On Getting A Blurb from Mark Knopfler For Big Sid’s Vincati, by Matthew Biberman

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It popped up in my email inbox:

"I don't think you need to be a motorcycle enthusiast to lose yourself in this book.  It is an open-handed classic about living and love, with a heart as big as a Vincent V-twin engine."-Mark Knopfler.

For a moment I was stunned. It was another Saturday night with nowhere to go. Later, when I was outside in the cold putting trash away, the word "classic" hit home.  I had longed my whole life to hear that word used about my work.

Decades ago, when I wasn't old enough to drive but old enough to want to, I wasted so many Saturday nights falling asleep in front of the TV.  Most often it was the USA network's late night programming.  In heavy rotation then was a short film called Making Movies.  It was comprised of a soundtrack of three or four Dire Straits songs, all off the Making Movies album, paired with short silent movies.

These were the first music videos I remember. I loved them all-"Tunnel of Love," "Skateaway," but especially "Romeo and Juliet."  

The video itself may have  been a bit tragic but at least Mark Knopfler's Romeo had known love and-even better-lives to sing about it: "Now you say, Oh Romeo-Yeah I used to have this scene with him / Juliet, when we made love you used to cry."  This is not Shakespeare's way of telling the story but what did I really know about Shakespeare?  I was 14.

Later when I was at college, things hadn't changed much. Late at night I would stumble back to the dorm and if I was lucky, I would hear music coming out from the girls' room across the hall.  For a time it was most often Making Movies. I would knock and ask (plead, really) if I could just lie on their floor and listen till I got sleepy.

The girls almost always said yes.

I understood why it was right for me to be alone: I wasn't handsome, rich or a jock.  But these girls-how could they not have Romeos standing under their street light saying, "You and me babe-how 'bout it?" 

So after a few drinks, one of the girls, S. would command me: "Bibhead, tell me I'm beautiful!" It wasn't a come on, far from it. I could have taken it as an insult or pure torture because she was stunningly beautiful. But in the land of svelte 80's ice queens, S --half Native American, half Black, with a knock out body- was totally unappreciated, perhaps even intimating to the pasty prep school boys we went to school with.

I suppose I lusted after her but at the same time I couldn't believe my good fortune.  Never again would I get to tell a woman she was beautiful in such an innocent way. Then, too soon, she was dead, the victim of a drunk driver, on graduation night.  So much of what we said I'll never forget.  The last conversation she talked of a dream she just had about white birds flying away.  She told me it meant that she was starting a new stage of her life and how happy she was to be finally out of college.

When I got to the church on the Rez where her funeral was being held, I sat in my car reading Rilke's Letters to a Young Poet. A few minutes later, I looked up and saw the hearse.  I wasn't in the funeral party but something made me get out of the car and knock on the driver's window: "You need a hand?" I asked.

The driver and I carried S in and I said goodbye when it was just the two of us. I said it again to her: "You are beautiful."

Last semester, I decided to teach Romeo and Juliet in my undergraduate Shakespeare Survey course.  I had never done it before, telling myself all the students had probably read it back in 8th grade, and that it wasn't one of his best plays, especially if you are older than 14.  It is amusing what we do to hide from ourselves.  As a way to start the conversation, I asked my students if they knew the Dire Straits song-and big surprise here, none of them did. (Perhaps I should I have asked if they knew the Killers' cover.)

On a whim, I played the video on youtube.  The class probably found the incident amusing, but I felt as if I had ripped open a raw stream of memories. There was so much I wanted to say about what that song means to me yet, what could I tell them? So instead I talked flatly about how Knopfler reinterprets the story and suggested as they went away that they should really think hard about fate and agency.

Then several months later I got the blurb. As Knopfler's words sunk in, I thought again of S and of all those lonely nights spent together.  Only now the memory was a good one.

Matthew Biberman, Big Sid's Vincanti, motorcycle, memoir, Penguin Books