Drag Race

I am alone, folded across the back of my motorcycle as the day dies around me. The dusk descends upon me on the streets, creeping black across the empty lanes ahead, before being beaten back again by an approaching set of seventies-vintage streetlights. The tangerine fuzz of the spotlights is already behind me, disturbed now only by the flight of gathering moths, magnified among the cracks and oil-stains below like angel’s wings. Traffic lights hang ahead in the dark, red this time, and I back off the throttle, hearing the slowing whup-whup, whup-whup of tar snakes beneath my tires as the clock rolls back to zero. I pop the bike into neutral, and the green indicator light doubles, trebles, inside my visor before I slip it open above my head. I do this at every stoplight, because otherwise, my exhaled breath would fog the plastic.

I’m looking down the deserted road ahead when a car eases to the line beside me, a murmur of conversation floating out the windows from the back seat. I look over and see a glossy yellow Mustang, waxed and detailed with football-hero care. The tom-tom hammer of American V-8 burbles side-of-beef thick through my dusty leathers, thumping my chest with the heavy hand of a play-yard bully.

The driver, his wrist is cocked in extravagant relaxation on his three-point steering wheel, his left arm hanging chimpanzee along his pristine paint job. He looks me over.

“Nice pipe,” he says. “Let’s hear the engine.”

My exhaust, I just installed the titanium glass-pack the week before, and I hit the gas. The ripping rev of my own v-twin rises briefly above the notes of the Mustang, and then once more settles below.

“Nice,” he says. “I like that. Nice bike.” But just to underscore who the real man is, he pumps his own throttle, and his 'Stang flexes on the pavement, bellowing rich and angry on high-test gasoline.

“I’ve got three hundred and fifty horses to the rear wheels,” he says.

A face appears in the window, from the back seat. “Hey dude, you wanna drag?”

They can’t see my face inside my helmet, but they see me pause as I do the math. Three-fifty to the rear wheels, oh yeah, that’s bitchin’. But his car weighs ten times what my bike does, and I can hit sixty off the line in just over three seconds. Still –

“C’mon, man, c’mon, c’mon. Give ‘er man, let’s do it.”

Well, when you put it that way. I look behind, confirming the empty highway, and nod.

The backseat frat boy whoops and slaps the side of the car, and I flick down my visor, revving the throttle with a James Dean wrist. Not to be outdone, the driver of the Mustang gooses the engine, and the ascending snarl of dueling engines drowns out all other sensations.

We’re doing this, having our little hit-the-gas pissing contest, when the light blinks green, and I accidentally dump my clutch at nearly eight thousand rpm.

I feel my rear wheel grab, and the nose of the bike leaps from the ground, pulling the best third-grade poppa-wheelie you’ve ever seen. As the bars rise to my eyes, my wrist locks the throttle open all the way, and my new muffler etches a sparkling Back-to-the-Future stripe into the pavement as I blast across the intersection.

I hear the banshee shriek of the Mustang laying rubber behind me, and I know nothing but go, go, go, and at last the wheel of the bike comes back to earth, and I slam the shifter into second, the engine raving all the way open, the traffic lines ticking past as I hit seventy miles per hour, and I risk a look back.

The Mustang is sideways in the intersection, just pulling out, a blue cigarette cloud of vaporized tires rolling under the lights behind him. He blew it, I realize. Too much gas, and he sat there spinning his Bridgestones even as my out-of-sight wheelie was finally coming under control. I flash my brakes, one-two-three to tell him the race is over, and he pulls up beside me.

Inside the car, the backseat frat boy is giving me a mock salute, and the driver gives me The Nod. I nod back, impenetrable inside my leathers, and notice the bike is back again into the meat of its powerband. With one last look – I own you, motherfucker – I open the gas to the stop, knowing I am matchless at this rpm, and I blow past the nose of the Mustang at seventy again, charging for eighty.

The last thing I see are the downcast headlights of the Mustang in my mirrors, still struggling to catch me as I disappear into the night.