Character Sketch
The Man On The Moped
A verbal photograph of a man in my town
He is always out in the Summer months. Buzzing up and down the road, down the alleyways, constantly looking left and right, surveying the landscape and its inhabitants. This is his kingdom, and he is the king astride his steed.
He never wears a helmet, so it is easy to tell it is the same man each time. The strongly tanned face, eyes barely visible but blue through the creases they peer from below his thick eyebrows, squinting against the sun. His hair is either short or shorter — not quite buzzcut, but still kept close to his scalp, showing more clearly the thinning that longer hair might easily hide. Most magnificent of all is his rich dark beard. It isn’t long, but so enviably full, tightly curled, and seemingly impermeable by the various insects that flutter into everything else on these hot Midwestern Summer afternoons. The beard defines him in my thoughts. It is my idea of what the beard of Agamemnon must have looked like, so I christen him Agamemnon.
It is important to distinguish him from another local bearded moped rider, now departed from the area. That was Mike Hunt, the man who let his house become a meth house. He was as decent a man as you could reasonably imagine a man to be, given that he let his house become a meth house, but he was very different. His beard and hair were long and uncared for, his driving erratic, and his moped the opposite of a shell, all but the guts having been sold by him or his meth-addled housemates. He was the anti-Agamemnon.
Our Agamemnon is a different caliber though. I cannot imagine him being swayed by temporal pleasures, his seeming responsibility to patrol the neighborhood seems to be his calling in life. Back and forth he goes, all over our part of town. He can be seen in a plain and bright colored t-shirt and jeans — shorts when the heat really builds up for July and August; our local overseer needs no fancy garb to portray his power. His scrutinous eyes are authority in themselves, as is the pristine condition of his moped. There are a few fine houses on the street, but none is as cared for as that moped appears to be.
I’ve never seen him stop the moped, not even at the traffic lights on the corner — he just slows down or turns right. He always seems to manage to time his route so that he is never forced to put a foot on the ground. Because of this, Agamemnon reminds me of Oisín, a storyteller and poet from the Irish legends. Oisín met Niamh, a golden-haired young woman from across the sea — from Tír Na nÓg, translated into English as the Land of the Young. Enchanted by his poems and his stories, she brought him back with her, and married him. After what felt to him like three years, he longed to visit his friends back in Ireland, and she let him return for a short visit, on condition that he did not set foot on the soil of Ireland. It follows then, that he was destined to do so, but not before finding Ireland to be a very different place than it was when he left it. When he fell and hit the ground, he aged 300 years immediately, realizing how long he had really been away, before shortly after passing on.
It’s hard to put an age on Agamemnon — I would be no more surprised to hear that he was about to turn 70 as I would be to hear that he was in his mid 40s. He could be younger than that, but I have a difficulty imagining that he could be younger than me. He holds himself with too much authority to be younger than I am, surely? He seems much more significant a local personage than I am, regardless of his casual clothing, or the fact that he is constantly on a moped, or the fact that he is on those streets all Summer long, when others might be at work or staying in out of the worst of the heat. These are the kind of things that might suggest some element of failure in someone else. Not in our friend, who seems to assess the streets as a gentleman farmer, landed gentry, surveying his land and livestock.
This fascinates me, having never really exuded an air of importance, despite having been in various high-status positions in the past. I have tended to reject the idea of authority in me. I can wear the clothes and have the badge, but it seems foolish to think that I could be the one people look to. The times I felt most confident in my influence was when I have been bearded — certainly they were the times I have felt most listened to by the People Who Make Important Decisions.
Agamemnon looks like a man who could emerge from the captain’s quarters on a ship in a hurricane with a plan for survival. He looks like he would be comfortable addressing the UN and appealing for international cooperation and aid in the wake of tragic humanitarian crisis in his nation. I can imagine him completing a crossing of Antarctica on foot. Were it not for the fact that his duty to his home town to patrol these streets and alleyways, perhaps he might yet do something of import, one day.
This is a lazy trap really. I find myself wondering “What more could Agamemnon have been, were he not cursed to wander the streets?” But maybe I am looking at this all the wrong way. Perhaps Agamemnon is glad that he is here, that he has the opportunity to do his bit — as he sees it — for the safety of his home town? Perhaps this is the mission he chose, and considers this the best use of the time and the authority he has built over the years. Perhaps this is his higher calling.
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