The reporter begins his article with an odd choice of diction; the accident happened, he writes, “as enthusiasts took advantage of the sunny day to again try the warm-weather sport.” That “enthusiasts” makes them seem rather like stamp collectors, but what prompted these men could not be touched by the term enthusiasm. “Warm-weather sport” sounds as if it could be badminton, or miniature golf, or as if this reporter wants to write brochures for Carnival Cruise Lines. And why the formulation “to again try”? The “again” just floats there, challenging you to comprehend its place in that clause. Again after what? you can’t help asking. And that awkward “try,” as if every ride before had been a failure, as if these men were attempting to climb K2. To again try: it rings ominous in my ear. It means every Sunday was a fatality in the making.
The dead man’s name was Robert Chittenden. He had recently borrowed four thousand dollars from Pop, probably to buy the very motorcycle that killed him, and Pop would never see that money again. He refused to ask the widow. Pop is mentioned only once in the newspaper clip: “William Giraldi, 49, of Manville was riding in a group with Chittenden and lost control of his motorcycle at the time of the fatal accident, resulting in minor injuries when he hit the ground.”
The clipping ends with this tally: “Surviving are his wife, JoAnn Fritz Chittenden; a son, Robert L. and a daughter, Cheryl, all at home; his parents, Mr. and Mrs. Lloyd Chittenden of Bound Brook; a brother, Richard, of Green Brook; and a sister, Susan Chittenden, of Bridgewater.”
The most stinging phrase in that tally? All at home. They were four and then they were three.
Four o’clock on a Sunday afternoon, May 7, 2000, the end of the semester for me, the weather an enticement to life. My girlfriend, Anna, and I sat reading in my basement dorm room at Drew University, and when the phone rang I went to the narrow window to look down a slope of grass at the cul-de-sac lying there in the perfect day, the cul-de-sac where I’d snapped photos of my father and his motorcycle just one month earlier.
My godfather was on the line now. He is my father’s first cousin, born the same year; each resided in half the memories of the other. His calls were not unusual, and so the sound of his voice did not pull an alarm in me. But it was Sunday and I knew what Sundays meant. On Sundays they rode. That fact slammed into me within another second or two of hearing his voice on the line. Sometimes the phone call in the night is a phone call in the afternoon.
I’ve been struggling to recall precisely what was said in those opening seconds. He must have said, “Your father crashed,” or perhaps the more evasive “There’s been a crash.” I can, however, recall precisely how he spoke: haltingly—all those uhhs and umms—as if he was sifting through a litany of possible sentences, not a one adequate to the task. The task of telling me, but also the task of assimilating this news himself. I stood immobile there at the window, the day wrathful in its beauty.
The body begins to know before the mind; the body has its own knowledge, its own manner of knowing, a subterranean method, a wisdom from the chasm opening inside you. Too often it’s described as a numbing, but that isn’t right. It’s true that for several seconds the head seems both to lighten and thicken, the sinuses seem to congest, there’s the slightest toning in the ears. But what happens then is actually the inverse of numbing. As the stomach starts its plunge, as the heart begins its roll, all the senses are tuned, boosted. Your body is giving birth, but to what you cannot say. What you perceive as a numbing is really a cannonade of feeling, a waylaying of emotion. The dread of what the body knows does not deaden the body.
I must have asked, “Is he hurt?” or else “How bad is he?” because the reply was this, five words that thump in me still: “I think your father’s gone.” My godfather’s fiancée was there in the room with him, and she must have lashed him for that line, because his next was “Well, we don’t know that for sure.” But he knew that for sure. And now so did I.
He told me that my grandparents and his own parents were just then on their way home from the Pennsylvania hospital, and then he told me that I should come home as soon as I could. All the family was being called about the crash, he said, all converging at my grandparents’ house in Manville, thirty minutes away. Anna and I left campus; I remember hearing how the seatbelts clicked. She drove as I sat looking at the flora out of focus at the edge of the interstate, trucks and sedans dashing madly around us, all that metal propelled by human will, tearing along like two-ton bullets. Her hand on mine but not a word in that car, not one word I can recover in my memory.
We will circle back to May 7, 2000, to how and where my father crashed, to the suicidal cult of speed and his blood on the road, but first you should have the following facts about his life, facts that will show how he came to mount that motorcycle, how his death was a collision of chance and choice.
He was Pop’s firstborn, the third William Giraldi in a patriarchal order of Italian immigrants, born into a severe family system of honor and masculine codes. Pop, a self-taught builder enraptured by motorcycles, bought my father dirt bikes when he was a kid. He rode them through the woods along the river, popped wheelies down backstreets. When my father turned seventeen in 1970, Pop bought him his inaugural street bike, a BSA 650cc with a chrome gas tank. For a time he seemed poised and willing to inherit both the skills of carpentry and the mantle of biker eros.
But that’s not what initially happened. Instead, he left Manville for college, the first Giraldi ever to attain escape velocity, to break from the persuasive pulling of the family and the town. A champion wrestler in high school, he went to Central Connecticut College in New Britain to pursue his goal of becoming a gym teacher and wrestling coach—Connecticut was far enough for him to shake loose from Pop, close enough for him to get home fast if he had to. His goal of teaching Phys. Ed. was sufficiently physical, masculine enough, to be deemed worthy of the patriarch while maintaining its autonomy—it was not carpentry, not Pop’s path. Just as bodybuilding was for me sufficiently separate from my father’s orbit, perhaps that’s how he himself found the incentive to ditch the family mold, to ditch Manville for college, precisely because Pop could not identify with that incentive, could not have cared any less for classroom pursuits. Pop’s dearth of respect for education was the only push my father needed to attain it.
Almost simultaneously, at nineteen, he married his beloved, a Manville girl. He was a residence assistant with an apartment in a dormitory, the walls an onslaught of cerulean, and he lived in this apartment with my mother, who had moved from Manville to be with him there. At twenty-one, just a junior in college, he was a father already, a family man already, his life now altered by the pressures he’d welcomed into it. Pop had advised him against this, against beginning a family at such an age. Just forty years old when I was born, Pop’s ego had a galactic problem with becoming a grandfather so soon; he once told me that. He’d said to my father, “If you have a child now, you’re on your own, don’t ask me for a nickel.” The opening months of my life unfurled on that campus in Connecticut; I was doted on by endearing hippies who passed me beer cans and then clicked bad Polaroids. When my father returned to Manville with a degree, a bride, and a boy, he saw that the annual pittance earned by high school gym teachers was many thousands short of what he needed. He saw, as so many new parents see, that his dreams would need downgrading.
With the solicitudes of a man much older, with an uncommon sobriety and urge to responsibility, and with no hand, not a nickel, from Pop, my father didn’t stay young very long. The dirt bikes he’d been riding since he was a boy, the street bikes he’d owned at seventeen and eighteen? They were gone now. He had a tiny one wailing at home and another en route. The pressures, I imagine, were onerous, and I mean also the pressures of living up to Pop’s example. And yet I’m told this by those who were there: all he wanted was this family-loyal life with my mother and his kids. Unlike Pop, he hadn’t persisted in the multiple risks of motorcycles, in spending either his crimped time or money on t
hem, because he was too devoted.
In addition to the new fiscal demands, it was this sense of devotion—and perhaps a half-conscious fealty to Pop—that lured him away from teaching and coaching and into the family trade of hammers and nails. He and my uncle Tony formed a company they named Giraldi Brothers, and the work was daily brutality because they began as roofers. If you’re a builder, you know there’s nothing worse than roofing: a battering heat in summer, the unholy cold of winter, the lugging of shingles up ladders, the always-there hazard of falling and snapping your neck, your spine.
He was plighted, then, to remain Manvillian. Whatever liberation he’d achieved at college in Connecticut hadn’t lasted. He was duly pulled back into the proletarian vortex, the Jupiter-scale gravity of Pop’s presence, Pop’s own pursuits. He gave everything to his family, in this sense. And that made it all the more disastrous, all the more humiliating—imagine the humiliation in a culture such as his—when his wife, after twelve years and three kids, abandoned him and, to boot, snatched half his money in the divorce. He was forced to borrow $150,000 against our house, half his net worth, in order to pay her. When she vanished from our lives, he had the look of someone who’d just lost his hearing in a blast, someone trying and failing to read your lips.
Again, he chose the hard path of duty; he raised my siblings and me himself, with help from Parma and Pop, when he could get it. Consider the nobility of that, and then consider the emasculation of it: first of not being man enough to hold on to his wife, and then of being burdened with distaff, with what many Manvillians considered the feminizing chores of parenthood, the dishes and the laundry—after pounding nails all day long. A single father who didn’t flinch at sacrifice, at relinquishing his own pleasures in order to do what needed doing, he spent the next decade trying to labor out of the squelching suck of debt. All through my childhood, I’d heard this refrain from him: “There was no way I was letting her take my kids.” But that hadn’t been a problem—she didn’t want us.
Yeats: Too long a sacrifice / Can make a stone of the heart, but not of my father’s. When those debts were finally paid, and when his kids were finally grown, this man of duty, now in his early forties, returned to pleasure, to the patriarchal passion championed by Pop. It’s perhaps a handy bit of irony that this cradle Catholic, who for a decade was weighed down by the slowness of duty, sought spiritual release in the cult of speed. He hurled himself into this eros with the abandon of one long denied. This was the letting loose, the exultation, he’d never had, an adolescent excess at last able to have its expression. He’d put in his time, and so he deserved this release. He’d earned it.
The transference of erotic energies into road racing, the focus and frisson given by that motorcycle, a red-and-white rocket called the Yamaha R1, the fiercest superbike on earth, a deific machine, racetrack-ready, light and tight, absurdly fast, a masterpiece of engineering. But the traits that make it dominant on the racetrack make it deadly on the road. A regular person can buy the thing but it’s simply not meant for a regular person, not meant for America’s erratic roads. It’s the assault rifle of superbikes, much more than is sane, a dispenser of death.
He kept it under a quilt in the garage and shined it with new socks, and when he and his pals went on riding trips, he’d wheel the bike inside the motel room with them. The motorcycle as paramour that would not jilt him. I have a photo of my father, lying sideways on a motel bedspread, his head propped up with one arm, looking at the motorcycle beside him, the seductive gleam of new rubber and metal. He’d modified the bike with grade-A components: stainless-steel brake lines, titanium exhaust, Battlax high-performance tires. In his black-and-red racing suit—an Italian work of art he’d had custom made—and his red boots and black helmet, he looked like a rapid flash from Dante’s feral mind, a demonic cosmonaut craving the speeds of some other realm. And why would a man crave such speeds? Because the world, our world, much too fast for many, is much too slow for some.
All his life force got poured into racing. He refused to sleep with his fiancée the night before his Sunday ride because his fluids had to be reserved for the red-and-white mistress. Racing brought him alive, yes, but it also brought him nearer the grave. There were crashes in that Sunday cult, lots of them, and there were injuries and funerals—lots of those too. But part of the prevailing attitude riders possessed was this: It’s never going to happen to me. He’s dead and I’m clear. Until you’re not.
The young father of my youth, in his twenties, committed and abstaining, famous for his competence, his reliable level-headedness, most alive when providing for his kids, versus the early-forties father, heedless and harebrained, a high-stakes gambler. I want to say that his death was unavoidable, decreed by watchful gods. Nobody or nothing could have saved my father. His family history, his bloodline, was a Siren he was powerless to ignore. The Yamaha R1 was the howl, the homecoming he needed, his death the ultimate articulation of that need. But in my most rational, regretful moments, I consider that perhaps his fatality was not inevitable, that I or others might have saved him had we only tried. It’s just that the trying would have seemed such a transgression against the familial code, and such a betrayal of his joy.
II
On May 7, 2000, an hour after I got the call, Anna and I were the first to arrive at my grandparents’ house in Manville, and we waited on the red-brick steps of the front porch. This quadrant of town had long ago been dubbed Lost Valley, pinched between the railroad tracks and the Raritan River, accessible only by a tunnel at the west end and a bridge at the east. Lost Valley would soon become more literally lost as the river, that unmanageable artery of mud, kept breaching its banks and wrecking homes. The government, repeatedly galled by spending billions in disaster relief, would swoop in, purchase the homes, and then bulldoze them away. My father’s boyhood home would be among those lost, just a patch of sick-looking grass where his memories once lived.
As we waited, there was nothing to do but look, and to feel the weather—eighty degrees, sun-filled, no humidity, incongruous with disaster. My aunt’s house sat to the left of us, my uncle’s to the right, those concrete sidewalks exploded in spots by stretching roots. In my grandparents’ long concrete driveway, the basketball hoop still hung from the garage. On those front and back lawns we neighborhood kids had held riotous wrestling matches in summer and autumn, a band of ruffians who strove for much bruising and the minor blood of others. When I think of my childhood, that barely observable cosmos rushing farther away from me each second, I think of that house, that street, that driveway, those sidewalks and lawns.
Roil the mind with news of this death and it will attempt some form of focus, a stay against the new anarchy booming through it. The focus is diversion. I studied the shifting, devolving light of day as five o’clock came, as late spring slid into early summer. I studied the cracks in the pebbled concrete walkway beneath my sneakers, multiple cracks veining off into the grass. Pop had poured that walkway when he built the house, by himself, fifty years earlier, in 1950, not long before he left to fight in Korea.
My father was born two years later, while Pop was still there fighting, a forward observer directing mortar fire at an incomprehensible foe. There’s a sepia photo of the day he returned from the war, dressed in a khaki uniform, unrecognizably good-looking and fit, a photo shot right there where I now sat. This photo was his first time meeting my father, already a year old. It was this photo I remembered now while waiting for the certainty of his death. And it was this very spot, on Easter Sunday, just two weeks earlier, where I’d last seen him alive. He’d handed me fifty bucks that afternoon and we’d given one another the clownish hug Parma loved to see.
Soon my grandparents’ sedan turned the corner onto Huff Avenue. Anna and I stood, stepped away from the porch, reached for one another’s hand. I tried to peer inside the car as they pulled into the driveway, tried to gauge their faces through the reflected foliage. They came slowly from the car, Parma’s face a picture of
hurt, a handkerchief pressed to her mouth.
Pop looked stoic still but walked somewhat unevenly, as if testing the earth before letting his full weight down, and when he reached me there on the walkway, he said four words: “You lost your dad.” My father was forty-seven years old. I was twenty-five. Pop was sixty-seven, recovering from a double-knee replacement or else he’d have been on the ride that day. He embraced me in that tense, back-clapping mode familiar to men everywhere, and I brought my right hand to my eyes as if to shield them from a punishing sun, but the sun had begun its drop behind roofs an hour ago. And I noticed again the cracks in the concrete beneath my sneakers.
I cannot say if I’d thought of my brother or sister since getting my godfather’s phone call two hours earlier, and I cannot say if I thought of them then, after learning for sure that our father was dead. It seems right that I should have thought of them: my brother, Mike, four years younger than me, eighteen hundred miles away in Boulder, Colorado, and my sister, Alisyn, two years younger, in Manville still. It seems right, but I cannot recall the thoughts, nor the probably lawless emotions to which they were attached, nor when I first saw my sister that day, or if I’d even seen her at all. We three have never been overly involved in each other’s life; after childhood, our trajectories were too disparate, our interests too incompatible. But I must have thought of my siblings then in our grandparents’ driveway. I want to believe that I thought of them.
There’s much I can’t recall. It’s been sixteen years and the memory has its own wayward agency, its own mysterious volition, citadels in one spot, lacunas in another. When something momentous hits you, you are not always conscious of needing or wanting to seal certain details inside the vault of your mind. You are not predicting that sixteen years hence, you will wish to resurrect those details. You have faith—it feels like faith—that the memory will clasp onto what is vital, what is necessary to remember. But that faith, like all faith, is too often a letdown.
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