Conservation of Angular Momentum By Aaron Jacobs
Physics is infallible but I don’t get into physics with Arn Grassley from KOAA Channel 5 News, Pueblo, Colorado. It’s no slight on Arn if he doesn’t know that D=kV2 means the range of a projectile is directly proportional to the square of its velocity. That’s why when he says, “So Cap, you’re trying for fourteen. A new personal best. Aren’t you at all afraid?” I don’t answer right away. I throw a heavy boot up on the table, though doing so radiates pure undiluted agony through my hip and knee. I chew the inside of my mouth and glare at him until the pain recedes. Then I shoot him a smile, a well-calibrated 7.8 out of 10 on the smugness scale. I look just like I do on the big graphic adorning the side of the Official Captain Cap Valentine motor coach in which we sit.
“The number is fifteen. And I’m not trying for anything. Tonight Carlotta and I are successfully jumping over fifteen American-manufactured school buses. God bless your family.”
He chuckles, coughs into his fist, asks again if I’m afraid. “Level with me.”
Now I squint like I’m thinking about it, even sucking a canine tooth like I’m really puzzling out his query. “You know I’ve been talking English my whole life but I never heard that word before. Afraid, is it?”
It occurs to me he’s wearing foundation and powder on his face, yet he told me he just came from a tennis lesson. “That’s comedy. Remember that line when we’re shooting.”
“I’ll do my best, I promise, but I’ve hit my head a few times,” I say, knocking knuckles on noggin.
“Since you brought it up, I was hoping you’d indulge my curiosity.”
He wears his earnest television reporter face, but I’m not biting. It’s been my experience that where jumping motorcycles is concerned, people by a wide margin have no capacity for an intelligent conversation about how a parabolic trajectory is the result of gravity exerting force on Carlotta’s center of mass. So as a general rule, when it comes to guys of Arn’s ilk, I set my expectations low. I just answer their questions, the same questions jump after jump, city after city, year after year, though they are the wrong questions.
“Fire when ready.”
He hits me with the classic of all classics. “Do you have a death wish?”
So unimaginative. Even if physics is a non-starter, why not ask something interesting like, Where do you get the school buses? Everywhere I go I conjure up eight, ten, twelve buses on a few hours’ notice. Where does he think they come from? Or why doesn’t he say, Hey, Cap, why jump school buses at all? Doesn’t he wonder why school buses and not oil drums, or double-wide trailers, or shipping containers, or dumpsters brimming with neglected love and expired dreams, or, while we’re at it, why not set up field-level seats and jump the audience itself? These are not philosophical exercises. They are real questions with real answers. For example, RE: jumping live people – it’s a liability issue.
Instead, I’m always asked nonsense like, Death wish? Or, Are you an adrenaline junkie? Or, Would you let your children do this? Or, What’s it like to wake up out of a coma with a shattered pelvis?, which, if I’m being honest, isn’t a terrible question, even if it provokes a bad memory.
I want to tell him there is a formula I use to determine the distance and height of my jumps. I want to explain that 45 degrees is the optimal ramp angle for achieving distance. But the sad truth is he and his viewers aren’t seeking inspired discourse. Dare devilry, along with Iron Chef competitions and Republican primary debates, is a last bastion of tolerated machismo. To sell tickets I dutifully act as if my head is drowning in testosterone and not a mechanical engineering degree. Above all, I stay on brand: Captain Cap Valentine is more suitable as far as brands go for my line of work than Harry J. Schneeweiss, family name though it may be.
So I lean forward.
“Look in my eyes,” I say, hoping he doesn’t notice the pupil dilation. I woke up restless for reasons unrelated to tonight’s jump and washed down 20 mg of Klonopin with my matcha green tea to bevel my edges. “Mr. Grassley, you see anything in my baby blues suggesting I don’t want to be here?” I take in a loud noseful of his cologne. “Truth of it is only God can knock me out of the sky and I give thanks for each and every safe landing He allows me. Thank you, Jesus!”
R=(vcosθ/g)[vsinθ+√(v2sin2θ+2gh)] with v in mph, h in feet, and g equal to 32 ft/s2, the acceleration due to gravity. That’s how I know I’m not coming up short or overshooting my landing ramp.
* * *
Physics is infallible, and God might or might not be, but we operate in a world rampant with mechanical failure. Hence nineteen crashes. Hence eighty-three broken bones, including skull, nose, jaw, both clavicles, sternum, sundry vertebrae, both arms, both wrists, fingers galore, all my damn ribs, coccyx, pelvis, right femur, both shins, both ankles, assorted toes. Hence the reason it takes me, on even the most temperate of mornings, fifteen minutes to roll myself off of my Dr. Arkady Orlov customized HeavenSoft mattress. Hence the pain that robs me of my humanity and turns my mood feral, against which my prescription for medical marijuana is a poor palliative. Hence two ex‑wives. Hence why I seldom see my children, even the grown ones, who by this point should have therapists sufficiently expert to tell them not all the evil in this world directed at them originated with me.
Arn and I shake hands and I see him off the tour bus. Later I’ll shoot my interview with him but in the meantime I fire off an email to my business manager who, due to a luscious degree of irony, just so happens to be ex‑wife numero dos. People smarter than I am question the wisdom of such a pact, but Cynthia and I have always shared a mutual inevitability that makes me feel like we are two pieces of ornate wooden furniture that can be rearranged around the room endlessly, but never thrown out. She’s not going to like what I have to say, which is why I write it.
Clear my calendar. I’m going on hiatus for a while after tonight. And yes, I know how much it’s going to cost this “sad little caravan of sycophants and bottom-feeders,” as you so lovingly call your place of employ. Since I’m technically the boss in this bargain I don’t have to give a reason why I’m pulling the plug and so I won’t, other than to say yes, of course I value you, so let’s not make it about that.
Each Jump Day is a series of rituals and routines, so when my phone starts vibrating through my jeans, I’m not surprised to see the text is from my daughter Jessica. At twelve years old, she’s my youngest, and although she hasn’t visited with me in five months, she’s a stickler for tradition. Her message is powerful in its simplicity.
dont do it!
Texting might lack intimacy, but I’d be stupid to overlook the similarity between her missives and her half-brother’s anti-smoking campaign of fifteen years earlier, stirring handwritten entreaties I discovered folded inside my matchbooks. I pray her concern for me is sincere, though. Josh, I learned in time, worried not for my health but for the embarrassment my trashy habit caused him. He was, and still is, fixated with the idea that I’m low rent, making him low rent by heredity, and both he and the Schneeweiss legacy deserve better. As part of our routine, I ignore my baby girl’s text.
Next I check in with Carlotta. Her Christian name is Harley-Davidson XR750. She weighs 295 lbs. and propels herself with a 748‑cc air cooled V‑twin engine. There have been a run of Carlottas over the span of thirty years and 300‑plus jumps. I’m not a mechanic by profession but I employ a team with over a century of combined years of experience. Their job is to eliminate the scourge of mechanical failure. A motorcycle engine is not a complicated system, but each of my calculations is incumbent upon her running tip top.
The jump site is the outfield at the Runyon Field Sports Complex. Team Valentine has transformed the visiting team’s bullpen into a makeshift garage. This is where I find Speedy, my chief mechanic. He and I hate each other with the poignancy of former best friends, for that is what we are, and that means it’s a hatred fueled by nostalgia for the men we used to be. It’s an uneven hatred to be sure. Speedy hates me for giving him that name before we became friends, when he was a gutsier and technically superior jumper and I invented a rivalry between us as a way to claim some of his greatness for myself. I was gutsy too, but unskilled, and it killed me that he was out of my league in every measurable category. So I hounded him with that name, as if he was a little kid zipping around to keep pace with his hero.
Perhaps there are longstanding grudges based only on a snotty sobriquet, but more than anything, Speedy hates me for putting him in a wheelchair. When it happened we were as close as brothers who actually like each other, I having eventually earned his respect with a successful jump of nine buses at the 2nd Annual Chili Cook-off in Hanover, PA, itself no great feat except I did it with a semi-healed clavicle that refractured upon landing. The afternoon of the accident we were celebrating some inessential milestone like the fact it was Wednesday. Of course I shouldn’t have been driving in my condition, but here is as good a place as any to admit how easy it is to let being a dare devil become an identity and not just a job. The longer you do this, the harder it is to separate the character you dreamed up from the real you. The distinction blurs until you find yourself thinking you really are Captain Cap Valentine, sliding into a bone leather bucket seat, and maybe you’re the kind of captain who views blood alcohol levels as a guideline he can take or leave. I rolled my ’78 Corvette Stingray down an embankment. Of all the wrecks I crawled out of, this one I got away from without a scratch. My former buddy, not so much.
The reason I hate Speedy is because he’s a sullen malcontent who should thank me for making good on my promise to support him, rather than complaining ad infinitum about the dick infections his catheter gives him. Mostly, though, I hate him for what his presence in my garage makes me think of myself.
He’s got his laptop hooked up to Carlotta, running a diagnostic on her electrical system. I put my hand on his shoulder and he shrugs it off.
“How’re we looking?” I say.
“What were you doing in New Hampshire?”
“Who said I was in New Hampshire?”
He peers up at me so he doesn’t have to tell me to shut the fuck up.
“I was scouting a location.”
“He’s got fifteen buses on the docket and he’s looking to the future,” Speedy says to crewmember Floyd.
“Got to stay ahead of the pack. You know that, Speedster,” I say, taking a boxing stance and throwing a few jabs in his direction.
“What’s with the good mood?”
“Every day is a gift.”
Now he tells me to shut the fuck up. “What were you really doing in New Hampshire?”
“How’re we looking?”
“I know what you’re up to. And the thing is, no matter what you do, or try to do, you’re still you. Got it?”
“Like I said, how’re we looking?”
“If I were you, it’s not Carlotta I’d be worried about.”
* * *
Dear Mr. Schneeweiss:
Thank you for your interest in our company. After reviewing your application and resume, we regret to inform you that we do not have a position for you at this time. We wish you the best of luck in your continued career efforts.
Sincerely, etc . . .
The emails all read similar. I saved them. At first it was because I was holding a grudge. One day in the not too distant future, when I contributed on some project like an advanced energy system that reduced pollution impact on our fragile ecosystem, I was going to contact the firms that had no use for my services and tell them they missed the boat on me. Then for a while I thought my reputation had preceded me, even if I applied under my birth name. The engineering world was uptight and didn’t have room for the likes of me. They would sooner hire a registered sex offender. It was pedigree, not ability, that kept me out. That was a nifty piece of mental acrobatics designed to distract me from fears that my skills and education were wanting, my intellect inferior. Far easier to believe narrow-minded individuals were too protective of their stuffy images to employ an aging dare devil than to acknowledge I might not be good enough.
As for why I keep throwing myself out there, I’ll let my nineteen crashes speak to my doggedness. That’s the kind of thing I might say publicly if asked, not that anyone would quiz Harry J. Schneeweiss on the topic of his secret aspirations. Really, though, consider the alternative. How could I continue watching the true purpose of my life collect dust?
What I was doing in New Hampshire was interviewing with Apollo Air Systems, a manufacturer of HVAC products and accessories, which isn’t exactly NASA, I know, but at least a solid place to start. After acing two phone interviews, I was invited to their offices in Rochester. It’s only been in the last couple of years that I worked up the courage to finally do something about my desire to be an engineer and this is the farthest I’ve gotten.
I met with the HR administrator, Sonia, and the president of the company, Bennett Purcell. I’m never anxious in front of crowds or talking with the media, but my social fluency comes from understanding how little is at stake. Whatever I say to a journalist or a fan is neither here nor there – beguile them or shit on them, who cares? – provided that when the time comes, Carlotta and I go screaming across the sky. Jumping absolves me from nearly every transgression.
My interview at the Apollo offices, with its unbearable high stakes, striped away the mask of inconsequence behind which I conduct most of life’s business. I didn’t need them to find me charming or brave; I needed them to find me worthy. Out of fear that I would show myself to be an idiot, or that I’d be turned away with no consideration, I struggled to meet Mr. Purcell’s gaze. For the first few minutes that I sat before him I settled my eyes on a discoloration in the shiny desktop laminate close to where he rested his hands.
He turned out to be a real sweetheart. I took it as a good sign when he said, “Call me Bennett.” A design team was working to increase efficiency in their evaporative condenser for the light industrial market. I took it as an even better sign when he said, “I’m looking for a passionate, committed person to join the team. I’m more interested in aptitude than experience.”
That was all I needed to hear. The fear lifted off me like humidity after a storm. Bennett wanted passion but I don’t think he expected self-actualization right there in his office.
“Let’s talk heat rejection,” I said. “I’ve been reading up on your product line, is this the condenser that uses R717 refrigerant?”
From the moment I align Carlotta with the jumping ramp to the moment I touch down on the other side, everything slows and my senses heighten to the limits of perception. It’s as potent a drug as any I’ve tried, and I’ve tried most of them. During the interview, for the fifteen, twenty minutes Bennett and I explored the design of a counterflow condenser, I could feel the individual hairs on my knuckles, just like when I stare down forty yards of yellow school buses.
I wished we could have continued this discussion for hours. Unfortunately for me, Bennett had a company to run and brought the interview to a close.
“I want to thank you for your time,” I said. I know that’s just an expression people say, but I was really grateful to the man for inviting me into his world and sparing me a small piece of his day.
On my way out, Sonia informed me they had narrowed the applicant pool to me and another candidate. They would make their final decision in a day or so. We were talking in the hall, from where I had a good vantage of the office’s layout. Until now, I viewed the job waiting at the end of the application process as almost an abstraction. I hadn’t allowed myself to picture it as a reality that could exist with me in it. I was on a tight schedule to get to Pueblo but I took a moment to envision how it would feel standing in this hall every day, sitting before a computer at one of the nearby workstations, meeting with the design team in Conference Room A, buying whatever crap my coworkers’ kids were selling to raise money at their schools, signing up for the annual company golf outing, hearing on my lunch break the bells tolling at the Rochester Public Library downtown. I’d never held an office job so I understood that working at Apollo would inevitably be different from the way I was imagining it, perhaps drastically so, but for the first time I let myself believe I had a shot at finding out how close to the mark I came with my fantasy.
Then I hopped in a car to Logan and flew to Colorado with less than a day to finalize my jump prep.
* * *
Physics is infallible; God, who knows; mechanical failure a pernicious virus to root out; but what about human error? For as often as I fault Carlotta for my mishaps, I must admit that there have been occasions when the blame was mine and mine alone. The infamous 4th of July jump at the fairgrounds in Bucyrus, Ohio had nothing to do with bald tread on Carlotta’s shoes, like the story goes. I took off underspeed and knew right away I didn’t have the juice to clear the last bus. Conservation of angular momentum allows me to control the attitude of my bike. As I nosedived, I tried to make up for it in the air by using the throttle to increase the speed of the rear wheel. Hit the gas and the front of the bike lifts as it rotates toward the back tire. I came damn close to pulling it off. The last thing I remember was seeing the roof of the eleventh bus rushing up at me. I don’t remember the impact but I’m told my body did two and a half flips at seventy miles per hour before I came to rest. I don’t remember the helicopter ride to the hospital but when I woke on July 7th I learned I broke my promise to watch the fireworks with Jessica and my son Anthony.
So here’s another interesting question no one ever asks: With all due respect, doesn’t family come first?
Now if someone like Arn Grassley put that question to me, I would be liable to smack him in his mouth. If he caught me in a moment of introspection, however, I might concede that becoming an elite motorcycle dare devil requires a man to possess certain traits that don’t often translate to successful interpersonal relationships. I would tell Arn that you simply can’t excel at what I do while entertaining a working definition of the word compromise. It’s worth noting that nineteen crashes in 311 professional attempts means that 93.9% of the time I deliver the goods. That puts me up there with the all-time greats.
* * *
The first time I seriously jacked myself up, I was twenty. I took a Kawasaki S2 350 over five hotdog carts in the parking lot behind Strike N Spare Lanes in Sicily, Illinois. I flew right over the landing ramp, never touched it. I hit down hard, but in keeping the bike upright, my right boot slipped off the foot peg, driving it into the asphalt. It was during my follow‑up appointment with Dr. Gelles, the surgeon who reattached my Achilles tendon and put four screws in my ankle, that he dropped Conceptual Physics, a high school textbook, in my lap and said, “If you want to keep acting stupid, maybe you need to get a little smarter.”
I was a proudly incurious young man, but I was enchanted to learn that physics sets out to answer the question posed by Talking Heads: Well, how did I get here? That it deals with the creation of the universe and the laws that every single object in the universe must obey. I don’t know how else to say it but the information I took from a battered, out-of‑date, sixth edition, high school textbook opened something up in me, freed me in fact by allowing me to feel less insignificant about my place in the world, so much so that when my cast came off I forged a GED diploma and enrolled at nearby Lincoln Land Community College, paying for credits by hurdling over cars and, soon, buses on my motorcycle.
After transferring to Western Illinois I left with a mechanical engineering degree and, instead of applying to grad school, I spent a season jumping two decommissioned tanks to the delight of tourists at a resort in Cancun. I’ll go back to school soon, I said, let me save up a few dollars first, although what I was really doing was succumbing to the lure of money and girls and sun and tequila and fish tacos. The whole time I defended my decision by telling myself that my window for peril and glory was quickly closing, whereas physics was as old as time. It would always be there. In a sense it was always there, in the fore of my thoughts, a passion I spent my downtime stoking. Yet I never took the final step and hung up my star-spangled jumpsuit. I cashed the checks and signed my name on cleavage without fully trusting I could succeed in the one place I was too scared to fail.
* * *
When the call from Apollo comes, I’m back in the tour bus, engaging in another ritual. On Jump Day, I eat one meal exactly three hours before the event: A BLT on sourdough toast, with two pickle spears, three ounces of German potato salad, and the coldest, cheapest can of beer my team can dig up.
Some days you catch a break. I’m talking about luck. Take, for instance, a rain-slick night in Montreal when, after a two-hour lightning delay, the insurance company underwriting the stunt broke the policy and I straddled a Canadian version of Carlotta anyway (the original having gotten jammed up at the border with a paperwork snafu) and though the speedometer was in km and my calculations were in mph, and though rainwater puddled at an indentation at the top of the landing ramp, I said, Fuck it, I’m the Captain, and with everything working against me, pulled off a jump for the ages.
The second I hear Sonia’s voice, and not Bennett’s, I know I didn’t catch a break today. I lost. I can describe the difference between acute pain and chronic pain, pain caused by tissue damage and pain caused by nerve damage, but I have no words for the hurt I feel. It’s like having food poisoning while watching a rival outjump me, as his Irish Wolfhound humps my ear to completion. Is there a word for that?
What cinched it on Apollo’s end was that they weren’t sure how I’d fit in with the other members of the design team.
“I’ve yet to meet someone I can’t get along with,” I say.
“I don’t doubt it. You really impressed Bennett, and that’s not easy. But I’m sorry to say the rest of the team is straight out of school. They’re kids, really, all of them. I wouldn’t be surprised if some haven’t even made their first student loan payment.”
After we hang up, I stare at the uneaten portion of my sandwich for I don’t know how long. I’m at a loss, truly, and in no mood for Cynthia who, of course, chooses right now to come lurching like a yearling on her five-inch heels down the aisle of the motor coach.
“Harold, what the shit is this?” she says, holding up her phone to display what I assume is my email.
“Inertia is a property of matter, Cyn, but it’s also a fairly strong description of your plans for me.”
“I stopped knowing what you’re talking about a long time ago.”
“You want me moving in the same direction, at the same speed, forever.”
“If you’re burnt out, take up meditation.”
“Namaste,” I say, and bow my head respectfully.
Cynthia has a laugh like a leaf blower – loud, windy, and reeking of gasoline. I mean that in a good way.
“The trick I never figured out is how you preserved our children’s love for yourself, when your job is to endorse the thing they hate me for,” I say.
“They don’t hate you. They just don’t like you. And it’s not because of what you do, but how you do it. How you do everything.”
“Have you been speaking to Speedy? He said just about the same thing.”
She sits down opposite me at the table, picks up a crumb of bacon from my plate, and licks it off her finger. Her nails are chewed to the quick. “Can we talk about this email?”
If I could do it over, I would wait to hear from Apollo before sending the email. “Surprise! April Fool’s,” I say.
“Not funny, Cappy.”
“Don’t call me that.”
“After all these years, I still don’t know where you came up with it.”
“It’s short for Captivating.”
Her leaf blower laugh gets the best of her and she starts coughing. “Try Capsize,” she says when she catches her breath. “What was going on in New Hampshire?”
“The Granite State is lovely this time of year.”
She holds up her phone again. “Do we need to worry about this?”
“I told you I was kidding. Book me wherever, whenever. Keep me in the air.”
She lets out her breath slow and relieved, in the manner of post-orgasm, so self-satisfied for getting what she wants. She stands up to leave. “You made a good decision,” she says.
Cynthia and I, we’ve shared a lot. Seeing her so pleased in achieving her goal of nixing my hiatus makes me want to share what I learned today: There is something plain unattractive about a 49‑year-old man pursuing an entry level position.
“Maybe our myth of reinvention has an expiration date on it,” I say.
“Huh?” but the look that accompanies her question isn’t one of incomprehension. She looks impatient, as if after getting what she came for, she no longer has time for me.
I know it won’t help my predicament, but I want to share my bad day with her. I want her to feel denied like I feel denied. I want her to hurt the way I hurt. She hasn’t done much to deserve it. She’s just the closest person available.
I let her make it halfway down the aisle.
“Hey, Cyn, one thing before you go.”
She looks over her shoulder. “Yeah.”
“I’m fucking firing you.”
She isn’t sure I mean it. “Yup,” I say, and to hammer home the point, I cross to the liquor cabinet and toast her with a Jump Day ritual shot of Old Overholt.
An amazing thing about my ex‑old lady is that she might laugh like a leaf blower, but she doesn’t cry. Ever. I can’t remember seeing her tears and God knows I’ve given her cause for waterworks. Yet I’m positive I got to her because she doesn’t stay and fight. She storms off on her impossible heels.
* * *
We’re in center field and Arn is grinning like he’s hiding an erection. Behind us the school buses are bookended by my red, white, and blue ramps. There are pyrotechnics arranged around the jump site that will detonate as I take to the air and that I will soar above at a hundred miles per hour. Fewer than four thousand spectators are in attendance, one of the consequences of live broadcasting the event. I’m a professional so I treat the moment as if I’m surrounded by eighty thousand at the Pontiac Silverdome. Arn asks his inane questions and I rehash my line from earlier.
“What’s that word you keep saying? Afraid? Nope, not familiar with that one.”
“Do you have a death wish?” he says.
“If the good Lord wants me home, He can have me anytime he wants.”
Fact is, I’m inclined to the opposite. I have a life wish. It’s just that the life I wish to live is inaccessible to me. Though 49 is ancient in dare devil years, for a man – even a bodily wreck like me – it’s young enough to dread the knowledge that for as long as I’m alive I will be doing everything but the thing I believe I was meant to do. What could be more unendurable than that?
“Thank you to everyone who came out here tonight and all the wonderful Puebloans watching from home. You’re going to get what you came to see, I promise you that. Those fifteen school buses just over my shoulder have met their match, folks! God bless your families.”
I hand the mic back to Arn, who signs off. He and his crew scamper from the field. I stride into the bullpen. Team Valentine greets me with hoots and applause. Carlotta, spit-shined and gleaming under the stadium lights, waits to be mounted. I notice my helmet on her seat. Speedy has broken from routine. It’s his job to hand deliver my helmet and update me on any changes to my bike or the condition of the track or the weather or even to say, if seldom, “Good luck, boss.”
I have bigger things to worry about and should probably let it go. Who cares if he left the helmet on the seat? It’s not like he lost it. But already I regret firing Cynthia and I know I’m too mulish to hire her back. Speedy, though, I’m in a position to help. I can make him feel good about himself, so why not? Sometimes friendship is as simple as giving a friend what he needs, even if he’s no longer a friend, even if that’s too bad because today is a day I could use a friend.
I shake my helmet in his face and yell so the whole of Team Valentine hears. “I don’t ask for your respect, you pitiful motherfucker, I demand it!”
Speedy looks the happiest I’ve seen him in years. And all because I proved him right. No matter what I try to do, or how hard I try to do it, I can’t be anyone but me.
“Jesus, take it easy, you unholy sack of shit. I’m sorry,” he says, and I believe him.
Carlotta and I tear out of the bullpen and onto the warning track, doing wheelies and donuts in the dirt. I take another lap standing up on her back. Music is loud and tinny from the PA system: Captain Cap Valentine’s theme music sounds not enough like “Eye of the Tiger” to have to pay licensing fees. We drive right up to the top of the jumping ramp, where I salute the crowd and wave goodbye. For ritual I knock three times on the gas tank that is airbrushed with my official logo and kept almost empty for weight and combustion reasons. We fly down the ramp and now the music has stopped. It’s nothing but anticipation at this point, the crowd so quiet that the only thing I hear is Carlotta saying, Potato-potato-potato-potato. I fasten my helmet. The mayor and assorted councilmen-and-women watch from inside the home team dugout. The fire department is on the field and so is an emergency medical staff, all of them itching to be called into action. I don’t pay attention to them. I stare down the track leading to the ramp.
In order to stop a moving body, you need to apply a force against it for a period of time. The lower the momentum or longer the time, the less force is needed. During a motorcycle crash, high momentum meets short collision time, meaning a shit-ton of force acts upon the moving body to stop it. In this case, the moving body is me. No, I don’t have a death wish. I’m not trying to kill myself. I’m trying to free myself of desire by knocking it clear out of my heart. Now, as a showman, I still have to sell it. Can’t miss it by yards. Have to miss it by inches, which is apropos, I think. This is not physics but very well could be: Our proximity to the object of our desire is directly proportional to the square of our sorrow. The closer we get to the thing we want without attaining it, the harder it hurts.
People ask if it feels like flying and there is in fact a sensation of weightlessness brought on by the force of gravity going unchecked by the force of the ground. I’m over the second bus and already I know I have the distance to make it. A new personal record as long as I don’t biff the landing. But if I squeeze the hand brake, even a little, slowing rear wheel speed, Carlotta rotates forward, as if she is casting down her eyes in deference to what is coming. Maybe you don’t appreciate how precise a mistake this is. In less than a second I will clear the last bus but drive my front tire into the edge of the landing ramp. I’m not going to remember the impact. I never do.
Aaron Jacobs is the author of the novel The Abundant Life (Run Amok Books, 2018). His short stories have appeared in The MacGuffin, JMWW, and Atticus Review.