Clark Buys a Motorcycle
by Alex Miller
Author's Note: "Clark Buys a Motorcycle" is a manual for adult male friendship. When I was a kid, making friends was easy, and I didn't have to worry about it at all. But it's harder now that I'm grown up. Really it's a societal problem—lots of men struggle to sustain close friendships with other men. I think it's because everybody is busy and we all have so many opinions. With any luck, my manual for adult male friendship will solve the whole problem.
My buddy Clark came to stay with me after he and his wife split up. Not divorced, just separated. Clark made this point clear. They could work things out. They had plenty of time. Anything was possible. He still loved his wife and believed she loved him too.
“The weight of the world is love,” Clark said, panting as he lowered a heavy cardboard box of books to the floor of my guest room. “Allen Ginsberg said that.”
Clark taught literature at the big public university in Fort Collins. One of the fringe benefits of being his pal was he was always quoting great authors. But there were drawbacks. Clark owned about a thousand books, and occasionally I had to help move them.
I strained my back hefting a big box. The room was set up like an office from when I’d worked from home during the dark days of the pandemic. The couch against the back wall could pull out into a bed, and that was where Clark would sleep until he worked out his problems with his wife.
“Do you really need all these?” I motioned to the six heavy boxes of books we’d stacked like building blocks on either side of the couch.
I mean every day?”
“I like being near them.” Clark spoke softly, like a preacher describing the grace of God. “Anyway Janice will be happy to have them out of the house. Happy to have some space. Janice always complains about my books.”
*
I cooked steaks that night the way I would for special occasions, even though we weren’t exactly celebrating. We ate in the living room and drank Voodoo Ranger and watched Daredevil on Disney Plus. Clark appreciated the beer. He said Janice never let him drink on weeknights.
I guess I’d expected that over our steak dinner we’d talk about what happened between him and his wife. I wanted details. And this wasn’t just prurient interest. I earnestly wanted to help my friend. But Clark was reticent. Evasive, even. He didn’t pay much attention to me or Daredevil. He read about motorcycles on his phone. Very recently he’d become interested in buying one.
“Honda makes a great touring bike, but I’m looking for something a little more badass,” he said. “When people see me coming, I want them to think there’s a new sheriff in town--Sheriff Clark!” Clark made gunfire noises with his mouth.
“Where did things go wrong between you and Janice? Did you have a fight?”
“This will all blow over,” Clark said without looking up from his phone. “She takes me for granted, that’s all. We need time apart. After a few days on her own, she’ll miss me for sure. The one bike I’ll never buy is a Harley. They’re toys for sad, divorced men. That’s why they cost so much. Sad, divorced men will pay any price to feel better.”
On TV, the Daredevil used his heightened sense of hearing to detect when a crook was lying. It would be nice to have that power, nice to know if Clark was being honest. He acted indifferent to the prospect of divorce.
“How do you feel?” I asked. “A breakup like this, it’s a lot to handle. Have you thought about seeing a therapist?”
“Now, an Indian—that’s a real bike. I can see myself on one of those. No one would recognize me. They would just think, damn, who’s that cowboy?”
“And Janice? How is she taking all this? ”
“Maybe I’ll get an electric motorcycle. You wouldn’t believe the acceleration on those things. Like riding a rocket.”
“Does Janice ever complain you don’t listen?”
*
Classes at the university had wrapped up for the summer, so Clark was free to fill his days reading literature and researching motorcycles in my spare room. But for me, an insurance claims adjuster, life kept rolling on like it always had. I commuted into the office the morning after our steak dinner, but instead of working I texted Janice to find out what happened between her and Clark, and how long I could expect to have him sleeping in my spare room.
“I’m done with that asshole. Finished. For good,” she told me via SMS message. She went on to explain she’d already started dating again. And found a boyfriend—an attorney with a big house in Cherry Creek and a hot tub. “I’ll never go back to that loser Clark. From now on, I’m on easy street.”
“But you love Clark,” I typed. I reminded her about their wedding and blissful honeymoon to Moab, Utah. If you love someone, you shouldn’t dump them—even for some rich guy with a hot tub.
“I wasted the best years of my life on that pussy Clark,” she typed. Clark was lazy and weak. Instead of lifting weights to stay in shape, he spent weekends on the couch reading books. Janice said she was no longer sexually attracted to Clark.
“Maybe you two should speak to a marriage counselor,” I typed. “Don’t be so quick to give up. Maybe, with a little time, you will reignite the flame of love that once burned in your hearts.”
I was certain my line about the flame of love would change Janice’s mind.
“If you love Clark so much,” she typed, “why don’t you marry him?”
*
Clark wasn’t my type. But for the right person, he would make an excellent spouse. When I got home from work, he was in the kitchen wearing oven mitts to take a hot casserole dish out of the oven. My entire townhouse smelled like hamburger casserole. As a single man, this was revolutionary. Most nights, I ate soup from a can or ordered takeout. Clark said cooking was no big deal.
“Janice works late, so I do most of the cooking. Most of the meal planning and grocery shopping too. It just makes sense for one person to do it all.”
I told him Janice would be a fool to divorce a husband who cooked for her. Clark was a real catch. Just then, I noticed my house was spotless. Clark had spent all day cleaning.
“A messy house makes Janice grouchy,” Clark said. “Your home, by the way, was filthy. I can’t imagine anyone living in such filth.”
I asked if he enjoyed cleaning, and he admitted he did it just to keep Janice happy. Cleaning was easier than arguing with her. I told him he didn’t have to clean so much while living with me. He could think of our time together as a vacation from cleanliness.
“With all that cooking and cleaning, you’ve got my vote for husband of the year,” I said. “Husband of the goddamned century. I’m sure Janice will come to her senses. Maybe you could surprise her by doing some weightlifting. Get jacked up and sexy. I bet Janice would like that. I hear there are shortcuts. You could take steroids.”
Clark said he didn’t need a ripped body or roid rage to feel like a man. He shoved a forkful of hamburger casserole into his mouth. Clark said he would buy a motorcycle.
*
Over the weekend I took Clark to a place called My Brother’s Bar. I knew he would love it because it’s famous as a spot where Beat writers used to drink. On the wall by the restroom hung a framed letter written by Neal Cassady, asking a friend to pay his tab. In recent decades, Denver has transformed into a tourist city, with flashy nightclubs and little shops selling expensive green smoothies. My Brother’s Bar hearkens back to Denver’s past, when it was a dusty cow town.
“Love is a long sad tale ending in graves.” Clark swirled his pint glass. “Jack Kerouac said that.”
I admitted I didn’t read much anymore. But back in college I had been obsessed with Kerouac. I read On the Road and Visions of Cody and The Dharma Bums.
Clark said Kerouac had lost some luster during the #MeToo era. All of Kerouac’s heroes were men, while the women in his books were crudely painted caricatures who existed merely as objects for men to jam their dicks into.
“That’s why I don’t read anymore,” I said.
Clark said he used to want to be just like Neal Cassady. He wanted to drive around the country, wild and free.
I told him he could still do it. He could buy a motorcycle and go wherever he wanted.
“The motorcycle is just a stupid dream,” Clark said, slouching, staring into the amber of his beer. “Pretty soon, me and Janice will get back together, and my life will go on like before, like clockwork. I’ll cook a pot roast all day so it will be ready when she gets home from work. I’ll clean the bathroom. I’ll scrub mildew out of the grout in the shower with a special toothbrush. Me and Janice, we’ve had our problems, but they are nothing we can’t solve. Sooner or later, I’m sure we’ll get back together.”
I thought about what Janice said about her new boyfriend, the attorney with the hot tub. I patted Clark on the back.
“Buddy, don’t give up on that motorcycle just yet.”
*
The next day, I took Clark to a motorcycle store to cheer him up. Ultimate Motorsports was sandwiched between Dollar General and an Asian nail salon in a South Denver stripmall. The parking lot looked sketchy, the kind of place where if you left your car for longer than ten minutes, some enterprising young man might relieve you of your catalytic converter.
Entering the motorcycle dealership was like passing through a portal to another world. A world of motorcycles. The warehouse-like space contained a rainbow of bikes—red, black, deep blue like the Pacific Ocean—polished to a high sheen and gleaming beneath the dealership’s fluorescent lighting. The bikes looked awesome. I’d never cared much for motorcycles, but there in the showroom, I had to admit they looked like a lot of fun.
A grizzled man in an Ultimate Motorsports polo shirt approached. He smiled aggressively through coffee-stained teeth and asked which one of us was getting divorced. Clark went white as a ghost. The salesman laughed—a deep, jelly-belly guffaw like Santa Claus. He introduced himself as Larry and shook both our hands, mangling them in his iron grip. He slapped Clark on the back and told him not to worry. Larry admitted to being a divorcee, himself. He said divorce was the best mistake he’d ever made.
“You know why divorce is so expensive?” Larry paused for an uncomfortably long time before delivering the punchline. “Because it’s worth it!”
I’m certain Larry told that joke a half-dozen times a day. Despite his stale sense of humor, I liked him. Larry spoke with an indistinctly rural accent, a shotgun marriage of redneck and hillbilly. His face shared the color and texture of a baseball glove, and his sturdily muscled frame resembled a Peterbilt truck. Had he been born in another era, Larry might have been a cowboy. But he lived in the twenty-first century, and in this modern age he sold motorcycles.
Larry asked Clark what he was looking for. A sport bike? Touring cycle? Cruiser? When Clark failed to answer right away, Larry sized him up and said he had just the thing. We followed Larry out back to a blood-red Kawasaki Vulcan, and he started it up.
“Listen to that bad boy hum,” Larry said, patting the leather seat with his thick fingers.
And I did listen, and it was beautiful. I imagined myself on the open highway, the landscape dissolving into a blur of sky and blowing wheat.
Larry told Clark to sit on the motorcycle and get a feel for it. Clark gripped the handle bars. The frame of the bike vibrated between his legs.
“Perfect thing for leaving that ex-wife of yours in the dust,” Larry said. And then, almost sexually, “So how about we talk financing?”
*
As I drove Clark home from the dealership, he told me he’d made up his mind to buy a motorcycle. He just needed to move some money around in his bank accounts.
I asked if he’d heard anything lately from Janice. He hadn’t and supposed it was for the best.
“The longer we’re apart, the more I realize I don’t even miss her. Really we had nothing in common. We stuck together for so long, but for what?” Clark stared out the window at traffic and the skyscrapers downtown. “I’m gonna buy that damn motorcycle. I’ll ride like an outlaw, just me and my bike out there on the open road, gunning the engine till I hit warp speed.” Clark’s face shone bright and jubilant. “And so love goes. And so life goes. And so I go. Neal Cassady said that.”
*
When we pulled into my driveway, I spotted Janice’s pea-green Hyundai Elantra parked by the garage.
“Oh,” Clark said. Janice’s sudden appearance rendered him monosyllabic. “Oh. Um. Oh.”
“I’m sure the two of you have a bunch to hash out.” I grabbed Clark by the wrist and squeezed. “Stay strong, brother.”
Janice got out of her car and greeted Clark coldly. I hung back, gave them space. I let them into the house and told them to help themselves to whatever they wanted from the kitchen. Then I beat a hasty retreat to the porch. I leaned against the weathered railing and thought about how I should give it a new coat of stain. One of these days. Somehow I never had time. I lit up a Marlboro cigarette. I didn’t smoke much anymore, but neither had I quit entirely. I was still holding onto something, even though I knew it was no good for me. Holding on to something about the idea of smoking, or the feeling.
From inside the house, I overheard the lovely couple yelling. Actually Janice did all the yelling. Clark’s voice never deviated from a conciliatory hum. I only heard bits and pieces but understood Janice had come to take him back—if he promised to shape up. She had composed a ten-point plan to improve his behavior. She wanted Clark to take greater responsibility for her cats. She wanted to adopt more cats and convert his home office into a cat room. She wanted him to stop spending so much time reading.
Out on the porch, I took a drag off my cigarette. I wondered what happened to Janice’s new attorney boyfriend. Maybe she introduced him to her cats. Maybe she suggested turning his hot tub into a litter box. The streets of my neighborhood were lined with plain houses occupied by husbands and wives raising children. I wondered how many of those couples were truly happy, and how many were secretly writing ten-point plans?
The front door squeaked, and my good friend Clark lurched through it. His eyes hung sadly, and his face looked ghoulishly pale. Clark hugged me. He thanked me for letting him stay at my place. He told me he was going home with Janice. They had worked everything out. From now on, everything would be better.
“I’m happy to be going home,” he said in a tone that didn’t sound happy at all.
I told Clark that I loved him, and he smiled and punched me on the shoulder. Janice scowled from the doorway. She seemed perturbed, somehow, by our expression of male friendship. Pretty soon Clark got into the passenger seat of her car, and he was gone.
*
Over the next few weeks, my life settled into familiar rhythms. I spent hours at work replying to emails. Came home and heated up cans of Campbell’s chicken noodle soup. One Saturday I sat at the kitchen table drinking my morning coffee. I had no plans. I considered taking a walk to a nearby park, and on the way back stopping by a bar. The bar was a home away from home for guys who had no plans.
That’s when I heard the motorcycle. I looked out the window and saw Clark pulling up on a sweet Ninja sport bike. He flipped up the helmet visor and grinned madly like I hadn’t seen him smile in a long time.
I hurried outside. Clark told me to get on behind him, and he offered me a helmet he’d stashed in the saddlebag. Clark was always thoughtful about safety. I hopped aboard and put my arms around his torso. I didn’t ask about Janice. Didn’t have to. Janice would never allow him to own a motorcycle. It wasn’t in her ten-point plan.
Clark took us south on Federal before merging onto the 6th Avenue Freeway, heading west toward Golden. Traffic choked the highway, like always, but Clark weaved a nimble path through brigades of oversized trucks and SUVs. He drove with a confidence I didn’t recognize. As traffic thinned past Wadsworth Boulevard, he advanced to a higher gear, and the road cleared into a flat patch of pavement stretching all the way to the Rocky Mountains. Clark gunned it. I held on tight like I was his girlfriend, held on to save my life.
We rushed toward the mountains, which grew tall and towering at our approach. The mountains and acceleration got me thinking about time. How we experience it in a straight line, one discreet moment after another, even though the truth is that everything that has ever happened or will happen is happening right now, in this instant. Clark and I are still on that bike. The engine thrums. He squares his shoulders with unexpected strength. Even as the sun scorches the land in late-summer heat, something in the air smells like spring.
Alex Miller is the author of the novel White People on Vacation (Malarkey Books) and the story collection How to Write an Emotionally Resonant Werewolf Novel (Unsolicited Press). His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Flyway, Pithead Chapel, and Colorado Review. He lives in Denver.
by Alex Miller
Author's Note: "Clark Buys a Motorcycle" is a manual for adult male friendship. When I was a kid, making friends was easy, and I didn't have to worry about it at all. But it's harder now that I'm grown up. Really it's a societal problem—lots of men struggle to sustain close friendships with other men. I think it's because everybody is busy and we all have so many opinions. With any luck, my manual for adult male friendship will solve the whole problem.
My buddy Clark came to stay with me after he and his wife split up. Not divorced, just separated. Clark made this point clear. They could work things out. They had plenty of time. Anything was possible. He still loved his wife and believed she loved him too.
“The weight of the world is love,” Clark said, panting as he lowered a heavy cardboard box of books to the floor of my guest room. “Allen Ginsberg said that.”
Clark taught literature at the big public university in Fort Collins. One of the fringe benefits of being his pal was he was always quoting great authors. But there were drawbacks. Clark owned about a thousand books, and occasionally I had to help move them.
I strained my back hefting a big box. The room was set up like an office from when I’d worked from home during the dark days of the pandemic. The couch against the back wall could pull out into a bed, and that was where Clark would sleep until he worked out his problems with his wife.
“Do you really need all these?” I motioned to the six heavy boxes of books we’d stacked like building blocks on either side of the couch.
I mean every day?”
“I like being near them.” Clark spoke softly, like a preacher describing the grace of God. “Anyway Janice will be happy to have them out of the house. Happy to have some space. Janice always complains about my books.”
*
I cooked steaks that night the way I would for special occasions, even though we weren’t exactly celebrating. We ate in the living room and drank Voodoo Ranger and watched Daredevil on Disney Plus. Clark appreciated the beer. He said Janice never let him drink on weeknights.
I guess I’d expected that over our steak dinner we’d talk about what happened between him and his wife. I wanted details. And this wasn’t just prurient interest. I earnestly wanted to help my friend. But Clark was reticent. Evasive, even. He didn’t pay much attention to me or Daredevil. He read about motorcycles on his phone. Very recently he’d become interested in buying one.
“Honda makes a great touring bike, but I’m looking for something a little more badass,” he said. “When people see me coming, I want them to think there’s a new sheriff in town--Sheriff Clark!” Clark made gunfire noises with his mouth.
“Where did things go wrong between you and Janice? Did you have a fight?”
“This will all blow over,” Clark said without looking up from his phone. “She takes me for granted, that’s all. We need time apart. After a few days on her own, she’ll miss me for sure. The one bike I’ll never buy is a Harley. They’re toys for sad, divorced men. That’s why they cost so much. Sad, divorced men will pay any price to feel better.”
On TV, the Daredevil used his heightened sense of hearing to detect when a crook was lying. It would be nice to have that power, nice to know if Clark was being honest. He acted indifferent to the prospect of divorce.
“How do you feel?” I asked. “A breakup like this, it’s a lot to handle. Have you thought about seeing a therapist?”
“Now, an Indian—that’s a real bike. I can see myself on one of those. No one would recognize me. They would just think, damn, who’s that cowboy?”
“And Janice? How is she taking all this? ”
“Maybe I’ll get an electric motorcycle. You wouldn’t believe the acceleration on those things. Like riding a rocket.”
“Does Janice ever complain you don’t listen?”
*
Classes at the university had wrapped up for the summer, so Clark was free to fill his days reading literature and researching motorcycles in my spare room. But for me, an insurance claims adjuster, life kept rolling on like it always had. I commuted into the office the morning after our steak dinner, but instead of working I texted Janice to find out what happened between her and Clark, and how long I could expect to have him sleeping in my spare room.
“I’m done with that asshole. Finished. For good,” she told me via SMS message. She went on to explain she’d already started dating again. And found a boyfriend—an attorney with a big house in Cherry Creek and a hot tub. “I’ll never go back to that loser Clark. From now on, I’m on easy street.”
“But you love Clark,” I typed. I reminded her about their wedding and blissful honeymoon to Moab, Utah. If you love someone, you shouldn’t dump them—even for some rich guy with a hot tub.
“I wasted the best years of my life on that pussy Clark,” she typed. Clark was lazy and weak. Instead of lifting weights to stay in shape, he spent weekends on the couch reading books. Janice said she was no longer sexually attracted to Clark.
“Maybe you two should speak to a marriage counselor,” I typed. “Don’t be so quick to give up. Maybe, with a little time, you will reignite the flame of love that once burned in your hearts.”
I was certain my line about the flame of love would change Janice’s mind.
“If you love Clark so much,” she typed, “why don’t you marry him?”
*
Clark wasn’t my type. But for the right person, he would make an excellent spouse. When I got home from work, he was in the kitchen wearing oven mitts to take a hot casserole dish out of the oven. My entire townhouse smelled like hamburger casserole. As a single man, this was revolutionary. Most nights, I ate soup from a can or ordered takeout. Clark said cooking was no big deal.
“Janice works late, so I do most of the cooking. Most of the meal planning and grocery shopping too. It just makes sense for one person to do it all.”
I told him Janice would be a fool to divorce a husband who cooked for her. Clark was a real catch. Just then, I noticed my house was spotless. Clark had spent all day cleaning.
“A messy house makes Janice grouchy,” Clark said. “Your home, by the way, was filthy. I can’t imagine anyone living in such filth.”
I asked if he enjoyed cleaning, and he admitted he did it just to keep Janice happy. Cleaning was easier than arguing with her. I told him he didn’t have to clean so much while living with me. He could think of our time together as a vacation from cleanliness.
“With all that cooking and cleaning, you’ve got my vote for husband of the year,” I said. “Husband of the goddamned century. I’m sure Janice will come to her senses. Maybe you could surprise her by doing some weightlifting. Get jacked up and sexy. I bet Janice would like that. I hear there are shortcuts. You could take steroids.”
Clark said he didn’t need a ripped body or roid rage to feel like a man. He shoved a forkful of hamburger casserole into his mouth. Clark said he would buy a motorcycle.
*
Over the weekend I took Clark to a place called My Brother’s Bar. I knew he would love it because it’s famous as a spot where Beat writers used to drink. On the wall by the restroom hung a framed letter written by Neal Cassady, asking a friend to pay his tab. In recent decades, Denver has transformed into a tourist city, with flashy nightclubs and little shops selling expensive green smoothies. My Brother’s Bar hearkens back to Denver’s past, when it was a dusty cow town.
“Love is a long sad tale ending in graves.” Clark swirled his pint glass. “Jack Kerouac said that.”
I admitted I didn’t read much anymore. But back in college I had been obsessed with Kerouac. I read On the Road and Visions of Cody and The Dharma Bums.
Clark said Kerouac had lost some luster during the #MeToo era. All of Kerouac’s heroes were men, while the women in his books were crudely painted caricatures who existed merely as objects for men to jam their dicks into.
“That’s why I don’t read anymore,” I said.
Clark said he used to want to be just like Neal Cassady. He wanted to drive around the country, wild and free.
I told him he could still do it. He could buy a motorcycle and go wherever he wanted.
“The motorcycle is just a stupid dream,” Clark said, slouching, staring into the amber of his beer. “Pretty soon, me and Janice will get back together, and my life will go on like before, like clockwork. I’ll cook a pot roast all day so it will be ready when she gets home from work. I’ll clean the bathroom. I’ll scrub mildew out of the grout in the shower with a special toothbrush. Me and Janice, we’ve had our problems, but they are nothing we can’t solve. Sooner or later, I’m sure we’ll get back together.”
I thought about what Janice said about her new boyfriend, the attorney with the hot tub. I patted Clark on the back.
“Buddy, don’t give up on that motorcycle just yet.”
*
The next day, I took Clark to a motorcycle store to cheer him up. Ultimate Motorsports was sandwiched between Dollar General and an Asian nail salon in a South Denver stripmall. The parking lot looked sketchy, the kind of place where if you left your car for longer than ten minutes, some enterprising young man might relieve you of your catalytic converter.
Entering the motorcycle dealership was like passing through a portal to another world. A world of motorcycles. The warehouse-like space contained a rainbow of bikes—red, black, deep blue like the Pacific Ocean—polished to a high sheen and gleaming beneath the dealership’s fluorescent lighting. The bikes looked awesome. I’d never cared much for motorcycles, but there in the showroom, I had to admit they looked like a lot of fun.
A grizzled man in an Ultimate Motorsports polo shirt approached. He smiled aggressively through coffee-stained teeth and asked which one of us was getting divorced. Clark went white as a ghost. The salesman laughed—a deep, jelly-belly guffaw like Santa Claus. He introduced himself as Larry and shook both our hands, mangling them in his iron grip. He slapped Clark on the back and told him not to worry. Larry admitted to being a divorcee, himself. He said divorce was the best mistake he’d ever made.
“You know why divorce is so expensive?” Larry paused for an uncomfortably long time before delivering the punchline. “Because it’s worth it!”
I’m certain Larry told that joke a half-dozen times a day. Despite his stale sense of humor, I liked him. Larry spoke with an indistinctly rural accent, a shotgun marriage of redneck and hillbilly. His face shared the color and texture of a baseball glove, and his sturdily muscled frame resembled a Peterbilt truck. Had he been born in another era, Larry might have been a cowboy. But he lived in the twenty-first century, and in this modern age he sold motorcycles.
Larry asked Clark what he was looking for. A sport bike? Touring cycle? Cruiser? When Clark failed to answer right away, Larry sized him up and said he had just the thing. We followed Larry out back to a blood-red Kawasaki Vulcan, and he started it up.
“Listen to that bad boy hum,” Larry said, patting the leather seat with his thick fingers.
And I did listen, and it was beautiful. I imagined myself on the open highway, the landscape dissolving into a blur of sky and blowing wheat.
Larry told Clark to sit on the motorcycle and get a feel for it. Clark gripped the handle bars. The frame of the bike vibrated between his legs.
“Perfect thing for leaving that ex-wife of yours in the dust,” Larry said. And then, almost sexually, “So how about we talk financing?”
*
As I drove Clark home from the dealership, he told me he’d made up his mind to buy a motorcycle. He just needed to move some money around in his bank accounts.
I asked if he’d heard anything lately from Janice. He hadn’t and supposed it was for the best.
“The longer we’re apart, the more I realize I don’t even miss her. Really we had nothing in common. We stuck together for so long, but for what?” Clark stared out the window at traffic and the skyscrapers downtown. “I’m gonna buy that damn motorcycle. I’ll ride like an outlaw, just me and my bike out there on the open road, gunning the engine till I hit warp speed.” Clark’s face shone bright and jubilant. “And so love goes. And so life goes. And so I go. Neal Cassady said that.”
*
When we pulled into my driveway, I spotted Janice’s pea-green Hyundai Elantra parked by the garage.
“Oh,” Clark said. Janice’s sudden appearance rendered him monosyllabic. “Oh. Um. Oh.”
“I’m sure the two of you have a bunch to hash out.” I grabbed Clark by the wrist and squeezed. “Stay strong, brother.”
Janice got out of her car and greeted Clark coldly. I hung back, gave them space. I let them into the house and told them to help themselves to whatever they wanted from the kitchen. Then I beat a hasty retreat to the porch. I leaned against the weathered railing and thought about how I should give it a new coat of stain. One of these days. Somehow I never had time. I lit up a Marlboro cigarette. I didn’t smoke much anymore, but neither had I quit entirely. I was still holding onto something, even though I knew it was no good for me. Holding on to something about the idea of smoking, or the feeling.
From inside the house, I overheard the lovely couple yelling. Actually Janice did all the yelling. Clark’s voice never deviated from a conciliatory hum. I only heard bits and pieces but understood Janice had come to take him back—if he promised to shape up. She had composed a ten-point plan to improve his behavior. She wanted Clark to take greater responsibility for her cats. She wanted to adopt more cats and convert his home office into a cat room. She wanted him to stop spending so much time reading.
Out on the porch, I took a drag off my cigarette. I wondered what happened to Janice’s new attorney boyfriend. Maybe she introduced him to her cats. Maybe she suggested turning his hot tub into a litter box. The streets of my neighborhood were lined with plain houses occupied by husbands and wives raising children. I wondered how many of those couples were truly happy, and how many were secretly writing ten-point plans?
The front door squeaked, and my good friend Clark lurched through it. His eyes hung sadly, and his face looked ghoulishly pale. Clark hugged me. He thanked me for letting him stay at my place. He told me he was going home with Janice. They had worked everything out. From now on, everything would be better.
“I’m happy to be going home,” he said in a tone that didn’t sound happy at all.
I told Clark that I loved him, and he smiled and punched me on the shoulder. Janice scowled from the doorway. She seemed perturbed, somehow, by our expression of male friendship. Pretty soon Clark got into the passenger seat of her car, and he was gone.
*
Over the next few weeks, my life settled into familiar rhythms. I spent hours at work replying to emails. Came home and heated up cans of Campbell’s chicken noodle soup. One Saturday I sat at the kitchen table drinking my morning coffee. I had no plans. I considered taking a walk to a nearby park, and on the way back stopping by a bar. The bar was a home away from home for guys who had no plans.
That’s when I heard the motorcycle. I looked out the window and saw Clark pulling up on a sweet Ninja sport bike. He flipped up the helmet visor and grinned madly like I hadn’t seen him smile in a long time.
I hurried outside. Clark told me to get on behind him, and he offered me a helmet he’d stashed in the saddlebag. Clark was always thoughtful about safety. I hopped aboard and put my arms around his torso. I didn’t ask about Janice. Didn’t have to. Janice would never allow him to own a motorcycle. It wasn’t in her ten-point plan.
Clark took us south on Federal before merging onto the 6th Avenue Freeway, heading west toward Golden. Traffic choked the highway, like always, but Clark weaved a nimble path through brigades of oversized trucks and SUVs. He drove with a confidence I didn’t recognize. As traffic thinned past Wadsworth Boulevard, he advanced to a higher gear, and the road cleared into a flat patch of pavement stretching all the way to the Rocky Mountains. Clark gunned it. I held on tight like I was his girlfriend, held on to save my life.
We rushed toward the mountains, which grew tall and towering at our approach. The mountains and acceleration got me thinking about time. How we experience it in a straight line, one discreet moment after another, even though the truth is that everything that has ever happened or will happen is happening right now, in this instant. Clark and I are still on that bike. The engine thrums. He squares his shoulders with unexpected strength. Even as the sun scorches the land in late-summer heat, something in the air smells like spring.
Alex Miller is the author of the novel White People on Vacation (Malarkey Books) and the story collection How to Write an Emotionally Resonant Werewolf Novel (Unsolicited Press). His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Flyway, Pithead Chapel, and Colorado Review. He lives in Denver.