Warehouse

When I was about nineteen I briefly dated a bartender who worked at the bar where I very nearly lived.  I was young and stupid enough to think there was something special about being chosen by this bartender, a man who spent his working life with drunken women flirting with him and trying to capture his attention.  Because he chose me.  I do not remember if he was attractive, if I liked him, or much about him.  Just that he worked at the bar.  I remember his first name.

He had a motorcycle rather than a car, which is ridiculous when you live in a city that is buried in snow eight months a year, but you know, he was a bartender.  He was significantly older than I was.  And I expected my mother to protest (mostly about the bike) but she did not.  She may have been too busy coping with my sister's more dangerous exploits to notice mine, or she may have secretly hoped I would be killed and ease her parental burden.  I dated him briefly enough that I never found out how he got to work in the long, long prairie winter.

Riding on the back of a motorcycle is overrated.  I know women who find it exhilerating and sexy.  I do not.  I might find driving a motorcycle exhilerating and sexy, but riding on the back of one is nothing special.  He used to become irritated with me because I wouldn't lean in to the curves with him.

He kept telling me how important it was to go with the bike, to let my body relax and lean in.  And each time he said it, I would resolve to do it, to trust him, to lean into the turn.  But every time it happened I could not stop myself from fighting him, fighting against the bike and its driver and especially against gravity, all conspiring to pull me down into the asphalt where I knew I would break and swallow my teeth.

He would stop the bike afterward and turn around to face me, talking loudly so I could hear him through both our helmets.  But undoubtedly talking loudly because he was frustrated with my mulish refusal to follow his explicit instructions.  You have to lean into the turn, he would say.  And I would nod, and promise to do it next time.  

I never did it.

(I am saying this because you wondered if you noticed yourself changing, if you would have time to stop the change before it overtook you.)

If you were to ask him about me today, he would say, No, I do not remember her name, No, I do not remember what she looked like.  But I definitely do remember that she would never lean into the turns.



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