The Motorcyclist
Page 13
(America displays a Tiffany grace: sprinkle feces with diamonds, and who won’t buy? Here sacred cows and golden calves alike are struck dead, strung up, and stripped to bone. Tombstones double as tables, desks, even beds.)
Check out motorcycle dealers. Change oil. Meet two Colo(u)red mechanics. They have clean bikes, yes, but their shop be grimy, greasy, oily, smelly!
Cop cars throng this white marble capital. D.C. is part-prison and part–liquor-distillery. The channelled dust of Pennsylvania Avenue mocks every statue.
Nigh The White House sits a black ghetto. Pig Alley and Goat Alley—rat-traps and cat-houses—run, stinking, catercorner to The Rose Garden. Ironically, Benjamin Banneker, Negro astronomer, planned this city. His use of grids, circles, and triangles recalls Byzantine Istanbul. But cockroaches chip away at the marble.
Go to Bethesda, Md.; see dealer Miller. His fine BMW shop includes a spectacular, white R50, with a 5-gallon tank. In effect, a cop chopper.
Thunder through Vienna, along Gallows Road and Old Gallows Road. See only diamond shops.
Lunch at a French restaurant whose chartreuse advertisement features the chanteuse Mistinguett, her cinch’d waist boasting a bunch of lime-green Champagne grapes. Sip a cocktail that exhibits “a spirituous orange and caramel bouquet.” It sure do!
Back to D.C. Pass down M Street, bound over Rock Creek and enter Georgetown, home of Mr. & Mrs. John F. Kennedy. (Sen. Kennedy snagged an LLD from The University of New Brunswick in ’57. So, he’s an honorary Maritimer . . . Why I like him.)
On Wisconsin Avenue, near the white and gold, Greek Temple-like Farmers and Mechanics’ Bank, note the abode of Missy Anne, Tarot Card Reader. Who’ll be my wife: Marina or Avril? (In the shop window, a trapped brown moth beats its wings frantically against a copy of Robert Graves’s The White Goddess.)
Go to a white tourist home. Feel funny there. Not served in restaurant either. I make like Jesse Owens. Scram!
Am almost ready to rejoin pimps and prostitutes at poetic Dunbar. Instead, a Negro postman directs me to a Colo(u)red lodge at Constitution and Tennessee Ave. N.E.
Go there. Arrange with the lady on duty—a buxom sphinx from Virginia. Place is just like The Dunbar, except you take your own woman and pay for so many hours. (“Not painted ladies, but venerable,” the “elderessa”—60 et sexy—says.) Considerably clean, though, it is, with working radio and TV in the room: radio chained to wall; TV bolted to the floor. One way to rivet attention! (Pun!)
The postman arrives in his car, wanting to show me the sights. I say, “Thanks, anyway.” His name is U.S.-Negro-typical: Maurice Johnson. A lean, charming, white-haired gent.
Washington is a washout. Glimpse “Dirty Tricks” Nixon exiting the Supreme Court. Likely not for the last time.
Tuesday, June 16
Zip to Virginia Beach, Va., two hours south. Pass spine-tingling greenery. Geography with room for mirage.
Cross snow-white sand. At the ocean fringe, bright bikinis splash—by the dozens—into the white-edged, blue water. I eye through dark sunglasses. Nice! Combers stroke the shore like brushes on a snare drum.
Picnic on the beach. Dine on meat, cheese, ale. No excessive draughts of ale!
Mauve, ivory, rose, aquamarine, lemon, tangerine are popular pastels here—as if each colour has cream added, to render brilliant, harsh, original tints soft and velvety, as if bleached. Here, both black and white get reproduced as tan.
The Negro paper carries this poem: “Your sparkin eyes / Be diamond mines. / My mournful heart / Feels like someone’s / Squeezed it apart . . .” Marina!
Wednesday, June 17
North to N.Y.C.—Gotham City. White wool clouds don’t hinder the sunset.
In at 2:30 a.m. See a house fire. Piano falls, blazing, from window. Pianist jumps. A smash hit.
Reprimanded by cop for going wrong way on a one-way. Check in at Sloane House at W. 34th Street and 9th Avenue. Mile gauge reads 1,645. Gas bill = $2.34. Oil = $1.12.
Dream of Mar: Her brown hand splayed over her bare belly between black-lace bustier and white-lace panties so sheer I can see her pubic hair. (Legal in N.Y.C. since just last year.)
Morning news: Dolt electrocuted himself while trying to wire up high-voltage to exterminate rats. The 61-year-old Greenwich Village artist was found dead next to a 380-volt cable and metal spikes jabbed into his bathroom floor. No rodents were fried. Jolting!
(In New York, radio is the people’s parliament. Only act more popular than bugging God with prayer is begging fools for cash.)
Off to U.S. Post Office—for stamps. What an edifice! Paid $8 for 4-day parking at garage across street. Man there remembered me from last year. (Not many Canuck Coloured cyclists here!)
Orchestra ticket for Music Man: $8.50. Also, Standing Room Only ticket for My Fair Lady: $3.45.
Macy’s prices are high. Items are priced above those at smaller stores. Spent $52, and still didn’t fill gift list. Did buy haberdashery for myself: my fashion passion, I guess.
See large party on at Rockefeller Center. Jukebox blasts jazzy chaos. Ginsberg’s Howl as interpreted by Howlin’ Wolf.
To the Museum of Modern Art: 75¢ admission. Hours there. See works by Picasso, Lautrec, Gauguin, etc. Some works look spectacularly absurd, but intriguing. Lunch at the Museum’s Tea Room. Chicken, apple pie, ice cream. Fine meal @ $2. I swear I’ll show Avril my art.
Visit a rubber ware show at U.S. Rubber Co. building. See process of making condoms: life savers. Inspiration for “lays.” (Pun!) Buy a few. (Never enough?)
En route to theatre, stop outside the Rivoli (where I’d seen South Pacific last fall). Watch celebrities arrive for the world premiere of John Paul Jones. See a tall blonde—can’t make out who she is. (Marisa Pavan?) See a crowd out to see (France’s) Brigitte Bardot in Mam’zelle Striptease and (Quebec’s) Lili St. Cyr in Josette from New Orleans.
(Burlesque is Film Noir as Romance, eh? Strippers always attract an audience, which seems bizarre, for female essentials never change. But different women wear what they got—reveal what they boast—differently. One woman’s asset is another woman’s tease? Explains all.)
To Imperial Theatre in time for curtain: Jamaica, starring Lena Horne and Ric Montalban. Superb! Sadly, the house ain’t packed. Too bad: the magic of this musical comedy exceeds my descriptive capabilities. Bought Lena Horne at the Cocoanut Grove. Like buying Belafonte crooning of the Caribbean. (Memory of Dear—Gone or Strayed or Lost—Dad.)
After, Broadway is lousy with cops and bogged down by limos. Gay atmosphere: this city is so shiny that its condemned killers must positively glow in their electric chairs. New York is like Halifax: a bad town for good women, but a good town for bad ones.
Read about Negro rapist Goodfellow. Being walked, flanked by two jailers, across Sing Sing prison yard to his hot date with electric chair, Goodfellow suffers lightning strike. He got incinerated—yes, but ahead of schedule. His guards, handcuffed to him, died of shock.
Meet a young singer and husband—from Head-Smashed-In Buffalo Jump, Alberta! Only in N.Y.C.
Walking to the Apollo Theater, see Carnegie Hall and The Met. (Watch Rudolf Bing serve coffee to a long line of Met patrons. Opening night: Tosca! The big shots parade.)
Eye flicks at the famous Apollo Theater on W. 42nd Street: No Sun in Venice (Roger Vadim, 1957) and Fire Under Her Skin (Marcel Blistène, 1954): French and sexy. No flim-flam. Couples act out obscenities, ass over heels, hand over fist.
Thursday, June 18
Write/dispatch about 10 postcards home. Breakfast in Sloane cafeteria.
Meet a student, ex Hong Kong, nigh Red China: Bob Soong. Nice guy. Good chat—geopolitics and the humanities. Also meet a Negro Pennsylvanian who studies. Wondered if I did too.
Sunshine on and off in morn. Later, overcast and rainy cool. Tramp in chill and damp.
Hike down the tip of Manhattan—through The Bowery, Greenwich Village, etc. Visit Cooper Union Museum: fascinating articles on display. Old obj
ects—from huge urns to small antiques and sketches.
Survey the Lionel (train) display rooms on E. 26th St.: felt “transported.” (Pun!)
Go up the Empire State Building at dusk: a grand view. Dusty light. 3/4 light. Next, spy almost intolerable gaudiness of neon. Elevated levels of luminescence.
Dine at The Taft. Order a supremely delicious avocado salad (salted and buttered), followed by tea-smoked duck, kept moist by a pleasantly dry red wine (1959 Château Leoville-Las-Cases “Grand Vin de Leoville du Marquis de Las Cases,” of Saint-Julien, France). Could drink this wine all night. Next, ogle Zahara on the hotel’s belly-dancer stage. She cavorts without prudery. What top-drawer, costume lingerie! (“Nothing makes a woman more feminine to a man.”)
Back to the Apollo. See The Way Out (1956): Gene Nelson’s acting is phony. A German film, The Third Sex (Das Dritte Goschlecht, 1957), lives up to my expectation: patently disgusting (if true)!
Buy a frankfurter from a cart. Muse on third sex: reality? Back to Sloane at midnight.
Friday, June 19
Dawn sun opes mine eyes. Breakfast in cafeteria. Regain Liz II. Away by 9:35 a.m.
Proceed to F.D.R. Drive, cross bridge to Long Island. Find Port Washington easily. A Coloured man on a black Harley gives directions to Butler & Smith.
En route, I visit Ghost Motorcycle: a fine set-up, busy. Owner’s son, Sal, is a swell dude (like dad). Sells me a chrome headlight cheap. Gives me a free BMW T-shirt.
At Butler & Smith, ask about R60 to R69 conversion. Find it’s “impossible, impractical, and altogether out of the question.” (Good buddy Sandy MacKay will have to stick to his Harley! Anyway, as a machinist, Sandy can modify it further; he already gets 100 mph at 7,000 rpm. He’s a rich man’s son, could just live off the old man’s portfolio, but bikers respect him because he dirties his hands, tinkering, retooling, repairing, etc., acting a truly “Popular Mechanic.” Sandy doesn’t care if all anyone ever sees of his machine is the “ass-end,” for that means he’s ahead and they’re behind. But he’s not usually a show-off or daredevil. Never as immaculate as his income could permit, his hero is Howard Hughes—the millionaire with a mechanic’s brain, even designing a “cantilevered” bra. When I dreamt up the Halifax Motorcyclists logo—a variation on Goodyear’s, save that a winged wheel replaces the winged foot, it was Sandy who footed [pun!] the bill for all the letterhead printing and fabricating as a device to be affixed to leather jackets.)
Cross Brooklyn Bridge. What a span, man! (Whitman didn’t write that!) Take steak dinner at Cobb’s Corner restaurant at 45th and Broadway.
Go to the Majestic Theatre; see Bob Preston and Barb Cooke (who lost her voice shortly before the end of the 1st act; replaced by her understudy). Music Man thrashes My Fair Lady—perhaps with a black, wasp-like, riding crop!
Buy lovely gilded earrings. For Avril. My Sin fragrance. For Mar. The identical perfume for Mom.
See Look Homeward, Angel at Ethel Barrymore Theater on W. 47th St. A Pulitzer Prize winner. Thoroughly enjoy it: brothels are always merry! Occupational necessity?
Subway to 125th: Amble Harlem. Gaze at the Harlem River.
Drop into the Apollo Theater. See finest Rhythm and Blues show EVER. Lewis Lyman and the Teenchords, Larry Williams, “Baby” Washington, The Pastels, John Bubbles, The Hines Kids, and Ed Townsend. I drowsed through 1 or 2 numbers, but they were all cool, man! A gas to absorb with the all-Negro audience. Exciting!
At Sloane round midnight. Slight rain tonight. Milky light.
Saturday, June 20
Up at 7:30 a.m. Breakfast at The Y Cafeteria. Pick up souvenirs on 34th Street.
Exit garage at 11:15 a.m. So much rain, it jointly massages and savages. 1,654 on the mileage gauge. Roll through the suburbs—pampered hinterland of Gotham City.
Meet two Jersey boys heading to Laconia, N.H. Happy when they ask me to lead. (They weren’t sure of the way; well, neither was I.)
Put rubber to asphalt; snap into wind. Pass every luxury car: working-class revenge! Nice to roll from city to city in a train of bikes.
Introductions at a station. (Spend $1.95 on gas.) Shake hands with Frank Glass and Dallas (no known surname; it’s not “Texas”). Frank is a runty, taciturn guy with a rat-tail hairdo. Dallas looks as fit as a moose, but his words stumble round his smokes.
Weather is sad. Gusts of water stream down our backs. Clears up as we near Laconia. Only a steamy fog as we enter town. (No fog smothers mountains.)
Rendezvous at eatery on Main. Have fantastic stew—and hot, butter-slathered biscuits. Plus unprecedented Presidente beer.
Later, Frank, Dallas, and I find a rooming place—a sorry property: $5 for 3 people. Not bad price-wise, but the room reeks of disinfectant and bug repellent.
We share beneficial alcohol. I undoubtedly seize his Jack Daniel’s from Frank. An indubitable drink. (Better than Dubonnet, eh?)
Dallas shows off photos of Venice, Italy, last January: The city was icy with snow. Spires and statues glittered with diamond frosting. Canals were frozen solid and the trapped gondoliers were complaining. Usually black, the gondolas looked albino. The piazza’s pigeons pecked at snow-frosted bread crumbs.
Next, Dallas hands round poontang snaps—“better souvenirs from Europe.” Frank blurts, “If it was me, I’d wiggle it up and down, side to side.” Dallas shows off the rubber in his wallet: “Guy’s gotta be careful in copulatin.”
Hit bed at 11:30 p.m. Bone-tired, dog-tired, just plain tired. This night, fireflies shed more useful light than stars.
Sunday, June 21(!)
Dawn is bright and early. Had a hard time gettin covers last night, what with Frankie and Dallas hoggin all the blankets.
Breakfast in town. My N.J. friends meet a couple more of their N.Y. friends today.
En route to the train station—now also a motorcycle shop—Ez Walcott overtakes me: “Sure good to see a face from home, let me tell you!” Unexpected meeting. An old Haligonian pal, Ez just got out of jail on a Sedition beef. Circulated cartoons—in Jamaica—derogatory of Prince Philip.
At the station, we check out bikes on display and buy A.M.A. memberships. I join AGAIN and receive a silver belt buckle. Then, Ez and I snap many photos of the assembled bikes—and of various motorcycle clubs (pointedly, patently, not gangs).
Then, Ez and I go into the motorcycle shop to chat with salesgirl Cathy (Fearon)—a sad, weird, superbly beautiful, tall, black-eyed blonde, with ice-cream-smooth skin. Flower-child farm girl. No wonder the shop carries on considerable commerce. (The pungent machinery of the display bikes out back, oiled, running smooth, hypnotizes.)
Behind the counter, Cathy wears a tight white T-shirt and ultra-tight black shorts. Her face gleams honey; her limbs are gold.
Ezra asks her for a kiss. She gives him a candy cane.
She tells me my teeth are “lovely.” She says she’ll think of me (or, really, my teeth) often.
Our four bikes dodge rocks and trees, down a long gap to the highway. I lead the boys back to town so we can gunk our machines for free at a local service station. (They nickname me “Blast Off” due to my speed and “punny” wit.)
After gunking our bikes, we start to wind up Belknap Mountain to see the sights and view a few races. (The mountain’s murder for an unwary rider.) We’re in time for Laconia Motorcycle Week, to view the machines competing at the Gunstock ski grounds.
We huddle, hunker, on the edge of an enormous forest, pure miles and miles of mosquitoes and trees. A swallow, just one, swoops past. Fill our canteens, scooping water from a hillside, gin-clear stream. Swig chilled, honeyed drink. Swallow.
(Dallas hands round another dirty snap. We all think no doubt about Cathy: how pretty such a scene could be.)
Over at Belknap, BMW put on no grand display this year. But the Ducati people show some spidery machines—Italian grace.
The lightweight races seize us. One guy, out in front, suffers a humiliating spill. His bike swishes on still-wet grass. The operator jackknif
es into the air, but lands—uncomfortably but unhurt—on his butt. He stands, staggers, wobbly. (Can’t help mourn last year—Mactaquac, N.B.—Mack’s death.)
Later, in a big race, another fellow crashes—in almost the same place. Metal sorely, brusquely, rips his body. Cracks his noggin gainst a rock: almost pokes an eye out. (The injured man’s oozing skull summons the helicopter ambulance. It sashays down, plucks him up.)
Belknap’s races underway at 1 p.m. 100 miles go first—because of storm clouds. Exhilarating contest: Dick Musson (BSA) leads for many laps, only to find an empty track, which lets Bear Andrews win.
During the race, a press photographer snaps 2 or 3 pix of me in my aviator sunglasses. (Must catch tomorrow’s local newspapers.) Like all journalists, he’s a pudgy alcoholic, but with alcohol-polished, brilliant white teeth.
Later, a series of ills—the plug and the clutch acting up, Frank losing his knapsack, Ez going to get his—splits us. We regroup, but Frank and Dallas decide they’ll sleep outside with their hometown friends—even though pouring rain is due.
(I won’t sleep out in these elements. Too easy to either drown or wake with pneumonia.)
Ezra agrees to stay with me in Laconia for half of $5. I’m glad of that, but I’ll leave early, to start for Halifax.