Lazarus Mount

I kicked Rosinante down to third just before the on-ramp, forty-five around the corner banking easy and tucked down over the stuff sack duct taped to the tank. Traffic was light on the freeway. Bars wouldn’t close for another hour. Head and taillights turned red and white starburst rivers through the thin mist on the visor, and the helmet rush rose to a steady song at sixty. I popped it into fourth at the end of the ramp, running down bumpers as fast as I could get her up to light speed.

For the three days prior I dreamt in negative space. Shades of revelations, my shadow, the dark rider, careening down a length of illimitable asphalt. The highway and miles of wasteland into the east laid themselves out, the last frontier to conquer in my escape, and a world left wasteland in the wake of my flight HOME. Death’s mount rattled hellfire dried bones, crawling to its own pale hooves not far behind.

In her day, Rosinante was a Kawasaki EX500, predecessor to the Ninja, a light frame stock racer with a pornstar profile. You could lay her down at eighty in a hairpin and pick her up accelerating into a cool buck flat. Theoretically.

Todd found the bike rotting on a side street downtown and took it home.  He put three weeks of work into it, turned it into a beast of burden for a messenger job, and rode it for a few months. He laid it down through a stoplight. Said that it was too much bike for him. He sold it to his sister, Q. She replaced a mirror and the turn signals, kept it around for a town bike. She called it her video game and threatened to paint it like up like the Kawasakitty once she got some free time. But she hit it big as a front-end web designer and blew a few paychecks on a brand-new Buell. She took to wearing a t-shirt that read: “does this bike make my butt look fast?” The Kawasaki was put out to pasture and spent three years sitting on the street, in the rain, in front of the Lair. It might well have rotted to a rust stain right there. Q sold all her shit to get ready for a move. The bike was just another corner clear.

I’m not a crotch rocket man so much, but wheels are wheels, and since they impounded my last horse, I had been on foot. All I needed was a mount, and short of winning the lottery, the rusted out rice burner sitting on the curb was as close to transportation as I was going to get. I handed her three hundred dollars, she handed me a key. I walked up the street past the empty Kismet window, to Ken’s market, bought a case of Schmidt’s and pushed the late eighties lawn ornament into the garage.

Complete with a litter of mismatched tools, salvation army stereo, coffee can ashtray, and a cooler, the garage doubled as Todd’s bike shop. The reception on the radio wasn’t so great, so I dug out the only cassette tape that I still own, the essential Gene Autry collection. Armed with a can of WD40 and a roll of duct tape, I set about the delicate resurrection of my new ride. I blew cleaner through the carbs, unclogged the petcock, changed the fluids, knocked the rust out of the tank with a handful of rocks, charged the battery, and hit it with a coat of flat black Krylon. The ferrings reattached with duct tape and zip ties. Gene sang along. Three days later, and five minutes before I was supposed to be at a kitchen staff meeting, I whispered her name like a secreto, and the rat bike Rosinante rose from the grave. I made it to the restaurant with a minute to spare, singing “back in the saddle again”.

It would be impossible to describe the sort of slow enveloping madness which compelled me to rush headlong into the night astride a questionably maintained motorcycle. When I climbed out of my suburban boxtrap years ago, I was looking for the edge, not a shit eating dish pit job and the endless dreary yesterday dogma. Days passed like there was never an adventure. Days when I forgot what it’s like to stand next to a desert highway without a dime in my pocket, or sleep on a friend’s front porch with a cap to keep out the lamplight and rain. Somewhere along the way the edge became pedestrian.

Todd and Q both seemed to think that I was suicidal. Most of my coworkers were of a similar mind on the matter. Three days to pull her from the grave and there seemed to be some question as to whether or not she’d even make it to the freeway, let alone the trek that I planned since the key was put in my hand. Rosinante was risen for a reason. She’s not curbside eye candy. She’s ugly, function over form. I had no plans to roll around town swinging my new supplemental mechanical cock at other bikers. So what the fuck did they think I was going to do with her?

At the end of my shift Bella and Zemp both tipped me twenties for gas and wished us luck. They might have been the only other people on the planet that really thought it would make it. Bella’s never more than a few blocks from Bill, so she was sympathetic to my plight. In any case they all knew that my mind was made up on the matter. I grinned, pulled on my helmet, and aimed Rosi at the Lair, taking side streets to get the feel of the new beast. The consummate Autry medley played on, etched into my brain after three days of continuous crooning. “I got spurs that jingle jangle jingle, as we go riding merrily along…”

My saddlebags were packed twenty minutes later. I arranged a sweater, some leather gloves, and a life preserver into an old boy scout issue stuff sack, tucked one end under the seat and duct taped the rest to the tank. Smoked my last bowl while I adjusted her chain, pocketed a couple of Todd’s wrenches just in case, kissed her dials and pulled her out onto the nothing third street traffic. Not quite fog, not quite mist turned the arms of my jacket a darker shade of brown and my 501s got to smelling damp. A few blocks to gas, a few blocks to the I-5 freeway, and then the languid, liquid roll into velocity and a two hundred ninety-mile drive HOME.

Laid out over her eager steel like reunited lovers, she turned soft machine. In fourth gear and just under seven grand, she’d climb notches like a thoroughbred; kicked up her heels like she’d been waiting for the gate for too long. She matched traffic, but she doesn’t even hit her power band until eighty, I was told. I cranked on the throttle, buckled down and tucked over her back, “Habibi” was my battle cry. I gunned her up to eighty-five and popped her into fifth. She pulled nine grand for maybe thirty seconds, and then she cut out, kind of. Rosinante, my underdog sweetheart and my ride HOME dropped to exactly fifty-five. Zero acceleration. I had to let go of the throttle, open the choke, and muster my best bewildered expression as the rest of the traffic sped past me. I coasted to lane one and sat up, pretending like I’d planned the whole thing.

I never actually highway tested Rosinante. Every machine has its own rhythm. Rosi was running on half an engine. WD40 blew clean through the first, but the second cylinder didn’t even get going until she got warm. In fifth gear, teasing the throttle with the choke cranked to full, the Wild Rose did fifty-five miles per hour. The rain turned downpour. I pulled my zipper tighter and tucked in again. I don’t much mind the rain these days. Through hail, through sleet, through snow, through hurricane Toupolo, through hellfire and all damnation, damn the limitations, Rosinante would take me HOME.

The throttle started kicking in again, slow, in pops and sputters. Maybe I just flooded the first cylinder. If I killed her good inside Seattle, I could always park her somewhere with the key and catch the metro back to the Lair come morning. Mildly humiliating, possibly, especially after my bullshit boasts since I inherited the beast. Enough people tried to stop me, stall me, turn me around, plow me under, that were I lacking conviction in my quest, I’d have turned around at the next exit. But the Lair is a box, just another cage. I’ve spent years pacing the floors of a hundred similar cells. The Lair was missing something.

The rain came harder and Rosinante slowed to forty-five up an incline. Traffic rushed past me at almost twice my speed. Cold rainfall stung my knuckles and the gusts of wind off the Puget Sound pushed my tail over into the second lane and relentless traffic. Nature rose up in passive opposition like a last-ditch effort at dissuasion. The I-90 interchange arched up over the light river Styx, suspended in mid-air by a length of concrete canal, diverting our path east and into an eventual sunrise. Propelled by nothing, against the fates threats at shearing my thread shorter along some stretch of leviathan asphalt, I popped it down to fourth and jumped back up to sixty for a few hundred feet. Seattle faded in a rattling rear view reflection.

Traffic thinned through the tunnels. The beast’s back dried and declined and Rosi eased into a few more miles per hour. The last hundred yards of the tunnel closed in and fired me out onto the floating bridge. The rain lightened. My shadow ran ahead at every lamppost, careening forward, negating miles of sporadic dim-lit asphalt, its constant passing darkened the path ahead and drew me headlong into the vacuum of night. I ran full throttle, slinking along at fifty-five, though the dream of the dark rider had long since sped away.

At worst, I might end up bouncing along some stretch of two lane. Maybe I’d die. No, not now. Cold crept deeper into my skin and the city lights collapsed on themselves. The possibility of rescue in case of a mishap slimmed to none. Not that it mattered much. If the horse died beneath me, I’d walk the rest of the way HOME. Even as Rosinante slowed to climb Snoqualmie pass, I clung tighter to her back.

“This is stupid.” My own voice echoed and through the helmet like thunder.

The temperature dropped steadily as the altitude rose. Rosinante crept up the I-90 through Snoqualmie pass pulling forty-five. I held my left hand over the engine or under my thigh. My right hand was all but a hook holding the throttle open. Black pines edged the highway in, serrated the sky. The headlight blossomed a reality from seeming nothing.

Just a little further.

A Subaru station wagon sailed past my left flank, white mask faces hung behind rain speckled windows, their features too fast to make out. Lightspeed my ass. It’s impossible to guess how they must see me, crouched over an ugly old crotch rocket, rolling slow up the side of the pass. Saddlebags packed, tucked low, clutching the handle grips like I meant to be going ninety-five and I’m doing just over forty. A semi rockets past.

Below the rush of the helmet, a moment without thought can be deafening.

The saddlebags are too much resistance.

Songs skipped through my head, some mutant Autry medley. I made certain to think the sound of a radio switching stations between songs.

We’d be faster without the bags.

The Snoqualmie Pass exit marked roughly a third of the trek. Not much for facilities in the middle of the night, but familiar territory. The greyhound bus stopped there at a Chevron station. There was gas, a truck stop, and a crossroads of chain shredded ski resort routes. The ditches along the sides of the offramp were edged in gravel encrusted snow; what lingered in permanent shadows, defied the daylight. I sat up around the corner and looped into the Chevron lot. The place was dark except the green glow of the pump displays and a few flickering fluorescents above the walkway. A couple of eighteen wheelers were tucked further back in the lot, orange runners on and the low growl of a sleeping beast.

I stretched my legs to stand through forfeit Riga mortise, kicked the stand down and eased off in a stretch, pulling still mafic blood back into crystallized veins. The sound of my teeth chattering echoed like gunfire in the helmet, and my right hand was numb digits falling on the key asleep and useless. I peered through the visor at them, disoriented by the sudden still and set my throttle hand against the side of engine, fumbling at the helmet strap left-handed. Pulled it off to find a dark sky and silence.

“Stars shining high above you, night breezes seem to whisper I love you.” Sung to clouds swimming past. The fluorescent lights above my head flickered off. I huffed into my hands. Even my breathe seemed to burn and turned my hands damp. I couldn’t pull the zipper on my coat and wiped my nose on the sleeve. The light flickered on. He stared back from the depths of the Chevron window; dark, pale and haggard. I clawed the zipper down and fumbled a cigarette out of the pack. It took a few dozen tries to get the Bic flicked.

I beat my hands against my thighs to knock some more blood into them. The sign in front of the truck stop flashed three twelve and forty-one degrees and diesel at a buck fifteen per gallon.

I’m not even halfway there.

I could  pull on all my shirts and wait for Chevron to open, catch the Greyhound on its way through and be in Ellensburg by eleven or so. Call from there. Paced the walkway. Peed behind a dumpster, cringing at my own icy fingers. The fluorescent flickered again.

“When I’m all alone and blue as can be…” a verse hidden in a soft cloud.

“…Dream a little dream of me.”

I sat down on the curb, cupping my hands over the ember. Rosinante crouched silent and at the ready.

The fluorescent flickered on again, casting him pale and hazy across the asphalt.

Old friend. My other. My self.

He seemed to sigh and breathe a dark cloud across the crumbling asphalt. “Get up.” he said.