The Hemophiliac's Motorcycle

"The fresh crispness and limpid clarity of Tom Andrews' poems give them a distinct brightness and accessibility. These are not poems about illness. They are about the dominion of the spirit when it is rich in imagination and courage" -Guy Davenport "A poet out at the edges--of language, of experience--Tom Andrews finds in this collection what he sought as the adolescent, eponymous rider of its title poem: 'the right rhythm of wildness and precision, when to hold back and when to let go.'" -Gregory Orr Click here to buy online:

St. Paul, Minnesota, when a middle-aged woman walked up and asked me to sign a copy of a book I'd written called The Hemophiliac's Motorcycle. "What a wild, surreal title!" she said. "How'd you come up with that one?"

"Well," I said, "I'm a hemophiliac, and I ride motorcycles."

"My God!" she said. "You must be really screwed up!"

She's not the only one to offer such a diagnosis. As a hemophiliac, I'm often asked why I ride motorcycles. (Hemophilia is a disease that thwarts my blood's ability to clot.) The question is usually hurled at me like an accusation, followed by more questions: Don't you know how dangerous it is? Is it some kind of cry for attention? A prolonged midlife crisis? Are you literally crazy? When are you going to grow out of it? What kind of example are setting?

My guess is that anyone who rides a motorcycle, or is thinking about riding, has heard such questions. How best to respond? Having hemophilia doesn't make the questions any easier or more difficult to answer. To our uncomprehending loved ones, anyone who rides might as well have hemophilia; anyone who rides, in other words, rides the hemophiliac's motorcycle.

At best we sputter and stammer, trying to articulate how it feels to ride a motorcycle. In a world measured by statisticians' charts and graphs--especially those employed by insurance companies--it is an indefensible thing to do.

But--thank God--we don't experience the world measured by charts and graphs. We experience the world as a puzzling mystery. As the Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard put it, "Life isn't a problem to be solved but a mystery to enter into." My relationship with hemophilia is flawed, rich, human, and ongoing. When I lean my bike into low, tilted sunlight, or simply ride down the street, I'm entering into and hoping to deepen the mystery of that relationship. It is more therapeutic than a dream team of psychologists.

And so I've continued to ride motorcycles, not because they represent something unattainable--perfect health, normal blood clotting, immortality--but because they sing to me in a way nothing else does. And what they sing has nothing to do with a death urge, an urge toward oblivion, as some would have it. As anyone who rides can attest, there's nothing more life-affirming and inspiriting than the strange intuitive calm that comes from exploring an unknown landscape on two wheels (though familiar landscapes, I hasten to add, can be equally miraculous).

Riding a motorcycle is risky, and having hemophilia certainly increases the risk, but the risk is quickening, and acceptable. Somewhere Freud says that life loses interest in direct proportion to its lack of risk. That sounds right to me. The important thing is not to let doctors script my life for me.

Melissa Holbrook Pierson, author of a wonderful book about motorcycling called The Perfect Vehicle, once wrote that "Motorcycle riders have long been seen as caring little about spilling their own blood, and so by extension have been feared as bloodthirsty." As a motorcycle enthusiast who happens to have hemophilia, I can assure all commuters: Trust me, nobody is less interested in spilling his blood, or yours, than I am. When I'm cruising some remote back road, miles even from a small town, the rhythmic hum of blood in my body and the echoing hum of my bike's engine are more precious to me than ever.