Free The Narcissist's Daughter by Craig Holden

Brigman turned to him and said something either profane or threatening enough that Donny turned red and left a minute later.
    But seeing them even for a moment with their heads together under a hood made me feel dizzy with nostalgia and dread. It had once been their fraternity. Brigman must have been thirty already when Motorhead formed around him, but it was as if only then did he find the place in the world that fit him, and ironically it was never a place at all—Motorhead had to move to stay alive, so you never knew where it was going to be until it happened. They came, Brigman and the others, to breathe and boast and let themselves out of themselves to burn through the nights of the city. They lived there in a way they could not live in the other places of their lives because they knew that anything was possible—fires or gunshots or knifings, revelations, acquisitions, wrecks, of course, arrests, the discovery of solutions to intractable problems, love, or other disasters they could none of them envision—and these possibilities sharpened the air and made it come alive in a way I imagined nothing else ever had for any of them. The noise itself felt dangerous, the simultaneous revving of two or three dozen magnum engines, big and bored-out and retrofitted and chromed-up and super-charged, each one generating over 350 horses or it didn’t count, and the searing of rubber that went along with it, and shouting and laughter, the screams of girls getting chased by boys who knew them some and wanted to know them better, and the pounding of rock and roll from amped up Tri-Ax’s, and often enough that eerie rising and dying of police sirens coming in. The lights, too, had edges, headlights and dome lights and street lights and lighters and flashers and store lights if it was in a parking lot and fires burning in garbage cans if it wasn’t.
    I was thirteen the summer of my first Motorhead and remember it as little more than a swirl of images and sounds and especially scents—the air laced with the smell of raw leaded gasoline and of the exhaust fumes of leaded gasoline, of raw rubber and of burned rubber, of the heated fusion of oil and metal. It was the smell of an industrial land, the same category of scents that strikes you in the factories where transmissions and glass and springs and batteries and the thousands of minute pieces that hold vehicles together and allow them to run are synthesized and stamped and welded and cooled and stacked and boxed, or in a garage or a trucking warehouse or a machine shop where the parts are tooled to minute specifications so they will all fit as they’re designed to do. Even today I can step into a certain sort of building and be immediately transported back to the high heat and unlimited possibilities of those lost nights, though I remember little of what actually went on there.
    Brigman taped a red bow to the Skylark’s hood and left it in the driveway for Chloe to find Christmas morning. We all went along for her first drive, Brigman riding shotgun and Donny and me in the backseat (the two of us farting around pretending to be scared for our lives until Brigman gave us a look). It was not an easy drive, that car, with its pre-synchro-mesh three-on-the-tree shifter, and I thought at first that maybe Brigman should have waited until Chloe had a little practice before putting in the new clutch. You could practically smell it smoking. But he was patient, remarkably so—I saw them out nearly every day even in the slush crawling around the block until, soon enough, she was cruising smoothly and in the new year he let her take it out for the first time alone (and stood in the front door watching and smoking the entire half hour she was gone).

    One night in early January Phyllis had off, so Ray was acting supervisor and Kathy Rudner (with whom, remember, I’d been working a couple mornings a week on Organic—I’d pulled that A with her help the first semester and felt primed for the