Dirtbag, Massachusetts: A Confessional by Isaac Fitzgerald

Author:Isaac Fitzgerald [Fitzgerald, Isaac]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Biography & Autobiography, Personal Memoirs, Literary Collections, Essays, Social Science, Gender Studies
ISBN: 9781635573985
Google: 5LQ0EAAAQBAJ
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Published: 2022-07-19T20:43:26+00:00

I had bought the motorcycle off a guy who often drank at the bar I was still working at. He was a motorcycle mechanic but never joined a club, being one of those beautiful loners, hair slicked back in a kind of California cool that almost nobody can pull off unless they’re up on a movie screen. He was older, maybe in his fifties, preternaturally youthful the way people who’ve never had kids (at least ones they know about) sometimes are.

When he sold me the bike, he gave me a card and said, “Call this person, they’re good for insurance.” Which was helpful. I’d never owned a vehicle before, and I was working three jobs and saving exactly zero dollars a month. If he hadn’t prompted me, I would never have thought to get insurance.

I called the number and asked how much it would cost.

“You’re in your twenties?” said the insurance man. “Probably around one hundred and twenty-five dollars.”

“There’s no way I can afford one hundred and twenty-five dollars a month,” I said.

“This is your first bike, huh? It’s not one hundred and twenty-five dollars a month. It’s one hundred and twenty-five dollars a year.”

“Oh,” I said. That I could afford. But now it was sounding way too cheap, if anything. Suspiciously cheap. I wondered if my very cool motorcycle friend had maybe set me up with a dubious insurance person. “Can I ask why it’s so, uh, affordable?”

The man exhaled. “Like I said, this is obviously your first bike. Kid, I like to shoot straight, and remember, I’m a rider myself, so this is the real and true answer: Insurance is so cheap because I most likely won’t have to pay you out because when you crash you’re most likely going to die.”

“Oh,” I said again. “Okay.”

And I was. Okay with it. I remember very clearly thinking, “If I die while riding this extremely fun and well-built machine, I die, and that’s okay.” I had thought that, unlike a car, a motorcycle could hurt only me.

But now, standing in the street and staring at the very fast thing which had sped me home from one city to another without needing any assistance from my conscious mind, I recognized that as a lie. Other people drove on roads, and other people didn’t know when you were fine with dying. I had been black-out drunk. I pictured a school bus full of kids swerving to avoid my bike, plummeting over the cliffs that the U.S. 101 hugs so tightly. Remembering that it had been a weekend night didn’t make the image any easier to shake—I just substituted it for other vehicles, other kinds of terrified faces.

I hopped on the bike and took it around the corner to the bar. I handed the keys over to a tall blonde friend of mine, who—I was oddly relieved to hear—planned to sell the bike, since she could use the money even more than I could.

The rest of that day, and a few more after, I kept checking to see if there had been any accidents on the U.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.