The Motorcyclist

by George Elliott Clarke

  A pose? Sure: a (white) woman turns her head; she sees Carl—the “lug”—his mahogany visage flaring dark shades, and she feels a twinge of arousal. So he hopes. And, yes, he’s flattered. But Liz II is just a prop: the machine props him up. Something has to.

  His good news? Wage Slavery and Light Deficiency end—if only for today. Carl seeks Pleasure now—just sheer, reflex Happiness—like a Greenwich Village in-crowd type or a Harlem bebop player. The Maritime air—salty, fishy, chocolatey—thrills his lungs. The BMW is an airship, uplifting him—from other cars, other folks’ creeds, and the dullard crowd. Carl wheels about like a slick hero. He could be one of Hemingway’s matadors, one of Hannibal’s mountain-striding generals. All winter, until now, his life has been humdrum walking or trolleying among the same set of city blocks (and trolling through the same gals). Until today. Ta-da!

  “Now is the time,” to quote Dr. King (from, yes, a more enlightened context), for Carl to indulge—to be all man for all women in all seasons, to make up for make-believe Equality by making love. He suspects that his behaviour is bankrupt, but he can’t help it. He has seen too many photos of Negroes put on trial—or lynched—because of their lust for love.

  Only now doth Carl expect women’s heads to swivel as he U-turns or pivots, one black-booted, blue-jeaned leg extended for careful balance. Finely, from his mounted vantage, women seem to step with sweetened energy, dancing or bouncing their way along each sidewalk, each concrete panel suddenly flaunting a catwalk.

  Carl’s aviator-style sunglasses, like black chrome, make onlookers’ visages expand, contract, and assume a slick of colour. The white-marble city buildings swim and swirl over his black shades, only to be dismissed.

  Carl zips past the Central Wharf, the Imperial Oil Company dock, the Market Wharf, the Dartmouth ferry, the City Wharf, the Irving Oil slip, A.J.M. Smith Limited (famous for its gifts of vers libre, i.e., “Free Worms,” to anglers), Bliss Bissett & Walter Whitman & Co. (relatives of the Yankee bard), National Seafoods Products Limited, Boutelier’s Wharf, Robert Burns Fisheries, North Atlantic Fisheries, Nova Scotia Light and Power Company, and the Halifax Harbour Commission. The government buildings and the Keith’s brewery come clad in as much beautifying ivy as do Harvard and Yale.

  Abruptly, Carl ascends from Water to Lower Water Street (which is actually uphill) and meets with Terminal Road. Directly before him looms the north side of the red-brick facade of the Nova Scotia Hotel. Rolling west to Hollis Street, Carl turns again to prance directly in front of the CNR station, the railway building. Now he gotta stop. Tarnation!

  His ride has taken only ten minutes. It seemed longer because Carl just had to—just had to—relish this indisputably fine sunlight.

  Down in America, the white Beats and white bikers pout like James Dean, slouch like Marlon Brando. Carl differs; he digs James Baldwin. Yet, he admires Brando—despite the soupçon of homosexuality in his slumping posture, his kissable sneer, his T-shirt-and-blue-jeans lingerie, his hard-candy ass. Carl likes to vogue—to appear sweet, juicy, intolerably spicy; to garb in black like Kid Hamlet; to astonish dainty, plaster faces; to inspire oohs and ahhs. What he’d like: to be a Lone Ranger type, cutting through a landscape, or loping away—lickety-split—from a Catastrophe. To lone-range into a bedroom, then mosey off at dawn.

  What a thrill, now, to conquer the train station—like Miles Davis taking Paris. Nothing’s out of place on Carl or his machine.

  Still, he’s never dreamt the coffee shop waitresses—blond, ponytailed Una, sixteen; brunette and blue-eyed Mona, nineteen; and Violette, twenty-five (homely enough to be an old maid, but whose violet eyes are as hypnotic as a vampire’s)—would rub up against him so, laurel him with their perfume, press their tits against his arm or chest. Their fuss makes Carl blush invisibly; he feels unambiguously cocky.

  But Joy is perilous: His bosses got jealous, in January, when they green-eyed that newspaper photo of Carl, a bow-tied and spiffy Baptist, standing behind two white girls, also Baptist, bent over a table before him. The bosses’ lyncher imaginations could easily picture sodomy. Here’s one more reason for Carl to get out of Dodge as frequently as he can: to dodge backward men spitting Spite between puffs on their reeking stogies.

  Carl’s work shift—a long four hours—just drags. Too many sheets to launder; too many suitcases to tote. Not enough tips to make the bother worthwhile. No wonder he’s itchin to jump back on Liz II and earn the debut saddle sores of the season.

  2 p.m.: White-marble, white-breasted Britannia looks on in profile as Carl roars from the station, throttles west up South Street, then north at Robie, then farther north to Kempt Road, thus bisecting the upside-down Tyrannosaurus rex–skull shape of Halifax. Passing Fairview Lawn Cemetery (graced with corpses from two disasters, the Titanic sinking of 1912 and the even-more-titanic Halifax Explosion of 1917), Carl skirts the Coloured village of Africville—invisibly northeast of him (though 150 years old, it’s struck from city maps)—the city dump, swamped by squawking seagulls, directly before him, and heads northwest to Rockingham and the Bedford Highway, girding Bedford Basin’s west shore.

  Carl aims for Sunnyside, just past the north reach of Bedford Basin. En route, he ogles Prince’s Lodge, the breast-shaped love nest that Prince Edward, Duke of Kent, had built for fucking his French mistress, Madame de Saint-Laurent: heaven for the hell of it.

  Carl holds Liz II steady at 50 mph. It’s also windy going, but the vision of scads of other bikes, pitching against wind and traffic, helps him pitch forward too.

  (Speedsters cut corners to get ahead. They treat speed limits as no better than a Manufacturer’s Suggested Retail Price: prone to inflation.)

  Carl scoots past aquiline, two-toned cars that, with their thick fins, look like flat-bodied rockets. Cinnamon odours bless the air. Apple blossoms erupt from bush.

  Admittedly, Liz II’s an individualist—or monopoly—form of locomotion. She, the machine, says, “There’s room in my life for only one other person, and she must sit behind me, following my lead, my map, my directions, my interests.” A car is practically a church-picnic bus, suggesting the driver is a minister in search of a “flock.” A motorcycle is about going; a car is about arrival. Or so Carl sees. Then again, a man’s gotta have guts to forego a car’s economical advantage (an extra roof over his head) and offer himself to the mercy of the elements, to favour BMW or Harley-Davidson or Indian over Ford, Dodge, and DeSoto. Cars are ships. Carl prefers to be a clipper, blending with the wind, the sun, the rain.

  At the Chickenburger, Carl’s late lunch is a jumbo chicken burger, plus brown-gravy-slathered fries, plus a chocolate shake. He hangs round an hour, studying other bikes (see that 1953 sky-blue Harley-Davidson FL Hydra-Glide) and lookin o’er da ladies.

  Too soon, Carl dashes back to downtown Halifax. Here he can see—and be seen by—the neighbourhood beauts, in long, tight skirts and sharp heels or blue jeans, or white bobby socks and black loafers. Whatever they wear, black women accent upthrust, outthrust backsides, just as white women highlight their busts.

  Carl makes a beeline to the Sunrise Café, where he claims many sweet-eyed glances and phone numbers (digits of Desire). Donna and Deanna (sisters) and Susan and Sally (best friends)—an entire sorority—tired of being pedestrian, crowd about Carl, clamouring for, and claiming, rides. Carl will provide—he tells himself—fairly: share and share alike.

  Muriel, a Coloured maid, eyes him. When he exits the Sunrise, she demands a ride, right-this-minute: “Those other girls are just kids. I’m a woman, Carl.” Verily: every curvaceous inch.

  Carl grins as he hefts Muriel aboard the BMW. Damn happy, he watches her long, taut, dark chocolate legs grip the sides of the bike; now, he feels her tits indent his upper back as she leans her head against his neck and shoulder; her arms snake about his waist, grappling hard. Bumps and sharp turns jostle and crumple Muriel and him together. The bike’s swerving and shaking sets the lady squirming deliciously against Carl’s back and upper pel
vis. The drive is nigh conjugal. The rumble of Carl’s engine percolates in Muriel’s heart. Carl tells her, “Lean when I lean. We’ll lean together.” The bike is clean; his heart’s a machine.

  He’s had Delight before in having Muriel. Truth: he likes a hussy—a nice-size, pretty slut. (Heed the Italian proverb: “Nothing pulls stronger than cunt hairs.”) But no complications, please—yeah, oh yeah—pretty, pretty, pretty please!

  This association didn’t begin auspiciously. Carl recalls his pre-Christmas entrée to Miss Muriel Dixon’s dirty, spicy premises. He’d met her down by Point Pleasant Park (the southern tip, boutique forest of the municipal peninsula) in a nervous position: She was scrambling, dishevelled and distressed, from a white car parked facing Black Rock Beach, while a ghostly voice chirped, “Cocksucker! Cocksucker!” A squat, sallow man then opened the driver’s door and emerged, shadowy in moonlight, plashing one dark shoe into the slushy grey snow, his fedora dark-fudging his face into anonymity, and he stood upright, to pursue the fleet woman. However, the urge died once he saw Carl, who happened to be present because of his penchant for long strolls, day or night—his preferred exercise and his imaginative means of possessing, stealthily, Caucasian-bossed Halifax. (In 1959, Coloureds don’t really live in, but only infiltrate, the city.) The oaf—as Carl dubbed the john—valuing his reputation more than an orgasm, slunk down behind his steering wheel and slid his ’58 Ford Edsel backward and then about-face, and surfed through the slush, careening away. After rearranging her blouse and skirt, cardigan and scarf, coat and hat, and smiling through two glistening jets of tears, Muriel hunkered in Carl’s enfolding arms, to get warm and get warmth.

  Carl’s known her since Sunday school—and grade school. At twenty-seven, she’s four years his senior, but her failures in some grades meant that she occupied the same classes as he, though she’d been too mature to mingle much with his junior set. A maid in the leafy South End, Muriel dwells, like most Negroes, in Halifax’s rat-infested North End. Carl had guessed that, either by her own hook—or by the gent’s crook—she’d found herself in the crisis from which she had now, only by luck and pluck, slipped. A licorice-coloured woman, with a jutting, horizontal bosom, straight black hair, violet lips, and mocha-sweet eyes, Muriel defines Femininity. Carl had been glad to wrap her in his arms that December night, just as he is glad now to feel her vigorous clutch. Voluptuity presses him; sweat prickles his back. Muriel herself feels empowered, that Carl is answering her wish to be transported somewhere, anywhere, better.

  The December ’58 eve had ended two times ably—i.e., enjoyably and memorably. Muriel had thanked God for Carl’s chivalrous rescue, and then she had tucked her arm into his, as he’d led her, not striding, but pacing easily northward again. At Cornwallis (rue of priests—Anglican, Baptist, Catholic, United, plus a clerical-collar’d pedophile or two), they’d turned right, or east, toward the harbour, and walked two blocks to Maynard Street to Muriel’s abode near the northwest corner. Her Victorian-era rooming house, with the Schwartz spice warehouse at its back, cascaded odours, from the decay of rats—a nostril-piercing stench—behind the wallpaper to the pungent, black pepper reek from the savoury enterprise itself.

  During the half-silent, half-joking, half-hour-long trek, Muriel had said that it was the first time for her to see, by night, some of the streets they strolled along. True: fearing they’d be mistaken for prowlers or prostitutes, Coloureds avoided the South End at night. Most lawful Negro faces in Dixie-side Halifax belonged to either daytime chimney sweeps or sleepover maids—figures from Disney’s Song of the South reconfigured for Disney’s Mary Poppins.

  Reaching Muriel’s building, Carl had to inhale, gamely, a gross stench of dank newspapers, dog piss, rat droppings, fried mackerel, stove oil, cat feces, boiled cabbage and vinegary sauerkraut, and the rank odours of people who have little reason to wash, and so don’t. (He had to recall, in part, his own boyhood barn lodgings.) The common, if desolate, perfumes of the penniless, the acrid bile of hunger and drunkenness, got spiced up by the Schwartz commercial scents that misted fine-ground pepper over some smells or, here and there, allowed a sweetening dollop of cinnamon. A special torture: to be starving and then get a whiff of the spices. The aromas would conjure up an invisible feast, thus stoking hunger to the point that a deluded wretch could slice off his nose.

  Despite the twitching of his nostrils—or, maybe, because they were flaring like a bull’s—Carl had traipsed close after Muriel. He’d trotted up the creaking, old-wood stairs and sidled into her cramped rooms, reeking of kerosene and long-downed greased-cardboard-plate meals of fish ’n’ chips, expecting that, soon, he’d be nosing her pungent woman scent. Sho nuff: clothes began to smell steamy—as if in a laundry—and then hot—as if under an iron. Carl ended up prone, on her bed, licking her where it was fine to lick. The circumstances legitimized her dirtiest dreams but suited the filth of the premises. (Pornography is autobiography, sometimes.) Yet, once climaxes subsided, Carl hurled himself from Muriel’s clasp, hauled on trousers and galoshes and sweater and coat, and then leapt down—two steps at a bound—the rancid staircase, back into the sharply clean night, praying that he and Muriel hadn’t just become Mom and Pop.

  (In 1959, Conception is a matter of numeracy—periods. Eves of courtship: sixty minutes of “hittin,” then a split-second of quittance before the generous, dangerous, male emission. In this era, a man lets fly while gambling that his seed don’t catch. One prays an instant of coitus don’t lead to nine months of anxiety and decades of regret.)

  Carl don’t want his sex odysseying to end with his being hog-tied to an unlettered maid. Though he’s a railway serf, he don’t wanna settle for a scullion. For Muriel. He’s gotta have someone—anyone—better.

  Someone like Marina White, the student nurse. She’s sinuous as a dollar sign, the secular side of a caduceus. Carl’d love to get her wine-sozzled, wobbly, so he can nail her ass to his bed like Luther hammering home his Ninety-Five Theses. To show the hoity-toity how to be hoochie-coochie nuff to please a truly gritty man. He want to grant her a “Ph.D.”—penis hard and deep—ASAP, never mind that B.Sc.!

  Certes: Marina’s university studies—in Nursing—will make her middle-class, if not an intellectual. In contrast, Carl’s broadsheet schoolin has made him an intellectual, but one who got grime—sometimes—on his face and calluses always on his hands.

  Carl guesses that if he can persuade Marina to have him, their children will be middle-class thanks to her pay, but high achievers thanks to his prodding (or so he thinks). Let her earn more than he: he’ll always be on top—if he can get her down—in bed.

  Too bad all these calculations make Love so unromantic, and so make it much more like a combo of sombre economics and foolhardy gambling. Yep, too bad. But not Carl’s fault.

  That Point Pleasant December night, out parking with “Allowishus”—what’s-his-face, whatever his dummy moniker (phony as Canadian Tire script)—Muriel was willing to see how far she could get ahead by tumbling, sprawling, in the humongous back seat. How much could her compliance, her kisses, her strokes and squeezes, “Golly gees,” wrench from a white man’s wallet? True: the hawk-nosed palooka had come off more as bungling rapist than big-spending Romeo. So, she’d been glad for Carl’s accidental rescue of her bod, and had been thrilled to see a white man falter in his arrogance toward a Coloured gal, and skedaddle in fright, but first plant his argyle socks and leather shoes in salty, corrosive slush.

  Exciting also was it to step through the chilly, smarting night, the Christmas-illuminated South End, Santa Claus–visited streets, with Carl, the beanpole, the straight-ties-and-narrow-thighs lad from school, always smart, always in the right grade and at the head of his class (The Head Boy, she thinks). Their breaths, jointly penetrating the night with personable white mist, were almost marital in their mingling. Too, Carl knew his way around, knew the city far better than she, though a South End–oriented maid. Muriel is proud that she doesn’t have to live “in serv
ice” with a white family, nursing the very babes that the head of the household might have made her bear so that he could then adopt them as a sign of his social-work benevolence, his tax-deductible, philanthropic, liberal Humanitarianism.

  So, even though Carl experiences Muriel’s scent-accented quarters as miasmic, swampy, pestilential, or as squeezed and constricted as tubercular lungs, for Muriel, it is that best of places: hers. Her kitchen, kitchen table, sink, window overlooking Cornwallis Street, bathroom adjacent to the kitchen, and bedroom off the kitchen, is a refuge—a redoubt—from the posh South End mansion where she must dress as a maid, clean and cook as a maid, kowtow as a maid, bend like a maid, stoop like a maid, and be furtively pinched and fondled as a maid. But here, in her own few rooms, with a hot plate and a squat fridge, a radio and a record player, a set of drawers and a laundry hamper, a closet stuffed with always-fashionable clothes and shoes, every inch is hers—albeit rented—and her bed is her palace. Outside her doors, a man might be a pig; but if she lets him into her quarters, he edges toward princely.

  Muriel’s actual Elegance don’t impress Carl. Following their lovemaking back then, he’d scrammed as if he’d been rusty-nail lacerated. Muriel had felt insult, even as his spunk had sunk deep into her, for she thought he ought to have felt blessed by her yielding of herself and her bed to him. After all, all that he had received had been her—hers. But she’d repressed Spite at being slighted, at Carl’s own scrambling, cockroach-like, from her lamplight into the cold, sordid darkness of the staircase to the street, for she knew—had always known—that he’d be back.

  After Carl’d interrupted Muriel’s near-rape (or an act sloppily, criminally similar) in a pasty fellow’s jalopy down Point Pleasant Park in December 1958, they’d got naked and noodled in her peppery quarters. It took his next bout with Muriel, back on February 3 (the same night Buddy Holly had his swan song, then swan dive), for Carl to learn that the gal could be extra elastic in her mores—in her amours. As flexible as is he, in his.