1969 and Then Some

by Robert Wintner

  The road to Dover passed the castle at Canterbury, white-cliffed and seagull screaming, then it curved easy to the terminal for the Ostende Ferry. The channel rolled and sloshed, misty damp and dismal gray—I mean grey—churning the sea to frothy lumps of white cap and gruel as most passengers heaved over the rail. We watched like students and learned another lesson. Most passengers had hurriedly ordered sandwiches and coffee and gobbled and swilled quickly to beat the rough ride. We had watched them with envy, hours since breakfast but constrained by $5 a day. When the puking started hardly a mile out, the dining area emptied as most passengers moved swiftly to the lee rail. Some tables remained served but untouched. David had three half sandwiches. I sat down to a brand new platter of French toast. We dined on the house, picking out two untouched coffees and asking the galley for a reheat, s’il vous plait. We felt fairly satisfied and seasoned and ready for France. Out on deck, the sea and snacks rose, but an eye on the horizon got us to the French coast with the French toast held down.

  Rolling off at Ostende we headed for Paris feeling purposeful and bound for deep penetration of left bank reality. Dead ahead was the truth that would change us from Midwestern children of the suburbs to worldly men. Maybe we would get black berets and wear them by necessity. Giant eucalyptus trees lined the French country roads on either side in perfect order, twenty or thirty to a cluster every few miles. Air pockets between each pair of sentries buffeted like giant kids swinging pillows, perhaps to humble our worldly insight with a beating as introduction to French hospitality.

  Paris is not a biker’s town. I remember feeling sort of okay, wending through the arrondissements in six lanes of traffic doing sixty, shifting lanes bumper to bumper, thinking it was crazy but I was good, very good, good enough for this action any day—when a screamer shot past doing a hundred ten, weaving like a wounded comet. I could never do that, and seeing another guy do it made me wonder if those skills were necessary to survive there. That guy looked like a high-miler.

  More importantly, I didn’t want to do that. I wanted out as quickly as we rode in. Paris was dirty, unfriendly and expensive. Call me philistine or too young to appreciate the arts, but I found a day at an art museum to be so uplifting and rewarding that I wouldn’t need another day like that for a long time, maybe not for the rest of this lifetime. David swore that he loved it, maybe more than anything ever in his life—fairly challenging me to deny that this was why we had come. He demonstrated his point by scrutinizing a painting of some people on horseback on a woodsy road with everything in black or brown or dark green. He soaked it up like a true intellect and art appreciator for five minutes, ten minutes and fifteen. I left and came back and left again as he wallowed in artistic delight, imagining the very thoughts and sensitivities of the masters, his forbears in art.

  He attributed my restlessness to chronic attitude. I couldn’t argue. Attitude had been a problem enumerated on report cards for the first twelve grades, and though the revolution of the 60’s justified my “attitude,” anyone more willing to accept the conventional social norm could still build a case against me.

  We walked along the Seine, maybe waiting for art to imitate life or vice versa, or maybe for a radical intellectual demonstration to break out on the occasion of our presence at the Sorbonne. David soon agreed, however, that Paris could not be met on $5 a day. He too would travel west-southwest to Biarritz, but not on back, no offense. He just couldn’t take it. He would take the train since he’d budgeted that part of it in his $5 a day. And he liked the train, always had, after all.

  And that was that. We parted company the next morning with a handshake and an agreement to meet up again, somewhere, maybe. I still marvel at the image of myself, alone on a BSA Lightning Rocket, maneuvering Paris. My motorcycle experience to date was the ride from London, plus a few miles on borrowed Hondas, plus about two hundred more miles on a Honda Dream.

  I would have gone farther on the Dream, but it kept breaking down. I bought that one, my first motorcycle, in ‘67 in Memphis. It was a 305cc parallel twin, its pistons not sequentially timed but moving together, like a single jug split into two that for some reason never worked for Honda. I bought mine chopped with megaphone pipes; it looked so cool to a teenager, and I was still in a flush from my Superhawk experience. My Dream had probably run a few laps around the moon with some side trips across the Sea of Tranquility. But when the guy fired it up it went WOMMMAAA! I was smitten then too, and for the few miles it ran I got more exposed to the fundamentals of motorcycling. For starters, you can’t steer one even if you want to. On my first curve (in town) I had to pull over to see why the handlebars were frozen. It was the self-preservation instinct overpowering the triple tree and preventing me from “turning” the handlebars. You have to lean a motorcycle to get it to turn. Now I know, kind of.

  Mechanical thoughts and solitude filled in through the thinning refuse of urban Paris south and west toward Bordeaux, through a series of small towns till I got tired late in the afternoon and stopped. I used my high school French well enough to find a chambre to louer for the nuit. I remember that room as small and wood paneled up the sides and along the roofline too, on the second floor overlooking some narrow streets and other houses. It would have been unusable space in America, the United States of, but a typical frog family squeezed a few francs out of it.

  The stuffy confinement and loneliness became oppressive and overwhelming, as if the French didn’t care. Maybe they didn’t, but they weren’t the cause of my pain. It was a night of molting, of coming into the world, as everyone must leave the world, alone. Sleep came early, like a blessing.

  The morning was better, warmer and livelier after coffee and a pastry. I mounted up for Biarritz.

  The road to Bordeaux was also solitary, but with a pastoral backdrop and movement it was old home week. Maybe a night was all I needed; the route felt right, peopled with farmers and truckers and bartenders who know about coming off the road for a smoke and a wine to ease the neck knots. Just south of Bordeaux, I spotted two guys resting under a tree near a parked motorcycle, so I pulled over. “Assistance?”

  “Yeah,” the younger one said. “Got a light?” The bike was his, a ‘50s vintage Triumph 650 Thunderbird, the only touring motorcycle Triumph had ever built. Never exported to the U.S., its fender cowlings curled into running boards, and its English saddlebags and no chromium roll bar made it look lean and hungry for long miles. “Picked him up hitching,” the younger one said, abrupt as urban adolescence.

  John Levy from LA sat on the ground holding a 35mm camera, fondling and shifting it in his hands. He explained that he was a photographer. The pivotal points of his identification, LA and photography, pegged John as a purebred Californian and natural star. I would know him and Bruno for many miles but never saw him take a picture. Those were the days of film and thirty-six shots, so maybe he didn’t have any, or many he waited for the perfect place to spend a roll.

  John was only nineteen but could handle his Triumph Thunderbird like the road pro he bought it from, who assured him the high-mileage didn’t matter, because it was broken in right and then maintained on steady cruising speeds. John’s bullshit factor was soon evident, but he seemed like a good guy with a soulful motorcycle. He’d picked up Bruno hitching out of Paris—Bruno had to flee France because he had no money, not $5 or five liras a day. At twenty-two, Bruno was old man out, seeing the world on a shoestring budget just like we were, kind of, except that he was from Rome, the lower eastside of it, and he had holes in his shoes and makeshift strings. He loved the big motos, even riding on back. And a chance to sit up front would be heaven sent. John and Bruno agreed that Paris was a rip-off, and so was all of France, so they were headed to Spain, where a nickel could get you lunch.

  Bruno said. “I hitch,” holding up one thumb with a smile.

  “He no speaka too gooda de English,” John said. “Isn’t that right, dumb shit?”

  Bruno said, “Ey. Watcha you a call me.”

 
; John laughed. “He’s got French and Spanish wired.”

  Bruno smiled again and pumped his head, affirming the resource he would contribute. “Si. Et oui. Wis me, you no a getting a fucked.”

  “Yeah, right. We’re hauling ass out of France,” John said. “It’s too rich around here. Fuck these frogs.” I nodded—a dollar made five francs then, and five francs got you half a cheese sandwich, except you couldn’t get half. Roadside wine ran two francs a glass, and your average American kid had to go all summer on a few hundred bucks. Everyone knew we could call home for more, but that was throwing in the towel on pride and independence. I added a pinch of opium to the hash speck they were trying to light, and soon the pipe was stoked, signifying victory. And unity. With the bond sealed and the revolution intact, we dreamed south-southwest for Spain.

  Bruno scanned the horizon before mounting up, and then nodded, “Spain. More cheaper everything.”

  We rode fast long hours, Bruno driving both bikes to spell John and me, because it was the age of brotherhood, and he said he knew how. He hadn’t eaten in two days except for milk and bread, but crouching over the handlebars his energy was that of a child meeting Santa, face-to-face. He made no secret of his belief in American magic. Americans were rich in any man’s country even if poor in their own. We laughed when Bruno complained of moskweetos. John asked him if he thought he would ever stop being a dumb shit. Bruno smiled yet again and sent a fine stream of wine between his two front teeth, dousing the arrogant boy. He stammered when I asked him which moto he liked best. He fidgeted and promised to decide. He said he could go two weeks on his current diet of bread and milk and had done it often and was comfortable with prospects of doing it again—it kept him young and strong. But he rubbed his belly at the other prospect of sandweeches in Spain, thick with meat.

  He spoke sparse English and had little to say otherwise, but not from shyness. He came alive in negotiation with others in French or Spanish, waving his hands, laughing and scowling before walking away from a deal. He would walk to John and me to tell us how we’d fared, what the price would be for food, wine or a place to sleep. When it came time to pay, he stood back, head down with humility. Average cash out was around two dollars. He had not one cent, so he earned his keep and gave John at nineteen and me at twenty a look at another form of humanity we’d never known, a man of resource. I wondered how far I could make it on empty pockets. John wanted him to call us Bwana. Bruno puffed his cheeks with wine until John begged off.

  In the south of France sit the little sisters astride the border, Biarritz on the French side, San Sebastian on the Spanish. After two days hard riding and little eating, we rode harder and ate less, bearing down on the promise of herring in oil, beefy sardines, horsemeat sandwiches, goat cheese and cheap wine waiting across the border. Light-headed we cat-and-moused, throttled down and sped up, weaving figure eights until ten miles from Biarritz, when we learned that even a Lightning Rocket is mortal. Its clutch cable broke near the lever. I squeezed nothingness and wondered what.

  Coasting and kicking into neutral, the little party stopped. We sat and breathed and looked stupid, grinning as the hot metal ticked.

  A motorcycle can be driven clutchless if the driver is sensitive to rpm and can hear the right time to shift. Even so, shifting isn’t smooth but must be muscled up and down with unavoidable gear crunching. The cable had to be fixed. So we limped into Biarritz with John driving the bum Lightning Rocket, since he was the far more experienced driver and had driven hundreds of clutchless miles, no shit. I knew he was a punk and a liar and itching to ride my rocket, but he was good, better than I was, maybe. I was curious anyway to see if the Thunderbird was smooth as it looked, and I was tired, so we switched.

  Inside the city limits of Biarritz we found no word that translates to motorcycle—moto covers it all, anything with two wheels and a putt, from mopeds to Lightning Rockets. After an hour or two of Bruno’s genuflections with the peasantry, each exchange taking us a few blocks deeper into the bowels of Biarritz, we found a small street, more of an alley, since a car would never fit on it—not a real car. A real moto was iffy. But local motos were thick there, with the shop double doors open wide and mopeds and mobilets spewed onto the street like hatchling insects. 35 and 50cc models were everywhere with just as many rug rats swarming among the motos buzzing high rpm French voices, amazed at the Americans on their giant machines. Tired and hungry, we felt little optimism.

  An old man came to the double doors like a hound to a scent, to see what was the matter, nose up to the sound of big motorcycles. Over six feet tall with yellow-white hair and an old jump suit to match but for the holes and grease spots, he thrust his flushed face out, leading with his French and whiskey nose. His hand grasping a door looked like a row of cypress knees, weatherworn and gnarled from wrench failure and age. The children followed his movement with their own, inching closer as he did, daring finally to touch the big motos, which got them tittering and chirping over the engine thunder, until the old man said, “Alors . . .”

  Bruno dismounted as he spoke. We shut the engines down as he proceeded, showing the old man the broken cable. The old man furrowed and scratched and then spoke back. The word London came to the surface, followed by a big, helpless shrug. Bruno turned around with the news: The clutch cable assembly was a one-piece part, from the lever to the clutch. The little mobilets had no parts anything at all like the one required. If the old man called that day to London, a new one would arrive in a week or three weeks.

  We hung our heads, mumbled and walked in circles. The old man watched, puffing his lower lip and throwing his hands in the air, which is French for All of life is bullshit, or What are you going to do? In intricate charade, he shooed us off, go, all but the broken Lightning Rocket. We should go and find a place, find a place and sleep because we looked very tired. La moto malade c’est bonne ici, avec moi.

  He patted our sleeping bags, rounded us up and pointed in a long arc, spewing French directions to a bluff off a secondary road that overlooked a beach and was partially sheltered by bushes and trees. “Allez!” the old man clapped like a Sultan. “Vite! Vite!” And all the children yelped and shrieked as we three mounted the old Thunderbird with our gear under our arms, weighing her shocks down springless.

  Around the corner at a shop just closing we bought a number ten can labeled SAUERKRAUT in block letters under a picture of some fairly good looking sauerkraut and sausage. Yum and grunt, we said, and got some mustard, bread and wine, two bottles. We drank one bottle on the curb for fortitude and acceptance of reality, which was an issue those days. Then we mounted up again.

  We made camp while Bruno explained as best he could that the old man was the only human being in France who could give good directions, so maybe something good would happen. I said, “Yeah, like a miracle.”

  John opened the can and found only sauerkraut, no sausage. “Fuckers. They couldn’t do this in America.” But sauerkraut and mustard sandwiches weren’t too bad, and the dream got better with another bottle of wine. Cocktails got better on Gauloises and a touch of opium. We escaped then, free at last of long hours in the saddle, broken cables and the high cost of France. The stars in the sky looked just like home.

  We woke up in rolling fog at dawn with all the snails in France sliming over our bags like drunk cartographers. More sandwiches for breakfast, since we had plenty of the ingredients, led to more smokes and a last pull on the wine bottle, then into town for coffee.

  We reached the shop early, all the mobilets and children still tucked in, asleep. The Lightning Rocket sat out front exactly as it had been left. The old man looked alive with the energy of those who don’t sleep because something more important waits in the world. He pushed the double doors open and came out, hands up, as if greeting old friends, reunited at last. He and Bruno spoke and moved slowly together toward the Lightning Rocket, hands dancing in questions and answers and yes, buts, until a big paw moved quickly to the clutch lever and squeezed it—it
resisted, fixed.

  I walked over and squeezed it and saw what he’d done. Each thread of the cable, maybe twenty strands, had been welded back onto the metal plug they’d shorn from. Then he’d sculpted the mass down to diameter, allowing a smooth slide through the cable guide. John examined it and said, “holy fuckin’ay.”

  The old man nodded and smiled but would not look again at his work. He walked back into his shop with Bruno, who called us to follow, way back and then back farther, through the garage behind the shop and farther back to the quiet rooms where he lived, where the walls were strewn with photos of a man over six feet with dark hair and a big nose, wearing a jump suit and standing in front of one motorcycle or another with a different trophy in his hands for each photo. A hundred motorcycles in a hundred pictures looked like they covered a decade or two or three. Then the old man showed us his trophies, or the few he had left, bent, dinged and tarnished.

  We scanned the wall in silence, touching the trophies.

  Out front again I asked to settle up. “Combien?”

  “Cinq francs,” he said.

  “Cinq francs?”

  “Oui oui oui oui oui. Cinq francs.” A dollar.

  I paid it. “Merci. Merci beaucoup, Monsieur . . .”

  “Rien!” It is nothing, he said, hands flying up. We lashed our gear then. He watched. I mounted the Lightning Rocket, turned the key and kicked it over. As the engine revved, the old man tilted an ear down as though to hear what it had to tell him.

  Head cocked then like a curious pup’s, the old man’s eyes opened big when I revved again, dismounted and held a hand up, an invitation. He would not move. I nodded and said, “Oui.” He nodded too but stood still, listening.

  “Oui oui,” he said at last, moving smoothly, one leg over, two hands on, settling in, revving and feeling the time between himself and the machine.

  He squeezed the clutch lever without looking at it, found first gear and eased into it, accelerating up the street, slowly at first. When the engine roared the old man did not hesitate but slipped into second easy as two follows one, wound it out and double clutched to third. Doing nearly sixty approaching the corner, he double clutched back to second and leaned into the corner till the foot peg shot sparks off the pavement. We couldn’t see him then but heard him come out of the turn winding up, shifting, winding up, shifting, winding up and away.