by Gabe K-S
1.
It was only this proximity I sought as I decided upon the motorcycle: proximity to the suicidal perfection of the present moment. It was the encroaching boredom of having strayed so far from the suicidal intensity that once animated my every move. It was the enticement of leather and the transcendence of mediocrity and the transcendent suicidal pleasure of being mean—that was how Buddy described it—“you’ve got to get mean, mean enough to not get boxed out”—and she was right. I had strayed. Even the crows had stopped regarding me with the insolence and hostility I’d grown to expect from them. The hollow between my shoulder blades had grown soft, and I’d started catching myself saying things like no kiddin’ and these guys do great candles and we can box that up take it home and heat it up for dinner later! so something was, clearly, dying, and it was incumbent upon me to at least attempt a resuscitation.
Buddy was not yet 24. He didn’t drink, but he was prone to riding on the sidewalks, to terrorizing the less-than-free, and when we were together I got the sense that at any moment she might take off on a wild black wing—wild black wings might literally burst out the hollow between her shoulder blades and she might take off just like that. I told her to come down and save me, I offered my bed, said we could save each other. I bought her her first omelet and she told me the story about the eggs: how her father had shot the dog clean in the head after she fed him (the dog) the eggs that he (the dad) had made her, and how she’d never imagined she’d be eating eggs like this—unburdened by memory and without revolt.
Buddy and I are alike in how far away we have to get from our fathers in order to rescue our souls. We are alike in how we just love a good old fashioned Coca-Cola, in how fear displaces itself throughout our bodies. We are alike in the debts we’ve incurred, through no direct fault of our own, that now must be paid if we are to get as free as we’ve challenged ourselves to get. Because there is hatred stored up in our bodies, hatred displaced like algae across slick black rocks—and because we will die if we fail to do away with this paternal inheritance—we decide upon the motorcycles as suitably violent extensions of self. In the morning, Buddy buys a weed vaporizer that is designed to mimic an asthma inhaler. It is basically indistinguishable from the real thing, and all day I will have to remind myself that she does not, in fact, have asthma, but that she is nevertheless sucking off some life-saving vapor from the life-giving teat of the thing, without which she risks something that might resemble “an attack."
2.
Like how it’s always, always special needs day when you decide to take acid at the aquarium—and how, on the wing of that inevitability and by virtue of all the fractures in your own mind, you are forced to reckon with the limits of your comprehension and your compassion—the simple fact is that nature is capable of manufacturing everything, including what might be called “a mistake”, but upon closer inspection is really just a vehicle for so much grace it makes you sick, so you throw up all over the sting-rays and you can see gummy sharks literally swimming in your sick, and at that very moment Buddy must’ve walked right past you, but the two of you were ten and fifteen, respectively, so nothing registered between you until, fourteen years later, you found yourselves once again on acid at the motorcycle show, surrounded this time not by sting rays and special needs kids but by all the hideous glory of maleness leather grease and steel, and at the very moment you catch your breath and it starts to dawn on you both that you might be capable of setting the woman free in one another, you suddenly find yourselves flanked on either side by two of the meanest looking Latino guys you’ve ever seen, methamphetamine and lust for danger oozing audibly out of their holes, and it’s clear that they want nothing whatsoever to do with the mutual-woman-liberation project in which you and Buddy are now presently entangled, but rather that they want to fucking kill both of you but Buddy in particular because s/he (Buddy) is wearing a paunchy red sweatshirt emblazoned with a certain insignia that I simply will not reveal here for fear of retribution—and the meaner of the two locks eyes with Buddy and says take it off or we’re gonna have a fucking problem with the most venom I reckon I’ve ever heard accompanying a string of words, and the venom makes the whole scene turn real dark, especially when contrasted against the preceding hours’ sweetness—like how the two of you found yourselves in the back of some converted trailer, demonstrating tenderness in guitar parts and soothing out the situation like women might sometimes do, things your fathers would’ve up and killed you both for, siding in an instant with the Latino guys and their methamphetamine and lust for danger—and following the encounter with the Latino guys Buddy gets real quiet for the first time all day and sucks pensively on his asthma inhaler, and you decide it’s time for him to ditch this whole scene and try his first oyster because that’s what men do, slurp up briny bivalves like proxies for pussy and prove beyond an echo of a doubt that we’re built hard and violent and raw and not in the least bit sweet.
3.
Father, if you’re in there, I have set the woman free. The chapel’s vaulted ceilings cast shadows in the shape of whales. Any harm you might’ve wished against my body has been carried out, in your name, by my hand—which is to say: I no longer need you. Your work here is done. I have severed myself from all that is tender and loving and safe and I have chosen, instead, to be an extension of metal: always hard, always hot, ready to kill and ready to fuck. I have built of my body a wrought-iron death machine, and everyone is frightened of me, and that gets me good in the cold gaze of God. I had to get mean, quick, and I did. You can shoot the dog over and over again in front of me—all I’ll see is little bursts of cold hard light. I have withered myself to more easily withstand the everyday cruelties that I know, in my sinning, in my wishing to be woman, I have wrought upon myself. You won, you won, you won—collect your prize now and go, go be among the winners in heaven who sit fattened on the lamb of their slaughter. Go tell the lie enough times for it to become an inevitability: that there has only ever been this—coldness and cruelty and concrete and ash.
4.
Spend enough time on two wheels in a city full of cars and you’ll realize some rotten, wretched, altogether unflattering truths about our species. You’ll peer into their windows at stoplights and register the vacancy behind their eyes. You’ll pick up on the soft suicidality hiding just behind their every thoughtless move, watching them entertain themselves into oncoming traffic over and over again, habits that suggest a permanent, inexorable severance from the will to live—a soft suicidality that hangs like a fog over what little remains of their ever-dwindling life-force.
See the grey-washed face of the man who, like your father, is kept alive only by sheer force of arrogance. See the lingering evil that emerges after sunset, the brief flashes of rage as the car starts to function like the internet: as a screen for fantasies of omnipotence; as a shield of anonymity behind which the animal can at last whip itself into the fury that its daily life tries so hard to constrain. There in the libidinal core of the animal’s truth is the sharpest moment of clarity it will be afforded all day. The diet is empty: pornography, variations of corn, and promises of freedom—all of this is empty, empty, empty, but my car, you see, it fills me up. It gets me right in the cold gaze of God, puts the freedom back in my body, back where it belongs. Just as our ancestors put men and babies to death upon great hulking wheels of stone, so too shall we feed our Gods blood on the pavement, blood on the windshield, blood on the iPad’s still-glowing screen. It is only this proximity that they, the drivers, seek: proximity to the infernal core of distraction unto death. The hurtling of bodies in corrugated death-boxes down endless expanses of pavement, pavement, pavement with no clear terminus but that final embrace—that immensely frightful moment when the chains unravel themselves and the woman is finally set free.
5.
On the wing of our encounter with the Vagos, the most actively brutal 1%er motorcycle gang still roaming the west coast, we alighted to the all-night diner called, most fittingly, My Father’s Place. Seated across from one another in our leathers, the question loomed. I told her, Buddy, I said put the freedom back in my body, and she obliged, scrawling freedom with something like bullet holes down the side of my torso. As with all tattoos, the pain was a necessary and at times enjoyable dimension of the experience. It was good to feel tough with my ass out on the table there, and the wriggling little black spots that appeared on my vision as she shaded her way into the armpit reminded me of the gummy sharks literally swimming around the sting-ray tank fourteen years ago, on that day when all the secrets of the universe began their slow unraveling, and I realized that what looks to the untrained eye like a “mistake” is often, in fact, an invitation to look more deeply at the patterns underlying all phenomena and just marvel, just witness—an invitation into the suicidal perfection of the present moment.
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Gabe K-S is a writer from New York who lives in Portland, Oregon. He aims to get free.
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