The Hero's Body

by William Giraldi

  There were perhaps two seconds, three at the most, from the time he saw the turn until the time he was too damaged ever to see anything else again. Count it: one, two, three, done. And two or three seconds don’t produce enough oxygen, aren’t expansive enough, for an intelligible thought or completed feeling. Conception or death, the beginning and the end, can happen in that abbreviated span, but little else. A sneeze, perhaps.

  Near the start of TT: Closer to the Edge, from a head-on camera angle, there’s a high-side accident that approximates what happened to my father. I’ve watched it fourteen times over, pausing it every half second so that it plays in slow motion, and still I cannot fathom precisely how the physics of the crash unfolds. Even in slow motion it happens too quickly, too minutely, to understand with the eyes.

  When you let off the brake and come out of a slide, the back tire gains grip, and if the bike doesn’t have the right position, if it’s not exactly vertical on the road, it goes from no traction to instant traction, from sideways to straight. When the tire grabs asphalt it has no choice but to force the bike straight. And then the bike’s momentum gets pretzeled, wants to twist itself over, and so it does—the bike always does what it wants—and then the bike and the rider both get flung. It’s a matter of weight transfer, from the front tire to the rear. The bike is heavy in front and light in back when the front brake is applied, but light in front and heavy in back when the back brake is applied. This weight transfer affects everything that happens on the bike.

  YouTube has plenty of high-sides for the crash-curious, and most are just like that, from upright to upended so rapidly you can’t make out what’s happened. Which tells me this: even if I had perfect video footage of my father’s crash, or if I’d been present that day, observing from some clear vista on Slifer Valley Road, I would not have been able to process the microseconds in which it all went irredeemably wrong.

  In a different context, Kipling made the phrase “thinking with the blood,” and maybe that fits here. My father reacted with his blood, not his brain, and his blood told him to save the bike, not to lay it down. We can’t calculate correctly in only three seconds, and so the viscera makes its own decisions. Often there’s not time enough even for that. If you’ve ever crashed your bicycle you know that you can be horizontal on the sidewalk with a leaking gash in an elbow or knee before you even understand how you went down. Before you have the chance to prepare to fall, you’re already fallen. Car crashes are similar: one second you’re in the sane and reasonable direction on the road, and the next second you’re askance in a ditch.

  There are certain troublous situations where, in that second when you understand with your blood, with your saliva, that you will not make the turn, you can glance for a spot to crash, “to jump ship,” as Guy Martin puts it. You glance for anywhere that’s flat, unmarked with immovable objects made of metal or wood, a patch to lay it down and slide or roll, or preferably a very soft place. A wheat field would be nice. A child’s bouncy house in a large front yard would be ideal; you’d aim your crash for that, if your crash were in any way aim-able, which it usually isn’t. It happens much too quickly for anything other than the controlled chaos of physics.

  That wheat field or bouncy house, frequently there when you don’t need it, is never there when you do, and that’s what makes the street such a perilous place for a motorcycle. Everything, everywhere is a solid object against which the organs and skeleton have no chance. My father didn’t get that one crucial second for that one crucial glance, and anyway, there was no good place to crash on Slifer Valley Road, unless he could lay it down and low-side, let the bike slide out from under him. The broken vertebrae would have hurt but he would have lived. As it was: I believe he had no time to understand that crashing was guaranteed, no time for rationality to declare I don’t have this one, and so no time to let it go. No crash options. He didn’t decide not to lay it down. He didn’t decide anything. A decision takes time he didn’t have.

  At that speed, in that turn, with that guardrail curved there before him and elms standing ancient and obstinate on either side, his only option was dying. You can add better brakes to the equation, subtract ten degrees from that miserable heat, change the time of day to eliminate his fatigue, but at that speed in that turn, the outcome is still a trinity of fatal wounds.

  Crashes are usually relayed in seconds. The famed split second. Or the finger-snapping just like that. The always popular in the blink of an eye. The much-hyped out of the blue and its globetrotting twin, out of nowhere. Avert a roadway fiasco and it’s usually done in the nick of time—nick: “a small broken area that appears on something after something else hits or cuts it.” The escape is always narrow, the call always close. Any closer and it’d have flung you far away. The miss is always near, and yet it’s the hit that was near. Mourning happens when the bike hits the guardrail, not when the bike misses the guardrail. Don’t avert that roadway fiasco and you’re at the wrong place at the wrong time, although the truth is that you’d be at the wrong place at the right time, or the right place at the wrong time. We’d do well to get our wrongs and rights right. It was the wrong speed on the right road, the wrong speed in that right turn.

  We’re pawns of causation, of because X then Y. Bodybuilding was no different: training hard equals getting strong. To live uncrazed in the world, we require a comprehension of the nexus from A to B, a knowledge of the strings making objects dance. We prefer to calculate the effect from the cause, of course, but when we’re already battered in the ditch, or dying beneath a guardrail, then we’re forced to calculate the cause from the effect. The speed, the rain, the ice, the multitasking derelict with only one hand on the wheel . . . the Yamaha R1 tearing down Slifer Valley Road. He never knew what hit him.

  But I know what hit him, and I live now with knowing that he didn’t. No final tally of forty-seven years, no concluding thought of his children, parents, all the good work he’d done. What does that matter, a final thought? Final thought of us or no final thought of us, the result was the same. But it matters to me. To believe that those last seconds don’t count because the result was the same is to believe that all seconds don’t count because the result is the same. If his thoughts were important that morning, if they were important the day, the week, the year, the decade before, then they would have been equally important as he was skidding, screeching, beneath the guardrail bleeding.

  Perhaps he had the famous flash you’ve heard about—My life flashed before my eyes—but flashes aren’t thoughts. Nothing gets tallied, no daughter, mother, son fully conjured, in a flash. To go peacefully in my sleep: that’s the understandable wish of many, and I don’t dispute the peaceful part. But to die and not be aware of it, not digest what’s happening to you, not experience it, not glimpse the narrowed glare of the Reaper? That seems to me a stupendous deprivation and injustice. Next to being born, dying is the most important thing that ever happens to you.

  Officer Branch’s formulation “point of final uncontrolled rest”—not once but twice—is an idiomatic marvel to ponder. He means where the bike stopped when the crashing was done, I know, but “uncontrolled rest” is a new concept to me, a deliberate contradiction, as if a chaotic calm were possible. Final rest, on the other hand—that makes sense if you insist on the euphemism R.I.P.

  (“He’s at rest now” was one of the more irritating declarations I had spoken at me during the funeral, always delivered in that pastel tone, mostly neutral but with a trace suggestion that it was better to be at rest, to be dead. It took rappelling down into auxiliary wells of politeness not to respond with “But he didn’t want to be at rest now.” Still, that wasn’t as loathsome as the popular nonsense that says Everything happens for a reason. To those who uttered that to me, I wanted to reply, Yes, and the reason is pointlessness and pain.)

  My father was in control of the bike until he was not. Under the guardrail, he and the bike were not both resting; they were both bleeding. I’m struck by that image mobili
zed by Branch, “a puddle of fuel,” the bike’s gasoline mingling with my father’s blood, the propellant of one meeting the propellant of the other, both of them propelled no further, no farther.

  I was struck, too, to learn in Officer Branch’s version that bystanders had wheeled the bike thirty feet away from where they’d found it, because I’d been told by the other riders that my father was with the bike against the guardrail, his leg or legs partially on top of it. Which means that these bystanders weren’t standing by, but rather had repositioned my father to get him off the bike, or to get the bike off of him. More conflicting reports from Calvary.

  It’s the impulse, I suppose, in a situation such as that, to attempt some form of rescue, however meager, however futile (to watch a man die and do nothing must cause a permanent ruction to the self). But I’m pretty sure that the repositioning of someone with those injuries isn’t in the protocol. Not that moving him or not moving him made any difference at all. At that point, nothing for him made any difference anymore.

  On page three, Officer Branch concludes his narration with “Scene was photographed by police.” For several hours after first reading the report, I’d thought that what the police had photographed was my father under the guardrail, on the stretcher, his body and his blood, and I went about preparing myself, preparing my own blood, to behold those shots, because of course I’d have to see them eventually, the photographic work of an anonymous police artist for whom my father was the model. Until I realized that the photographs Branch refers to are the standard shots of any accident scene: the skid marks, the bike, lipstick-like smears on the guardrail, gouges in the asphalt. By the time the police began taking photos, my father would already have been in the ambulance, en route to the ER, having his racer’s suit sheared from him, being tended to by hands incapable of reversing the hurt.

  From the middle of page three to the end on page twelve, another narrator takes up the thread: Robert L. Bell, the police chief himself. (Daniel Branch and Robert Bell: wholesome American names. You can picture them: sandy-haired and sideburned, slightly freckled, a pinch overweight, highly Protestant in that Pennsylvania vein.) Chief Bell’s narrative of my father’s crash is taken up mostly with “witness testimony”: to say what you saw, and in saying it, to make it true. Remember the irate old farmer in the pickup truck, the one with the crippled hand? He was “startled to discover one of the motorcycles was traveling 5 feet behind him”—tailgating, he means, and he got the word right. If ever you’ve turned to find on your bumper what looks like a Crayola cosmonaut astride a two-wheeled rocket, startled is exactly what you feel. The farmer was then startled some more when the bikes began roaring past him, that distinct silver roar, the sexed-up scream that sounds like nothing else on earth.

  The farmer is sure to mention “an oncoming white van that came very close to colliding with one of the cycles, head on.” A white van: he remembered the color. Then he pulled to the shoulder and waved on the other bikes, watching them “across a valley as they accelerated quickly away from him.” For some reason he doesn’t mention what the married couple told me when I visited the crash site weeks earlier: that he unzipped my father’s suit in an effort to give him more air. He doesn’t mention the blood that must have been on his fingers after he did so. How could he have forgotten? This farmer who remembered the detail of the white van doesn’t remember my father’s blood on his own crippled hand. Or else he considered it too indecent and upsetting to say so.

  Another witness was at a stop sign on Hickory Lane—what a pleasant-sounding American street: nothing awful ever happens on Hickory Lane—waiting to turn onto Slifer Valley Road, and that’s when he saw the bikes go by “well above the speed limit.” He himself was about to pull onto Slifer behind the pack, but that’s when he saw my father coming, “traveling faster than the previous group of motorcycles, apparently trying to catch up with the group . . . He believes Unit #1 was traveling approximately 80 MPH.” (That’s a good guess, eighty—I wish it were true. At eighty, an R1 is just getting warmed up. The faster it goes, the better it works. Unless there’s that turn you don’t know is there, in which case both it and you cease working altogether.) When this witness found my father on the road, “he felt for a pulse, but did not feel one.” It’s uncertain just what he would have done if he had felt a pulse—in my father’s neck or wrist, which did he touch? What does a bystander do then except ogle and be relieved, by turns fear-lashed and inwardly glad, grateful to his god that today is the day of another man’s death and not his own? He’s dead and I’m clear.

  After that, Chief Bell has what looks like an irritating time in conversation with the riders who were with my father that Sunday, every one of whom retches up the same lie: their average speed was forty-five miles per hour. One guy says he “believes Unit # 1 was doing around 35 MPH,” a comedy any way you cut it. Another guy says that “they traveled no more than 50 MPH,” as if he could appear consummately truthful with an admission that they were indeed speeding, but only by five miles per hour above the limit on those roads. What’s the harm of a measly five miles per hour over the limit? Everybody does it.

  And after hearing the same bullshit line from the last rider he interviewed, Bell had had enough: “I confronted him on that statement and explained to him that numerous witnesses and the total of over 100 feet of braking skids by Unit #1 contradict that stated speed. Nevertheless, he maintained they were not going over 50 MPH at any time.”

  Each rider tells Chief Bell the same sequence of events: the pack stopped at a Mobil gas station for a breather. My father was complaining of his front brakes; they didn’t sound or look right. He said he had a headache, “didn’t feel well . . . was going to take it easy and head home.” When they saw that my father wasn’t with them anymore, they waited at a stop sign (some say the pack waited three minutes, some say it waited thirty seconds; that’s a two-minute-and-thirty-second discrepancy in the conception of time). After waiting, two riders went back to look for him. About two minutes later, one of the riders returned to the pack to inform them that “Unit #1 had been involved in an accident.”

  Involved in an accident: the word choice of the rider who returned to tell the others what had happened. Not crashed into a guardrail. Not killed himself in that right turn. The linguistic sleight of hand is telling for how it strives to absolve my father of blame, how it strives to absolve them all of blame. Involved in an accident sounds rather like involved in a lightning strike.

  This same rider confesses that he “did not know if Unit #1 was familiar with the road.” To him, for his willingness to indulge the obvious, I’d like to put two questions. After what happened, how can you still not know if he was or was not familiar with the road? And if you were familiar with that turn, and if you doubted that he was, then why didn’t you warn him of it? Think of the other guy. Why wasn’t anybody thinking of him?

  My father’s riding pals are all ashine with admiration for him—“was an excellent rider . . . the best rider in the group . . . more than 20 years of riding experience . . . a highly skilled rider”—which is the reason they have to lie to Bell about his speed, about how fast every one of them rode every weekend of every summer. To tell the truth would be not to risk a summons for themselves, but to betray my father, to snitch on a fellow Sunday soldier, to transgress against the code and camaraderie. They are, in that way, identical to the cops they badmouthed, outmaneuvered, outran each week: the brotherhood and the bond, clan-thinking, tribal solidarity—it always and everywhere trumps the truth. A tribe of warriors protects its own, even when, especially when, he has fallen in battle.

  I can guess Bell’s sensible query as he listened to the laudations for my father: How does such “a highly skilled rider,” an “excellent rider,” end up dead beneath a guardrail? Because it would seem to him, as it no doubt seems to you, that the inverse of skill and excellence are required to find yourself smashed and bleeding to death on a Pennsylvania roadway.

  A detail I c
an’t explain: halfway into Chief Bell’s narrative, he begins referring to my father by name: “GIRALDI stated he was going to take it easy . . . GIRALDI was lagging behind . . . Two riders went back looking for GIRALDI.” But on the final page of the report, under “OPINION and CONCLUSION,” Bell reverts to form, as if invoking my father’s name here, in this most pertinent section, the section of his ruling, would be a debasement of the dead:

  While a recall exists for the front brakes of the involved motorcycle, there is no indication the defect in the front brakes contributed to this accident. The existence of lining on three of the four brake pads, although very thin, was sufficient to stop Unit #1 when driven at legal and prudent speeds.

  The statements of uninvolved witnesses and the length of the one-wheel skid mark both indicate excessive speed, well above the posted suggested speed for the curve of 20 mph.

  Operator of Unit #1 was solely in violation for failing to drive at a safe speed.

  There’s no revising the word choice, no erasing those terms: legal, prudent, excessive, safe. But it’s the word solely I feel trembling in me now, because it means solely responsible.

  X

  Calamity usually results from the confluence of bad things. On May 7, 2000, on Slifer Valley Road, that confluence was present for my father. The day’s cruel heat, the condition of the front brake pads, the fatigue at the end of the ride, his ignorance of the road, the warning sign much too close to the turn, his not wanting to keep the other riders waiting for him. Eliminate just one of those factors and perhaps there’s no crash that day. But you can eliminate all of those factors and it will make no difference if he’s kissing a hundred miles per hour at the near lip of that crest. And those men, I know, were always kissing a hundred miles per hour.