If Rock and Roll Were a Machine

by Terry Davis

  Bert saw bright blood shining. He nodded his head.

  “They’d collect your pieces in a plastic bag,” Shepard said. “Your folks would get a call, they’d go, and that’s the last they’d see of their boy.”

  Shepard stopped. He bent and set the flowers on the asphalt, then pulled up one leg of his jeans. Bert looked at the boot. It had a strap where laces would be. He saw Shepard’s pale, hairy leg. Then he saw his grandfather’s leg. Then he saw the blood again.

  “People call these motorcycle boots,” Shepard said. “But they’re engineer boots. Their function is not to stomp heads, but to protect feet. As you can see, they have no laces to catch on something and end your days.” He snugged the leg of his jeans over the boot, picked up his flowers, and headed down the alley again.

  “Is that what happened to your legs?” Bert asked.

  “No,” Shepard replied. “One knee went in football, and the other in an accident in my job.”

  Up ahead Bert saw Shepard’s partner spraying off an old bike. He was wearing sunglasses and looked so much like Billy Gibbons of ZZ Top that Bert wouldn’t have been surprised to see him pull a V-shaped guitar from behind the trash barrel and whip into “Legs” or “Sleeping Bag.”

  Shepard held the dried flowers above his head as he walked through the mist thrown up by the pressure sprayer.

  Bert slowed to have a look at the old bike. Dave didn’t look up from the rear wheel where he was directing the nozzle.

  The sprocket, hub, and wheel rim were so thick with grease that no metal showed through. Dirty white feathers clung to the grease, and Bert wondered if a chicken had tried to cross the road at the wrong moment back when this poor old wreck had been a running motorcycle.

  The hiss died and Dave turned and extended his big, wet hand. “I see both you and the old Sportster are still in one piece,” he said.

  “Barely,” Bert replied.

  “Stay off your head, youngster,” Dave said, and he turned back to his work.

  Bert pushed the Sportster out of the mist and parked it to one side of the open overhead door Shepard had entered. He took off his mist-covered glasses and wiped them on his T-shirt.

  A wooden shed ran the length of the cinder-block building. The door of the shed was open. Bert peeked in and his eyes went big. Old motorcycles leaned one against the other, packed tight as anchovies in a can, from the sunlit doorway into the darkness at the end of the shed. The chrome and rust cast a dull sheen and made Bert imagine gold shining through the dust of years. The air was thick with the smell of old grease and rubber gone to rot, and he caught a whiff of leather.

  The next thing Bert caught was a hot, hard jab above his right kidney. He gasped and threw up his arms.

  “You’ve seen our stash,” the voice said. “Now we’ll have t’ waste ya.”

  It wasn’t Shepard and it wasn’t his partner.

  “Turn around,” the voice said.

  Bert turned. It was the biker who had come to football practice with Shepard, the guy who wanted to beat up Coach Christman, the guy with the big arms, the guy who didn’t need big arms because he carried a gun, the guy Bert had called the police on. He held the sprayer level with Bert’s chin.

  “You the kid bought the Sportster?”

  Bert nodded.

  “World’s best buy on a motorcycle,” the guy said. “We’ll have to let you live. Thanks to your acuity and decisiveness, there’ll be a hot tub on the Shepard estate. I myself plan to be the first Shepard soothed in its balmy effervescence. I may have to fight my brother and my nephew for the honor,” he said. “But I’m up to it.” He extended his hand. “Steve Shepard.”

  Bert lowered his arms. “Bert Bowden,” he said as he shook hands. He wanted to smile, but he wasn’t sure it would be prudent.

  “Bert,” Steve said, “I want you to experience something of the sensation your purchase will bring to others.” He lowered the sprayer and blasted Bert in the chest.

  It was just one pull of the trigger, just a quick squirt that left a latitudinal line through the word “Shepard’s.” It startled Bert, though, and he stumbled back into the shed like he’d been shot. He fell against an old bike’s front fender.

  Steve tossed the sprayer in the air, the red hose trailing like a piece of intestine.

  Dave caught it above his head.

  “Billy Gibbons!” Steve said. “I knew it was you. I just needed to see that guitar in your hand.”

  Steve turned to Bert. “Guy here probably introduced himself as Dave Ward, right?” He didn’t wait for Bert to respond. “Actually this is old Billy Gibbons, famed ax-man for ZZ Top. Does bikes when he’s not on the road with the band. But then a pup like yourself wouldn’t know ZZ Top.”

  Bert wanted to say he’d seen Dave’s resemblance to Billy Gibbons right away, but he didn’t.

  “Let me guess,” Steve said. “Your favorite song stylist is . . .” He closed his eyes, dipped his head, and put his fingers to his temples. In a few seconds he raised his head and made a face that suggested enlightenment. “Tiffany!” he proclaimed.

  Barfola, Bert wanted to say.

  But Bert couldn’t have gotten a word in because Steve went right on talking. “Big Billy Gibbons!” he said. “How ’bout a tune?”

  Dave held the pressure wand like a guitar. “This’n goes out to Steve Shepard,” he said. Then he leveled the wand and let fly.

  “Mama!” Steve yelled as he ran into the shop. “Mama!”

  Bert walked back into the sunlight. He looked at Dave smiling and holding the wand nozzle-down, leaning on it like a cane. “You’d think that man was on drugs,” he said.

  No shit, Bert thought. He nodded his head.

  “But he ain’t,” Dave said. “It’s just Shepard juice, I guess. Scotty’s like that too when you get him goin’. The difference with Steve is he’s goin’ all the time.”

  Steve was behind the counter drying off with a shop rag when Bert looked in from the work area. Scotty waved from the showroom where he stood with two uniformed Spokane cops by the custom Harleys. “Catalog’s on the counter,” he said. “Steve’ll ride with you to buy some boots.”

  Steve tossed Bert an L.L. Bean catalog. It was what Bert had come for.

  * * *

  Bert and Steve rumbled down Division like a mobile earthquake, like a volcanic eruption. When they stopped for a light on the way back from Sears, Bert felt the pavement vibrating through the soles of his new boots. They rolled down the alley behind the nursery and stopped in back of the shop. Bert hit his kill button, but Steve kept his bike running. He stretched out his arm and Bert saw the shoulder holster under his sleeveless jean jacket. “I’ll see ya, Bootsie,” he said.

  Bert didn’t realize at first that Steve wanted to shake hands. He was holding his forearm upward, and when Bert reached to shake in the traditional way Steve hooked his thumb, turned his palm perpendicular to Bert’s, and held him in the grip that symbolizes fraternity. Steve pumped Bert’s hand twice, then let go. “I want you not only to stay off your head,” Steve said over the roar of the engine, “I want none of your body parts except your feet in those new boots to touch the pavement.”

  “Thanks for riding with me,” Bert replied.

  “We’ll do ’er again,” Steve said. Then he was off down the alley.

  Bert turned and saw Scotty standing in the doorway. “Come in and have a sit,” he said.

  Bert settled into the old chair next to the wood stove. This back corner with the old Coke machine, stove, couch, chair, floor lamp, and the old console radio was like a living room from the World War II era. The only modern thing here was the big Ektelon gym bag sitting beside the chair. Racquetball gloves hung from the carrying straps. Some were new and soft-looking, but most were old, sweat-stained and brittle like animal skins run over and rained on so many times the fur is gone. Through the open zipper Bert saw a blue ball lying against a white weave of racquet strings. Bert had never played racquetball. He wondered how Scotty c
ould play with such bad knees.

  “The restoration business requires some research,” Scotty said. “Even guys like Dave and I who’ve been working on these bikes most of our lives have to do a lot of reading. So we’ve got the couch and chair and the lamp. This stuff came from the house Steve and I grew up in.”

  Bert wondered what kind of kids became men like Scott and Steve Shepard.

  “You play a winter sport?” Scotty asked.

  “I played basketball in grade school,” Bert replied. “I don’t play anything anymore.”

  “There’s a job open here after school and Saturdays,” Scotty said. “It runs from now till the end of basketball season. I was saving it for my boy, but he surprised us and made the football team. It’s dirty work mostly—cleaning bikes and parts. After a while, if you decide you like being around a shop, we’ll teach you how to tune and service.”

  “I’ll take it,” Bert said.

  “Think about it,” Scotty said. “Talk it over with your folks and let me know tomorrow.”

  Bert didn’t need to think about it, and he didn’t want to talk it over with his folks. But “Okay” was what he said.

  Shepard stood and Bert stood. Bert extended his hand and they shook in the traditional way.

  Bert was about to bring his weight down on the kick pedal when the growl of an engine made him stop and turn. It had sounded like a bike, but it was a sports car with a blond woman at the wheel. Bert turned back to his business, wound up, and came down on the pedal. In the mirror he saw Scotty walk to the car with the can of flowers. Bert was curious to see more, but he’d come to the end of the alley and it was time to head for home.

  * * *

  Bert lay in bed knowing it had been a lucky day and that he was a lucky guy. If he’d made the football team, he wouldn’t have a job at Shepard’s Classic and Custom, and he’d rather work there than be a third-string quarterback.

  He wondered how they could have doubted Camille would make the team. The kid was as big as his dad. A guy would have a lot better chance of being somebody, Bert thought, if he evolved out of the Shepard gene pool.

  Bert hated it that he wanted so much and that he envied what other people had. He knew he was more fortunate than most of the people in the world. He had his own room in a nice house, a sound system, a TV, his own phone, he was healthy, and he owned not one but two motor vehicles. Bert knew he was a lucky guy.

  Chapter 14

  “Though Much Is Taken, Much Abides”

  Thompson High’s first pep convocation of the year is in its initial phase of combustion. The auditorium is packed with clapping, chanting students. There’s a football game tonight and volleyball tomorrow night. The football boys sit on folding chairs on one side of the stage, and the volleyball girls sit on the other. Bert Bowden, who is not burning with the flame of school spirit, sits in the darkness in the last row of the upper level. Up here he doesn’t feel the urge to stand when everybody stands, clap when everybody claps, yell when everybody yells.

  Bert likes the pep cons. He finds them fascinating, and high in the darkness he can be fascinated in peace. There’s always a trade-off, of course. In this case Bert is trading the inspiration he feels at watching kids root for other kids who are trying to be somebody against the desperation he feels at being nobody. At being worse than nobody, really. At being too small-hearted to stand up and cheer with the rest of the crowd for people who have earned the acclaim and deserve the boost.

  Bert wishes he were up on the stage with the varsity football team now. But he’s not and he knows he doesn’t deserve to be. He does, however, yearn for a seat on some stage sometime somewhere.

  Coach Christman has risen to introduce the football team. Bert would rather listen to something else, so he pulls from his back pocket the essay Tanneran returned this morning, squints into the darkness, and reads the man’s comments one more time.

  Bert,

  You’re a good writer. Your prose doesn’t sound like writing, or like someone straining to sound like a writer. The voice is of a thoughtful person talking, and that’s exactly what it needs to be.

  One of your strongest qualities as a writer, it seems to me, is your ability first to see, and then to remember and use the sensory details that focus your readers’ attention in a scene.

  You say, for example, “Ours was an old school with wooden floors, and some of the boards had warped at the edges and were no longer level with the others. I felt the metal legs of the desk-chair catch on these raised boards and rip through them. The room was silent except for the squeal of the metal legs of my desk sliding over the floor and the intermittent splintering of the board edges.”

  This is good narrative writing, Bert. It does one of the things all good narrative does: It forces the reader to experience what’s happening. You take us to that room with you and make us hear your chair go squealing across the floor. You create images in our heads not just of the chair ripping wood, but of the sight of the splintered boards. You don’t have to show us those boards specifically because you’ve already switched on our imaginations, and in our imaginations we see (and hear and smell and touch) the experience ourselves.

  You also force us to experience the damage a lousy teacher—maybe good-intentioned, but nevertheless lousy—can do to a kid. This guy took a lot away from you, Bert. But I want you to remember this little line from a great poem: “Though much is taken, much abides.” Some of your spirit was taken, yes. But there’s plenty left. I see it in your writing, and I know it’s still there inside you. And I know you’ll find it.

  In closing, a demand and an invitation: I demand that you feel good about this piece. It’s fine work. It’s the absolute real thing. And I want to invite you to write for The Explorer. If you think you’d enjoy it, come see me.

  Gene Tanneran

  Bert is still a little light-headed from this praise. The feeling has diminished since this morning, and it never was the dizzying rush he’d feel sitting up on the stage. But it feels good.

  Bert wonders if he’d be up there on stage if so much had not been taken. He also wonders if much abides. Sometimes he wonders if there are any positive qualities left in him at all. Tanneran was kind to say so, but that doesn’t make it true.

  The thought of other kids reading his writing is scary. But it’s also alluring. Bert would like to write for the paper. Is the possibility of recognition worth the risk of ridicule? That’s the question he’ll have to answer.

  Chapter 15

  Peckered

  The writing Bert did for The Explorer wasn’t much fun. He did, however, like opening a new ink-smelling paper and finding his byline. He’d scan each page with care, and when he saw his name his chest would go tight for a second. His stories were informative and clear, which is all they were supposed to be. He’d written about tennis, cross-country, junior varsity football, and the new horticulture club. Bert wasn’t contemptuous of news writing. He liked the symmetry of the inverted-pyramid style that required the most important element in the lede and elements of declining importance below.

  Bert wrote his stories at home after work, and he would not have wanted anyone to find out how long these short, simple pieces took him to complete. It was tough to come up with the right words. When he found the right words, it was tough to get them into sentences that flowed smoothly, then into paragraphs that broke from one another at logical junctures. It was tough to get all the words together so they fit. This was why Bert couldn’t believe Tanneran’s comment that he was a good writer. If he was good, how come it took him so long to write a sentence?

  The writing Bert enjoyed most was what he did for Tanneran’s class. Bert did no homework but English. He knew he should, but he just didn’t feel like it. There was too much other stuff going on in his life. There had been, for example, his motorcycle-riding exam to deal with.

  Bert Bowden

  Junior English

  October 4, 1989

  PECKERED

  My bo
ss, Scott Shepard, proprietor of Shepard’s Classic and Custom Cycles, warned me that the State Patrol had it in for Harley riders.

  “They’re pricks to anybody rides a Harley,” Scotty said. “Doesn’t matter what the guy looks like or how he comports himself. J. Edgar Hoover comes back from the dead and rides through the state of Washington on a Harley, these guys would bust his bulldog jowls from the Idaho border to Puget Sound.”

  “Only two living beings more contemptuous of Harley riders than your basic Washington State Trooper,” Scotty’s brother Steve said from beside me where he sat on his idling Harley. “One is a Washington State Trooper who has drawn out-of-state vehicle inspection duty and meets a Harley rider bringing his bike in from California and applying for a Washington title. Those inspections are like a Red Cross search for tainted blood. They check every orifice in the bike and in the owner right down to the exhaust port. Officious pricks,” Steve said. “Real peckers. And thorough.”

  Steve looks like a bad biker, a 1 percenter as they are referred to, but he’s not.

  I was mounted on my ’69 Sportster as this conversation took place. It was a comfort to me that the Sportster was titled in Washington when I bought it from Scotty.

  “Another person nastier is a Washington State Trooper monitoring the riding segment of the motorcycle operator’s exam,” Scotty said. “They can hear a Harley a mile away in heavy traffic. They have recognition of the exhaust note implanted. They hear the H-D, grab an exam sheet, and mark down a failure. They fill in your name after you’ve rolled in.”

  I was on my way to take my exam, so this was not good news.

  Scotty reached out with the breaker bar he was holding and touched me on the forearm where I wish I had a tattoo but lack the courage. Not the courage to be tattooed, but the courage to face my mom and dad after it’s done.

  Scotty, Steve, and Scotty’s son, Camille, each has a tattoo on his forearm that says RIDE FAST, LIVE FOREVER. My intellect tells me this is a stupid sentiment, but I confess that sometimes when I’m riding and I say it to myself my heart wants to fly out of my chest.