Awake and Alive

The First Three Pages

In a warehouse loft just off Brooklyn’s Bushwick Avenue a motorcycle frame sits on the kitchen counter. Light from a tin shop lamp glints off chrome exhaust pipes and silverware in the dish drainer. Next to the stove a carburetor lays against a coffee press and a wheel stands behind the trashcan.

The bike’s a 1957 BSA, just like the poster on the wall behind it. The motorcycle and its owner are both British. James Gale leans on the sink as he explains the work he’s doing in the kitchen. This is his dream bike. Another BSA sits out on the street, a super modified 1966 Lighting, but the one on the kitchen counter will be his masterpiece. James stands by the frame without touching it, as boys hover near girls they wish to hold.

I know the feeling. A few days ago, standing at a traffic light, hunched over the tank of my 1973 BMW, hands pressed against the cylinders for warmth, I felt the body of my bike move. The slow rhythm of opposing pistons humming in my embrace. Frozen fingers warming on the heart of my treasure, my Twilight.

Through the drifting steam of my breath I saw a guy go flying past on some kind of old British Norton Commando, his silk scarf flapping in the wind. And I got to thinking an old familiar thought, why are we still riding? With warm subway cars rumbling along right below the winter streets, why am I doing this? Me, and the Norton guy, the Guzzi guys; why are we out here on antique, foreign bikes wearing tattered jackets and frostbite?

I thought, maybe the Brit bike cats know the answer, a real solid reason why we do this. Maybe I don’t have to figure it out on my own, I can ask them. I go in search of the learned that I may partake of their wisdom. Cool.

That’s how I wound up in the kitchen of James Gale and his wife Kate. Both are bikers. Kate’s project is a 1969 Triumph Bonneville sitting on a little platform directly in front of the TV. Like the BSA, Kate’s Triumph is only frame, engine and suspension so far. Kate is some six feet tall and throws her leg over the incomplete bike, sitting on the frame as we talk. Kate wears biker boots around the house, and that’s a real good sign.

So I hit them with the question, why? Why do this? Why are we riding antique motorcycles in miserable cold though crowded, dangerous streets?

James folds his arms as he looks at the floor. Kate rests hands on knees as she looks at the Triumph between her legs. The Gales’ cat purrs in my lap.

Both James and Kate like the old British bikes because they like to create something unique, personal. Born of imagination and ingenuity, fashioned and customized by hand, the bike is a work of art, a work of performance art. Riding their bikes in the heat and cold and sun and rain, the Gales become a functioning part of the cityscape. An artwork they live, and the rest of us catch glimpses of as they go by.

Not what I was looking for. I wanted to hear something about better commute times or gas mileage. That’s how I try to explain it when people ask why I ride. Those are the lies I tell myself and others. Sounds a little less crazy that way.

The Gales have abandoned explanations of brute functionality. Assessment of need is irrelevant in their motorcycle lives. The motorcycle is an expression of beauty. Art needs no explanation, music needs no explanation, a boy needs no reason to love a girl.

Anyone who has known love, and who has then witnessed love greater then their own, knows how I feel beside the Gales. Devotion needs no reason, and perhaps my need for reason seems vulgar to hearts unfamiliar with the chains of my apprehension. I need time to think about it, so I ride.

Up on the Williamsburg Bridge the air is cool, the East River hard and raked with shadow. The Manhattan skyline spreads before me, a sweeping range of buildings along the water. Cast in red of setting sun, the buildings seem to wander one behind another as I approach. The whole city is so real and sharp I can feel the life of it, feel it’s energy moving toward me.

And there am I, on my motorcycle charging in with nothing between us but the air, and the cold, and the sunset. This moment on the Williamsburg Bridge, the presence of such a massive city open wide and burning with details painted in red sunlight, this moment is enough reason to grow up and become an adult even if that means age and decay soon follow. This moment is a thousand years of serenity lived in a few hundred feet of bridge. But it’s still only a feeling, a feeling so deep inside I still don’t know what the feeling is.

Why do I love this old German bike I call Twilight? With it’s creeping rust and torn seat and antiquated technology. Why does it excite me? How does it draw me out onto the street even in air that leaves ice on my skin?

Those shadows creeping among the towers of the city, the answer is there, somewhere. I can’t find it, or maybe I can’t see it, or maybe I just can’t understand what I see, but these Brit riders, with their old bikes scratched and worked and worn, they might know.

Hugh Mackey has been repairing old British iron at 6th Street Specials for some 20 years. He’s an East Village institution, something of a folk legend by now. Hugh wears sideburns and a gentle curve to his body that looks like a physical adaptation to leaning against a bar. Soft tones of a Scottish accent color his voice as we talk about business, how the chopper craze and EBay changed the way people use these old bikes. How he takes in stray BMWs and such because no one else in town works on old Euro-bikes anymore.

Hugh is the nexus of my search, I got in touch with the Gales through him. I hadn’t hit him with the question yet, but when I came in search of his wisdom I found him with a broken collarbone and thumb. Hugh races bikes on the weekend, the last race left a sling around his arm and a splint on his thumb.

Hugh rests his good arm on a bench vice as I ask him, “Why?” Why do we live in danger? I too have injuries; a shattered wrist from last December when a woman made a U-turn in front of me. Why are we riding bikes with less power and safety features than modern bikes? Why forty-year-old, European bikes?

Hugh’s answer is spoken in well formed sentences that seem disjointed when sewn together. He’s obviously thought about this before, talked about it before, defended himself before. His eyes wander the room between ideas, a hot cup of tea rising again and again in punctuation.

Parts are cheap and easy to get, the Brit-bikes are light, make heaps of horsepower, and look so hot it’s like a hurricane of awesome just hit town.

That’s Hugh’s answer, but it’s not Hugh’s answer. In the spaces between words it’s easy to see Hugh knows why, for years he’s known, but the answer is too true for words. Hugh is a master wizard, a man familiar with all the magic the rest of us are learning. But to know secrets doesn’t make them easy to explain. He’s doing what I do, trying to make it sound sane when it’s not.

Clearly years of friendship and copious amounts of alcohol would be necessary to tap the wisdom hidden within Hugh Mackey. Perhaps that’s as good an answer as any. Perhaps it’s something that can’t be taught without apprenticing the wise. Perhaps just asking the question doesn’t mean I’ve earned an answer. Perhaps I need to learn a new language before I’ll understand the words. Very well then, I continue.

Hugh’s assistant is a 22-year-old guy with a thin scruffy beard and brown leather jacket made from a cow that died decades ago. His name is Zach Tucker and he rides an old British BSA that seems to be made from coat hangers and willpower. Every day Zach rides the bike, no matter the weather. He’s had that BSA since age 16 when he built it from spare parts. Zach even slept on the bike (that’s right, on it) in the woods when he didn’t have an apartment in college.

“It wasn’t so bad,” says Zach as he sits on the steps in front of the shop smoking a cigarette and drinking tea with milk. “Ya’ lay across the tank an’ seat. Ya’ just have to keep your helmet on or the bars dig into yer skull.

There’s a certain resolve in everything Zach says. The universe seems ordered by his evaluation. Complex feelings become simple filtered through his philosophy of “Kuz I do.” The sun comes up, cigarettes get smoked, and Zach rides a BSA.

Why do you ride a BSA? Kuz I do. Why not a Triumph? Kuz I ride a BSA. Why in the cold? Why not? What’s so great about a BSA? I like them.

I envy Zach this existence, to live by such clear laws and never need another explanation. To be so sure, to know your own truths so completely that to rationalize anything is just a bunch of chatter.

Check this out, it’s a passage by someone who understood destiny, trying to describe it to someone else. I heard it once, somewhere, translated from Japanese. “When rain falls, it doesn’t land by chance. Air temperature and wind direct the drops to their mark. They join, following paths defined by the land. One inevitability merges from another, each time swelling into a larger purpose. Bit by bit the water is bound together until the rush is so strong it becomes a river. It’s easy to listen to the rain, but to understand the meaning behind every single drop, that’s something I couldn’t begin to explain.”

That’s Zach! Except he doesn’t even take all that time to say it! If Zach said it, it would be, “I am what I am.”

Perhaps Zach found the ultimate explanation. Why does anyone do anything? “Because I do, because I exist, because I am.” My question seems ill matched for such a philosophical tournament. I guess in my search for answers I’ll have to leave Zach in the woods sleeping on his bike like Gandhi or Buddha, he’s reached another plateau of consciousness.

 

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