The Hair of Harold Roux by Thomas Williams

Author:Thomas Williams [Williams, Thomas]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
Published: 2011-06-07T05:00:00+00:00

My name is Allard Benson, and I here confess that I have been in love with a certain kind of machine for most of my life. Love is love, and is not cured by the disapproval of love’s object. I disapprove of all machines. Filthy, dangerous, what they do is remove us from our true lives, speed us loose from what we would be content to be—walking animals upon the slow and beautiful earth. But we are cursed with presumption, and never rest from creating false new worlds.

My first two-wheeled machine, which I possessed at the age of four, was a strange sort of bike with pedals on the front axle—a tricycle-like thing with only one wheel on the back. Remember that I don’t use the word “love” lightly; even though I find the word impossible to define, neither can I define in any logical way my continuing relationship with machines that have caused me to break bones and lose skin. It’s not reasonable at all. In airplanes, for instance, which have been proven as safe as our general lives, safer than the bathroom, the basement or the bed, I’m in anxiety, as nervous as a cat—that animal who, like me, feels control to be safety in a world of dangers that must be deftly avoided. Who controls those great silver monsters? But then one’s control over a two-wheeled vehicle is pretty nominal at best, and when that modicum of control decides to disappear, nothing could be less visible. I once rolled a measured hundred feet down East Orange Grove Avenue in Pasadena—an unforgettable experience in non-control. One second I was riding, and the next I was six to eight feet in the air, watching my motorcycle’s taillight pass beneath me. A rather classic wing-ding. Both the headlight and the taillight were broken in that accident. I tucked (a witness later told me that I resembled an oversized basketball). In that accident I lost some skin, blood, and the position of one kneecap, but not this weird and continuing fascination.

It is not for me to analyze this fascination. What I will do is remember one warm spring night when this love ran true, a night of no particular significance except that I have never forgotten it.

I was twenty-one, an undergraduate who hadn’t the slightest idea what he wanted to do in life except that someday it must change into meaning—become heroic, dedicated, disciplined by style. I was on the GI Bill, drifting from one school to another and finding them more or less the same. At the time I was at the University of New Hampshire; next year I’d be at the University of Chicago. An aimless time, remembered without much nostalgia at all. There were girls to whom, I’m afraid, I could be attentive and then turn cruelly indifferent. I was writing my first novel, but hadn’t yet come to believe it might be publishable, so even that possibility of a future seemed as unrealistic as any other daydream.

My

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