The Road to San Donato - Robert Cocuzzo

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what?”

      “Our cycling trip—let’s go to the village.”

      He knew exactly where I meant. “Papa’s village?”

      “Yeah. Let’s fly to Florence and pedal to the village. It will be, I dunno, five hundred miles or so.”

      Silence. It was one thing for my creature-of-habit father to cycle through towns that spoke his language and served his food and quite another to put an ocean between him and the safety of his routine. I had no idea when he’d last left the country. Chances were, neither did he. But there was something therapeutic about this idea of pedaling through Italy together and discovering the village Papa never got a chance to see. Here we were helpless, watching my grandfather fade day after day. But over there, we could live for him and check that big empty box on his bucket list.

      “We’ll go for Papa,” I said. “We’ll pedal to the village, take photos, meet any family we can find there, and come back and tell him all about it.”

      “We’ll kind of go in his honor?” Dad said, now on board.

      “Exactly.”

      Sitting at the kitchen table with Papa that day, I’d had a vision of my own father. I could picture us sitting at a similar table years from now, flipping through old photographs and sharing regrets of the things we never made time to do together, places we’d never seen. The window of Papa’s life was rapidly closing, with so many things left undone, not the least of which was reconciling with his own father. I didn’t want that to happen for me and my father. Dad’s dream was to pedal across the country. I was going to make sure that we did that—except we’d be pedaling across the Old Country.

      I BOOKED OUR FLIGHTS to Florence for late March and researched a cycling route to Rome. Papa’s village of San Donato was around a hundred miles south of the capital city, so I figured we’d be able to piece our way there from Rome. There was a litany of questions to consider. Do we ship our bikes to Italy, or do we rent? Do we use saddlebags and panniers to carry our luggage, or do we simply travel ultra light wearing backpacks? But of all the questions, one reigned supreme: with the tickets booked, would my father stay healthy enough for us to take this trip?

      Yes, he was in peak physical condition, probably fitter than most of my friends who were half his age. But my father had an addiction that put his life on the line every single day. It wasn’t an addiction in the traditional sense. As crazy as it might sound, most of my family thought my father was addicted to risk-taking. No matter how hard we pleaded with him, he flat out refused to give it up.

      CHAPTER 3

      There he goes. One of God’s own prototypes. A high-powered mutant of some kind never even considered for mass production. Too weird to live, and too rare to die.

      —Hunter S. Thompson

      My father had been hit by a car twenty-one times. Or more accurately, while riding his bicycle, he’d been hit by sixteen cars, four buses, and a Dodge Ram pickup truck. And these weren’t just superficial sideswipes. He’d been launched into windshields, T-boned at intersections, and driven into the cold, hard pavement with enough force to crack his helmet in half. When the pickup truck hit him, the driver accidently punched the gas instead of hitting the brake and proceeded to run over my father’s bicycle, instantly turning it into carbon fiber kindling. Luckily for Dad, he rolled out of the way milliseconds before the truck’s tires crushed his rib cage.

      Part of the problem was that Dad’s bike didn’t have any brakes. He rode what is known as a fixed-gear, or fixie—the weapon of choice for most city bike messengers. What makes the fixie unique is that the bike’s chain is on a single track connected to a cog on the back wheel that does not spin freely. On a regular bike, when you stop pedaling, the back wheel spins freely, allowing you to coast. But on a fixie, if you try to coast, the pedals continue to turn in unison with the back wheel, forcing your legs forward whether you like it or not. This direct connection between the wheels and the pedals makes going down hills, swerving around potholes, and stopping short extremely difficult. To stop, Dad had to essentially pedal backward, resisting the bike’s forward momentum, until it slowed to a halt.

      Part of the machismo associated with riding a fixie is to strip off the bike’s hand brakes and rely entirely on the strength of your legs to stop the bike. “Its beauty is in its simplicity,” my father would tell people, after they exclaimed, “You don’t have any brakes!?” Stripping the hand brakes opened him up to disastrous scenarios. For instance, if he was going downhill and picked up too much speed, the pedals could spin wildly out of control, dragging his legs through the rapid rotations until his feet were thrown from the pedals. Or if he was speeding along a flat and his chain broke, he’d have no way to stop but to put his feet down and drag them along the pavement. Pedaling a fixed gear through gridlock traffic was a bit like rock climbing without a rope—every move needed to be perfect.

      My dad was hard-wired for the fixie. His attitude on a bike might best be described as punk rocker meets Hells Angel. Like a lawless bike messenger, my father weaved around cars, ran red lights, and swerved around pedestrians on one of the most trafficked streets in Boston. Massachusetts Avenue was littered with ghost bikes, bicycles painted all white and chained to street signs that served as makeshift memorials to cyclists who had been killed there. Fatalities were common on Mass Ave. One morning in 2015, I got a barrage of calls from friends when local news reported that an unidentified cyclist had been crushed to death by an eighteen-wheeler on Mass Ave. I frantically dialed up my father’s shop, only to find him casually sipping coffee on the other end of the line. He rode by these ghost bikes twice a day, but they never seemed to give him much pause.

      Instead, on a street that called for defensive driving, Dad was always on the offense. He flipped off motorists who cut him off, spit on their windshields, and screamed obscenities fiery enough to singe your eyebrows. Perhaps not surprisingly, the combination of no brakes, chaotic traffic, and my father’s Mad Max mentality made collisions in traffic a common occurrence. The aftermath was always the same. Horrified pedestrians would swarm my father, who, if not unconscious, would try to get up and shake the glass and grit from his jersey. Blood would stream down from his old elbows as he clicked and clacked on the sidewalk in his cycling cleats. In the old days, before he gave up swearing, he’d be spewing a colorful string of expletives. With his long blond hair, black goatee, and patchwork of tattoos covering his compact build, Dad was a sight to see even when he hadn’t just been slammed across an intersection by a school bus, so onlookers were always quick to collect.

      The driver would be next on the scene, phone pressed to his ear with 911 on the line, his jaw dragging on the ground behind him. “Are you alright? God, I didn’t even see you. Are you alright—Jesus, I didn’t see you.” Dad would no doubt be more concerned about the condition of his bike than his own body. “I’m fine,” he’d say. “Really, I’m fine.” But then the ambulance would pull up with lights and sirens screaming. The gloved EMTs would check his wounds, shine a flashlight in his eyes, and insist that he come to the hospital to get checked out. So into the ambulance Dad would go, bike and all—or what was left of it. He’d sit there on the gurney, waving goodbye to the driver who almost killed him, completely neglecting to get any contact information.

      “You have to talk to him,” my mother once insisted outside the hospital room. I was nineteen at the time, back home visiting from college. “He can’t go on like this,” she pleaded. “It’s not fair. He has a family to provide for. I’m not taking care of him if he’s a vegetable. You have to talk to him.” My parents made for a curious couple. On the one hand, there was my father, looking like a swashbuckling pirate who just stumbled out of the Bermuda Triangle. On the other hand, there was my mother, a smartly dressed lady who practically ran the Catholic church in our hometown. They loved each other intensely and were the definition of opposites attracting, but my mother’s patience for my father’s frequent brushes with death was long gone. She once caught him blasting down Mass Ave. without a helmet. The only thing buffering his skull from the pavement was a thin painter’s cap. She slammed on the horn when she saw him, but he couldn’t hear her because he was wearing earphones

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