“I’ll Just Go Here.”
The intricacies of a father-son relationship.
Story by Maks Moses | Photos Courtesy of Maks Moses
Life is always about having a couple more, a couple more minutes, a couple more dollars, a couple more years. Such is the case for me. Except, what I really wish for is a couple more chances.
The worst part about a-couple-mores is that no matter how hard you try, you’re not going to get any back.
Introduction over. This is a story about me and my dad.
My dad has always loved cars. Specifically fast cars. When he was a kid, he tagged along with his dad to track days until he was old enough to race his own. Throughout his career, he drove at Daytona, Watkins Glen, Sebring and Charlotte Motor Speedway, and commanded a countless number of cars in between.
My dad has always been more than just a car guy, he’s been a race driver.
Last August, I tagged along on his quest for 180 mph riding his Kawasaki ZX-14R, The Naked Ninja, at the Bonneville Salt Flats. During the week of the two-wheeled trials, the whole speed-junkie world convenes in a dried-up prehistoric lake bed at the edge of Utah to see who can ride their piece of metal the fastest.
You have the Japanese, the Australian and the American camps, each distinctively different. The Japanese love the new experience of the salt flats and Harley Davidsons. The Australians are ingenious, and take pleasure in the mechanical challenges. And then there are the Americans, who love the competition. You also have the contrast of the young hotshots with Mercedes Benz film crews documenting their every move, to the 70-year-olds barely squeezing into their leathers that really fit them better 20 pounds ago. This is the canvas of the Bonneville Salt Flats.
After each run, riders collect their ticket from a sweating attendant sitting in a window at the side of a trailer. I usually ride a bike to the window and pick up my dad’s ticket for him.
“You’re not going to like this,” I winced as I handed him the ticket.
It read 179.392, which is 608 milliseconds from 180.
He was disappointed. I was happy that he was still standing to receive the ticket.
The good thing about racing a motorcycle at that kind of speed is that if you crash, you’re only going to have to experience it once.
Each time he ran, I mentally prepared myself for the worst to happen. Every day as I waited for his turn to scream down 3 miles of salt, I thought, OK, here we go. Make sure to tell him you love him.
Looking at my love and concern for my dad now, you would be shocked to see what the previous eight years looked like. It was a verbal and emotional bloodbath. We fought about dishes in the sink, shoes at the door, missing basketball practice, not doing homework, grades too low, forgetting to call, not working as hard as other kids. In his words, not trying. But in my words, trying the best a teenager can.
It seemed like every night we put on our gloves and stepped into the ring for a 15-round yelling match. It was like the last fight in Rocky IV, except not the part when Rocky wins, but every part before that when he gets his ass kicked.
I remember one day I was sitting in my junior science class and my teacher looked at me.
“Are you okay?”
“Yes.”
I was sitting in my chair crying. I had been every day that week. What was I supposed to say? No?
My dad lived by a mantra from one of his mentors Harry “Doc” Bundy which was, “I don’t care if you’re drivin’ down the back straight at Daytona and your car gets struck by lightning, it’s your fault for being where the lightning wanted to land.”
The idea that what you can’t control still ultimately ends up as your responsibility to control, puts an insurmountable weight and responsibility on someone. It’s not humanly possible. And if you don’t know how to handle the stress of that self-imposed responsibility, it’s going to come out in the ugliest way.
My dad and I went in a circle for years, fighting until we didn’t even know what we were fighting about.
But now let me explain how this story actually includes the ending of Rocky IV.
At a point, it clicked. It took ten years to be able to articulate and wield my thoughts just enough to break through to him in one momentous conversation that encapsulated every thought, frustration and emotion I experienced in the past five years.
And it worked. Just like that, we were on the same side.
He asked me, why did you not tell me this sooner? I told him I didn’t have the words.
“The theory is you learn how to handle your stress, but the reality is you need to change your personality, at least. But it’s far too difficult to control,” my dad wrote in an email.
Now, I’m here in comfortable Bellingham, Washington, and he’s across the world building a home with his Balinese wife in Tana Jawa, a remote town in Sumatra, Indonesia. Now when I say remote, I mean bathroom-is — a-hole-in-the-ground remote.
Indonesia has one of the largest coronavirus outbreaks in Southeast Asia with over 35,000 confirmed cases. Right now, 1,570 people have been tested for every million in the population. Let me repeat that: 1,570 for every million.
For political, economical, or infrastructural reasons, COVID-19 data in many countries is often horribly unrepresented. But more insight to gauge actual impacts can be found in other records like funerals, and Indonesia has had over 40% more than usual.
And there is my dad. With airport and country lockdowns, there’s no way he can come home.
“If corona gets me, I’ll just go here,” he wrote at 4:03 a.m.
I was at home when I opened the email. And yeah, I cried. How much longer did I have until his chips ran out? A day? A week? Or was I overreacting? Like watching my dad ride his Naked Ninja 179.392 mph across the salt flats, it was another moment stuck in limbo.
He wrote, “I like the decision. Makes me feel better.”
And this is the moment I wish I had a-couple-mores. A couple more chances to do a relationship with my dad in a more conventional way because in the last couple years, we both realized we wasted a lot of time.
But we stuck it out. And now my dad and I are in a great place.
The story of us has been an incredible trajectory of the highs and lows of two men racing to grow as people, sons and fathers. Along the way, life presented a hundred doors for me to walk out of, and even more to slam shut. But I chose not to. And I am so proud of that choice. I had faith in us both. Faith that it would get better.
And it did.
