1969 and Then Some

by Robert Wintner

  He laughed. “What the fuck, man?”

  With wits finally restored and eyes wiped I stood, shrugging it off and casting again. But fishing was over and just as well; it was time to head up the road and make camp where black bear roamed but no griz. The store clerk had recommended a special place.

  Sundown was quick with hundred fifty foot conifers casting the clearing into shadow. We ate and drank well, with fillets and a few bottles of fah fah de blah blah cabernet in the two hundred dollar range. Why not? Did we not deserve the very best? Who would better celebrate us than us? The evening felt unique, and fine vintage wine could raise fine rhetoric.

  The partner opened on a few things that must change, like attitude. I took no offense; we were blitzed and had a happy history of candor. He honed in to money management. We lacked trust. We ignored the skill and intention of others. We were woefully doubtful. Doubt is so cynical, and frankly, it’s negative. And we must stop the paranoia—people were talking; no need to mention names. Above all we must show faith in humanity rather than questioning petty expenditures. They might seem lavish on the surface, but they actually affirmed long-range wisdom, what we might call vision, if we could ditch the attitude.

  He’d been insolvent and had gone to bankrupt on a beach shop specializing in silk dresses in an opulent setting, back when four hundred grand was some real money. Normal floor tile ran a buck a foot installed—or you could spend four bucks for the Cypress Mint Collection imported from Italy, and he did. Plus a buck a square to install, but what could he do, not install? And a buck and a half on freight, but that didn’t count, if you . . .

  What was the attraction to partnership with a financial delusional? The guy could turn a half-starved calf into a cash cow. That he showed symptoms of mad cow disease had seemed curable. It wasn’t. No matter how much he generated, he spent more. He kept a checkbook ledger with a negative balance and wrote more checks, bad checks. He said, “No, I’m not.”

  “You have brackets around this figure.” The balance: <$1,800>. “You’re writing a check for thirty-two hundred. That takes the balance to negative five grand. Capiche?”

  “Yeah. So?”

  “So it’s a bad check.”

  “No it’s not! It’s not a bad check unless it bounces. The checks above it won’t clear for seven days. Or nine! We’ll cover it.”

  “What if it rains?” That question had brought the first lecture on attitude. Twenty years later investment bankers would money-manage economic collapse on that same approach. The partner, sadly, got no millions for his vision, not one.

  It rained. A few checks bounced, requiring phone calls and happy explanations on true intent and resolution from a Master of Business Administration. As a major in leg and reefer I then required that all dollars written into any check would be considered spent. It sounded like a theorem, graduate level.

  Once spent, those dollars could not be spent again.

  He called me amazing with money and laughed that it must be those Jewish genes.

  As a recreation director for a major resort hotel he’d learned a thing or two about service. Still early in our liaison, when I viewed fifty dollars as potential inventory, we pulled into a hotel, where he tipped the parking valet fifty dollars. As I stared in shock, sputtering what the fuck, he said, “Trust me on this one. Watch me get their attention. This is gonna be fun.”

  That is, he’d seen wealthy people tip heavily on arrival at a posh hotel, causing murmurs from valet to bell to fine dining, setting up gold-star service down the line for a fifty or hundred dollar tip from the man—what he most wanted to be. I remained skeptical through checkout with nary a twitch in service. Had I missed something in our return on investment? He mumbled about attitude and loosening up then too, explaining that sometimes returns are deferred, like when a parking valet would remember the man from last year. Word gets out quickly that the man is back.

  Oh, brother. But it was good, with the wine and reefer loosening us up on a camping trip. It was wilderness time, still the best time, time to relax and to point out that my cynical view had spawned a dynamic media campaign.

  “That’s fine. I wouldn’t change that for anything. But who do you think can live with your distrust every day?”

  “Distrust?”

  “You distrust my judgment.”

  “Ah. Well, my ex-wife couldn’t live with it either.”

  “No, and I don’t blame her.”

  “You never met her.”

  “I can imagine. Oh, man, I can imagine!”

  The breeze had increased into twilight and was stiff by nightfall, nature’s bluster preempting that of the partner. I brewed espressos and stoked the pipe, lighting it with great effort in the wind. Another vintage wine for vintage fellows would come next.

  He began again on trust, business, worldview and women, using his new girlfriend as a shining example of “what two people can have together.” He was married with seven children. The new girlfriend was a manikin, posed and mute. She provided the great calming salve that cleared his head for better business.

  Janel at forty-two had never married. The partner was amazed that a woman so stacked could remain unmarried. “Did you hear what I said? She’s never been married! Can you believe it? And we just met! Just like that! Like it was meant to be!”

  Meant to be or simply was—either/or seemed incidental to a common drive: screwing early and often just like the free spirits used to do. Janel didn’t like so much screwing but didn’t mind—it meant so much to him. He loved his little bird for her sacrifice and stupendous rack swinging to and fro. “They’re not just huge, they stick out. They could poke you in the eye! Ha!” He loved playing with them and talking about them when they weren’t around. He equated her marital status with virginity, casually dismissing three long-term boyfriends in the four- to eight-year range, though all three relationships had led to the same familiarity and contempt as marriages. All her long-term relationships ended on the same realization that life is long and should be better.

  Not a pretty woman, Janel turned heads with her practiced profile. She could lure men with her wares, and she knew it. So she wasn’t surprised when she hooked the partner on fool’s bait.

  He couldn’t get enough and wanted to prove his love. One day they passed a shop window with a nifty little sundress at seven hundred clams, not nearly as much as an evening dress. She wanted an evening dress but glanced at the sundress. He said, “Let’s get it,” like they would share it, which they would, when you thought about it. Seeing her in it would make him happy.

  The cute little shift with plunging neckline and supple support for separation, lift and spread on the dazzling cleavage went on the company card, as in business-related. Six eyes watched the transaction, two jaundiced, two beaming in joy and two resigned to marginal return. I was a ripple on their lovely pond. Janel knew what a good man provides beyond basics—any grunt could come up with basics. She wanted the flourish, the whimsical and fantastic, not all the time but whenever she wanted it.

  Between that spontaneous act of love with a sun dress at seven bills and the best camping gear money could buy on a blustery night threatening eruption, many thousands more dollars supported the partner’s love and largesse for his new woman and the world. Surely they would love him back. He had discovered colloidal silver, a purifying mineral as costly as its name implies. Ten bucks an ounce isn’t so bad, when a four-ounce bottle lasts a few weeks. But it got bad by the case at twelve hundred bucks.

  In a positive light, a case earned an additional discount. Besides that, the partner’s office staff could absorb cases of the amazing new product, so it was win/win all over again—his specialty. That would be the office of his side business, reselling healthcare products. Colloidal silver could be part of inventory, with adequate testing and results confirming improved health as another win/win by-product.

  Then came gold teeth. The nine staffers of the side business each had three to five mercury amalgam filling
s removed and replaced with gold crowns, gold inlays and/or gold overlays, also charged to the company card—my company. Other embezzlements would surface with a whine, “I was gonna tell you!”

  But alas, the hammer fell.

  The love all around us had warped. The partner could not tell the difference between love and a pathological need for love. Was that bad, being guilty of excessive goodness? Who could pay taxes with so many better uses for the money at hand? He stole everything he gave away, like Robin Hood, except nobody was rich or poor; the victims were duped, the beneficiaries willing.

  In the legal scramble ahead he was made to admit duplicity; he’d promised to bring university-level smarts to the partnership but provided stupidity. “You bought gold teeth for people I don’t know?”

  “You can know them anytime. They’re good people, in spite of your attitude. Do you know how important dental health is?”

  “Do you know how important livelihood is? The company is insolvent. You will render fifty people unemployed.” But that came later, a long way from free- spirit concerns for solvency and employment.

  Back in Montana on a blustery night, the wind howled. Treetops whipped and crashed. Massive limbs plummeted to Earth with dramatic impact. A camp chair stupor and exciting visual fare warranted another pipe and another swig and kept me seated.

  The partner glared at this perfect example of attitude with limbs crashing around us. He gained momentum, proclaiming danger. “We could be killed here!”

  “Go hide in the car. You accuse me of distrust, cynicism and no faith. Look at you. You’re scared. You have no faith that the motherfucking universe will protect you from falling limbs. That’s hypocritical. That’s attitude. So shut the fuck up.”

  A limb crashed into the fire and the camp latte maker to highlight the great windstorm story. Sleeping in the car seemed best, and by morning the spirits were becalmed. A stoned, drunken tirade was what the doors of perception had led to, and untidy devolutions were easily dismissed with prosperity upon us. Once again we had not copped out but deferred to the developing process.

  Two weeks later I could not meditate. Years of morning meditation had connected things, till they disconnected. I visited a psychic—an imposition because of the energy required for what I requested. But something was amiss. Fidgets haunted the stillness. I told her of the creek-side episode, though the trip seemed good otherwise.

  Carol asked about recent confrontation. My grandmother died, displeased with my disrespect for her turd of a son, Old Mom’s brother. Carol put a limp hand in the air, went snake-eyed and then went inside. Twitching like a sleeping dog, she soon came out. “It’s not your grandmother. The Montana incident was real. You were standing on the spot where your family was killed.”

  “My family?”

  “Your Indian family. You were there. You saw it. You felt it. But I can’t tell if . . . I’m getting something in business. What’s going wrong in business?”

  “Business couldn’t be better. I walked away from a shitty lease deal on the Big Island, but that was a good thing.” She went back in for a long stay, five or seven minutes, and came out spent.

  “It’s hard to see, but I still get business and numbers.”

  Ten days later the tax office called. In the next few months and the first sixty grand of legal defense, we dodged a criminal charge and copped to seven misdemeanors, one for each corporation. The partner had proven his genius twenty years before Wall Street worked the same scam, borrowing from one corp to pay another in a shell game too slick for the human eye to follow. Appearance and substance merged. Was copping to pleas the same as copping out?

  The Feds were easy—come in from the cold, pay the tax and gain amnesty.

  The State wanted blood. The house got leveraged in three days flat, because the State doesn’t want indebted property. With a huge mortgage in place, the house looked like a flawed gem. I rented it out, then sold or packed everything from a life so swell it seemed like a setup but didn’t have to be if I could have been aware. I moved with my girlfriend to Seattle. The partner became ex- like the ex-wife, no longer subject to ambient attitude.

  The partner does not linger but serves as disclaimer to the love all around us. No generation is invincibly moral. The rough time felt spiritually genetic, descended from peoples who died well, with a war cry—my people. The old tribe would have been proud, and so was the current family.

  Philip Roth called Native Americans the original goyem, but he wrote of urbane characters, constrained and self-obsessed. Philip Roth, “man of letters,” was not a man of action. I sensed something else in native peoples, a warrior spirit linking generations on trails of tears, and those warriors are mishpocha to me.

  It felt like full circle from war resistance to war cry, and the love settled again all around us.

  Asymmetry as an Indication of Life

  WORD WAS OUT on a guy building Norton Commando replicas with improvements: disc brakes, a bigger engine and better tranny. I punched it up but alas, the Commando had gone muscular and looked more retro classic than comfortable.

  I punched up BSA and got some diehard guys wrenching tappets on ancient Beezers. I hit Triumph for the warm and fuzzy feel—and found that Triumph was back. Triumph morphed years ago to a clenched fist engine on a twisted pretzel chassis with a riding profile that looked prostate-exam-ready.

  But ownership had changed at the Triumph company, and the crotch-rocket line got pre-empted. The classics were back, born again in the first rule of retail: don’t forget what got you here. The Bonneville was back in a replica nearly identical to the original, with disc brakes and a new engine up from 650cc to 865cc.

  You see an old friend after decades and recall the old times and how it was and . . . God . . . the life that will not be lived again. Unless . . . Nah, the new Bonny rode too high. The classic bench seat seemed soulful, but a rider would stop more air than a truck grill. And who wants a high center of gravity?

  Nobody is who, but under New Cruisers, Speedmaster claimed Bonneville genetics with a longer wheel base, lower seat and center of gravity, forward foot controls and stock stuff that would run thousands on a Harley Davidson—like a 180 back tire with no compromise on a skinny belt because this wheel was chain driven—the superior secondary drive. Double discs up front, a tach and a discreet oil cooler between the double down tubes suggested the raw appeal of a matchbox full of kief at a Pamplona campground in 1969 and felt, uh . . . correct.

  Eighty-seven hundred? My last Road King went forty grand and wanted to fold up in the curves. Yes, that was forty thousand dollars on an addiction to the V-twin fantasy.

  Never mind. Idle fantasy had been good, but another motorcycle would not be good. I went down to the Harley place to see the new Wide Glide, descended from the Sturgis. It seemed straightforward but the Harley Davidson cost twice as much, and that was BC—before corrections. The correct windshield was four hundred more and the official Harley Davidson windshield mounting brackets were more than that. Then came the Harley Davidson windshield quick release mounting bracket levers for another hundred or two hundred or four-fifty. The Harley Davidson saddlebags were nine hundred, plus another two hundred for the rear turn signal relocation kit, because the rear turn signals had to move so the saddlebags would fit. The tachometer was another five hundred plus installation, but Harley Davidson riders are supposed to get along without a tachometer by listening to the pipes—audible pipes would run another five to seven hundred.

  At eighteen to twenty-one grand, depending on dealer surcharge over MSRP, the rig had admirable low-end torque on the bigger power plant but still wanted to fold in the curves. The sales guy held back on an explanation or defense or any response at all, as if familiar with the deal-killers. But it wasn’t a deal. It was a mugging. Worse yet: “This thing has no taillight.”

  “Oh, that. You don’t need one.”

  “I don’t need one?”

  “Yeah. I mean no. Harley Davidson figured it out. You
don’t really need a taillight.”

  “What about the guys who got creamed from the rear. I bet I can get a taillight.”

  “Yes! They got a kit. Two, three hundred is all.”

  “Plus the labor to tie it into the wiring harness.”

  “Well, sure, you got to tie in. How you gonna get power?”

  “You just run it back from the battery?”

  “No. You take it through the fuse box, because, you know.”

  “Yeah. What’s installation on the taillight?”

  “Uh. I’m not sure. Let’s walk back to service and find out.”

  “I’m out of time right now.”

  “You save two hundred on the turn signal relocation kit if you get the taillight kit.”

  It was over, because instinct overrides appetite, or you just keep getting fucked.

  In Honolulu soon after, I stopped at the Triumph dealer. Holy moly, the Triumph Speedmaster could track. Look left; it went left, no bulldogging, coercing, hoping or hoisting. Or folding at the swing arm. So this was engineering, what the motorcycle geeks kept talking about.

  In coming weeks I thought the Harley salesman would call to give me a taillight. This is the rationale of an addict.

  But it didn’t matter, because it was over.

  Motorcycle of the Year went to the Triumph Speedmaster, for engineering, balance, quality and value—beating out Honda, Kawasaki, Ducati, Yamaha, BMW and the rest.

  The business also tracked well, but the gallbladder inflamed as annoying emails announced that year’s Fall Smoker, the gathering of guys for the annual debauchery tour of the Pacific Northwest.

  I hadn’t gone in seven years and would not go again. The guys embraced online, reuniting in unspeakable joy. Liberated at last from what we’d fought clear of decades ago—home, wife and kids—they would hit the road one more time, stopping a mile up to burn a fatty and remember when. Some nicotine would enhance the best feeling in the world. Non-smokers smoked. Smokers smoked more. The weed bag shrank like a puddle in Death Valley in a scene so repetitious and tiresome that it felt like vengeance but not redemption. The Fall Smoker was tragic and comic, a random group of blue-collar grunts and white-collar wannabe road warriors riding into the wilderness with liquor, reefer, bad behavior and pussy jokes in delusional pursuit. Old stories were told and retold for the benefit of newcomers. Stories involving road dogs of the female variety were a source of validation, as if we were unique among men, and these very miles were like history in the making.