Paula Isler's 28-year marriage was the ride of her life. Then her husband left her behind.
By LANE DeGREGORY
Published September 18, 2003
[Times photo: Chris Zuppa]
Isler sits on the Harley-Davidson 100th Anniversary Edition low-rider that her husband always dreamed of owning.
[Photo courtesy of Paula Isler]
When this snapshot of Paula and Tom Isler was taken a year and a half ago, he was struggling to cope with his illness.
[Times photo: Chris Zuppa]
New Rider course instructor Brian Diehl gives Paula Isler a thumbs up for her efforts.
TAMPA - The orange cones are just ahead. Paula Isler starts to panic. She hunches over the handlebars, squints through her mirrored sunglasses. She steers shakily across the parking lot, trying to remember.
Do you lean into the turn or against it? Does the right grip work the front brake or the rear? Which hand controls the clutch?
Inside her new black leather gloves, her knuckles are clenched white. Under her helmet, her brown bangs are soaked with sweat. The instructor is waving her on. The rest of the class is watching. She threads through the cones, grazing the last one. Then, on the straightaway, she squeezes both hand grips. The motorcycle lurches forward, throwing her off, onto the asphalt.
She picks herself up, brushes the gravel off her jeans. She didn't think this would be so hard.
When she rode on the back of her husband's Harley, all she had to do was hold on.
Now everything is different.
She's driving.
Dream bike
Paula Isler never wanted to drive a motorcycle.
She's too prissy, she says. She doesn't like getting dirty. She might chip her French manicure.
Plus, she's 53. Too old, she sometimes thinks, to try something so dangerous. So drastic.
But after all she has been through, she feels she has to do this.
On July 5, just after 9 a.m., her husband Tom Isler walked into his garage and shot himself in the head. She found him lying next to the thing he treasured most: his new, $30,000, custom chrome-plated, black and silver, 100th Anniversary Edition Harley-Davidson low-rider. The one he had always wanted.
The one he rode only 500 miles.
Tom has been gone two months now, but his Harley is still in the garage. Something is telling Paula to get on that bike.
Shifting gears
"Okay, now we're going to go around here in first gear, then shift up to second. Listen to your engines. You don't have tachometers anymore," says the instructor, Brian Diehl.
He teaches the new Rider's Edge class for Jim's Harley-Davidson in St. Petersburg. For $300, in three nights and one weekend, he'll show you the basics. At the end, there's a test. Pass it and you can get your license.
Paula has been on a bike for two hours now. On this hazy Saturday in September, at this riding range in Tampa, she and five other students are trying to learn how to change gears. Paula feels like she's been doing that a lot lately. "Okay, everybody ready?" Brian asks.
The students fire up their engines. The motorcycles they ride in class are Buell Blasts, single-cylinder, 484 cubic centimeters. They're the smallest bikes Harley dealerships carry. They're supposed to be easy to handle, even for wiry women like Paula. The bikes weigh 360 pounds.
Her husband's Harley weighs 900. Even he couldn't handle it.
She's still determined to try.
She's at least a decade older than the other students. At breaks, she reminds them to drink plenty of water and offers them Nutter Butter cookies. She's trying to keep up out here. But she's so tired. And hot. Her head is pounding. The exhaust fumes are making her sick. Inside her helmet, she can taste her lipstick melting.
"You okay?" Brian asks.
Paula looks up. "I just don't feel like I'm in control out here," she says. "I still keep feeling like it's going to slip out from under me."
Holding on
When Paula met her husband, he was a civilian contractor for the Army. Tom was 14 years older than she. He was funny and strong and he loved to drive fast: boats, cars, trucks, it didn't matter.
They were married for 28 years.
They traveled a lot. They lived in Turkey, then Spain. They had a son, Kris. When they moved back to Florida in 1988, Tom bought the first motorcycle he had owned since he was a teenager: a Kawasaki.
He swore, someday, he'd have a Harley.
When their son was starting high school, Paula and Tom settled in St. Petersburg. Tom went to work for the city, in the public utilities department. When he retired, he took a part-time position at Radio Shack.
Paula worked in an insurance office. Then she opened a nail salon. But she got tired of seeing only women, so she became a cashier at Home Depot. Then she took a job at Jim's Harley-Davidson, working in the clothing section. She still had no desire to drive a bike. That remained her husband's hobby.
Not long after Paula started working at the Harley shop, Tom found out he had prostate cancer. He started drinking. He would stay up all night, sitting at the kitchen table, alone, except for a bottle. Last fall, doctors told him he had emphysema, too. They told him to carry around a canister of oxygen. He refused. He wouldn't stop smoking. "What does it matter now?" he asked.
Instead, he bought a Harley Sportster, then a Roadglide. Just before Christmas, he traded that in for the low-rider. Riding helped him breathe, he said. Wind in your face forces oxygen into the lungs. Better than any old tube up your nose.
But by then Tom was weak. The bike was too big, too heavy. He wobbled on it. He scared Paula.
She rode on the back a few times, though, to make him happy. Just up to Clearwater and back. He couldn't handle long hauls anymore. The last picture Paula has of her husband shows them both on that motorcycle, both wearing leather jackets.
He's holding the handlebars. She's holding him.
Ride to live, live to ride
Paula can't make her motorcycle start. She's cranking the throttle again and again. She keeps bucking the bike with her new leather boots, as if that would help. But the engine just won't turn over.
It's Sunday morning. The test is in two hours.
She tries again. Not even a sputter.
Brian jogs over and kicks up the kickstand. "Try it now," he says.
For the rest of the morning, Paula practices hugging the perimeter of the parking lot; taking corners going counter-clockwise; starting and stopping and cutting figure-eights inside a box of cones. She figures out how to shift gears without shifting direction.
She stays in the back of the pack.
She doesn't understand, really, why she's doing this. She's not sure how long she can keep going.
In the driver's seat
Tom didn't leave a note.
Paula searched everywhere, hoping to find an answer.
Without him, Paula isn't sure who she is anymore. Or what she should do.
When you're married to someone for that long, that person becomes part of you, defines you, completes you. Their friends become yours. Their hobbies fill your weekends. Even when you disagree, even when one person is sick or drunk, your lives remain intertwined. When you lose that person, there's this hole.
Paula still wakes up, sometimes, and forgets Tom is gone. Just for an instant, she still feels him there beside her. But then their bed is too big. And half the covers are cold. And she remembers.
She's trying to be strong. To recover. Rebuild. She's going out to dinner with friends, replanting her garden, taking her two Dobermans on long walks.
She's trying not to be angry. But she is.
Why would he do this to himself? To her? How could he?
How could he leave her to take care of their house, their yard, their dogs and cats, all the responsibilities, all the bills? All alone.
His life insurance didn't cover suicides. Paula had to borrow money to pay for his funeral. His Ford pickup is about to be repossessed.
And every month, she has to scrape together the $500 payment on that motorcycle no one drives.
She should have sold it by now. Her son put it on eBay, but no one has bid nearly enough. She could have taken out an ad, put it on consignment at the dealer, let the bank come and get it. But she couldn't let it go.
"How could he?" His friends are still asking that too. How could someone who had just bought a bike like that, who finally had what he always wanted, do what he did?
Maybe that was the problem.
Sometimes, after you get everything you've always wanted, you find out it's still not enough.
Outside the box
Just before noon, Brian waves the students to the edge of the parking lot. "Okay, you all are looking good out here. Looking good," he says. "Everybody confident?"
Five of the students, two men and three women, nod and smile and really do seem ready.
Paula doesn't answer. She has already parked her bike. She's over in the shade, by a cooler, pouring water down the back of her denim shirt.
"Okay. Okay," Brian says, laughing. "Let's take a break."
So the students unclip their helmets and get drinks. They stretch out in the grass, under a sprawling live oak. Paula sinks into a metal folding chair and lights a Newport Menthol.
"I like the speed. I'm starting to like the corners," she announces. "I just don't like doing those figure-eights.
"I don't like having to stay inside that box."
When the students seem cooled off, Brian stands up. He and the other instructor have stopwatches. They have clipboards. "Okay, now, you all have to go out there one by one and drive the course for us, one at a time. The other students will wait here and watch. Now who wants to go first?"
Five of the students study their boots.
Paula stands up. "I'm ready," she announces. Everyone stares.
"You sure?" Brian wants to know. Paula nods.
She grabs her new gloves. Her hands are black, from sweating through the leather. She chipped her French manicure.
Hog heaven
Paula walks slowly toward the motorcycle, trying to remember. Do you lean into the turn or against it? Does the right hand work the front brake or the rear?
She smoothes her curls under her helmet. Starts to buckle it under her chin.
"Wait, wait," Brian calls. "I've got something to tell you."
All morning, while the students were riding around and around, he and the other instructor had been evaluating them. Secretly, without any of them knowing, without any of them freaking out and forgetting everything, they all were being tested.
"What?" Paula screams. "You were writing stuff down?"
"Yep," Brian answers.
For the first time all weekend, the motorcycle range is silent. Brian flips through his clipboard. Fiddles with his pencil. Then he looks up, grinning.
"You all passed."
Paula drops her helmet. She runs over and throws her arms around Brian's neck. "Aaah!" she starts shouting. "I did it! Aaah!"
Home stretch
After toasting her classmates over margaritas at Applebee's, Paula goes home to her two Dobermans. She tosses her helmet on the table, by the pile of mail. She takes off her sunglasses.
She should feel more excited. Mostly, she feels sleepy. And scared.
She may have passed that class, but she's not ready to drive a motorcycle yet. She barely gained control over that little Buell. Just think of what her husband's Harley would do to her.
She pops open a caffeine-free Pepsi. Sinks into a kitchen chair. She lights another cigarette as her Dobermans dance around her.
Tom has only been gone two months. Maybe it's still too early for answers. Maybe she'll never know. She has narrowed down the possibilities, she says. Neither is comforting.
Either he was too terrified to face the end, or he did it for her.
That's what she tries to think. Maybe he did it to spare her. Because she's so much younger. Because she still has so much life ahead of her. Maybe he didn't want her to have to take care of him. Maybe he wanted her to be able to move on.
She walks through the dining room, out the sliding glass doors. The dogs follow her. She unlocks the garage.
The Harley is still shiny. In the motorcycle's custom-chrome wheels, she sees herself. What is she doing?
She signed up for that class to prove something. To Tom. To everyone. Mostly, to herself.
But that Harley was his. His dream. Not hers. She would never feel free on it. Only frightened.
She leaves the garage and locks the door behind her. Her dogs trail her closely, wagging their stumps. "You know," she says, scratching Luke's back, "I've decided I'm going to sell that Harley." The Doberman looks up at her, as if were surprised.
"Now that I passed that class, I might never ride again."
She never really wanted to drive a motorcycle. She just wanted to know she could.
