BACKROADS • AUGUST 2021
Page 6
O N T H E MAR K MARK BYERS
You Can’t Go Home Again Thomas Wolfe wrote “You Can’t Go Home Again.” Some people think it means that once you’ve become an adult, you can’t move back in with your parents. Some take it literally and think it refers to the fact that once you move, especially to the “big city,” going back to your rural home will never be the same. Personally, I think Wolfe was talking about time, not space. I think Wolfe was talking about not being able to relive our youth, but that doesn’t stop us from trying. You can’t go home again. That’s why a lot of us end up with old motorcycles. We see an old bike in a yard or a shed. Maybe it’s just like the one we had or a buddy had or the one on which we learned and suddenly, it’s as if we have no choice – no control. We’re compelled to stop by an inexplicable force of nature that wells up from our subconscious minds, constituted of memories of that motorcycle, that time, that place, and of those people. You can’t go home again, but you know of whom I speak. That motorcycle is inextricably linked to the people and psyche of that era. Your mom, who grudgingly accepted the motorcycle by extracting a promise that you’d “be careful,” even though “careful” in your bulletproof mind was only racing where cops didn’t lurk. Your dad, who made you earn at least a portion of the money, if not all of it. Your friends, who were envious unless they had bikes of their own and who then, if yours was better, feigned ambivalence. You can’t go home again, but there was a girl. There was always a girl. Even if you were a hopeless loser, there was a subject of unrequited adulation. If you were lucky, she liked you because bad boys rode motorcycles and wore leather jackets. She met you around the block from her house because her mother forbade her to ride. You’d hand her an ill-fitting helmet that she’d press over hair streaked with sun and she’d climb aboard, clad in capris and a
sweater. If you were athletic, she’d have on your letterman’s jacket as a symbol of her title to you. You can’t go home again, but you’d ride and she with you, clinging to your waist out of a mixture of love and fear and exhilaration. Stoplights were a frustrating delight, hindering your progress, but causing her to press even tighter against your back as willowy old forks dove toward the stop line. Streetlights would cast orange-yellow splashes of light on the asphalt rivers leading to the Dairy Queen, where what little money you had bought Cokes that might have been spiked from a small, silver flask. You sat there with her and admired the way the neon played across the paint and the chrome and you were the king of the world. You can’t go home again, but you can go in the garage and tear down an old bike like you did then. You can add hop-up parts like the ones you bought with money you saved by working at the grocery store and mowing lawns. You can bob fenders and saw off pipes and pull out baffles and put on clubman bars. You can strip it down to parade rest and put it back together, polishing as you go, smelling the wax and the rubber and the gas and the oil, every inhalation stirring olfactory memories of that time so long ago when “life was sweet, and oh so mellow.” You can’t go home again, but you can ply the electronic highways deep into the night. You can look for the bike that will take you back: the two-wheeled time machine that will transport your body in space, but your soul in time to the place from where those visceral memories came. It doesn’t matter by what name it goes, be it “Bonnie” or “Duc” or “Dream” or simply a collection of initials. When you find it, you can strip and polish and buff and cut and modify until it resembles the one you remember. You can’t go home again, but if you’re really lucky, the girl with the letterman jacket will smile the smile that created the gentle lines at the corners of her eyes. She’ll put a helmet over hair streaked with gray and sit down behind you and cling to you with a mixture of love and fear and exhilaration while you ride to the Dairy Queen. You can’t go home again, but you can ride. You can still ride. ,
