Dan the man

I think at that point in my life I wanted more for myself, but I was giving more of myself to others and that is a great way to waste your life. I was doing what I believe was expected of me, but I was always dreaming of being somewhere else. The memories were much more enjoyable than the present, in the shittiest of times I could smile because I was feeling the last ride I was on. The wind blowing through my soul as the sun warmed my face, the bike purring like a kitten and running flawlessly me knowing it was because of me and my talents.

That simple walk every morning would help create a desire in me to kick my own fat ass and do something about my physical condition. I’ve seen and older gentleman running on my walks home from work, he ran in the street instead of the sidewalk. I wondered why (having never ran a step in my life) he did. One afternoon he was stopped on a corner waiting for traffic to pass and I asked him “why” he told me the asphalt was softer that the concrete sidewalk. That afternoon I put on my converse sneakers and began running at first not very far, but I was determined to lose weight be skinny so I kept at it everyday. I then had to starve myself, there is no faster way to lose weight than running and no eating, of course it’s unhealthy as all hell as I quickly found out. There were a lot on days of light headedness dizziness and cramps. It took less than a year mostly from spring into late fall, but I went from 205lbs to 160lbs. I read up on diet and nutrition and soon realized how much I was harming myself so I began eating clean and taking supplements that was at eighteen years old, 1978.

We sat on the side of the road watching the cars go by soaking up the sun and planning my next move. It was a beautiful July day perfect really, bright sunshine the only breeze was from the passing traffic which wasn’t enough to stop the sweat that was already running down my face. The fact that O was wearing full leathers wasn’t helping plus the anxiety of not knowing where we we’re was not helping. I decided to push my bike to the next exit which didn’t look far but after a few minutes felt like miles away. Thank GOD I put on my leather saddlebags because by the time we reached the exit ramp I was stripped down to just my jeans and boots. There was a gas station up the road off the exit and like a mirage there was a Harley parked there. I belong to one of the guys working there, turned out there was a Harley dealership up the road a he went and got a new chain for my bike. He let me us some tools and after a couple of hours we were back in the saddle and heading to my brothers. It took a little more than an hour to find his place, he lived in a servents house on an estate property he must have heard me coming because as we rounded the corner he was standing on the street and guided me into the driveway which was loose pebble and caught me off guard and I nearly dropped my bike on its side.

I have always been drawn to water, the mystics say it’s because I’m a water sign, Pieces twin fish. Astrology has always fascinated me much like religion and I respect both aspects but don’t hate me because I don’t practice. I prefer to keep my feet in both realms. Self empowerment and blind faith life comfortably in me. I thank GOD when things I cannot control work in my favor and I pat myself on the back when things work out the way I planned. Or like when my guardian angels watch over me and make sure I don’t kill myself doing something stupid. There were a few close calls in my life and a few over sights, more than once I would run out of gas in my van as I was pulling into a gas station, or a stranger helped jumpstart my van when the battery died. That’s why even in today’s world I’ll stop and ask if someone needs help. Traveling allows you to meet different people, expand our own world. I built my first Harley when I was in my twenties, it took fourteen months and less than two grand. I had been hanging around two local motorcycle shops for quite a few years and figured it was time for me to put everything I learned to the test. I did well.

At sixteen I got a paying job and a driver license. I would describe myself as responsibly irresponsible, I was still in high school and worked at night and drove around on the weekends. That was my life and I wasn’t alone, all the guys were doing it , it was the seventy’s an amazing time to be a teenager and the world was huge and me and the boys spent every weekend exploring it. It mainly involved driving to another state hitting the beaches if they had any or hiking in the mountains, we either camped or slept it the car. There were a few occasions where we ended up near friend of friends or a cousin that would put us up for the night. I had family from New York to Canada all throughout New England, turned out that was my world and I was pretty darn happy just exploring it. So I never made it any farther west than Buffalo and never farther south than Pennsylvania. So my big plans to see the world got put on the back burner as I continued to live life, not necessarily my own life, but a life I believed people wanted me to live. That my friends made for the worst possible life for me.

I was never much of a traveler, when I was a kid my parents would stay home during the summer when my brothers and I were vacation from school. Mom didn’t work and Dad was always working, we lived in the suburbs near a lake so everything we wanted to do on vacation we could just walk to the lake and do it, swimming, fishing, boating or just hiking through the woods that surrounded the lake it was all there for us. Growing up in the sixties and seventies I feel I had an amazing childhood, lots of freedom to stretch our imaginations and build lifelong friendships. The neighborhood policed itself and always felt safe. As I was entering my teens my parents rented a cottage near the ocean which felt like we we’re going to another state, but in reality was about a forty five minute drive. Once we arrived it was like a neighborhood reunion as nearly everyone on our street rented cottages there in the summer. The only difference was the smell of the ocean was always present. The moms would congregate in one of the cottages planning the meals, the activities and what to do with the kids and husbands. As a pre-teen struggling to find my way and fairly overweight the last place I wanted to be was the beach… in a bathing suit that my mom picked out.

The studio was filled with the rich odour of roses, and when the light summer wind stirred amidst the trees of the garden, there came through the open door the heavy scent of the lilac, or the more delicate perfume of the pink-flowering thorn.

From the corner of the divan of Persian saddle-bags on which he was lying, smoking, as was his custom, innumerable cigarettes, Lord Henry Wotton could just catch the gleam of the honey-sweet and honey-coloured blossoms of a laburnum, whose tremulous branches seemed hardly able to bear the burden of a beauty so flamelike as theirs; and now and then the fantastic shadows of birds in flight flitted across the long tussore-silk curtains that were stretched in front of the huge window, producing a kind of momentary Japanese effect, and making him think of those pallid, jade-faced painters of Tokyo who, through the medium of an art that is necessarily immobile, seek to convey the sense of swiftness and motion. The sullen murmur of the bees shouldering their way through the long unmown grass, or circling with monotonous insistence round the dusty gilt horns of the straggling woodbine, seemed to make the stillness more oppressive. The dim roar of London was like the bourdon note of a distant organ.

In the centre of the room, clamped to an upright easel, stood the full-length portrait of a young man of extraordinary personal beauty, and in front of it, some little distance away, was sitting the artist himself, Basil Hallward, whose sudden disappearance some years ago caused, at the time, such public excitement and gave rise to so many strange conjectures.

As the painter looked at the gracious and comely form he had so skilfully mirrored in his art, a smile of pleasure passed across his face, and seemed about to linger there. But he suddenly started up, and closing his eyes, placed his fingers upon the lids, as though he sought to imprison within his brain some curious dream from which he feared he might awake.

“It is your best work, Basil, the best thing you have ever done,” said Lord Henry languidly. “You must certainly send it next year to the Grosvenor. The Academy is too large and too vulgar. Whenever I have gone there, there have been either so many people that I have not been able to see the pictures, which was dreadful, or so many pictures that I have not been able to see the people, which was worse. The Grosvenor is really the only place.”

“I don’t think I shall send it anywhere,” he answered, tossing his head back in that odd way that used to make his friends laugh at him at Oxford. “No, I won’t send it anywhere.”

Lord Henry elevated his eyebrows and looked at him in amazement through the thin blue wreaths of smoke that curled up in such fanciful whorls from his heavy, opium-tainted cigarette. “Not send it anywhere? My dear fellow, why? Have you any reason? What odd chaps you painters are! You do anything in the world to gain a reputation. As soon as you have one, you seem to want to throw it away. It is silly of you, for there is only one thing in the world worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about. A portrait like this would set you far above all the young men in England, and make the old men quite jealous, if old men are ever capable of any emotion.”

“I know you will laugh at me,” he replied, “but I really can’t exhibit it. I have put too much of myself into it.”

Lord Henry stretched himself out on the divan and laughed.

“Yes, I knew you would; but it is quite true, all the same.”

“Too much of yourself in it! Upon my word, Basil, I didn’t know you were so vain; and I really can’t see any resemblance between you, with your rugged strong face and your coal-black hair, and this young Adonis, who looks as if he was made out of ivory and rose-leaves. Why, my dear Basil, he is a Narcissus, and you—well, of course you have an intellectual expression and all that. But beauty, real beauty, ends where an intellectual expression begins. Intellect is in itself a mode of exaggeration, and destroys the harmony of any face. The moment one sits down to think, one becomes all nose, or all forehead, or something horrid. Look at the successful men in any of the learned professions. How perfectly hideous they are! Except, of course, in the Church. But then in the Church they don’t think. A bishop keeps on saying at the age of eighty what he was told to say when he was a boy of eighteen, and as a natural consequence he always looks absolutely delightful. Your mysterious young friend, whose name you have never told me, but whose picture really fascinates me, never thinks. I feel quite sure of that. He is some brainless beautiful creature who should be always here in winter when we have no flowers to look at, and always here in summer when we want something to chill our intelligence. Don’t flatter yourself, Basil: you are not in the least like him.”

“You don’t understand me, Harry,” answered the artist. “Of course I am not like him. I know that perfectly well. Indeed, I should be sorry to look like him. You shrug your shoulders? I am telling you the truth. There is a fatality about all physical and intellectual distinction, the sort of fatality that seems to dog through history the faltering steps of kings. It is better not to be different from one’s fellows. The ugly and the stupid have the best of it in this world. They can sit at their ease and gape at the play. If they know nothing of victory, they are at least spared the knowledge of defeat. They live as we all should live—undisturbed, indifferent, and without disquiet. They neither bring ruin upon others, nor ever receive it from alien hands. Your rank and wealth, Harry; my brains, such as they are—my art, whatever it may be worth; Dorian Gray’s good looks—we shall all suffer for what the gods have given us, suffer terribly.”

“Dorian Gray? Is that his name?” asked Lord Henry, walking across the studio towards Basil Hallward.

“Yes, that is his name. I didn’t intend to tell it to you.”