AGV Backmarker: Select All
April 27, 2006
By Mark Gardiner
Click here for a printer-friendly version

I guess it was a little less than a year ago that I was up at Infineon Raceway (nee Sears Point) with the ZX-6RR. I used a Pridmore CLASS school to shake the bike down for some to-be-determined adventure. Then I stayed to ride the promoter’s practice prior to the AMA race. The bike was so fast that I thought, I’ll get someone to time me against the AMA boys, and if I’m in the zone I’ll try and qualify for a national.

Fat chance. Although I got faster every session, I mentally graphed my progress and knew that I wasn’t getting faster fast enough—I’d just be a rolling chicane in a balls-out AMA qualifying session. Still, it was a valuable learning experience. In my final session, I determined to brake a little later, since the fast guys were all braking much later than I was.

My friends Stan and Catherine.

Up at the top of the hill after the front straight, there’s a blind cresting right where one of my friends once high-sided herself so violently she immediately went out and bought a smaller bike. That should probably have been on my mind when I picked that corner to experiment with whacking it on—which is what it seemed like everyone else was doing. (Besides out-braking me on the way in, they were jumping away from me on each corner exit, too.)

The bike bucked me so hard that I caught sight of Chris Peris under my legs. I landed back in the saddle and kept it on its wheels, wondering what would have been more embarrassing, wrecking a bike that wasn’t mine, or taking out one of the AMA’s fastest privateers. Discretion, as they say, got the better part of valor. I pulled in and folded my tent; my weekend was over and it was still only Thursday afternoon. I was packing up when I heard a voice call my name.

The voice belonged to a guy named Stan, who I first met on the Isle of Man. We had a mutual friend in Michelle Duff. (A long time ago, Michelle was Mike Duff. Mike was the first North American to win a Grand Prix; I think I’ve already mentioned that in a previous column.) Stan asked me what I was doing and I explained, nothing now. I guessed I’d check into some fleabag motel in the Bay Area and wait for my ride on Sunday.

“Not a chance,” he said. “You’ll stay with Catherine and me.”

I didn’t really know Stan at that point. I’m a pretty private person and would not normally want to stay with a casual acquaintance but I was in no financial position to turn down his hospitality. It turned out he lived a few miles from the track. He returned with a spotless van he used only to transport his Aprilia RS250 to track days. We loaded up my gear. He drove us to his house and showed me the guest room. We opened a bottle of wine. He was in his 60s, he’d been retired but had sort of started working again, helping out some friends in the specialty food business. I don’t think Catherine, his girlfriend/wife/partner, was there that first evening; she was away somewhere.

I was grateful for his hospitality and was warming up to him. He seemed to have a pretty good life worked out for himself, with enough money to live in a nice place and indulge in his bike habit. He told me that he worked a little for some friends with a large organic market garden, taking his pay in produce. “Do you want to try some of my olives?” he asked.

I’m a food snob. And in particular, I’m an olive snob. You may not know that olives are tricky to prepare; in order to make them digestible, raw olives are soaked in lye and are downright toxic at a certain point in the process. Then they’re soaked in water that needs to be changed on a rigorous schedule. Stan told a funny story about having just started to prepare them when some family emergency forced him to drive across the country. He took his buckets of olives with him, stopping at rest stops to drain them and change the water.

I was determined to say something nice about them no matter how bad they were. Luckily, he only had a few left, so I could just eat one or two and beg off, pretending I wanted him to have the last fruits of his labor. Then I tasted one. It was the best olive ever. It reminded me of the “lucques” that I used to get in the market in Paris—fresh olives that were only at their peak for a few weeks in late fall. Only Stan’s were sweeter, more buttery. He watched in horror as I demolished his last precious few, but he didn’t try to retrieve the Tupperware container. It would have been like grabbing a sandwich back from a bear in Yellowstone.

He was more careful when he offered me one of his last pickles. That was the best pickle I’d ever tasted. (I planted cucumbers in my back yard and made my own pickles that fall. They were okay, but nowhere near as good as Stan’s.)

As I recall, I met Catherine the next day. She was younger than him, taller than him, and I had one of those man-moments where I thought, “not bad, Stan.” He obviously worshipped the ground she walked on.

Stan led us on a daylong ride along his favorite wine-country backroads, knowing exactly where to stop for the best coffee, the best lunch, the best pastry. We were chilling, it wasn’t some rock-pissing competition. Still, it wasn’t slow. He showed himself to be a calm, confident rider.

A month or so later, Stan sent me an email offering to find a bed for me if I was going to Laguna for the MotoGP races; he’d booked two or three motel rooms for friends and visitors and promised to find me a bike if I needed one. But by then my magazine gig had collapsed and I couldn’t afford to get there, or to buy a ticket. So I haven’t seen Stan since.

Then last week I got an email from him with a one-word subject line: Catherine.

That wasn’t good.

The body of the email was short. Numbed. Stan merely said that Catherine had been killed that very day, in a motorcycle accident on Highway 1. He concluded, “I suspect I am in shock myself right now and do not quite know what will happen next. I have always known that the most important things that happen, happen without your vote… Stanley.”

There was a huge list of names in the “to” part of the message, and I was struck by the modernity of that instinct, to hit “Select all” in your email program and write that message and click “Send.” In another time or place, he might have walked into the town square and shouted “Argh!” I’ve actually told a few of my friends where to find all the unpublished stuff on my computer; if anything ever happens to me, they are to put it all on the web, then select everyone in my email program and write, “Mark’s dead. Go to this web address, there’s something there he wanted you to read.”

Motorcycles give us a reason to live. In my case, they actually gave me life itself, but that’s too long a story to get into right now. Riding makes us feel alive, in part because there are inherent risks in the activity.