The Ride and Fall
August 11, 2004—Rockhampton (Beef Capital of Australia)
Amazingly, absolutely no experience or knowledge is necessary to ride a bull.
When I read in Let’s Go that the Great Western hotel, owned by a major Australian country music star, hosted weekly “practice bull riding,” I assumed it meant mechanical bulls, like in bars in movies about Texas. But as I found out, it’s the bulls who are practicing. Of every 200 bulls or broncos only one will buck adequately for a rodeo and a dozen professional riders are on hand every Wednesday night weeding out the candidates for the monthly rodeo. I’m content to sit in the stands and enjoy the free entertainment with my mediocre chicken parmagiana, until the MC announces that for $11 and a simple signature the experience is open to anyone in the crowd.
A Londoner named Ashley wants to do it as well. He’s slated to go second because he’s left-handed but is encouraged to do it right-handed anyway, and I insist—oh so politely—that he be thrown to his death first.
“Don’t worry,” says Kimbo, the 30-something fading beauty blonde who’s poorly MCing the evening, “we’re pretty much tying you down.” That eases my worries a bit, as does the discovery I’ll only be riding a “beginner bull.” “You nervous?” she asks me through the microphone. “Yeah,” I say, and she recoils. “Uh, well, at least you’re honest.”
Ashley and I stand watching one young up-and-coming rider after another be hurled to the ground as a couple of older, stern-faced Secret Service types get a hold of the bull and lead it away. After one particularly gruesome disembarkment I’m informed that that stag is the “beginner” I’m slated to ride. Great.
A rotund 12-year-old with a stud earring comes up to me and asks if I’ve ever ridden before. I say no and his eyes grow wide. “You nervous?” “Yes,” I say, and tell him I’m doing it just to piss off my parents. He looks at me quizzically. “Don’t you like your parents?” I smile and wait for him to go away.
I entrust my health and well-being to a 14-year-old rider named John, whose safety gear I will borrow after his ride. I lean on the eye-high fence to see him last an impressive 7 seconds (in competition, you need 8 to win) on a near-full-grown bull before being tossed off and landing on his head. He hands me his equipment and insists to his hovering cloud of pre-pubescent admirers that he is fine, but I catch him rubbing his head for several minutes afterward. The helmet I wear is his, and it’s a bit tight.
In the moments leading up to his ride, Ashley seems not the least bit nervous, while I preoccupy myself with alphabetizing the myriad contents of my pockets. Paperclips, pens, playing cards.
Ash lasts an amazing 5 seconds, and, at Kimbo’s instruction, does a little dance for the crowd in the center of the arena. I zip up a thin black vest, don the helmet and a worn looking gardener’s glove, and breathe, breathe.
I follow John as he climbs up and over several rows of cattle fence to the pen where my beginner is waiting. Another John, the 7th-ranked bull rider in Australia, wraps thick tape around the wrist of my glove, as John the younger straddles the bull and helps a man who could be his father tie a rope around the bull’s flank. (This, Kimbo had explained, is what makes the bull buck, by irritating his genitals. I guess I’d be kicking and snorting, too).
In 3rd-grade, my baseball team took a field trip to the batting cage, where the coach watched and critiqued our swings. When it was my turn, the coach and several of my teammates shouted at me to step back, but I didn’t know if they meant back from the plate or back from the machine and while I was asking the clarifying question the ball slammed into my right index finger, which has since curved to the right slightly more than it should. This memory ran in repeat in my mind as the bullriders told me to sit down, then back, then up, then place my hand, no the other way, tighten, release, hold this rope, open again, hold another rope, sit up on your hand, ok. The bull is still but for the vague vibrations of muscle and bone, and sitting on it feels like straddling the back of a suede couch with a massage setting and, incidentally, horns. My nerves boil over into panic, and I grasp for a question I haven’t asked yet—should I move back? In which direction? This time it won’t be a baseball and my finger but a hoof and my head, and I want to be damn well sure I do this right.
“If I have to fall, which way should I go?”
The older guy smiles at me and pats the bull on its hindquarters. “Down!” he says, and the door opens and faster than I can perceive we’re out in the arena and the bull flings its head back and my body follows. The momentary relief I feel at no longer being on the bull dulls the pain of impact but is instantly replaced with the realization that I’m still fucking tethered to the thing. I scramble to unwind the rope from my hand as I’m dragged through the dirt inches away from the bull’s hooves, like pistons pounding the ground, in moments that feel like hours.
“Aw, Dave!” I hear Kimbo’s voice over the loudspeaker. “You’re supposed to wait until I start counting!” I could have sworn she had made it to three while I was riding, but then again I’m not too sure of anything I saw or felt in that instant; a total sensory mess.
Somehow in the chaos the flesh was ripped from my right shin, leaving a scrape and bruise resembling a long thin rock under my skin. On my way back out of the arena no one looks me straight in the eye, even the bartenders when I go to retrieve my complimentary Coke.
Tilting nostalgically in his Harvard-issue desk-chair David B. Rochelson ’05—an English concentrator in Mather and Crimson News Executive —lasts much longer.