Go Westing! - Cosmo

“Later,” I said.
I kicked the bike down into first. It’s a satisfying feeling to feel the gears on a bike engage and hear the engine rev up and then the bike shoot out between your legs cutting a clean arc into a lane of a fresh paved road. We rode out of Springfield, through its grimy little downtown and caught the I-91N to the Mass Pike, I-90 West, and in a matter of minutes we were making good time. Westing.
Kate had hooked a splitter up to her I-pod and was dee-jaying for us. The I-Pod could revolutionize motorcycle travel. It sounds kind of wimpy, not bikey at all, but having your own tunes can make a long ride pass a lot faster. Kate’s a hipster so she always has a very current collection of music and a very current explanation of why it’s good. The only problem was the wind kept pulling the splitter loose from the jack as the cord flapped around, so you’d get like 30 seconds of a song and then silence. I guess it was some kind of foreshadowing. It made me nervous to see her twisting and turning to mess with the cord as we bombed the left lane of the Pike at like 85 mph and then the music coming in loud and back to silence again. I felt like my head was going to explode.
Kate was so focused on the tunes she didn’t notice the traffic whizzing by her. She’s kind of myopic that way. It was already well over 90 degrees out and it was going to get hotter. I felt the sun burning my nose, the wind on my face. It feels like you’re drinking it when you’re going that fast. You have to breathe slow and even through your nose to get enough air. Kate somehow figured out how to get the splitter to stay in the jack. I got used to the extra weight on the bike and how it felt when I changed lanes. All it took was a little hip rock to one side or the other, a curl of the right wrist to inject some gas and the bike would zip into a new traffic pocket a lane away.
My nextdoor neighbor in Cambridge, one of the twenty-four people who lived in the triple-decker next to me, Noah, and Kirsten, was this dude named Cosmo. Cosmo’s almost fifty. I got to know him just shooting the shit out front of the house. His family had owned the three buildings next to where I lived for almost thirty years. It used to be a middle class black neighborhood and it was filling with MIT students, Harvard students and bio-tech yuppies. The rents were climbing rapidly, along with the property values and the taxes. The black folks were on their way out. The tension that accompanies gentrification hung in the air on Howard Street, so I had always made it my business to go out of my way with the neighbors. It was good because I ended up getting to be friends with Cosmo. He was always out there fiddling with his truck to get away from his wife. The week before I left on the bike he cut his thumb off with a table saw. He said he didn’t feel anything, just looked down and picked his thumb up. He said it didn’t bleed that much either and then he laughed and his gold caps gave me a warm feeling.
Cosmo’s the type of guy I call a Moondog, a groovy 70s cat who didn’t understand what happened to everyone in the 80s and was already kind of an artifact by the 90s with his carefree attitude and his nostalgia for the crazy days left behind. Moondogs are sidewalk philosophers that don’t talk that much. Cosmo is a family man now. He’s even a deacon at church and an officer at his Mason’s Lodge. My roommate Noah thinks Cosmo has something wrong with his head. Noah is not alone in this assessment. Cosmo talks in a high-pitched voice and he’s always smiling but he’s built like a brick house.
“Just another beautiful day on God’s planet,” he’d say.
“I love this sunshine,” I’d say.
“That’s all,” he’d reply.
That’s how a lot of our interactions went. I always found more sanity than insanity in his attitude. It wasn’t until I got the motorcycle that we really started to talk. He’s a biker. He’d wrecked his bike a few years back, a 1600cc Kawasaki Vulcan. He had a seizure going 85mph and ran into a tree. His bike spilt in half. He was in a coma for six weeks. The docs told his wife he’d never recover. One day he woke up and came back to reality. Now all he talks about is getting back on a bike.
“Oh naw,” he said in a high whine, the first time I pulled up on my Honda. “You a bikey now. You a bikey now.”
He talks simply like that but I usually find profound meaning in his platitudes. He was affirming my decision to break free. Riding with Kate on the back of the Nighthawk, screaming down the Pike, I heard his voice in my ear, high-whining with philosophical sweetness:
“Once you get used to the weight of a woman on the back of the bike, it don’t feel right when it’s gone.”
Whenever he says the word “woman,” he circles his hands around imaginary hips and his voice gets dreamy. It wasn’t just Kate on the bike with me. There were a lot of people on the bike with me. Anybody who ever wanted to be free was on that bike behind me but it made a big difference that Kate was the one who was there in person, who was willing to trust me with her life.
We had driven 26 miles when she tapped me and pointed at a service area exit on the Pike—one of those full service plazas with two fast-food restaurants, a travel center, and a gigantic Mobil station. I was amazed how many people were still on the road mid-day on the 4th of July. It didn’t feel like the 4th of July. I remember this place my family used to go in the summers. It was on the Severn River in Maryland, a tributary of the Chesapeake Bay right near Annapolis. We raced box turtles we caught in the woods in the morning, then had a big parade at noon, a softball game in the afternoon, a huge corn roast at the beach in the evening, and finally the fireworks over the water at dark. That was the full English. Forrest and his folks were going to a bonfire that night where there would be fireworks. I don’t know why I decided to head out that day. I just wanted to get going and Kate had her last day of work at the comic book store, so we settled on Monday. Besides, 4th of July is a family holiday and both our families were scattered all over. I have a mom in Maryland, a dad in Georgia, and a sister in Oregon. Kate’s the same way. We are both children of the American Urban Diaspora, and as of yet there are no parades celebrating our existence.