“Well, that particular bit was inspired by the time my father told me I didn’t have to wait to be miserable before choosing to be happy,” Lucy says. “It seemed relatively applicable here.”
“It absolutely was.”
“So, you’ll take my advice?”
“Unlikely,” I admit.
“Fine. And you already told me all about work today, so how are things at Trailhead?”
Still mostly submerged, I catch her up on random stories about people she’s never actually met, but probably knows too well. I was married to my wife and blissfully in love with her for a very long time, but if Lucy’s ever found it strange that I ended up frequenting a gay bar as a widower, she’s never said. Maybe she thinks I’m running away from something. Maybe she thinks I’m running toward something.
Maybe she and I will talk about it someday.
Lucy tells me a little more about things at the resort, but I can tell she’s winding down, and by the time I lift myself out of the water, I’m getting restless. It’s not something that happens to me often—usually I could sit and read all afternoon or stand over the stove for an hour or float in my pool until I’ve daydreamed the day away—but if pasta, wine, and soaking in the spa haven’t been enough to pin me to the ground tonight, I already know I’ll have to fly.
After toweling off, I go back inside and silence the music, stilluncharacteristically lazy when I pour the rest of my wine back into the bottle and cork it near the sink piled with dishes. I’m too warm. Thrumming with energy. I’m almost positive I have something to smoke upstairs, but I don’t even want that when I’m ready to crawl out of my skin. My greatest solace is that I already know the feeling will be gone by morning, this mood reliably fleeting as long as I tend to it, and I hurry to change into jeans, a t-shirt, and one of my favorite leather jackets before I get back downstairs and grab my boots.
When I’m in the garage again, I take a minute to study my bikes, wondering whether my inexplicable need togomight be relieved by staying right here. I could take one of them apart and put it back together again. I could do it with all three. I love getting my hands dirty. I love the subtle physical strain of disassembling a motorcycle’s engine, and the mental challenge that comes with rebuilding it into something new and still exactly the same.
But another minute tells me this isn’t a problem I can solve with my hands, the rest of me too needy.
The garage door slides open.
I pull my helmet from a handlebar, a pair of gloves tucked inside.
Before I realize I can breathe without pain, I’m halfway down the street.
I head west for a while, but Mulholland Drive feels far too familiar tonight, my body leaning into turns before I should know they’re there. It’s my neighborhood, more or less, the streetlampsones that have shone upon me for years. I’ve attended so many parties in so many of these homes—very few in the past nine years, but all of it recent somehow—and I don’t think too hard about the trouble Lucy and her friends might’ve gotten into around here when they were teenagers.
The memories are close, mostly because I am, and while my next exhale still doesn’t hurt, I turn around and speed toward Angeles Crest Highway instead.
My thighs are wrapped around the kind of power that I’d like to believe is a bigger blessing than threat, and it’s late enough on a weeknight for me to surrender to it more than usual. I’m wearing more than I was at home, but it’s been close to an hour since I left, and I’m finally cooler now, the wind offering the chill that will help clear my mind. I haven’t ridden up here in a while, and the darkness reminds me to slow when it’s time to stop being stupid. And slow is better, maybe, when my heart is pounding and my grip has to remain steady.
Eventually, I need a break, and I take it, pulling off the road where a scenic turnout gives me the room to park my bike and lie down next to it, my helmet still within arm’s reach. I’m too old for this kind of nonsense—I can’t help but laugh when I try to imagine asking Michelle to relax in the dirt with me when we probably outgrew this sort of thing before she was gone—but it can be tomorrow’s problem, everything aboutnowforgotten in the minutes I spend staring at the sky.
I’m not sore, and I’m not lonely.
At some point, I close my eyes and rest, and when I’m notinterested in becoming caught up in the future, I tumble backward. Even with the cold ground there to keep me where I am, it feels exactly right. Michelle might not have wanted this specific moment with me, but we’d had a million others together, and the worst part of any ride is not having her weight against my back.
The best part is remembering that I had her pressed close to me until the very, very end.
I’m not sore, and I’m not lonely.
When I’m ready to sit up, I roll with caution brought about by wisdom, and pick up my helmet again. I don’t know what time it is, but I also don’t check, and it only surprises me that I wonder whether Beau and Adrian are still at Trailhead with Darren when I’ve never felt like I was missing out before. I smile again when I think about what it might’ve been like to bring Michelle there, an impossibility when I hadn’t even known the bar existed back then, but she would’ve had a great time flirting with shirtless bartenders and riding the mechanical bull and dragging me onto the dance floor.
In an even more impossible world, she would’ve loved Beau and Darren for a hundred obvious reasons, and probably a few less so. She and Riley would’ve been a special kind of trouble together, because I know little about them, but I think Michelle would’ve known it all. She would’ve damn near adopted Noah, even if he already has a kickass mom of his own. And as much as Michelle could be an outright bitch when she wanted to be, I think it would’ve pulled her closer to Adrian before it pushed him away, and it’s so easy to see her laughing and flipping me offabout my disinterest in him.
Lord, help me.
I’m not sore, and I’m not lonely.
Yet.
I blame my daydreaming on my mood, and my mood on whatever got into me after sitting at a boardroom table for too long. Then I stand and return to the motorcycle that’s been patient long enough.
Winding back the way I came, I think I’m in a hurry and very much not. I’m done with the need to be far from home, but also okay with existing out here, everything a little colder and a little darker, but somehow still a comfort as I move through it. Minutes pass quickly and seconds are long, and as I ride along the north side of Griffith Park, I’m only sorry that it’s not early enough for me to cut through to the observatory. I spare a thought for James Dean, Natalie Wood, and Sal Mineo, and race along until I’m passing Forest Lawn, sparing a thought for countless others, too.
It brings me back to Michelle, and then to Lucy. Another moment has me distracted by the hospital and Trailhead. I think about the mountains and the desert and my backyard, and I want to be everywhere at once. I’m almost forced into a slight detour as it is, close to missing my exit when the late-night lack of traffic makes it easy to stop paying attention, but I shake my head and try to refocus.