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Dirt Rag Articles
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Dermott McDougal was born late in the Great Depression, the second loinfruit of Maggie and Fergus, domestic combatants at the edge of an iron company town in Michigan's Upper Peninsula. Maggie, a fulsome dishwater blond with a quick laugh and flexible character, worked tables at Johnny's Horseshoe Bar. Fergus kept a close eye on her through the bottom of a glass and enthusiastically punched for the Irish in the brawls that regularly erupted between them and the Swedes—often over Maggie. Whiskey, the occasional stint in the slammer, and strikes at the mine kept the family at the edge of destitution. The situation got worse when Fergus volunteered for the big fight and took a bullet in the thigh at Normandy. He bled out in the surf before ever putting a boot on the continent.
The gold star in the window and the widow's allowance weren't much. Most of the men who used to leave her a nickel had gone to war. But Maggie still turned heads. She made ends meet by working the November deer camps, servicing auto execs up from Detroit. Most of them actually took a gun into the woods, usually to stump-sit next to a pile of sugar beets picked up near Saginaw on the way north. For some, though, deer season was two weeks of Four Roses, five card stud, and whoring. So every year when Johnny's closed for Thanksgiving, there was a turkey in the McDougal oven. And on Christmas morning, 1946, there was a brand new blue Schwinn bicycle leaning against a white pine in the snow outside their brown shingled house at the edge of Negaunee.
The bike might have represented a mother's love, and it did, but more to the point, it was independence. Not longed-for freedom, Dermott had never felt confined in the north country, more a clear message that he was almost on his own. To say that Dermott and his sister, Agnes, became resourceful and self-reliant through hard work suggests some choice in the matter. In fact, it was a matter of survival that they learned early how to use a chain saw, grow root vegetables, dress a deer, and cook for themselves.
At nine, Dermott was a wiry redhead with forest fire energy. He pedaled the blue bike furiously up and down the iron-stained streets of Negaunee, chucking the Marquette Mining Journal at every other doorstep. At thirteen, he pedaled the dirt two-tracks to the hunting camps to take buck orders. He shot whitetails and sold them to the sugar beeters to show off down state, charging fifty bucks for an eight point or thirty for a six; spikes and forks were twenty. Once he a got a hundred dollars for a thirteen point wallhanger he nailed in the cedar swamp behind his house. He saved the deer money till he turned sixteen, bought a '47 Chevy, and forgot the bike.
Dermott joined the Air Force right out of high school and spent the Eisenhower years chafing under rigid layers of authority that seemed almost comical during peacetime. His quick mind, comfort with blood and guts, and great hands made him a natural for the medical corps. While stationed close to home at KI Sawyer he made friends with John Isles, a pilot trainer with a similar distaste for authority. In the summer of '57, on a training run to drop duds on Drummond Island, Isles flew a delta-winged Tub at 600mph under the Mackinaw Bridge while it was still being constructed, a career-limiting move that Dermott admired greatly.
When he got out, the GI Bill paid for college at Northern Normal and then dental school at U of M. He enjoyed the smart people he met in the college towns, but couldn't help thinking that if subjected to the Darwinian forces he'd grown up with, few of them would have survived. He especially disliked the dental school professors who seemed to value their theories about teeth more than the ability to chew.
Maggie expanded her business, which by now the kids understood. She hired three more girls: a pair of round-heeled twins from Escanaba and a blond floozy from Felch Mountain. She set up satellite cabins near several fishing camps for the summers. But the real money maker was The Tip Up, a two room ice shanty she annually skidded two miles out on Little Bay de Noc. It was pink on the outside and lit by red kerosene lanterns. There was a big bed in the back, and up front a bar and four wooden chairs around a hole in the ice where customers could jig a Swedish Pimple for walleye while they waited their turn. In late March of '62 it turned warm fast, blew hard, and rained buckets in the middle of the night. Twenty acres of ice broke loose and The Tip Up sailed half way to Beaver Island before a giant wave swept it off the floe. Maggie, the floozy from Felch, and three ice fishermen including a minister from St. Johns went down in the frigid water.
Maggie was perhaps the only working girl in history to leave a will. Whoring success had allowed her to buy a comfortable cabin on the East Branch of the Escanaba, which she left to Agnes, who had married a fighting drunk who hit her and fortunately didn't survive a closing time T-bone while driving home from the Shamrock. Agnes suffered only a few broken bones and a little brain damage.
Dermott went to work for an old dentist in Bay City, a downstate port town. A year later he bought the practice and married Shirley, his assistant. He failed to anticipate how much the day-to-day smell of enamel dust and the screaming drills would eat at him. Eventually his ears rang so loudly that he might as well have been drilling all the time. After thirty-five years, his ankles, hips, and shoulders hurt constantly and he listed a bit to the right from leaning over the chair. His patients, like most people, all looked soft and stupid to him. He'd short them on Novocain just so they could share his pain. Hell, he'd done a root canal on his own front tooth once; it was no big deal. His abuse of patients escalated.
"Keeping your teeth is pretty damn simple, Clyde. Brush, floss, and come and see me once in a while. Why is that so frikkin, hard? I gotta come in here on my day off cuz you're whining about a toothache, and there isn't a damn thing I can do but yank it. You're gonna end up toothless. Your lips are gonna cave in till you can't tell your face from your ass."
Clyde was digging his fingernails into the arms of the chair as he braced himself to lose another rotten molar. He wasn't the first patient Dermott had gone off on, but as it happened, he was the last. The week before, a lady with periodontal disease, who Dermott had called pus gums right to her malodorous face, had called the state licensing board to lodge a complaint. Hers was added to an already long list, in spite of multiple warnings.
Meanwhile, two well-dressed men sat in the waiting area and paged through a pile of tattered hunting magazines. Shirley, who was having a cigarette in the lab while Dermott extracted the abscessed tooth, finally noticed them and asked if she could help. "I'm Dr. Norbert Cain and this is Dr. Mark Curry; we're here from the peer review board. We need to speak with Dr. McDougal," said the silver-haired Cain.
Shirley knew this was trouble. She told the men that the doctor was with a patient and she didn't think he'd be able to see them today. "Look lady, there's no sense in being obstructionist at this point. We'll wait," said Curry, a little too excited by the confrontation.
Shirley turned to inform her husband, but he was already coming through the door. "Well, if it isn't the amalgamated Norbercain and Marcurry, a goddamn walking duo of dental destruction. What brings you assholes around?" Dermott smiled broadly. He had known Norb since dental school, and always regarded him as a bit of prig. Curry he'd met only once, but immediately pegged him as a pinstripe short of a suit, the sort of jerk who knew everything about process and nothing about people. Dermott considered himself expert on human relations. He invited them back to his private office, told them to sit, closed the door, and stood in front of it. "If you fucks ever talk to my wife like that again I'll knock your goddamn teeth so far down your throat you'll be flossin' with a thong."
Dermott caught himself. "But I know why you're here and it don't matter. I've had enough of this shit. I don't give a rat's ass if I never drill another goddamn tooth."
Shirley listened from the hallway and was unimpressed with Dermott's defense of her honor, his sanity, or the prospect of long retirement years with him. She filed for divorce and got the house. Dermott moved into a thin-walled, flat-roofed, dead-end efficiency. He closed the office, and for a while saw patients in his apartment. He seated them in a cracked Naugahyde barber chair he'd picked up at a yard sale and had them spit in a cereal bowl. Talk radio filled the room with opinions. But the broken-mouthed bastards rarely paid, so that only lasted a few months. He had cleaned a little of his stuff out of his old house: an exam light, his deer rifle and a fishing pole, a few pots and pans, and from the back wall of the garage, the old blue Schwinn. The seat cover had disintegrated, the tires were cracked, and the chain was rusted solid, but it reminded him of another time, not an easy time, but a simpler one.
He spent his days wandering the neighborhood or sitting in the barber chair reading. The bright exam light illuminated pages beautifully. His reading tastes ran from Hesse to Hustler, but he quickly got bored. He decided to walk the old Schwinn down to the bike shop to see if he could get it going again. He figured fifteen dollars for new tires and a chain, but was disappointed to learn it would be ten times that. Curt, the shop owner, walked over and eyed the old bike, considering how it would look mounted above the door. He then surveyed Dermott, with his bushel of white beard, ruddy cheeks, and a nose that looked like a piece of his liver had crawled up to the end of his face to see what the hell he was pouring down his throat. He thought it best that no money changed hands. "I'll tell you what," Curt said, "I'll trade you even up for a used Gary Fisher hardtail I've got chained up out back. It's ready to ride."
"Who the hell is Gary Fisher?" asked Dermott. He didn't ask what a hardtail was; it sounded hardass, which sounded all right.
"He invented mountain bikes. The guy's over fifty and he still races. This bike's too old for the hotdogs around here, but not quite a collectors' item." He walked Dermott out to look at it. It was faded dark blue with fat knobby gumwalls. It had seven gears in the back and three up front. Dermott thought it looked sturdy, but all the cogs and derailleurs looked like trouble.
"Can you take all that crap off the back?"
"Yeah, we can, but you won't be able to shift in the front either if we do that. It'll be a singlespeed. Hey, but I think they're coming back in style."
"I don't give a shit about style. But good, take it off. How about fenders? My backside'll be striped up like a skunk if I ride wet with that thing."
"Fenders are cheap. We can do that."
"Don't want no charity. I can pay." He didn't look like he could. Next he eyed the seat. It looked way too high and was so small Dermott thought it might disappear in his crack. "I'm not the most regular guy," he said, "But I don't need no bike seat enema. Got something bigger? I like to baby my ass."
"Yeah we do. We got some nice big seats in the used pile. I can switch it off."
"Them handlebars are too low." Dermott said with a growing air of authority.
"Well, that's harder to change. But I guess we could swap some sweepers off another old one. That'll mean longer brake cables, but at least the shifters will be gone. Probably oughta have new brake cables anyway. Yeah, we can do that."
Dermott was beginning to like this. Bike dealers were a lot easier to manipulate than car salesmen. "How about baskets?" he added.
"We might have to charge you for baskets; I'm not sure I've got any to cob. Front or back?"
"Both," said Dermott.
"Is that it, then? Don't want a motor or nothin'?" said Curt, beginning to forget the classic old Schwinn that would decorate the shop.
"That's it," said Dermott.
"How bout a brain bucket?" asked Curt, "Might find a freebie in the stock room."
"Nothin' up there worth savin'," said Dermott.
He came back that afternoon to pick up the bike. Curt had thrown in a horn with a big rubber bulb. After they lowered the big seat all the way to the frame it looked perfect to Dermott. The difference had come to fifty dollars, but the shop had sold two high-end full-suspension rigs that day, so Curt declined the cash. Dermott pedaled across the lot, bounced over the curb, and honked off down the street like he was nine again.
The next months were heady. Dermott explored every street in and around the town where he'd drilled teeth for more than half his life—places he'd never seen that were less than a mile off his beaten paths. After a couple of weeks he raised the seat to where the bike shop had suggested. His knees stopped hurting and his legs got stronger. He picked up cans for money, but with the ten cent deposit, not many got thrown out the windows of Michigan cars. What did get tossed were all beer cans from drivers trying not to get caught with open alcohol. Some of the local drinkers had regular routes, and Dermott figured out the ounces-per-mile from favorite quick stops to wherever it was they always went. Once he followed a trail of Bud Light cans all the way to Crump, a twelve pack in eighteen miles. That's eight ounces per mile. Cars got better mileage. He hoped that driver never came up behind him.
When winter came he dug out his old blaze-orange camo coveralls and continued to ride. With his huge white beard bending in the wind, he was an apparition pedaling through rising fog over the big drawbridge high above the Saginaw River. People got used to seeing him, but rarely engaged him in conversation. He honked and looked crazy. If someone did talk to him, he always introduced his bike: "This is Gary Fisher; he's older'n dirt and he still races." The same guys would throw the same cans on the same roads, so there were always a few on top of the snow and he always had a little change in his pocket. Sometimes they threw the cans at him, which at least made them easy to find. Usually there was good roadkill. He'd skin a rabbit or a squirrel, or a hind leg from a roadside deer, and stick it in one of the baskets. In a savory turnip stew with a bottle of cheap red he figured it was haute cuisine. At least it beat the hell out of frozen pot pies.
On the first day of spring he got a short letter from his sister. Agnes had found him through Shirley, who had written to tell her how Dermott was living these days. Agnes hadn't seen him in a decade, but said she was doing okay and invited him to come home to the U.P. to live with her on the river. She could use his help and thought it might be mutual.
He put some food and a few books in garbage bags and stuffed them into the bike baskets with his deer rifle and fishing pole sticking up behind. He tied an American flag to the gun barrel and a pair of Shirley's underpants to the pole. He had sunshine and a tailwind, and made a hundred and fourteen miles the first day. That night he slept like a hay bale in an abandoned barn.
Dermott was deep into the big tracts of state land late the next afternoon when the sky and the temperature dropped. After an hour on bad pavement, angling into sharp rain and wind, he thought to use one of the garbage bags for a poncho, but he was already soaked. Thirty miles south of the Straits, dusk came early and the rain turned to wet snow. He pulled off at a thick stand of cedars, walked old Gary Fisher in under the browse line, and found a high spot to rest. There was nothing dry to build a fire with, and his matches were wet anyway. He ate a few crackers that had turned to soggy mush, but he really wasn't hungry. Mostly he needed to sleep.
The following spring a mushroom hunter found Dermott's bones. They cremated his remains and sent them to Agnes. She floated his ashes down the Escanaba to find their mother in the deep blue waters of Lake Michigan. Gary Fisher was returned to Bay City, where they hung him high on the wall next to the old blue Schwinn.
| Exclusive Dirt Rag Web-Only Extras For Wallhangers | | This story earned James W. Crissman first place in the 2007 Dirt Rag Literature Contest. Learn more about James via this Rider Profile.
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| Comment from keith whelpley on 2007-11-18 |
| McDougals article was supurb. Very heart warming. It made me look at every old bicycle propped against a basement, attic or garage wall differently. If these old bikes could talk.
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