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By Root 311 0

work in its intellectual context, and the only response I got was a series of postcards, which I was to return after checking some boxes specifying my race, gender, and sexual orientation. Stepping outside the intellectually serious circle of my teachers and friends at Chicago into the broader academic world, it struck me as an industry hostile to thinking. I once attended a conference entitled “After the Beautiful.” The premise was a variation on “the death of God,” the supposed disenchantment of the world, and so forth. Speaking up for my own sense of enchantment, I pointed out, from the audience, the existence of beautiful human bodies. Youthful ones, in particular. This must have touched a nerve, as it was greeted with incredulous howls of outrage from some of the more senior harpies.

So, for a number of reasons, I failed to develop a sincere aspiration to be a professor. The responsible thing would have been to figure out, quickly, how I was going to make a living come June. But my response was more like denial: I retreated to a makeshift workshop I set up in the basement of a Hyde Park apartment building, tearing down a 1975 Honda CB360 and rebuilding it as a café racer. The physicality of it, and the clear specificity of what the project required of me, was a balm for feelings of professional panic. Each morning that winter I would arrive with a hammer and a large screwdriver, and proceed to the day’s first task: chipping my way through the ice that encased the gate that led down to the basement. A spectacular ice cliff, like a frozen waterfall, had formed over the entire rear fire escape early in the winter. Each day enough of it melted, then refroze at night, so the gate could be freed only by hammer and chisel. Inside the gate and down a short flight of stairs, I kept a basin of solvent stashed under the stairway; this was the parts-cleaning area. It doubled as the refrigerator. I had an unspoken understanding with the resident janitor, Dwayne, based on my inexact accounting for the beer I kept under the stairway and his failure to notice the open container of highly inflammable solvent, next to the beer. Through another door was the shop proper, which I had made pretty comfortable by tapping into the common, unmetered electrical panel for lights and power. An air compressor was made possible by the generous support of the John M. Olin Foundation (they thought their money was going toward a book on Plutarch). The compressor provided power to drive pneumatic tools: a die grinder, an impact wrench, a cutoff wheel. Heat was never a problem, due to the presence of a manifold for the building’s boiler. The boiler itself was in another basement, which was ideal. Not only did this spare me the noise, it also made welding and grinding a less anxious affair, as the only explosive vapors present were those I generated myself. It was easy enough to keep the sparks and open flames away from things I could see: the electrical contact cleaner, carburetor cleaner, engine degreaser, cutting oil (one for ferrous metals, another for aluminum), moly grease, lithium grease, gasoline, antiseize compound, oxygen tank, acetylene tank, and whatnot. It was my own environmental holocaust, stewing away beneath the very domiciles of unsuspecting academics.

I hadn’t really intended this. What started as a carburetor rebuild had gotten out of hand; I kept pulling things off the bike until I was down to a bare frame, and my fellowship checks were going mostly toward tools. It felt like I’d picked up right where I’d left off in my teenage education as a gearhead, and the intervening studies of ancient Greek began to feel like a parallel dream life.

Stumped by a starter motor that seemed to check out in every way (it had the specified impedance through its windings, and turned freely in its bearings) but wouldn’t work, I started asking around at Honda dealerships. Nobody had an answer; finally one service manager told me to call Fred Cousins of Triple “O” Service. “If anyone can help you, Fred can.”

The Motorcycle Antiquarian

I called