Free If Rock and Roll Were a Machine by Terry Davis Page B

from you, Bert. But I want you to remember this little line from a great poem: “Though much is taken, much abides.” Some of your spirit was taken, yes. But there’s plenty left. I see it in your writing, and I know it’s still there inside you. And I know you’ll find it.
    In closing, a demand and an invitation: I demand that you feel good about this piece. It’s fine work. It’sthe absolute real thing. And I want to invite you to write for The Explorer . If you think you’d enjoy it, come see me.
    Gene Tanneran
    Bert is still a little light-headed from this praise. The feeling has diminished since this morning, and it never was the dizzying rush he’d feel sitting up on the stage. But it feels good.
    Bert wonders if he’d be up there on stage if so much had not been taken. He also wonders if much abides. Sometimes he wonders if there are any positive qualities left in him at all. Tanneran was kind to say so, but that doesn’t make it true.
    The thought of other kids reading his writing is scary. But it’s also alluring. Bert would like to write for the paper. Is the possibility of recognition worth the risk of ridicule? That’s the question he’ll have to answer.

Chapter 15
Peckered
    The writing Bert did for The Explorer wasn’t much fun. He did, however, like opening a new ink-smelling paper and finding his byline. He’d scan each page with care, and when he saw his name his chest would go tight for a second. His stories were informative and clear, which is all they were supposed to be. He’d written about tennis, cross-country, junior varsity football, and the new horticulture club. Bert wasn’t contemptuous of news writing. He liked the symmetry of the inverted-pyramid style that required the most important element in the lede and elements of declining importance below.
    Bert wrote his stories at home after work, and he would not have wanted anyone to find out how long these short, simple pieces took him to complete. It was tough to come up with the right words. When he found the right words, it was tough to get them into sentences that flowed smoothly, then into paragraphs that broke from one another at logical junctures. It was tough to get all the words together so they fit. This was why Bert couldn’t believe Tanneran’s comment that he was a good writer. If he was good, how come it took him so long to write a sentence?
    The writing Bert enjoyed most was what he did for Tanneran’s class. Bert did no homework but English. He knew he should, but he just didn’t feel like it. There was too much other stuff going on in his life. There had been, for example, his motorcycle-riding exam to deal with.
    Bert Bowden
    Junior English
    October 4, 1989
    PECKERED
    My boss, Scott Shepard, proprietor of Shepard’s Classic and Custom Cycles, warned me that the State Patrol had it in for Harley riders.
    â€œThey’re pricks to anybody rides a Harley,” Scotty said. “Doesn’t matter what the guy looks like or how he comports himself. J. Edgar Hoover comes back from the dead and rides through the state of Washington on a Harley, these guys would bust his bulldog jowls from the Idaho border to Puget Sound.”
    â€œOnly two living beings more contemptuous of Harley riders than your basic Washington State Trooper,” Scotty’s brother Steve said from beside me where he sat on his idling Harley. “One is a Washington State Trooper who has drawn out-of-state vehicle inspection duty and meets a Harley rider bringing his bike in from California and applying for a Washington title. Those inspections are like a Red Cross search for tainted blood. They check every orifice in the bike and in the owner right down to the exhaust port. Officious pricks,” Steve said. “Real peckers. And thorough.”
    Steve looks like a bad biker, a 1 percenter as they are referred to, but he’s not.
    I was mounted on my