Читать книгу The Road to San Donato - Robert Cocuzzo - Страница 12

There he goes. One of God’s own prototypes. A high-powered mutant of some kind never even considered for mass production. Too weird to live, and too rare to die.

—Hunter S. Thompson

My father had been hit by a car twenty-one times. Or more accurately, while riding his bicycle, he’d been hit by sixteen cars, four buses, and a Dodge Ram pickup truck. And these weren’t just superficial sideswipes. He’d been launched into windshields, T-boned at intersections, and driven into the cold, hard pavement with enough force to crack his helmet in half. When the pickup truck hit him, the driver accidently punched the gas instead of hitting the brake and proceeded to run over my father’s bicycle, instantly turning it into carbon fiber kindling. Luckily for Dad, he rolled out of the way milliseconds before the truck’s tires crushed his rib cage.

Part of the problem was that Dad’s bike didn’t have any brakes. He rode what is known as a fixed-gear, or fixie—the weapon of choice for most city bike messengers. What makes the fixie unique is that the bike’s chain is on a single track connected to a cog on the back wheel that does not spin freely. On a regular bike, when you stop pedaling, the back wheel spins freely, allowing you to coast. But on a fixie, if you try to coast, the pedals continue to turn in unison with the back wheel, forcing your legs forward whether you like it or not. This direct connection between the wheels and the pedals makes going down hills, swerving around potholes, and stopping short extremely difficult. To stop, Dad had to essentially pedal backward, resisting the bike’s forward momentum, until it slowed to a halt.

Part of the machismo associated with riding a fixie is to strip off the bike’s hand brakes and rely entirely on the strength of your legs to stop the bike. “Its beauty is in its simplicity,” my father would tell people, after they exclaimed, “You don’t have any brakes!?” Stripping the hand brakes opened him up to disastrous scenarios. For instance, if he was going downhill and picked up too much speed, the pedals could spin wildly out of control, dragging his legs through the rapid rotations until his feet were thrown from the pedals. Or if he was speeding along a flat and his chain broke, he’d have no way to stop but to put his feet down and drag them along the pavement. Pedaling a fixed gear through gridlock traffic was a bit like rock climbing without a rope—every move needed to be perfect.

My dad was hard-wired for the fixie. His attitude on a bike might best be described as punk rocker meets Hells Angel. Like a lawless bike messenger, my father weaved around cars, ran red lights, and swerved around pedestrians on one of the most trafficked streets in Boston. Massachusetts Avenue was littered with ghost bikes, bicycles painted all white and chained to street signs that served as makeshift memorials to cyclists who had been killed there. Fatalities were common on Mass Ave. One morning in 2015, I got a barrage of calls from friends when local news reported that an unidentified cyclist had been crushed to death by an eighteen-wheeler on Mass Ave. I frantically dialed up my father’s shop, only to find him casually sipping coffee on the other end of the line. He rode by these ghost bikes twice a day, but they never seemed to give him much pause.

Instead, on a street that called for defensive driving, Dad was always on the offense. He flipped off motorists who cut him off, spit on their windshields, and screamed obscenities fiery enough to singe your eyebrows. Perhaps not surprisingly, the combination of no brakes, chaotic traffic, and my father’s Mad Max mentality made collisions in traffic a common occurrence. The aftermath was always the same. Horrified pedestrians would swarm my father, who, if not unconscious, would try to get up and shake the glass and grit from his jersey. Blood would stream down from his old elbows as he clicked and clacked on the sidewalk in his cycling cleats. In the old days, before he gave up swearing, he’d be spewing a colorful string of expletives. With his long blond hair, black goatee, and patchwork of tattoos covering his compact build, Dad was a sight to see even when he hadn’t just been slammed across an intersection by a school bus, so onlookers were always quick to collect.

The driver would be next on the scene, phone pressed to his ear with 911 on the line, his jaw dragging on the ground behind him. “Are you alright? God, I didn’t even see you. Are you alright—Jesus, I didn’t see you.” Dad would no doubt be more concerned about the condition of his bike than his own body. “I’m fine,” he’d say. “Really, I’m fine.” But then the ambulance would pull up with lights and sirens screaming. The gloved EMTs would check his wounds, shine a flashlight in his eyes, and insist that he come to the hospital to get checked out. So into the ambulance Dad would go, bike and all—or what was left of it. He’d sit there on the gurney, waving goodbye to the driver who almost killed him, completely neglecting to get any contact information.

“You have to talk to him,” my mother once insisted outside the hospital room. I was nineteen at the time, back home visiting from college. “He can’t go on like this,” she pleaded. “It’s not fair. He has a family to provide for. I’m not taking care of him if he’s a vegetable. You have to talk to him.” My parents made for a curious couple. On the one hand, there was my father, looking like a swashbuckling pirate who just stumbled out of the Bermuda Triangle. On the other hand, there was my mother, a smartly dressed lady who practically ran the Catholic church in our hometown. They loved each other intensely and were the definition of opposites attracting, but my mother’s patience for my father’s frequent brushes with death was long gone. She once caught him blasting down Mass Ave. without a helmet. The only thing buffering his skull from the pavement was a thin painter’s cap. She slammed on the horn when she saw him, but he couldn’t hear her because he was wearing earphones that were no doubt blasting AC/DC.

“He won’t listen to me,” she insisted outside the hospital room. “He’ll listen to you. Please. Talk to him.” I entered the room and sat on the edge of my father’s hospital bed. He was waiting to be taken into surgery to have a screw drilled into his broken ankle. This latest crash hadn’t been with a car. Instead, he had been racing another cyclist early in the morning. Sprinting neck and neck—as Dad told the story—he was about to overtake the other cyclist when he had to swerve out of the way of a car and rammed into a cement median, shattering his ankle into bits.

“I had this guy,” Dad said.

“Forget about the guy,” I said. “You have to chill out. Mom is really worried.”

“I know. I know. It’s fine. It’s fiiine. Don’t worry.”

“It’s not fine,” I said, doubling down. “You have to take it easy. You’re fifty-two years old, for god’s sake.”

The surgeon entered the room, trailed by my mother, and picked up Dad’s chart from the end of the bed. “Mr. Cocuzzo, any medical history we should know about?”

“No, Doc,” he proudly reported. “I’m perfectly healthy.”

My mother shot him an exasperated look. “Actually, he has three coronary stents.” Four years earlier, Dad almost had a heart attack when three of his arteries nearly closed while he was running to work. Despite his being a strict vegetarian for the past thirty years, hereditary heart disease had clogged up his arteries. He now had tiny plastic tubes in his heart and swallowed a cocktail of pills every day to keep the blood flowing.

“Other than that, I’m pretty healthy,” my father said.

“Do you smoke?”

Dad shook his head.

“Drink?”

“Haven’t had a drop in thirty-plus years,” he said.

“How ’bout caffeine? How much coffee to do you drink?”

“You know . . . a couple cups.”

“A couple cups?” my mother chimed in. “Stephen, you drink a pot a day!”

The doctor closed the file. “Alright, Mr. Cocuzzo, a nurse will be in shortly to get you ready for surgery.”

With the doctor gone, I continued to make my case. “It’s unfair to Mom,” I said. “She doesn’t want to see you end up dead. And what about Mark and me? You owe it to us. You have to slow down.”

He nodded. Truth be told, I didn’t believe the words coming out of my mouth. It wasn’t that I didn’t want him to slow down and be more cautious—I did. But his all-or-nothing attitude was who he was and who he’d always be. I didn’t fully understand it, but my father held a primal devotion to his athletic endeavors. Cycling, being physical, was more than an addiction—it was a way of life. I didn’t actually expect him to stop. And, honestly, I admired him for it. Dad had one gear and one gear only: GO!

AS I PLANNED OUR trip to Italy, the thought of leading my collision-prone parent down Italian back roads and through the Tuscan countryside simmered anxiously in my mind. If I’ve learned anything from my years traveling, it’s that you can absolutely count on the shit hitting the fan spectacularly. I just hoped that any catastrophes we encountered in Italy didn’t involve me pulling a Fiat hood ornament out of my father’s forehead.

That was, of course, if I didn’t kill him myself. This would be the longest uninterrupted time my father and I had ever spent together. Our relationship had benefited significantly from us not living under the same roof over the past thirteen years. Before I left home for college, we were like two bull elks circling a small watering hole. Our horns locked often. Spending every waking hour together, navigating hundreds of miles on unfamiliar roads, and encountering the normal, run-of-the-mill inconveniences of international travel would be a challenge for any two human beings. The thought of doing all that with a man who had a penchant for danger and a Rubik’s Cube of idiosyncrasies made me anxious. I was absolutely certain that we would reach a breaking point. The only question was how broken that fight would leave us. Would we find strength to come together, or would it drive us further apart?

“DAD, YOUR PASSPORT IS expired.”

“Wha—?”

“I’m looking at it right now,” I said over the phone. “We need to get you a new passport. Pronto.”

“You gotta be kidding me,” he said. “We’re leaving next week.”

“We are?” I deadpanned. “Listen, go down to CVS and have them take a passport photo of you. I’m coming to get ya.” Thirty minutes later, I pulled up to my childhood home in Arlington, Massachusetts, a suburb outside of Boston. My parents had lived there my entire life. Despite Dad and Papa renovating the house over the years, the two-bedroom was now dwarfed by all the new McMansions rising up on our quiet residential street.

Waiting at the door, Dad spotted my car through the rain and darted across the front lawn, which he had converted into a Zen rock garden a few years back. “Thank God we checked, huh?” he said, climbing into the car. He was wearing ripped jeans, a pair of beaded moccasins, a tight white undershirt inside out, and his fanny pack across his chest like a seat belt.

“Yeah, now let’s just hope we can get a new passport in time for the flight.”

Dad drew quiet. Situations like this, the lack of control, were exactly why he hated air travel. To him, the whole process was daunting. On the extremely rare occasions we flew anywhere when I was younger, well before the post-9/11 scrutiny of TSA security, Dad had the family encamped at the airport a full four hours before our flight. So I guess it shouldn’t have come as much of a surprise to learn that the last time he used his passport, Reagan was in office.

Luckily for him, this wasn’t my first time getting an emergency passport. While backpacking through Europe during college, I had my passport, along with my student visa and all my credit cards and money, stolen in Amsterdam. Earlier that day I had checked out of my hostel and set off on a psychedelic romp through the pot capital of the planet. Lost in a haze, I left my backpack with all my possessions on the floor of a coffee shop. With no money to book another hostel, I ended up sleeping on the floor of the train station before reporting to the US embassy the next morning. At the embassy a line stretched around the gates, each person neatly dressed, with their applications organized and ready to be presented. Meanwhile, I looked like a piece of dryer lint stuck to the skirt of reality. At 8:30 on the nose, a big Hawaiian opened the gates and called out, “Are there any Americans in line?” I was the only one to raise my hand. “Okay, come to the front.” I had a new passport by the time the closest cannabis cafe opened.

By contrast, the passport office in Boston’s City Hall looked like Noah’s ark. All walks of humanity sat on the edge of their seats, praying they had the proper combination of paperwork to beat the flood. Dad took a seat and pulled his readers out from his fanny pack to fill out his passport renewal application. I watched him scan the instructions with the tip of his pen before jotting his first name in the box designated for last.

“Dad, last name goes there.”

“Ugh—”

“It’s cool,” I said, trying to keep him calm. “It’s cool. I’ll grab you another.” As I fetched him a fresh application, I considered what the road ahead held. Ninety-nine percent of my traveling abroad had been done alone, where I was only responsible for myself. I could go where I wanted, do what I wanted. Traveling with another person would be a continual negotiation, pleading a case of where to stay, when to eat, and what to do. That type of travel was completely foreign to me. And now I was about to experience it with the most travel-phobic person I knew.

“Here you go,” I said, handing him a new application.

“Alright, let’s see.” I held my breath as he scanned the instructions again. You got this, Dad, I thought. You got this. But then I wondered, Do I got this?

I DROPPED MY FATHER back home and returned to my apartment in Boston. “How’d it go?” Jenny asked.

“Well, we got it,” I said. “Passport should be ready for us to pick up by Monday.”

“Oh good,” she said.

I returned to the kitchen table, where I had begun whittling down the bare essentials for the trip. Camera, tubes, tires, wrench set, patch kit, and a myriad of other items were scattered along the table. “What’s that?” Jenny asked, pointing to a couple of little orange baggies.

“Oh, those are emergency sleeping bags,” I said. “Just in case we get caught out in the middle of nowhere for the night.”

She shot me a look. “You’re kidding me, right?”

I snickered. “You never know.”

“Yeah, I don’t even want to know,” she said, shaking her head. “You guys are crazy.”

Emergency sleeping bags aside, Jenny had supported this trip since the beginning, even when the initial idea was for a monthlong cross-country tour. She wasn’t looking to get rid of me; rather, she viewed this trip as an opportunity for me to shake out the last bits of my restlessness, a chance to finally hang up my bachelor boots. For most of our relationship, I’d been a flight risk, jetting off for weeks or months at a time to hunt writing projects around the world. We’d been dating on and off for five years, and with both of us wanting a family, we needed to get started soon. Jenny hoped this time away would sufficiently scratch my adventure itch and allow me to finally settle down and get married.

As I giddily checked the emergency sleeping bags off on my packing list, I wondered if that would ever be possible.