down, stumbles crazily over to the bent remains of my bike and shuts off the gas. A huge pool of it has already formed beneath the finally beaten bike, and I’m wondering if my exhaust pipe is hot enough to ignite it. Right now all that matters is getting back to the truck, getting ourselves patched up, assessing the damage, seeing if we need to drive back to Bend and the hospital.
“Come on man….. we can come back for the bike later….. fuuuuck, my BIKE, my bike man, its fucking destroyed, fuuuuuuck!” It’s like losing one of my closest friends, like seeing Eric lying on the hill, that’s the feeling I get as I look at the once proud marvel of Austrian engineering lying there in a twisted heap.
Eric climbs onto the bike behind me. “You’ll get it fixed man, you’ll ride it again. I’ll help you dude, we’ll make it stronger, better, faster.” The concussed, fucked up, beaten down Eric is still a thousand times better than the Eric last night.
“My poor bike man…” We roll slowly through the quarry in 1st gear, every bump sending a bolt of hot pain through my ribs. Just signals, block them out, I’m gritting my teeth hard, the sweet taste of my own blood making me want to throw up in my helmet. The ride back seems to stretch on forever, but at last we pull into our camping spot and I lean the fucked up Honda against my dad’s Toyota, fall off the other side, and lay there.
Eric gets off and goes to sit on the tailgate, his head in his hands. “I feel drunk dude, but not good drunk, uuuuugh. Fuck.”
I put a hand on the Honda’s footpeg and drag myself onto my feet, stumble over and sit down next to Eric. “Concussions are the worst man, remember when I shattered my face boarding last winter? Dude, I hate to tell you, but you’re gonna feel really stupid for the next two weeks or so.”
Eric grins. “Sounds fun. Maybe I can finally enjoy mid-day sitcoms now.”
“Not that stupid man, but don’t plan on acing any algebra tests for a while.”
“Fuck, I could never do algebra anyhow.”
I undo the clasps on my boots and pull my feet out of them. My left foot is swollen up, black and blue and red, and I hope nothing is broken. Nothing feels broken. Soft tissue damage can hurt as bad as any broken bone. I slide off the tailgate and try to put weight on it; a flame of pain burns up my leg. “Fuck.” I cram my good foot into a skate shoe, one of the ragged pair of Vans that I’ve had for two years. I pull off my jersey. I’ll never get to ride in it again. It’s ripped nearly in half and there are holes and gouges all over it, bloodstains, dirt and gravel embedded in it. It looks like someone ran it through a blender with a mix of silt and gore. Time to assess the damage.
There’s a hole in my side, I think it must’ve been the footpeg that ripped it in me when the bike hunted me down and tagged me. Footpegs on motocross bikes are lined with sharp spikes for traction against the underside of your boot; the downside of this is their ability to carve through you like a steak knife. There’s a large patch of skin missing from my right side, a circle of exposed flesh three inches in diameter and half an inch deep. An avulsion, this is called. Thank you First Aid class, I know what to call that gaping hole in me now. Streams of blood are still trickling down the side. Eric looks at it and quickly turns his head. “That’s gonna make me puke again dude, get something over that.”
“Gotta wash it out first,” I say. This is my least favorite part of after-crash cleanup. I grab a bottle of water from the cooler in the bed of the Toyota and start drizzling it into the wound, washing away the grit and gravel and dust, and my side is raging at me; my abdominals tense up with the pain and I inhale sharply as the water gushes into the wound. It comes out the other side red and muddy. At last all the dirt is gone, but there’s a ¼ inch diameter chunk of gravel embedded dead center of the hole. “Pocket kinfe, please,” I say to Eric. He hands me the knife without looking, and I dig the blade in under the gravel, “FUUUUCK!” and push down on the handle. The gravel chunk pops out and I catch it and wash it off. A souvenir.
I wash the blood and chunks of skin off of Eric’s knife, hand it back to him. “Dude, the first aid kit’s in the back seat. Can you get it for me? I can’t walk on my right foot.” Eric looks down at the blue/purple ball of flesh that is just recognizable as my foot by the little swollen toes sticking out of one end, and pukes again, wipes his mouth, and says “water.”
I hand him the almost empty water bottle and he gargles and spits, then drinks down the rest. “Much better. I’ll grab you the kit dude, that’s a fucking gnarly hole.”
Eric slides off the tailgate and weaves over to the passenger side door, opens it, groans, closes it, and staggers around the front of the Yota to the driver’s side, opens the door, and pulls out a Tupperware containter full of bandaids and Vet-Wrap and hydrogen peroxide. He walks slowly back to the tailgate, one hand on the bed rail for support, and hands me the first aid kit before hopping up to sit next to me again.
I pop the top off the first aid kit and dig for the peroxide, grab the black bottle, pop the top, and pour the liquid into the hole where it burns and stings and bubbles. This must be what it’s like to get an acid burn. I grab a thick wad of gauze and bite down on it, growling through my clenched teeth, and pour more on until the bubbling stops. The bubbling stops when most of the bacteria are dead; I learned this in another life. Thanks again, First Aid class..
“Ouch,” says Eric, apparently forgetting his nausea as he stares at the bubbling wound.
“YEAH, OUCH.” I can block out pain to a degree but this is making me shake and sweat again. I pull out a large gauze pad, slap it over the wound, and start wrapping Vet-Wrap, a brown fibrous material that my mom uses for the horses, around and around my lower torso. I wrap it tight; open wounds need pressure to stop the bleeding. First Aid again. After about eight passes I tie it off, cinch it down hard, and look over at Eric. “Where else am I bleeding dude?”
Eric laughs. “Where should I start?”
“With the biggest holes.” Eric grabs the peroxide and says “Brace yourself bro,” and my shoulder is screaming, bubbling, hissing at me. “You got a pretty good hole there too dude,…. and there’s a rock stuck in it… want me to dig it out?”
I nod. I can’t really talk right now. Eric says, “On 3. 1.…2.…3.” Something stabs into the hissing wound and again my muscles tense up, I am a rock hard protesting mass of pain, and something moves, scrapes out of the skin and lands with a clink on the tailgate. Eric holds up a ½ inch chunk of gravel. “Big, dude.”
“FUCK, that hurts. That better be the last of it, Fuck.”
Eric pours more peroxide on the hole and then unwraps a 3” square Band-aid and applies it slowly. “I think that’ll cover it without sticking to it, but it’s close, dude.”
For the next half an hour Eric helps me patch up my shredded body. I get a small band-aid across a deep scrape in my forehead and have to wonder how I got that with a helmet and goggles on. Both of my knees are padded with gauze and wrapped tight with Vet-wrap after a wash and peroxide treatment. My right elbow is a giant patch of road rash, little intersecting lines of blood, too big of an area to bandage and too shallow of wounds to justify the bandage anyhow. Eric dumps peroxide on it and I mop at it with a square of Vet-Wrap, getting the dirt out. At last all the leaks are patched, and I’m able to breathe again, feeling every separate wound jolt with each pulse. “I need a beer.”
Eric’s digging in the first aid kit. Suddenly, he stops and smiles. “How ‘bout some Vicodin?”
“God, YEAH, hand that shit over dude.” I’d forgotten about this, my dad’s unused Vicodin from his broken collarbone. He said the shit made him feel weird and instead smoked weed for a few weeks, went for the natural pain killer. I line up the arrows on the little plastic cylinder and the lid and pop the top, grab three pills, throw them in my mouth and crunch two in half. Time-released, well, I don’t have time, I need relief now. I wash it down with a full bottle of water, Eric and I are both chugging water now, empty bottles littering the tailgate. Nothing will dehydrate you like losing a pint of blood or concussion-induced projectile vomiting.
“Dude, find me a stick with a fork in it, would you? I need a crutch.”
Eric laughs. “You’re a cripple, huh bro. Least its physical; man, I feel fucking retarded right now.” He gets up, wanders out of sight, and comes back 20 minutes later with a forked log about the right height.
“Beautiful, man. Let me see your knife again.” For the next 20 minutes, I’m whittling away on the log, carving out the rough spots and jagged little knots until I’ve got a workable crutch. I stand up with the crutch and something inside me grates on itself. I can’t breathe; there’s something twisting and grinding and rioting inside me. “Busted rib, maybe a few,” I choke out.
Eric’s eyes get wide. “Fuck dude, do you think they damaged anything in there? You can survive broken ribs, there’s not shit you can do for ‘em really, but if they cut you up inside we gotta get to a hospital quick.”
“Naw…… I don’t think… they cut me up… just broken,” I whisper. Every breath is torture with broken ribs, something I’m destined to become far too familiar with over the next few weeks. “My bike dude… we have to go… do what we can.”
Eric looks at me doubtfully. “Can you ride?”
I look up and grin. “It’d take a hellofa lot more than this to stop me from rescuing my loyal Katoom.”
Eric laughs. “Yeah, KTM guys are fucking fanatics. Alright, hang on a sec.”
Eric goes and wheels the Honda around, kicks it over. “Hop on bro, I’ll go slow and try not to grate your ribs together.” I don’t think he can go slow enough to help that, but I limp over with my crutch and pick my bad foot up with my hand, drape it over the side of the bike, and center myself.
“Slow, dude.”
Its another interminable ride through the quarry, another thousand little knives as we hit rocks, bumps, and holes. I’m not even noticing the pain; every molecule of my brain is focused on the twisted orange and black heap lying at the base of the hill. I can see how the crash must have looked, and I’m amazed I got off as easy as I did. The hill is nearly sixty feet tall, and a good hundred wide; I launched clear over this hill and splattered all over the ground on the other side, and I don’t think I’ll even be going to the hospital. At times like this I do feel religious. I put my hands together behind Eric’s back and say “thanks” in my mind.
When we pull up next to the badly wounded KTM, I could cry. The forks didn’t snap, thank god, but they’re both warped and twisted, the front tire is bent in an oval, and half the spokes are snapped. My front fender is scattered across the ground in about fifteen pieces, little broken chunks of orange plastic. “Fuuuuck dude, look at it, looook at it, goddammit, my bike…”
Eric whistles. “You must’ve hit HARD, dude, I’m surprised you didn’t join the femur club.” The femur club has two members right now, our riding buddies Elliot and Aaron. Both of the guys snapped their left femurs within a few months of each other.
“Me too man, I’m lucky, but my bike…”
“Look dude, mine’ll be easier to ride. I’ll limp yours home, if it’ll start, you just sit here and keep your weight off that foot.” Eric dismounts and walks over to my pile of twisted metal, my beautiful disaster, andpicks it up. “Fuck dude, you’re gonna need a whole new front end… forks, triple clamps, rim, they’re all smoked.” He reaches under the plastic on the left side and turns the gas on, pulls in the hot-start lever that modern-day four strokes have to make starting them when flooded easier, and starts kicking.
Again and again, Erick kicks the bike 30 times, 40, 50. I stop counting. “START, motherfucker!” Eric yells. Kicking a bike gets tiring. Quickly. The kickstarter goes down, the engine makes a muffled cough, down again, cough, down again, cough. Eric’s about to give up when by some miracle the cough turns into a spluttering idle.
“Yeah bro, you can wreck everything else on a KTM, but you can’t fuck with the engines! Those Austrains know their shit!” I’m ecstatic that it turned over, that we don’t have to tow it back to the yota. I click Eric’s Honda in to gear and follow him off, the KTM’s front tire wobbling and shaking in an s-curve.
We get back to the truck after another thousand knives in my ribs, butter knives now that the Vicodin is kicking, and lean both bikes against the Yoda. It’s getting dark, and we’re both annihilated from the riding, the crashes, and everything that’s happened today. I lean back into my lawn chair and crunch up another Vicodin like I’m Dr. House himself. I follow it with another bottle of water as Eric starts the fire.
“What a day, what a fucking day. We’re both walking wounded and our bikes are FUCKED.”
Eric laughs. “Yeah, we really did it this time, huh bro? I’m just glad we don’t have to make a run for the hospital. It’s a long ways off.”
I nod. “I’m amazed that I’m not hooked up to a bunch of I.V.s and tubes and shit right now dude, seriously, I dropped like a fucking rock straight out of the sky.”
“You must have, it’s pretty hard to crumple an Excel rim like that.”
I pull out my can of Skoal apple, pack it, and take a huge dip. I can very literally feel that Nicotine flooding my bloodstream, taking the edge off of it, cutting the stress as surely as the Vicodin cuts the pain. “You know dude, I think I might have crashed on purpose.” I surprised myself with that.
Eric chokes on his water. “Why the fuck would you do that?”
“I have no idea, but on the run up to the hip, I just pinned it harder than I should’ve. It might’ve been all that shit last night, I dunno, but I just twisted it to the stops man. Its crazy.”
Eric stares at me, takes a sip of water, stares into the fire and repeats. “Now that you mention it, I knew I shouldn’t even try that jump. I can never whip to the right. But I sort of said fuck it, I’ll do it anyhow. What the hell’s that about? I’m not suicidal.”
“Neither am I man. I don’t know, fuck, are we crazy bro?”
We sit there in silence for a while as the darkness sets in. Tonight we‘re sober enough to feed the fire. It blazes up bright orange as my Vicodin-clouded mind grinds away furiously. Why did I pin the throttle back? What was the motive there? I don’t understand myself at the moment. Eric’s staring dazedly at the fire, eyes a little crossed. Thinking with a concussion is like trying to walk a straight line while wasted: hard.
I lean forward and spit Skoal juice into the fire. “Maybe it’s because I wanted to feel something intense again. You know, I’ve been just drifting through the daily shit, I never feel excited or mad or anything anymore, not since Melissa and I broke up and I smashed Kyle in his ugly face.” Huh, so the irrational anger is still there.
Eric snaps out of his trance and looks at me. “That could be it dude. Fuck, can you imagine anything more stupid? Killing ourselves to feel alive again, hahaha, goddamn. I need a girlfriend.”
I laugh at this. “Don’t be so sure dude. You think it’s bad now, fall in love then lose it.”
Eric squints at the fire. Focusing is another one of those things you take for granted that suddenly requires all your concentration after a hard knock to the head. “Yeah, I guess so. Fuck, I don’t know what I need. But I can’t go being all fuckin’ reckless and stupid, I need what brain cells I‘ve got.”
“Yeah, and I need to be able to breathe without my fucking ribs stabbing my lung, or whatever the hell’s going on in there,” I say. It’s true; with every breath I get a jolting shot of pain deep in my chest, which makes me inhale sharply and get stabbed again. It‘s getting old fast.
“Dude, we gotta focus all that shit into something. Riding is good, it gets it out, but damn, when it builds up like that and we just lose it, riding could get us fucking killed.”
Neither Eric nor I have ever spoken a word against motocross. We acknowledge the risks and say it’s still the best damned thing we’ve ever done, the hell with the risks. It’s as if Eric just badmouthed one of our best friends behind their back.
“It’s not riding, fuck that. It’s us, man. We need to be able to control it. Riding doesn’t change it, what if we didn’t ride today and sat around getting drunk all day instead? That could’ve been just as bad or worse.”
Eric looks at me, yeah, his eyes are definitely crossed. “Good point. So what the fuck do we do then?”
I spit another stream of Skoal juice into the fire, and it hisses at me. “I don’t know man, I’m too fucked up to know anything.”
“Well I’m watching out for it now dude, I don’t want to get behind the wheel after a bad day and roll my Chevy trying to be some fuckin speed racer.”
“Yeah, I think today’s gonna be enough to put me on my guard too. But I gotta let it out somehow, I’m gonna find a way.”
“Let me know when you do.”
“It could be a while dude. You know what though? I’d rather be sitting here with my rib trying to carve its way out of my chest than be feeling the way I felt last night. That was fucked up.”
“For sure dude. I’ll take the concussion any day.”
“Crash therapy bro, we should set up a clinic. Walk in and get smacked upside the cranium with a baseball bat, that’ll be fifty bucks please.”
Eric laughs and takes another long chug off a water bottle. “Now there’s a thought. Love life gone to shit? Feeling down? Come get your skull cracked, you’ll feel way better or we’ll crack it again free.”
“We could be onto something here man. Wonder what kind of insurance you’d need to start that up.”
“We could just do it as a public service, see someone looking confused or abused or misused, smash them over the back of the head and take fifty bucks out of their wallet. Bet we’d get in the papers real quick.”
This is how Millican should be. Eric with his concussion and me with my torn body, we sit and just laugh. Every laugh is brutal pain, but it’s so worth it to me. We are the polar opposite of what we were last night, all the dark shit we discussed in a drunken fury sits untouched as we talk about what our hospital bills would look like if we had gone, come up with stories to tell our parents, how we got mugged in Bend or beaten down by cops, police brutality when they caught us drinking. It’s like old times.
Again we sit in the middle of the bleak, freezing emptiness, staring at each other through the roaring blaze, laughing late at the darkness, providing the only sound that breaks the silence of the night. The laughs are punctuated with gasps of pain as my ribs tickle my lungs, but the little stabs of agony that break up the laughter tonight are nothing to the anguish and the bitterness of 24 hours ago, the physical pain in our laughter is infinitely less damaging than the hollow, dead sound of last night’s black humor.