As a child, Carl’s only other “Negro” hero was Batman. A white man by day, but a black avenger—leather-fisted brawler—at night. Carl viewed the comic book superhero as a modern type of Nat Turner, the swashbuckling swordsman and prophet who had campaigned bloodily for slave revolution in Virginia in 1831. A courageous and righteously Gothic dude.
But as a motorcyclist, Carl looks up to only one, if dead, man: T.E. Lawrence—writer, artist, war hero, camel jockey, and motorcyclist—the Batman, so to speak, of Arabia.
Astride the BMW, even when he’s bent over the fuel tank, trying to duck the tonguing wind that washes under, over, around his helmet and his jacket, Carl feels erect, like a gunfighter in full gallop, streamlining with his stallion, ready for the showdown, the high-noon or midnight fray. His legs are sturdy wishbones and his arms are Frankenstein-monster outstretched and steel-hard. His manhood too, even at rest, is cocked. Liz II, his “queen of queans,” transforms Carl into a black-leather Priapus, a dark roustabout darting cupidic, or so he doth believe.
Aboard that machine, he imagines that he’s Jesse Owens, streaking always to Victory, with style, with panache, with a kind word for all women and any and every tipper. Liberation is going, floating, flying; i.e., feeling actually free.
With polysyllables and a whistle at his lips, eight-millimetre sex loops in his head, the wind and Wagner in his ears, crisp bucks in his pockets, and a motorcycle as jockstrap, Carl is ready to sally forth, to seduce as many (milk-white) ladies as he may. He plans to introduce the motorcyclist Lawrence of Arabia to the plushest bedrooms of mainland Nova Scotia, wherever swagger and deft heft are welcomed. Carl will borrow the cap and garb of Rommel—The Desert Fox—to be a man of action, never Alienation. To lay down ladies, not lay down switchblade-rumble-in-dark-alleys Nihilism. Vroom! Va-va-voom!
TOUR II
Take from beauty ultimate beauty
and from truth ultimate truth . . .
and from femininity tenderest tenderness. . . .
—JUHAN LIIV, “THE LAST CHANCE”
Wednesday, May 13
After his May 9th cruise with mercurial Muriel, Carl sets his heart a-ramblin—as is his wont. The women swirling past his dark sunglasses seem delectable bonbons in rainbow-colourful sheathes. Even a repugnant face becomes acceptable if heading and fronting a curvaceous physique. Loose morals make a tight butt way more enticing.
Carl’s aesthetic is, luckily, portable—and instantly applicable—as in his on-and-off flirtation with Laura “Blue Roses” States. Carl spies her at the Chinese-operated Sunrise Café on Gottingen, south of Cornwallis, facing the Vogue Cinema. She’s in from out of town (up Windsor way, where the States clan—of ex–U.S. slave descent—settled). He pulls Liz II over, letting the engine’s rumble vibrate the restaurant windows: to broadcast his fanfare, as if he were Queen Liz, cross-dressed, exchangin royal-purple satin for Lumpen black leather.
Carl enters the door as if parting a theatre curtain. He’s on stage now. Laura sits in a booth by the front window. She wears a flirty skirt; plaid pleats flatter her thighs and ivory legs. Carl grins into her face: she smiles into his mirror sunglasses. She seems invitingly guileless, and yet—as Carl knows—she hides her limp, just like Laura “Blue Roses” Wingfield in Tennessee Williams’s play The Glass Menagerie. She is about to stand when Carl, the gentleman, tells her, “Relax,” then slides into the booth, sitting opposite her. So the States girl perches: her hair, an exciting ponytail, flops up and down. Spiting her handicap, she moves as fluidly as water. Yes, she has a limp, but the extra rubber piece on one heel—the right—grants her posture an illusion of equilibrium. Carl studies an ever-radiant face, a Marilyn Monroe beauty spot off one Shirley Temple dimple. Her skin is pass-for-white cream, but Laura’s dark sable eyes hint at her Negro cum Micmac mix. Carl is surprised to find her here, this Wednesday, for he knows that she’s at the teachers’ college in Truro, an hour away by train or by car. Why she gracing Halifax t’day?
“Spent a winter cooped up in Truro. It’s big for a town, but still just the right size for small minds. Teachers’ college is done. Time to kick up my heels in Halifax.”
Carl flashes his teeth: How can “Blue Roses” kick up her heels easily?
“Finish your Coke float! I’ll float you on my bike.”
“Right away, alligator!” She wrongs the slang, but her error is endearing. Laura even flutters her eyelashes—as if she’s taken Gone with the Wind as a tutorial in Southernly seduction.
But Laura’s mistake is intentional. She likes the slick, eligible bachelor, and is very pleased he’s noticed her. From the perspective of Bay Street, or Wall Street, or London’s City, Carlyle Black is a nobody and worth nothing. As a teacher-trainee, however, Laura lauds all who complete Grades Ten to Twelve. Carl Black is a high school dropout—a plain fact. Having finished Grade Ten, though, Carl exceeds the average Coloured Scotian and the Coloured Scotian average. Carl be, then, a good local catch—an iridescent, marine-sleek being.
The motorcyclist studies the light-complected, secret-Negress brunette: she mirrors the Columbia Pictures goddess, the icon holding aloft a torch—La Liberté guidant le peuple.
Politely jarring the Sunset Café door open for Laura, thus facilitating her egress to “Got-a-gun” Street, Carl is able to observe the extra perky swish of bottom and skirt that her uneven walk creates. Her see-saw step mimics a Hollywood sexpot’s red-carpet strut.
Carl proposes a spin to Miss States’s homestead, i.e., Windsor. Despite probable wet weather, Laura agrees.
She’s a trouper, Carl wagers, to face such imminently inclement conditions: but Laura says she’s a farm girl who can face the elements, the looming black clusters of clouds. The afternoon copies an English April: dismal, smoky, chilly. They board the bike and go, but sudden wet turns tires spongy. Wind raises clay-splintering cold. Slab upon slab of rain makes for intense work, hard going. Still, the two wheel two wheels to Windsor. Then, rain ends. The highway looks a gold-brick beauty. After the jolting ride, arrival finds the pair groggy, feeling a perfect chill, and Laura’s garments—sweater, blouse, and skirt—are see-through wet. Still, her skin looks a milk bath. Her black hair flares over her shoulders and bosom. Her beguiling scent washes over Carl lightly, loosely, almost erasing the clinging saltiness of fog, the silvery damp they passed through miles back, round St. Croix and then Three Mile Plains.
Sure: the trip means silly driving. Windsor is just a bush-league, rained-out Windsor, England. Unwelcoming. The Avon—Shakespearean—River mud flats, usually ochre, look gory, now engorged with rain and pitted by the splattering gouts. The Windsor Wear factory workers, released from spinning cotton into delicates and denim, mill about the riverfront, dreaming of rainbow panties or drab underpants in which to outfit the uncaring cadavers in the Windsor Funeral Home. A Victorian, red-brick hotel bleeds red rain, while ivy vaults across its back, shielding the Nova Scotia Liquor Commission outlet from teetotallers and the casual bordello above it from wives. (Entertaining it is to stand in line to buy a beer here while listening for the tart squeals and bedspring squeaks that penetrate the ceiling as bottles clank into boxes and coins clink into hands.)
The motorcycling pair takes tea and sandwiches at a café on Avon Street, bordering the Avon River. Gee, they feel just fine. Conversation is quips, puns, jokes, and gossip. But it’s rainy, foggy, again, all this evening. The sky’s dreary velvet. Mists of cloud swamp early stars.
The journey back to Halifax—to lights and shadows wobbling upon the harbour—sees Carl and Laura tunnel through fog. Carl’s headlight shines a queer, pinpoint brilliance that’s almost futile.
Back in Halifax, they feel frozen. A cold, miserable night. The fog drops like snow; rain drills down pointedly like icicles.
Laura jests, “There was so much rain today, I don’t need to get a tan. I can just stand around and rust.”
Carl laughs heartily: he wonders if Laura intends the pun on stand. Even with the half-inch extension co
bbled on the right shoe heel, there’s something courageous about her limp. Now, they’re kissing hotly. But curtly.
Laura shivers. “Shouldn’t we be getting someplace warm?”
Carl jets Laura to the Poesis Restaurant. They’re starved after their trip—and then those kisses. They have fish and chips, with green-tomato chow-chow garnish, then lyrical custard and melancholy wine. Next: time to eat tea. Carl scrutinizes her physique, but Laura is as elusive as Confucius. She seems to like him, but Carl can’t coax more from her than smiles and lively laughs. He’s met now a Coloured woman who welcomes his humour. His dark face grins back pallidly from a china plate.
Afterward, agreeably, Laura rides with Carl into the glassy smoke of night. He swerves the thoughtful beauty through cloudy indigo to her temporary quarters at Princess Place. All about them, fragrant apple blossoms flounce.
Nervous, Carl swallows hard. He asks “Blue Roses” back to his place, finally. No more dodging. But she says she’s bushed. He tries to hug her, and he can, but still she feels ungraspable—like a dream evaporating in cigarette smoke. She turns and leaves.
Dejected, Carl zooms uptown but runs out of gas on Robie Street. He gotta jog to a service station to pick up more. His feet squish through minor puddles at every step.
Back at his place, Despair daunts Carl. Loveless, wifeless, childless, shiftless, and worthless (though not penniless): that’s him summed up. By his own account. Uninviting is his cold bed after Laura, hugging, was so warm. Warm as red wine and buttered toast.
Too damn lonely, he tunes in CJCH, The Hit Parade, and audits the whine and gasp of crooners, some songs as clear and as mysterious as lingerie. Then, even though jazz does not please him, unlike classical music, Charlie Parker’s tune “Laura” slips him into a dream.
It bests anything imagined in the adventures of author Lawrence’s “Shady Slatternly”: Laura begs Carl to stick his paintbrush in her inkpot. He does. Soon she’s an eel wriggling at the point of his spear. Her wide mouth, those pomegranate-red lips agape, cry such sweet love, his blues turn to Bliss. She’s a pretty queen: gleaming brown eyes; the smell of a mint-scented lynx; fine, vanilla ice-cream skin; crystalline speech.
Carl awakes; a milky scent saturates the room. But now he hears Herbert W. Armstrong trumpeting Damnation all the way from “beautiful, downtown Pasadena, California.” Carl doesn’t crave Penance; no, he feels like taking nurse Marina and having maid Muriel and giving a nice slice of himself to teacher Laura.
Restless, Carl opens up Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer. The U.S.-banned but sailor-circulated (contraband) novel is like a study of his dream life: Lust, ladies, liquor. And Love, but only if it entails Liberation, s’il vous plait!
Laura is sad to spurn Carl’s company after the damp but truly transporting evening. But a man must not know a woman, or know all about her, too soon. Nor does she feel obligated to bat her eyelids for just one beau.
As a teen, not too many birthdays behind her, Laura’d been bewitched by the Negro chaps off the gypsum boats plying the Caribbean, the Bay of Fundy, and the Minas Basin, ricocheting (lazily, very lazily) among the British West Indies and the Dominion of Canada, all ports of enlightened, easygoin Buckingham-Palace rule, plus hard drinking. Sweet it was for Laura to escape the gruff, untutored embraces of country bumpkins. Instead of suffering those clod-hopper, two-left-hayseed feet, she could waltz with a walnut-handsome foreigner, in town to exchange sugar for gypsum and a Cuba libre for a kiss. Nor did such ocean cruisers “tsk-tsk” at the sight of her slight deformity. Rather, they eyed a petite, buxom lady, whose mixed-blood might have dismayed segregationists, but whose complexion was translucent, whose rump was pointue in the patented African fashion, and whose hair compiled scalloped curls.
For her part, Laura likes to press her ivory face against a cocoa-coloured or iron-coloured man’s face. But she also wants to help uplift Scotianer Baptists by securing a teaching post, now that, as with nursing, the opportunity is open to provincial Coloured ladies. Took a lot of fuss and fight to open outward those white-collar, once pink-face-only professions.
Yet, unlike Marina White, who also hails from Windsor, N.S., and is a co-religionist with “Blue Roses,” Laura welcomes the courtesies of illiterates, so long as they’re not also dolts. Okay: she’d reject the hand of any uncouth, ill-mannered, badly dressed, ill-coiffed, or poor-mouthed Negro. Yet, her dances with lonesome but black, handsome sailors docked in the anti-Negro, crucifix-burning town of Windsor has taught her not all personable and enchanting Island lads are sons of lawyers, engineers, or doctors, that triumvirate of bourgeois nobility. Thus, she is as willing to date a Jamaican deck-swabber as she is to date, say, a fellow like Leicester Jenkins, M.D.-to-be, who’s scheming to fit in some Bluenose gynecological “cramming,” before steaming home to doctor Grenadian vaginas.
Not to say that Laura considers maid Muriel her equal. Au contraire: she knows she has options—choices—that Grade Three–schooled Muriel can only lip-read about while fingering borrowed Harlequin romances. Laura won’t lord it over most guys, even if she is their superior in terms of education and (eventual) salary, but she asserts her superiority to most Coloured women, due to her cream complexion, her college reading (John Milton, y’all, not just Mickey Spillane), her poise and elocution, and her fashion sense to garb herself so that her limp becomes a prop. A man sees, eyeing her, a Calder mobile, a Picasso-cubist-clothed nude, whose curves play one riveting jiggle upon another.
Laura need not compete with Marina or Muriel for male Negro courtship. Her only rivals can only be real white girls—schooled in chat and talcum-powdered of skin, and whose chewing gum is really Goldschläger’s gold flakes, the additive that makes that schnapps a veritable, tax-deductible Pleasure.
Saturday, May 16
Up north from Mar’s place, Carl spies “Blue Roses”: so lovely—all-day and all-night lovely. She stands outside Halifax Motorcycle Shoppe, chattin with Corkum. This good-lookin cookie’s been lookin for Carl. She’s in town just for the day (now night) and wonders if he might take her for a treat before she vacates to Truro tomorrow.
Carl says, “Hop on.” Goodbye, Corkum. (He hopes that the married man envies him for transporting—sporting about with—yet another lady today.)
Again Carl asks Laura if she’d just like to come back to 1½ Belle Aire Terrace since it is late—already eight p.m.
“Yes!”
A delectable answer.
(He’s planned—promised—to call Mar. Instead, Carl has Laura. And he’ll have Laura now, and he’ll try Muriel tomorrow.)
After a “beauty” run, a spin, just for looks, for kicks, through the night-darkened city, the harbour waves rushing up inky and ivory, the houses blinking blinds and curtains and yellow light upon the streets, the maples and chestnuts waving in their boulevard formations, the pair scoot finally to Belle Aire Terrace—B.A.T. (Bountiful Action Tonight), the lair of a truly black Batman. Here, Carl unfurls the art of the proletarian gourmet, serving smoked oysters on crackers, olives with cheese, olive loaf (with pimento), and red wine in two glasses, and sets Yma Sumac on the turntable and candles on the coffee table. It’s all good. They’re all in. Bongos and maracas await.
They talk. They kiss. Nothin ain’t arousin.
Then, they hie to bed. He is fire; she is cream. He is Mozart; she is Motown. When full-bore climax hits, and Carl cries out, “Cripes! Laura! Cripes!” he understands why she has the same name as Petrarch’s Laura. He sees her face behind his shut eyes as he sinks between this Laura’s thighs. It’s all “ooh-la-la” and “oh-oh-oh”! Can’t sleep. So they do it again.
Not ambivalent, but ambidextrous is their coupling. Finally, it is ambiguous, so neither is sure who is giving, who is receiving. Carl wonders whether Marina could ever feel this good. He don’t bother to compare Laura to Muriel. “Blue Roses” is—joint—ecstasy, and she seems as oblivious to any misgivings as he is now to her right leg that’s a tad shorter than the left.
&n
bsp; Laura deems Sex as healthy and healing. A student teacher, she’s savvy, but her only contraceptive is rhythm method. Carl didn’t find a rubber to don, but Laura holds she’s safe from conceiving. Yet, were she to carry a child for Carl—a Negro with Grade Ten, a lustrous pedigree (Aunt Pretty and Grandpa Waters), his own apartment, and a steady job—she wouldn’t rue this fate, for he’s a match, compared to the freckled, feckless hicks of Windsor and the unlettered lechers of Africville-Beechville-Cobequid-Lucasville-Preston and the gypsum boats. Carl’s cedar-and-ebony complexion dazzles; his speech and smile are snazzy. What’s not to like?
Carl trusts that Miss States is in no rush to become Mrs. Black. He likes Laura, sure, but he wants Marina, to prove he merits the student nurse’s committed Passion.
Despite romancing moist, pliable Muriel, plus difficult, if teasing Marina, plus comme-ci-comme-ça, seldom-about Laura, Carl begins to court a vanilla-ice-cream-complexion woman, Avril Phaedra Beauchamps, an American student. As a Mississippian, studying Nursing at Dalhousie, Avril enjoys her present liberty to ogle Coloured guys. Though Negro women revile her for her Presumption, none speak any word directly to—or against—her. After all, they could end up having to work for her, should she form a household with a Halifax (white) man and produce a crop of pinkish cherubs.
Like Marina, she’s a student nurse. But Avril is also starkly not like Marina, for she need not bear the burden of symbolizing Venus as Virgin. Hailing from magnolia-hypnotic, if homicidal, Mississippi, her yen for Coloured gents would be a death wish in the South. She is twenty-one, flashes gold hair, green eyes, scarlet lips, and is plush enough to dispatch a thousand brothers of Emmett Till (the bashed-up Negro version of the carved-up “Black Dahlia”) to lynching trees, just for glancing her way. She’s a plump ringer for Disney’s Sleeping Beauty, but she’s no devotee of Disney Morality, which would outfit Sleeping Beauty in a chastity belt and a straitjacket.
The Motorcyclist Page 9