backforthmenu Motorcycle Man. When my father was a kid growing up in Jackson, Mississippi he used to sneak around an old Army depot near his home, where, he once told me, he and his friends found a human hand sealed up inside a jar. His name was Robert Emmitt, Bob for short, but everyone called him Bubby. When he was about 12, his father died while repairing an escalator—I never got the details, and I think it’s because he never did either. His mother, Sally, dragged him to the open casket and it haunted him. In the natural chain of command Sally was left to watch over a house with five of her own kids plus a few cousins thrown in from an uncle or aunt’s bad marriage. As a teen, Bubby became an Eagle Scout and journeyed to the annual Boy Scout Jamboree in Washington D.C. He took a bunch of photos of friends and monuments with a Brownie camera. None of himself. He was a skinny kid but he lifted weights and developed a pretty big chest and arms. He was a high-diver and judo wrester too—that probably helped. On the flip side, Bubby was a tough guy who smoked and rode a motorcycle which he raced on occasion. I guess he won a few too, there’s an old photo of him on the bike in a white T-shirt, hair greased back, cigarette dangling, with a couple of trophies standing by his foot. He used to play this game with his buddies back then; he would press his forearm against a friend’s forearm and between them they would place a slowly burning cigarette. The guy who pulled away first was the loser. I guess he won a few of these too—on one of his big forearms were a few circular scars from the cigarette burns. I never did ask him how he pulled off being an Eagle Scout and a hardass at the same time. During his 10th year of high school he dropped out to go to work as a mechanic to help support the family. Starting about this time he began a life-long passion for cars, which he always worked on himself. At 17 Bubby enlisted in the Air Force and was renamed Sergeant Jenkins, Bob for short. He was almost immediately sent overseas to Moron, Spain where he met a 18 year-old native Spanish girl, Maria, whom he married in 1962 though they could barely speak each other’s languages. By December of ’63 I was born, then Janice in ’65. In ’66 this new family was moved stateside by the U.S. Government. He would come home from work tired but would always hug us and throw us really high in the air one at a time, laughing. He began taking correspondence courses in art. When it came time to re-enlist for another tour of duty he said no and we moved from Marquette, Michigan back to Jackson where he began working as a sorter for the U.S. Post Office. His car tinkering was at it’s peek—a hand-built, custom-framed Carmen Ghia sat in the driveway stuffed with a huge 460 Chevy block. We never ate out but sometimes he would bring home a bag of warm Crystal hamburgers and fries. He didn’t like the post office job much and after two years, re-enlisted with the Air Force at his old rank. They moved us a few hours south to Panama, Florida. It was there, one morning, that we were awakened to find backpacks, sleeping bags, tents and dad grinning, ushering us into the current family car, a sky blue Chevelle. This was our introduction to camping—and my introduction to playing with campfires. It was around one of these campfires that he first talked to me about sex. He could hardly hold a straight face. His motorcycle at the time was an Orange Yamaha DT 250 that he rode on the beach. At home there was a scale model replica of it on the shelf. He would polish his shoes every night with Kiwi Polish after chilling a tall glass of milk in the freezer. He’d drink the cool milk before bed, in his Jockey underwear, seated on his big, ugly plaid recliner. On top of the fridge there was always a another glass, this one stuffed with an olive green government issue cap—so the bill would retain just the right shape. He had a good set of tools and would yell at me whenever I left them out. A favorite expression was, “Boy, if you had a brain, you’d be dangerous.” He owned a lot of Elvis Presley records and always wore a set of keys on his belt. These acted as a warning signal that he was coming up the stairs on nights when my sister and I were too giddy to sleep. There was always a guitar around the house, but he never learned to play. When he talked on the phone with his sister, Cookie—which was rarely—his Southern accent would thicken up like gravy. Eventually we all wound up in the remotes of Wyoming where once, on his way home from the base, he got stuck in a snow drift and walked the few miles home with a Steve Martin record under his parka. It was my birthday. We sat down, listened and laughed for a long time. He always told me I’d stop liking Kiss and would jokingly play Jerry Lee Lewis records and sing along when he wanted to get my goat. He had no really close friends that I remember, except my mother. Sometimes we rode dirt bikes together, other times he would sleep in front of the TV on the big brown recliner. On those kind of days he usually kept pretty quiet. And on those kind of days, we steered clear. He always wanted more for me than he ever had, and told me this often. He was always chasing the “American Dream” of owning a house and being financially independent. Shaping ideas that might create those dreams. Most of them entrepreneurial losses. He was fascinated by the Wild West and would drag us all to ghost towns in our maroon Ford Bronco. By this time, the art correspondence course was long over, but most nights he continued painting into the a.m. and was compiling quite a collection—he gave a lot of them away, but sometimes they sold for a modest amount. During the day, he still fixed government issue cars for the United States Air Force. The black and the white—military conformist during the day, inspired artist at night. He did this for years until he suffered a severe breakdown in the late ’70s. He was diagnosed with manic depression and schizophrenia, then given the proper pills to combat it. Now we understood the rollercoaster we were riding—some days he would be boiling over with energy and other days he would hardly speak. I call him the Motorcycle Man because that’s how I like to remember him—rumbling along some road, smiling and humming a Jerry Lee Lewis tune... all the broken cars left at the garage. From the Motorcycle Man I learned everything. A passion for life and art, and the flip side, a lack of self worth, cynicism and prejudice. He was filled with electricity, and wind, noise, fire... emotions he rarely let loose. He was a caged spirit. Looking straight into my father’s anguish helped me to see him in myself, and for this, I am the most grateful. It is the key he left me to open my own cage. This piece was originally written for Dirt magazine #08 (1992) which was never printed by the publisher, Lang Communications. Dirt went on to be sold to ESPN and subsequentially folded. "Motorcyle Man" will appear in episode #6 of "Glimpses" in an upcoming issue of Level magazine (UK).—A