mind. What comes to mind, usually, is whatever we’ve been thinking about in the half hour or forty-five minutes since we last talked to each other. When it’s roads or weather or people or old memories or what’s in the newspapers, the conversation just naturally builds pleasantly. But whenever the performance of the machine has been on my mind and gets into the conversation, the building stops. The conversation no longer moves forward. There is a silence and a break in the continuity. It is as though two old friends, a Catholic and Protestant, were sitting drinking beer, enjoying life, and the subject of birth control somehow came up. Big freeze-out.
And, of course, when you discover something like that it’s like discovering a tooth with a missing filling. You can never leave it alone. You have to probe it, work around it, push on it, think about it, not because it’s enjoyable but because it’s on your mind and it won’t get off your mind. And the more I probe and push on this subject of cycle maintenance the more irritated he gets, and of course that makes me want to probe and push all the more. Not deliberately to irritate him but because the irritation seems symptomatic of something deeper, something under the surface that isn’t immediately apparent.
When you’re talking birth control, what blocks it and freezes it out is that it’s not a matter of more or fewer babies being argued. That’s just on the surface. What’s underneath is a conflict of faith, of faith in empirical social planning versus faith in the authority of God as revealed by the teachings of the Catholic Church. You can prove the practicality of planned parenthood till you get tired of listening to yourself and it’s going to go nowhere because your antagonist isn’t buying the assumption that anything socially practical is good per se. Goodness for him has other sources which he values as much as or more than social practicality.
So it is with John. I could preach the practical value and worth of motorcycle maintenance till I’m hoarse and it would make not a dent in him. After two sentences on the subject his eyes go completely glassy and he changes the conversation or just looks away. He doesn’t want to hear about it.
Sylvia is completely with him on this one. In fact she is even more emphatic. “It’s just a whole other thing”, she says, when in a thoughtful mood. “Like garbage”, she says, when not. They want not to understand it. Not to hear about it. And the more I try to fathom what makes me enjoy mechanical work and them hate it so, the more elusive it becomes. The ultimate cause of this originally minor difference of opinion appears to run way, way deep.
Inability on their part is ruled out immediately. They are both plenty bright enough. Either one of them could learn to tune a motorcycle in an hour and a half if they put their minds and energy to it, and the saving in money and worry and delay would repay them over and over again for their effort. And they know that. Or maybe they don’t. I don’t know. I never confront them with the question. It’s better to just get along.
But I remember once, outside a bar in Savage, Minnesota, on a really scorching day when I just about let loose. We’d been in the bar for about an hour and we came out and the machines were so hot you could hardly get on them. I’m started and ready to go and there’s John pumping away on the kick starter. I smell gas like we’re next to a refinery and tell him so, thinking this is enough to let him know his engine’s flooded.
“Yeah, I smell it too”, he says and keeps on pumping. And he pumps and pumps and jumps and pumps and I don’t know what more to say. Finally, he’s really winded and sweat’s running down all over his face and he can’t pump anymore, and so I suggest taking out the plugs to dry them off and air out the cylinders while we go back for another beer.
Oh my God no! He doesn’t want to get into all that stuff.
“All what stuff?”
“Oh, getting out the tools and all that stuff. There’s no reason why it shouldn’t start. It’s a brand-new machine and I’m following the instructions perfectly. See, it’s right on full choke like they say.”
“Full choke!”
“That’s what the instructions say.”
“That’s for when it’s cold!”
“Well, we’ve been in there for a half an hour at least”, he says.
It kind of shakes me up. “This is a hot day, John”, I say. “And they take longer than that to cool off even on a freezing day.”
He scratches his head. “Well, why don’t they tell you that in the instructions?” He opens the choke and on the second kick it starts. “I guess that was it”, he says cheerfully.
And the very next day we were out near the same area and it happened again. This time I was determined not to say a word, and when my wife urged me to go over and help him I shook my head. I told her that until he had a real felt need he was just going to resent help, so we went over and sat in the shade and waited.
I noticed he was being superpolite to Sylvia while he pumped away, meaning he was furious, and she was looking over with a kind of “Ye gods!” look. If he had asked any single question I would have been over in a second to diagnose it, but he wouldn’t. It must have been fifteen minutes before he got it started.
Later we were drinking beer again over at Lake Minnetonka and everybody was talking around the table, but he was silent and I could see he was really tied up in knots inside. After all that time. Probably to get them untied he finally said, “You know — when it doesn’t start like that it just — really turns me into a monster inside. I just get paranoic about it.” This seemed to loosen him up, and he added, “They just had this one motorcycle, see? This lemon. And they didn’t know what to do with it, whether to send it back to the factory or sell it for scrap or what — and then at the last moment they saw me coming. With eighteen hundred bucks in my pocket. And they knew their problems were over.”
In a kind of singsong voice I repeated the plea for tuning and he tried hard to listen. He really tries hard sometimes. But then the block came again and he was off to the bar for another round for all of us and the subject was closed.
He is not stubborn, not narrow-minded, not lazy, not stupid. There was just no easy explanation. So it was left up in the air, a kind of mystery that one gives up on because there is no sense in just going round and round and round looking for an answer that’s not there.
It occurred to me that maybe I was the odd one on the subject, but that was disposed of too. Most touring cyclists know how to keep their machines tuned. Car owners usually won’t touch the engine, but every town of any size at all has a garage with expensive lifts, special tools and diagnostic equipment that the average owner can’t afford. And a car engine is more complex and inaccessible than a cycle engine so there’s more sense to this. But for John’s cycle, a BMW R60, I’ll bet there’s not a mechanic between here and Salt Lake City. If his points or plugs burn out, he’s done for. I know he doesn’t have a set of spare points with him. He doesn’t know what points are. If it quits on him in western South Dakota or Montana I don’t know what he’s going to do. Sell it to the Indians maybe. Right now I know what he’s doing. He’s carefully avoiding giving any thought whatsoever to the subject. The BMW is famous for not giving mechanical problems on the road and that’s what he’s counting on.
I might have thought this was just a peculiar attitude of theirs about motorcycles but discovered later that it extended to other things. Waiting for them to get going one morning in their kitchen I noticed the sink faucet was dripping and remembered that it was dripping the last time I was there before and that in fact it had been dripping as long as I could remember. I commented on it and John said he had tried to fix it with a new faucet washer but it hadn’t worked. That was all he said. The presumption left was that that was the end of the matter. If you try to fix a faucet and your fixing doesn’t work then it’s just your lot to live with a dripping faucet.
This made me wonder to myself if it got on their nerves, this drip-drip-drip, week in, week out, year in, year out, but I could not notice any irritation or concern about it on their part, and so concluded they just aren’t bothered by things like dripping faucets. Some people aren’t.
What it was that changed this conclusion, I don’t remember — some intuition, some insight one day, perhaps it was a subtle change in Sylvia’s mood whenever the dripping was particularly loud and she was trying to talk. She has a very soft voice. And one day when she was trying to talk above the dripping and the kids came in and interrupted her she lost her temper at them. It seemed that her anger at the kids would not have been nearly as great if the faucet hadn’t also been dripping when she was trying to talk. It was the combined dripping and loud kids that blew her up. What struck me hard then was that she was not blaming the faucet, and that she was deliberately not blaming the faucet. She wasn’t ignoring that faucet at all! She was suppressing anger at that faucet and that goddamned dripping faucet was just about killing her! But she could not admit the importance of this for some reason.
Why suppress anger at a dripping faucet? I wondered.
Then that patched in with the motorcycle maintenance and one of those light bulbs went on over my head and I thought, Ahhhhhhhh!
