Check This Action
By Owen Clarke
When I was a teenager I loved the Hellacopters, a garage band from Stockholm. In 1999, they released a 7” split with the Powder Monkeys titled “Check This Action.” Discovering the record years later, I was entranced. The songs themselves weren’t anything to write home about, but the cover art had me in a chokehold.
It depicted three gunmen in balaclavas, one holding a screaming woman hostage with his gun pointed at the viewer. I’m not sure what about the art attracted me so much, but I went to a local print shop and had the image scanned onto a white t-shirt. CHECK THIS ACTION.
I didn’t know the intention of pairing that phrase with that image, and I’m not sure the Hellacopters knew either (this was a band whose backup guitarist went by the moniker ‘Andrew Shit’). But it started to hold meaning for me. Check this action. Check this action. It became a mantra for taking control of a situation. Of life. And not just taking control, but letting everyone know it.
Perhaps I was drawn to this sentiment because, at the time, I felt a woeful lack of control. I began dealing with chronic neuropathic pain when I was 15. I’ve ridden it out fairly well in my adulthood, thanks to dedication and medication, but in my teenage years, my mind teetered on the brink of a potent, visceral darkness.
At times, I spent more of my week in doctor’s offices than I did school. I was haunted by the thought of a life spent homebound, perhaps eventually with canes and wheelchairs, as my degenerating nerves led to burning, then tingling, then dull, dead, numbness in my feet. To me, that lack of sensation was far more sinister than any pain.
So, I desperately wanted the world to check my action.
To see me for the person I wanted to be, not the depressed, doctor’s office-haunting, prematurely balding individual I was. I’d been a rock climber since I was a kid, and enjoyed a variety of other activities, lacrosse, wrestling, backpacking, skateboarding—now, I couldn’t do any of that without extensive pain.
There was nothing I could do to push myself. Nothing I could do to show myself I was a living, breathing being.
So I became obsessed with death.
I’m not talking black eyeliner and chain wallets and dyed hair hanging down in my face. On the outside, I didn’t change. I doubt anyone around me even knew. I just thought about it, dreamed about it. I stuck up paper printouts in my bedroom of my favorite death scenes. Butch and Sundance running out to face the Bolivian soldiers in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. Magua and Chingachgook on the cliff in The Last of the Mohicans. Katsumoto riding into the Gatling gun in The Last Samurai.
So, I wasn’t some all-black, pierced-up emo. But internally, I was incessantly pondering death. It wasn’t in a suicidal way, either. I never once considered killing myself. Not directly. That struck me as undeniably cowardly. Spineless.
Instead, I dreamed of a situation where death would be inescapable.
Where someone or something else would take life from me. I dreamed of having no other choice but to die. And not dying obscurely, but finding some heroic, or at least rebellious, way to die. Publically. Notably. Gloriously.
Dying in a way that would show the world my action.
I walked around the halls of my high school with idiotic visions filling my head. Robbing banks on motorcycles, snowboarding off of exploding volcanoes, getting in gunfights with guerillas in tropical jungles, bombing up the corporate offices of palm oil companies and BASE jumping out the window.
But the conclusion of these daydreams wasn’t riding off into the sunset. It was that I would die, definitively and absolutely. That I would be obliterated.
No more pain. No more doctor appointments. No more treatments or supplements or weird diets. Nothing. I wouldn’t have to stick around any longer. The world would check my action, and then I would check out of the world.
My father taught me to ride motorcycles when I was 19. I think he did it largely to give me something that I could take for my own. Something I had control over. I couldn’t control my pain, or what might happen to me and my body in the future, but I could control a bike.
And at first, that’s all I took from it. Control. That, and another way for me to show the world my action. I think a lot of riders ride for that. To show off to the world. Wheelies and burnouts and seat stands.
But I wasn’t living in that realm, because bikes scared the hell out of me. Beyond the typical fears a beginner rider faces, I had an incessant terror that my tingly hands would go numb, that I’d dump the bike at high speeds. I had inane anxieties about riding. That the handlebars would simply fall off the bike. That the tires would explode. That the wind from a tanker truck would knock me out of control.
For several years, I rode not so much because I enjoyed it, but to face my fears.
But after a while, on the back of the bike my desire (or perhaps need) to show the world my action began to melt away.
That’s because true obliteration, the sort you can instantly access on the back of a motorcycle, is a potent neutralizer for delusions of grandeur.
I imagine it’s sort of like those idealistic kids who enlist and go to war, then find out real combat is nothing like Call of Duty. You get your head stuffed up with honor and glory and start thinking you know what you want, what you believe in, what you’re willing to die for, what death will be like, how little it will bother you—then you get over there and it becomes reality, and all those pre-conceived notions get blasted out the window.
That was riding for me. On the back of a bike, it was all I could do to keep my head on a swivel and keep myself safe. My abstract desires for death were put to the test, and found wanting. I didn’t really want to die. I never had.
Those fantastical Indiana Jones-esque daydreams I’d had of adventures where death was inescapable—on a motorcycle, they weren’t fantasies anymore. They were real.
Sure, there weren’t masked gunmen or volcanoes exploding, but death was very real and present. It always is on a bike, if you’re being honest with yourself. A flick of the wrist. A turn of the head at the wrong time. A busted tire. A truck pulling out in front of you. After a few dozen hours on a bike, dreaming of situations where death is inescapable becomes a moot point. You’re living it, every second you’re on the road.
On bikes, there was no showing off for anyone else, not for me. I was scared enough that it was all I could do to “show off” for myself. The only person I wanted to check my action was me. So I began to realize that even in the depths of my worst pain days, death wasn’t what I really wanted.
I just wanted a way to feel alive again.
I didn’t want the world to check my action. I only thought I did, because what the world thought of me was so tied up in what I thought of myself. At the bottom of it all, I just wanted to prove to myself that I still had action left in me. Motorcycles gave me that. And once you have that, once you really have it, deep down…
Well, that’s about as close as you can come to invulnerability in this life. Not physical, but mental. Where it counts.
A few years after I started riding my “Check This Action” t-shirt was stolen, along with a few rucksacks, while I was living in New Zealand during college. I was a bit bummed about the theft because I lost a couple thousand dollars of climbing gear. But I didn’t miss the shirt. I didn’t need it anymore.
Owen Clarke is a freelance journalist, motorcyclist, and mountaineer, and also the founder of this publication. You can find his work on his website.
