The Harley class

Tomorrow night I start my Harley training, as Chuck calls it.

I'm going to Newnan, to the Great South Harley Davidson store , for two nights and two days, and they are going to teach me how to ride.

I had to buy gloves and boots for this so that if I fell off, I wouldn't end up with gravel buried in my knuckles or a broken ankle. At Pilates last night, Dennis, who has a motorcycle of some variety (it's white) told me that everyone falls off, and I should expect to lay the cycle down at some point. His wife said, "just try to get your foot out from under it."

I am not a physically brave person. I'm doing this because it seems interesting, I can write about it, and frankly because it scares me. I don't want to fall. I hate falling. And I have been assured that I will absolutely fall. Thus, I have to go fall.

My friend Martha, when I told her months ago that I intended to learn to ride, was horrified. She works as a chaplain in the trauma center at Tampa General Hospital. She told me stories. The way doctors call the bikes murdercycles, the helmets are brainbuckets, the whole thing. It was sweet. It reminded me of my father, sort of: he used to cut out articles in the newspaper about mutilated bodies got that way from being thrown off speeding cycles or mashed under the wheels of some behemoth truck or having skidded across half a mile of pavement right out of their clothes. He cut out every one he could find. Sent them to my older brother Karl (search hipchen at this site). Who owned and rode a bike for who knows how many years, has a scooter now, my mother says a bike too, but Karl doesn't say that.

Anyway, all this newspaper stuff kept me off bikes mostly. I rode with my cousins once in a meadow I think, when we were kids, dirt bikes. The only other time I rode was on the back of a bike driven by a math professor at IIT-Kanpur last spring. It was my only way home: Chitra was sick; it was a long walk. The math professor had a bike. I hopped on, no helmet, in a skirt, behind a stranger. And I really liked it.

We didn't fall.

I'm hoping that I like riding by myself, and that I can get a bike to take to and from school to save gas and be a more careful consumer. Which is boring. So maybe what I mean is that I want that plus the cachet of a bike. The math prof was tough in her salwar kameez on her unmuffled old Triumph in the middle of the night, screaming past the peacocks and pariah dogs, dust kicked up everywhere. The bicyclists tinkled horns we couldn't hear, though we saw the riders with their hands on the bells. Her hair blew back in my face and smelled of cumin and cooking and the night was impossibly dark and tasted clean and good and fast.