If Rock and Roll Were a Machine

by Terry Davis

  The back of the showroom opens into the shop, and this is where Bert sees Shepard. The man stands beside a rusty old wreck of a motorcycle strapped to a workstand, scrutinizing the nasty thing and making notes on his clipboard. Now he turns to Bert.

  “Wheat farmer from down around Reardon brought an old Triumph in last winter,” Shepard says. He gestures at the bike with his clipboard. “It was in worse shape than this. Guy said it’d been leaning against his windmill since 1959.

  “I got it up on the stand and was looking it over,” he says. “I stuck my face down where the dynamo should have been and shined my penlight in the mounting hole. Two little black eyes shined right back at me, and I thought I saw a forked tongue whipping.”

  Shepard turns and sets the clipboard on the bench. “I let out a scream and went up in the air,” he says. “I came down about halfway across the room.” He pulls a long metal bar from a set of bars in graduated sizes hanging on the pegboard above the bench and holds it up. “I grabbed this breaker bar, and I went back and tapped on the dynamo housing. No response from the snake. So I poked around in there and fished him out.” He returns the bar to its peg and walks toward Bert.

  “You’re thinking that snake was dead, right?” Shepard says.

  Bert isn’t terribly comfortable here in a place he’s never been before with this big man walking toward him. He smiles a nervous smile and shrugs.

  “He looked dead,” Shepard says. “He felt dead. He didn’t smell dead, though, which should have told me something. I tossed him in the trash barrel back by the wood stove.” He points his thumb toward the back of the shop.

  “About a half hour later I’m dumping a worthless fairing in the trash and that snake goes off like a school bell. He’d been hibernating in that dynamo housing,” Shepard says. “Thing had nine rattles.” He smiles now, and there’s a quality in his face that puts Bert at ease.

  “So, son,” Shepard says—and he’s right in front of Bert now, so tall, Bert has to lift his head to look him in the face—“don’t ever let anyone tell you restoring motorcycles is for sissies.”

  “Nobody could convince me of it” is Bert’s reply.

  Shepard laughs. “Well, that’s good,” he says.

  Shepard walks along the line of classic bikes and Bert walks beside him. He tells Bert he remembers him, that Bert is the cause of the shop going over their yearly budget for Glass Plus because Bert drooled so heavily on the window where the Sportster sits. Bert smiles and says he stopped to look at it once or twice. In front of the old Sportster is where they stop now.

  The bike looks bigger today. It’s more sharply defined against the air and the objects around it. Everything evaporates from Bert’s thoughts but the image of this machine and his related imaginings. Nothing hurts now. He wonders if he could be a different guy on this motorcycle.

  “I’ve dropped the price to eleven hundred,” Shepard says. “My boy’s come to stay with me, and we want to put a hot tub in. We’ve got everything ready except the tub itself, and I can’t find anybody who’ll trade for one or let me work for it. So I need eleven hundred dollars cash money.”

  God, Bert thinks, eleven hundred bucks! I can buy it! He looks past the motorcycle to the window where it and he and Shepard are reflected. He would pay every cent of his savings to feel the way he looks in this reflection.

  “I don’t know much about motorcycles,” Bert says. “I just think it’s a beautiful thing.” God, Bert asks himself, why did I say that?

  “I do too,” Shepard says. He sweeps his hand from the Sportster to the other bikes. “I think they’re all beautiful things.

  “What a guy’s got to consider,” Shepard goes on, “is that these older Harleys—all the classic bikes, for that matter—aren’t like Japanese bikes. They require maintenance. If a guy just wants to ride, he should have a Japanese bike. Get a good used Honda for five hundred bucks, change the oil once a year, adjust the valves every decade, and you’ll be riding it the rest of your life.”

  He steps up to the Sportster. “The old bikes don’t go as fast or stop as fast,” he says. He points to the front wheel. “No disk brakes.” He points to the forks. “Inferior suspension.” He raps the gas tank. “Worse fuel economy.” He moves his fingers over the leather seat. “Not as comfortable.” He points with his left hand to the little headlight and to the taillight with his right. “Inferior lighting. These weren’t made to run the lights all the time, which is the law now. And you can’t just push a button to start ’em.”

  The glow begins to fade from Bert’s face.

  Shepard walks past the bike to the corner of the room, grabs an aluminum loading ramp and returns. “You do, however, get the pleasure and the challenge of kick-starting these.”

  He places one end of the ramp on the edge of the platform where the bike sits and the other end on the floor, then he steps up onto the platform. “And there’s no sound I know of in the world of machines that’s as sweet as the exhaust note of a Harley-Davidson V-twin,” he says.

  Shepard rolls the Sportster forward, then lifts the back wheel and sets it square with the ramp. “What’s your name?” he asks.

  “Bert Bowden,” Bert says.

  “Well, Bert, I’ll let this thing down as easy as I can, and you keep it from rolling across the floor and busting up the place,” Shepard says. “I’m Scotty.”

  Bert holds the rear fender brace and steps backward, pushing against the rolling weight. In a second the bike is flat on the floor. He holds the door as Shepard pushes the Sportster out onto the asphalt. The big man has a limp, and Bert wonders if he got it falling off a motorcycle. Bert watches him more closely and sees that both his legs are bad. Shepard lets the bike settle onto its sidestand. “Throw a leg over,” he says.

  Bert climbs on, tips the bike off the stand, and keeps it steady with his legs. It’s heavy, and it sits high. But it’s really neat. It’s like a chunk of condensed power there beneath him.

  “Can you still get parts for these?” Bert asks. He knows his dad would ask that. He wishes he hadn’t thought of his dad. His dad hates motorcycles even more than his mom does. Bert’s father is an insurance man.

  “No problem on spares,” Shepard replies. “What you can’t get as original equipment is being remanufactured.” He takes a step closer. “Now you’re going to light this thing up,” he says.

  Light it up? Bert thinks.

  They turn on the fuel tap and retard the spark by adjusting the magneto. Bert looks around for the key, but Shepard tells him there is no key. “Not many people know how to start one of these,” he says. “But you’re gonna know.”

  Shepard reaches down and pivots the kick pedal outward on the lever. He tells Bert to kick it through easy a couple times to prime the carb. Bert feels the big pistons move. They gulp air through the carburetor with a thirsty sound.

  “Okay,” Shepard says, “we got the gas on, spark set, carb primed, biker expression on face. Time to give ’er a manly kick, as the British say.”

  Bert rests his weight on his left leg. Then he rears up, shifts his weight to his right, and comes down hard on the pedal.

  The sound of the engine is deep and mellow. Bert feels the pulse rise through him slow and measured like a heartbeat. “Okay,” Shepard says, “blip the throttle.”

  Bert turns the throttle and the Sportster roars. The sound rises like a fist punching a hole in the world. And when Bert backs off, the exhaust makes a hard, barking sound like nasty laughter.

  Shepard thumbs the red button next to the throttle and the engine dies. “That’s how you shut ’er down,” he says.

  “I’ll be here tomorrow to give you the money,” Bert says. “If I had any money now, I’d give you some to hold it.”

  “No need,” Sherpard replies. “Your word’s enough.”

  “I give you my word, then,” Bert says, and he reaches to shake Shepard’s hand.

  Chapter 4

  Too Chickenshit to Live

  Bert pulls u
p in front of his house, climbs out of the Bug, sets his school folder on the hood, and pulls his new Harley T-shirt over his head. Everybody who buys a bike gets a shirt, Shepard said. Bert bends down and looks at himself in the side mirror. He smooths the collar of his white Lacoste shirt over the black T-shirt. He doesn’t feel like himself in tough-guy clothes. He just bought a tough-guy motorcycle, though, so some changes in his image might be due. “This could be a look for me,” Bert says, thinking of Michael Keaton at the end of Beetlejuice when his head is shrunk.

  Bert walks through the garage to the back door. He can’t keep from looking down at his chest where an eagle glares out of yellow eyes and screams with its beak wide, HARLEY-DAVIDSON, TOO TOUGH TO DIE!

  His dad’s Acura is sitting next to his mom’s Mazda. Bert was hoping his dad would be at a dinner meeting. There won’t be any playing them off against each other. But the time for that is over, Bert tells himself. Time to stand up and face them both.

  * * *

  I’ll have some shirts printed up, Bert is thinking as he lies on his bed. They’ll be pink with a picture of me in a diaper, a thoughtful expression on my baby face, and above the picture they’ll say ALBERT BOWDEN, and below, TOO CHICKENSHIT TO LIVE!

  Bert didn’t tell his parents during supper. Now Nightline is over and he’s lying on his bed not paying attention to a Hill Street Blues rerun.

  For a while during the evening Bert’s mind was filled with images of riding the Sportster. He rode along the Spokane River through a cool green tunnel of fir trees. He rode into the school parking lot, the Sportster’s exhaust note deep and mellow like a musical motif that accompanies the hero in a movie.

  But Bert wants a real image of himself he can admire for a change instead of a fantasy, and it is in pursuit of this that he arises from his bed, walks upstairs, and knocks on his parents’ bedroom door.

  “Bert?” his mother says.

  “Yeah,” Bert says. “I need to talk to you guys.”

  “Well, come in,” she says.

  Bert sits at the foot of his mother’s bed. Her reading lamp is on, but it only illuminates a circle the size of a basketball on her pillow. Bert’s father is just a dark shape turning and sitting up against the headboard of his bed a few feet away. “Jesus, Bert,” comes the voice from the dark shape. “We’ve got to work tomorrow.”

  “I bought that Harley-Davidson motorcycle I told you guys about,” Bert says.

  The dark shape sits straighter. His mother doesn’t move. “What can we do, Donald?” she finally says.

  “You can’t do anything,” Bert says. “You don’t need to do anything.”

  “Of course we can do something,” Donald Bowden says. “You’re sixteen years old. You can’t enter into a contract without our permission.”

  “Jesus, Dad,” Bert says. “That’s not the point.” Bert shakes his head. He can see the mixture of disapproval and scorn on his mom’s face, but his dad is just a voice and a shape in the dark.

  “It doesn’t matter how much it cost, Bert,” his mother says. “That money is for college.”

  “College is two years away, Mom. If I can get in at all. I don’t need money for college right now. I need this motorcycle.”

  “Human beings need food, water, protection from the cold,” his father says. “We might have a physical need for affection. But nobody needs a goddamn motorcycle.”

  That’s right, Bert says to himself. What kind of a human being thinks he needs a motorcycle?

  “Where’s the bike?” his father asks.

  “It’s still at the shop.”

  “Good,” his father says. “Then you won’t have to take it back.”

  “Dad, I gave my word.”

  “You can take your word back. Taking your word back isn’t lying,” Bert’s father says. “If you’re concerned about integrity, you might give some thought to the fact that we said you couldn’t buy that motorcycle, and you said okay. And you might consider that you live in our house, and that as a matter of integrity you might abide by our rules.

  “We’ve told you, and told you, and told you, Bert,” his father goes on. “It wouldn’t matter if you had a million dollars in the bank and a full ride to Stanford, we wouldn’t let you buy a motorcycle because they’re too dangerous. Motorcycles kill and maim thousands of people every year. It’s the ones who survive and lie in hospital beds like veg—”

  Bert is up and screaming into the dark. “I don’t need a motorcycle wreck to turn me into a vegetable. I’m a vegetable now! I’m a fucking vegetable right now!”

  Bert is out the door, down the hall, and halfway across the kitchen. He takes a half-dozen deep breaths as he stands at the sink looking out the window into the dark. He listens for his father’s footsteps. He drinks a glass of water. He’s sure his mother will come out. He drinks another glass of water. The house is silent except for water dripping into the drain. Neither his mother nor his father comes after him. Bert can’t think of a thing to do but go back to his room.

  Bert walks around three sides of his bed and back, around and back. He hates it that he’s not going to buy the Sportster. He hates it that he’s going to break his word. And he hates it most that he doesn’t have the guts to do what he wants to do.

  Maybe this is the worst thing that ever happened to him. He needs to start writing that essay. But he needs to apologize to his folks first.

  A milestone, Bert thinks as he walks upstairs, I said “fuck” in front of my mom and dad.

  Bert hears voices behind the door, so he hesitates before knocking. He puts his hear to the door to hear his father’s words.

  “Bert was such a bright kid when he was younger,” Donald Bowden is saying. “I don’t know what happened. It seems like he gets dimmer every year. I don’t know if there’s anything in there anymore. He’s just become this zero. A nothing.”

  Bert turns and walks quietly down the hall, through the kitchen and downstairs. He pulls his green-and-gold Thompson High athletic bag from his closet shelf and tosses it on his bed. He takes his savings book from the drawer of his nightstand, removes the seventy-one dollars from between the pages, puts the cash in his wallet, then throws the wallet and savings book in the bag. He tosses in some clothes, then walks to the bathroom and grabs his toothbrush and toothpaste. He steps into his Reeboks, pulls on the Harley T-shirt, and looks around the room. He sees his school folder on the desk and grabs it along with two pens. This is all he needs for tonight. He can come back tomorrow before his folks get home from work. He turns off the light and heads upstairs once more.

  Bert leaves a note on the fridge telling his parents not to worry, that he’s spending the night in a motel, then he’ll find a room to rent. He tells them they’re right, he should abide by their rules if he’s going to live in their house. But this is a rule he can’t abide, so he’s moving out. He says he’ll be careful on his motorcycle.

  Chapter 5

  Everything Changes

  Bert feels an unexpected sense of adventure as he pushes the Bug to the end of the block. He’s pushed the sixteen-year-old car plenty of times, but it’s never pushed this easily. Bert is energized. He feels like he could stay up all night, and he’s going to have to if he wants to finish his English essay. Which he will do.

  Bert gives a final push and lets the Bug roll through the intersection and down the gentle slope of the Susan B. Anthony Elementary School parking lot. He follows, looking up at the stars.

  God, what a beautiful night. The air is cool, like water on his face and neck and arms. Bert is scared, but that’s okay. He should be a little scared if he’s going to face this.

  He walks through the lot and across the grass and sits on one of the swings. These are the swings he swung on all through his childhood. This is where he started school. He remembers his first day of kindergarten like it was yesterday. He can hear the teacher call out the names: Steven Thonski, Janice Fluman, Jeannie Knutsen, Kyle Retger, Pat Sweat. He can see their faces. He was scared of
all the boys.

  “Everything changes,” Bert says aloud in the dark. The creaking of the chains and the wind whistling softly in his ears as he pumps high are the only sounds.

  Everything changes, he says to himself again. And I can change too. If I changed once for the worse, I can change again for the better. I can be somebody different from who I am now.

  Bert thinks of the days when he fit comfortably on the seat of this little-kids’ swing. He loved school then. There were always other kids to play with, always something new to learn, assignments he could take home and do with ease and find a star or a bird sticker on when the teacher returned them. It seemed like Bert knew the answer to every question the teachers asked then. He thought he knew all the answers, anyway, and he sure tried to answer all the questions. Until fifth grade, that is. That’s when things began to go bad.

  And now, at one o’clock in the morning as he swings on the little-kids’ swings, Bert realizes the worst thing that ever happened to him. He digs his heels into the dirt to stop himself. He walks fast across the playground, climbs into the Bug, fires it up, and heads to town to find a motel. He’s got an essay to write.

  Chapter 6

  Bert Keeps His Word

  The motel clock-radio erupts in Rolling Stones at the same time the wake-up call buzzes. The exact same time, Bert thinks. It’s amazing! It’s a sign!

  The Stones are suffering mixed emotions at high volume. Bert Bowden, however, is possessed of singular conviction as he sits on the edge of the bed and speaks aloud. “I consider this roughly akin to the Holy Virgin appearing in cloud formations over the state of Wisconsin. What we have here, ladies and gentlemen, is a miracle. This,” he says as he shuffles toward the shower like Beetlejuice heading for the whorehouse, “is the way to begin a day.”

  When Bert reaches the bathroom door, he turns and faces the room, bends his knees, thrusts out his crotch, and grabs himself in what strikes him as an appropriate gesture of masculine affirmation. “Honk! Honk!” he says to the empty room, to the day, to this new life he is beginning.