A FIXIE BIKE

Willy Vlautin
The Motel Life
First published in: 2006
This edition: Faber and Faber, 2006
ISBN: 978-0-571-22807-2 or 0-571-22807-0
Genre: Americana, fiction
Pages: 206
Cover illustrations by Nate Beaty, jacket design by gray318
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(private on flickr for now)

What attracts me about Willy Vlautin's books is that they look so beautiful on the outside (the covert art is pretty, and pretty amazing), but these beautiful outsides usually cover some gritty subject matter. Vlautin delves into an America which a lot of writers just prefer to ignore; his characters are the complete opposite of the faces of America with are preferred by some (example: Louboutin wearing, Cosmo sipping blondes). The Americans you encounter in Vlautin's novels are poor, lost and they make mistakes with heartbreaking, or plain terrible consequences.
Jerry Lee Flannigan's mistake? Killing a teenager and subsequently fleeing the scene. Before jumping to any conclusions, it's important to know a few things about this event up front:
a) the boy suddenly crossed the road on his bike at 4AM during a blizzard; Jerry Lee or any other car driver – who had right of way – couldn't expect the boy to be there.
b) Jerry Lee claims to his brother Frank he was only driving 20 mph, max.
c) Jerry Lee was "a little drunk" (read: more drunk than a passed out Frank).
Whether the kid was supposed to be there or not, Jerry Lee had been drinking and driving. The end. Fearing he'll have to go to jail, Jerry flees the state with Frank's help.
Vlautin puts the reader is put in a tough spot; we are angry at the brothers for running away, but we quickly realize these men aren't bad people. Regret oozes off the pages, like those clocks in a Dali painting.
The main theme of this book is guilty conscience and the struggle with knowing you did something horrible. I (personally) wouldn't say it's a book about redemption, rather it is about guilt, being consumed by it, and feeling the pain that comes with it in your veins. How it owns you – and ultimately can destroy you and the people who love you. Frank witnesses his brother's demise into guilt, and shares that with us in a frank (no pun intended) narration. It's obvious that Frank is hurting, too – for his brother.
It's their relationship that is the heart of the story. There is a clear strength between the brothers' bond, a closeness that makes this harsh story, at times, feel warm and even optimistic. Jerry Lee depends on Frank, especially now, and Frank is there for him.
The brothers' relationship reminds me a lot of My Name is Earl – Randy is sweet but can't really function well without Earl, who has his dumb moments but is the smarter one of the two. Earl and Randy live in a motel, much like Frank and Jerry Lee, and they are also part of the "white trash class" the rest of America loves to hate.
My Name is Earl is a considerably lighter story about two brothers – it is a sitcom after all – but the brothers' relationship is similar to that of Frank and Jerry Lee. This I liked.
What I disliked is how both Jerry Lee and Frank feel pain for what happened to the boy, but they both continue to behave irresponsibly when it comes to alcohol (Frank drives drunk, Jerry Lee "wishing he'd been there too").
Yes, there is a redemptive storyline apart from Jerry Lee's downward guilt spiral: Frank takes a dog under his wings – and it's cute and I found myself saying out loud multiple times, "Don't let anything happen to that dog"…
But it's also, maybe, not enough.

It's unreasonable for a reader to demand that alcoholic characters hop on the wagon immediately and remain sober for the rest of their lives, but it's hard for me to accept their feelings of guilt knowing that somewhere along the line, the brothers would drink and drive, and hit someone again. Having been part of an accident that killed someone, why would you want to risk repetition of this, and why would you increase the chance of re-occurrence? Yes, the brothers struggle with their conscience, but continuing this behavior does make me feel like they didn't learn from that terrible accident.
I sympathized with the brothers, but I also felt disappointed with them.

I wouldn't be surprised if Vlautin purposely went in this direction, though; it does make a reader think about life and how it's not easy for everyone. I do admire Vlautin for being an unapologetic writer who's not afraid to let people, his protagonists, be that imperfect. As a reader, I struggled with feeling either too understanding or too judgmental of the brothers. I say this all the time, but this one calls for it to be said again for good measure: There is no black and white.
Maybe I would have understood it a little better, if I knew the brothers better. I do feel that I got mostly glimpses of these people. The 202 page book, in my opinion, could easily do with a couple dozen extra pages to provide more insight, especially considering this book is t

1974 Schwinn Continental.

I have no way of knowing whether or not this was the first 10-speed I ever owned — I just don't remember — but this is as close to my recollection of that bike as I can find. The color is the same, and mine definitely had those dangerous "safety" brake-levers.

When I was in sixth grade (?), Huffy released (and heavily promoted) the Aerowind, which soon became the must-have bike. A real 10-speed! (I'm not sure if that's the correct model name or not, but the bike I'm thinking of sold for around $100 and featured Christopher Cross' "Ride Like the Wind" as background music in the television commercial. It just made you want one, SO BAD!) Dave Jones was the first to get one of these bikes — it was sky blue — and I was infinitely envious.

Perhaps it wasn't long after that when Dad took me to this small bike shop in Naperville that no longer exists (it was located in the little strip-mall next to the DuPage river, between Burger King and Prince Castle — also no longer there). He ended up buying me a second-hand 10-speed in "racing brown"; the catalog calls it chestnut, which was also the color of the plastic, translucent bar tape. I'm almost certain this wasn't the bike I wanted, but it was a 10-speed all the same.

(Random memory: while riding down Calumet one day, I was "practicing" stopping short on the front brakes to see how far I could swing up and balance over the front wheel without actually going vertical and flipping over. Sorry to say, I found out the hard way just how much is too much. I never did it again, though...)

Placing this bike on my personal timeline is proving a bit tricky. It seems likely I would have got this bike after the Raleigh BMX, but I can't be certain of that. The only credible memory I have to date this bike is riding it to Wheaton during 8th grade to visit my maybe girlfriend, Kelly Clarke. (I can't verify she was my girlfriend by any standard measure, but we did spend an ungodly number of hours on the phone together.) Kelly lived behind Monroe Junior High, just across the tracks from our school but quite a trek from our house in Warrenville.

(Thinking about it now, that was a strange family — though they were always amazed at how far I'd come to see Kelly. As for me, I remember being so impressed that her brother would regularly jog 4-6 miles and a little freaked out that her mother had achieved a kind of perverse notoriety for dating — was it dating? — a local Elvis impersonator, Rick Saucedo. It's probably good that our "relationship" fizzled when it did. I had things to do.)

In any case, this bike was the first to ferry me beyond the periphery of my known stomping grounds, allowing a taste of the adventure and freedom that most kids don't experience until they start driving.