#cz175

Johnny called me up one Sunday morning and said the German would buy my CZ.

"Five-hundred cash, today," he said.

I asked him who the German was.

My mind flashed back to Seligman and a backpack too heavy for my own good. Johnny told me, The crazy one, and I asked, The peeping Tom with the strawberries in his teeth? No, the other crazy one, he said.

"I'll have to meet him someday," I replied.

"It doesn't have a title," Johnny reminded me a week later, when I was on my fire escape in Bed-Stuy, eating rice from the sushi joint I frequented below my apartment. “Plus Sarah just found out she’s pregnant again, so who knows when I’ll have the time to—”

I winced as the Shabbat sirens started going off, shoving a finger in my ear. I yelled back, "Does that really matter?!"

Johnny asked me which part, the title or the pregnancy.

Tiny children with suits and side locks were running giant circles, yelling through a toy megaphone on the patio below me. I peeked over the railing and emptied what was left of my water bottle on their heads. In the killing humidity they threw their arms in the air and shouted for more, rejoicing from what the sky had brought.

"Fuckers," I said, shaking my head.

Johnny asked me what I was talking about and I said, My people.

The sirens finished with the last of their song, the elevators began stopping at every floor. I asked about old plates, registering out of state. Johnny laid out my best case scenario; I'd be redlining her at forty in the slow lane on 78, with half a gallon left by the time I hit green. I told him I'd have to think about it.

"I'll let the German know you'll be in touch," he said, hanging up.

"I mean, what do you want with a motorcycle you can't sell?" I shook my head, I couldn't have this conversation again. Motorcycles, of all the things I needed to bring up. "Now is there anything I should bring with me into the city when I come?"

I told my mom no, then yes, then asked her if she had an old iron lying around anywhere.

"Well can I borrow it?"

"Yes, but only if you call Johnny back and agree to sell that God forbidden thing."

There was a noise from the bathroom, my bathroom, a crash and the sound of Ethan cursing. I punted my bedroom door shut and locked it, safe again from the World's Worst Roommate.

"Don't you have anything you're sentimental about?" I asked her, stepping back out onto my fire escape.

"Yeah," she replied, shifting the phone on her shoulder. "The space I used to have in my garage."

I could hear her in the background, probably in the laundry room already, digging around for the last thing on earth I had yet to ask her for. My stomach grumbled. It wasn't but ten in the morning and yet I could taste my sweet ginger already. "Found it," she said. My mother loved me the way I loved sushi; she showered me with favors the span of every flavor.

"Well what if I could get it down into the basement somehow?"

"The same way you got it down from your apartment in Hollywood?"

Well played, mom.

“How do you even know about that?” I asked her, baffled as was usually the case by the things she knew. I had violent flashbacks of strewn about whiskey bottles, of Alicia with a cigarette in her mouth, of that motorcycle crashing down my staircase, with me on board.

“You called me the next morning, remember?”

I didn’t.

"Panicking because you were so hungover, and had that whole moving truck still to pack?”

I grunted.

“You should of left it in Los Angeles,” my mom said.

I sighed and told her, And I should have left myself, too.

“It’s a 175, ’76,” I told the man on the phone, Caller Unknown. “I bought it a couple years ago in Arizona, when I was riding my motorcycle across the country.” The man on the other end whistled and said, I’ll be dammed. “Yeah,” I replied. “And it’s been a pain in my ass ever since.”

“You know, I’ve always wanted to do that,” he said, almost like he was asking me.

I told him, It’s never too late, and he said, Unfortunately my wife would disagree.

And so we talked, and we talked, and we talked.

And I told him all about the motorcycle I had placed for sale in the local want ads, about what a sight it had made to the guy I was then, parked on a lawn by itself alongside old Route 66. I told him about the son of the owner whom I had met with in San Diego two months later and about how it had looked then, strapped down in the back of his pick up truck. A little less flashy, quite a bit more frowzy.

I told him about carrying it up the stairs and into my apartment, about how much you could accomplish when you were inherently complacent to the results. It had sat there leaning against my fireplace for months while the bird’s nest I’d pulled from the airbox sat on the mantle above it, and my cat went crazy for days.

“But it doesn’t run, huh?”

“Well, now that’s where all the fun comes in.”

I wasn’t trying to sell him on anything, because I didn’t want to sell it to begin with.

He asked about the title and I told him, You could get two for the price I’m asking. I just didn’t have the patience to.

“How’d you get it over here from California?”

“In a big box truck, that I drove.”

The man whistled again.

“You’ve been around the block some, huh?”

“It’s not as bad once you get into the mood some,” I replied.

The man laughed and I said, Let me guess. Unfortunately your wife would disagree.

Maddox finally called me back on the first of April.

He didn’t want it either.

“Well what about your girlfriend?” I asked him. “Your baby nephew? Your fourth grade math teacher? For Christ’s sake man, help me out here.”

“I wish there was something I could do,” he said, as if he actually owed me something.

I closed the window in our living room, brushed the ashes from our couch and then sat down. I wish Johnny would stop getting his wife pregnant and let me keep it stashed in his garage for another year, I said.

“And spend his every free minute trying to get it running again.”

Like any good friend would, Maddox agreed.

There were sirens in the distance, a prolonged wail that slowly grew in intensity and then a fire engine flew down Bedford in the wrong direction, and just like that, it was loud again.

“Well I can’t talk long,” he interjected. “I’m teaching a workshop in Williamsburg at eight, if you’re not up to anything.”

I thought about it for a second and then said, Maybe next time.

I wasn’t up to anything, but that was the point.

“Hey, Maddox. Remember as a teenager how satisfying it was just to sit around all night and not accomplish jack shit? Do the Buddhists ever talk about where that vaguely suspicious appreciation for life goes when we age?”

Maddox laughed.

“My friend,” he said. “They would have nothing to talk about if they didn’t.”

There’s something about clutter that feels very much like Christmas to a young kid without friends to substitute.

Growing up, I remember my parent’s garage.

And I remember the two Honda’s my dad kept buried in the back corner, under a tarp, with cobwebs for gift wrap.

“One of them was Ed’s, I think,” my dad said, pausing for a moment. “Jesus, yeah... It was Ed’s. He must have dropped it off there one winter and then probably forgot all about it. Yeah. Yeah, I remember them.”

I took another sip from my coffee.

I didn’t say anything. I just teetered with my chair on two legs, sharing the recollection.

“You at your place?”

“I’m on my balcony, yeah.”

“And school’s going well?”

“Halfway there,” I replied.

I listened to Ethan through my closed balcony door, my closed bedroom door, from down our long hallway and through his own closed door, laughing at anime.

My dad wanted to know, So what are you asking about them for?

“The motorcycles?”

“Yeah.”

I thought about it for a second and then asked him, If you guys were so busy with work, why didn’t you just sell them?

My dad thought about it for a second and said, You don’t break up a marriage just because you haven’t fucked in a couple months, do you?

And I laughed pretty hard at that.

And there were sirens and car horns and subways rumbling beneath the ground.