A HERO OF THE ROAD
by
Peter Nolan Smith
Anybody can jump a motorcycle. The trouble begins when you try to land it. – Evel Knieval
MANGOZEEN BOOKS 2022
CHAPTER 1
A lice infestation swept through southern Maine in the winter of 1958 and every school district mandated crew cuts for all the boys without explaining why girls were exempt from this edict. Every Sunday night my father sheared his sons’ scalps to the bone with electric clippers and once we passed my mother’s inspection for ‘cooties’, my older brother and I ran into the living room to watch DAVY CROCKETT on TV.
Millions of adolescent boys idolized the frontiersman, although our devotion was dedicated to Fess Parker’s Disney character rather than the slaver Tennessee Senator martyred at the Alamo. We wore coonskin caps and sang the theme song on the school bus to Underwood Primary School. No one, not even our parents, could tell the boys in the school apart from each other in our identical outfits.
On the 4th of July 1958 my parents loaded our Ford station wagon for a drive to the seashore. My father had installed aluminum bars across the rear windows to prevent his children from falling out of the car. My grandmother Edith joked that we were the youngest reform school residents in the State of Maine. My mother didn’t find her comment funny. Four kids were a handful and she had another one on the way.
That weekend Old Orchard Beach was crowded with Canadian tourists, families from Portland, and local residents. The cold Atlantic washed the sand clean under a hot sun. By late afternoon my two younger sisters’ skins radiated with a pink bordering on red and our parents called it a day for the beach. My brother and I rushed to the bathhouse, because Old Orchard had more to offer than an ocean. Dressed in identical jeans and Davy Crockett tee-shirts, we ran out of the bathhouse to our father, who lifted his hands.
“Calm down.”
“Yes, sir.” We respected his commands, especially when they were in our best interests. He looked over his shoulder to the amusement park.
“Are you ready for a little fun?”
“Yes, sir,”
Silvery stars sparkled over the darkening Atlantic beyond Old Orchard’s pier. My father accompanied us on the Mighty Mouse coaster ride and the three of us screamed on the turns. My older brother got lost in Noah’s Ark funhouse and I cut my knee on the giant slide. The carousel was the only ride my mother considered safe for my sisters.
At the arcade I failed to knock over milk bottles with three baseballs. My strikes barely wobbled the targets, while teenage boys won Kewpie dolls for pony-tailed girlfriends, who rewarded their prowess with kisses from candy-colored lips.
“What you looking at?” my brother asked holding a bag of popcorn.
“Nothing.”
I cringed inside my Davy Crockett shirt, for ‘bein’ born on a mountaintop in Tennessee’ suddenly ceased to be more important as knowing the words to the Platters’ YAKKETY-YAK.
“Yeah, nothing.” My brother understood the desire to be older.
“Let me have a go at this.” My father’s strength matched by his aim and his second throw cleared the dais. He had won a stuffed dog for my mother.
“Who’s hungry?”
“We are.” My brother and I walked away from the White Way.
Our family queued at the take-out counter of Gordon’s restaurant, our mouths watering in anticipation of golden fried clams, French fries, and cold Cokes.
A roaring thunder stopped my father’s order in mid-sentence. Ten motorcycles rumbled down East Grand Street and screeched to a halt before the restaurant. Their riders sported dirty leather jackets and oil-smeared jeans. Sideburns skated down their cheeks and they strode along the sidewalk, as if they had inherited the world from the meek.
“We better go?” My mother spirited us into the family station wagon.
“Why?”
“Because those thugs are trouble,” my mother answered with no uncertainty and a uniformed policeman ran from the Whiteway to shout, “You scum better be moving along.”
“We ain’t breakin” no laws,” the twenty year-old with a Mohawk replied, leaning on the metal counter. “All we want is ice cream.”
“Then go down to Saco and get some with the rest of your white trash friends.” Saco was a factory town. “Scum like you are welcome there, but not here.”
“I thought this was a free country.” The biker defiantly stood his ground.
“Not for your type.” Another policeman arrived, tapping his billyclub into an open palm.
“Our type?” The biker with the Mohawk examined our station wagon.
“Guess Old Orchard is for squares. Let’s go, boys.”
Even at age six I knew that squares were uncool and the Davy Crockett shirt crawled on my skin. The bikers mounted their motorcycles and revved the engines. Our station wagon vibrated with each twist of the gas. The Mohawk biker pointed at the aluminum bars and said with a gap-toothed smile, “Don’t worry, kid, you’ll escape that jail wagon soon enough.”
My hero worship of Davy Crockett died in the bikers’ swirling nebula of high-octane exhaust.
“We’re going home,” my mother told my father.
“What about the fireworks?”
“We’re going. No telling what other trash is hanging around Old Orchard.”
My father to drove away from the White Way. We ate fried clams in the car. I kept looking over my shoulder for the single headlights of the motorcycles. All I saw were cars, then againSaco was in the opposite direction our home on Falmouth Foresides. That night I asked my father about motorcycles.
“I never had one, but your Uncle Russ bought one after he returned from Japan.” Russ had been stationed in Nagasaki after the surrender. “He was a good driver, but his older brother wanted to try. He had never taken a lesson and drove down the street straight into a stone wall. He broke his leg and still walks with a limp.”
My mother had overheard our conversation and said sternly, “No son of mine will ever ride a one of those devil machines. Say your prayers and go to sleep.”
The next morning my mother burned our blue jeans. The fire saved my brother and sisters, but the blaze came too late for my soul. I attached baseball cards to my bike’s rear wheel. Their flapping over the spokes imitated a motorcycle. My best friend, Cheney, copied this style.
We called ourselves the Seagulls and I asked my father to give me a Mohawk. A buzz-cut was the only style available in our house.
Within a week both my knees were scrapped skinless by a failed attempts to leap over a garbage can and my head was scarred by a failed wheelie off a bluff overlooking Portland Harbor at the end of our street.
My mother threatened to take away my bike. My father said it was simply a phase, because any Pine Tree State native understood there were two seasons in Maine. One of good biking and the other of bad biking. A late October blizzard covered the streets of Falmouth Foresides with a thick snow. My bike was retired to the garage and the tattered baseball cards were freed from the wheels. I kept one. Pete Runnel, the Red Sox ace fielder.
The next summer my father announced his promotion to a better job in Boston. The move brought my mother closer to her family in Jamaica Plains. I was sad to leave the coast of Maine and Cheney. He waved good-bye from the lawn.
Our home was a pink split-level ranch house in the Blue Hills. The next-door neighbors were Italians. Mrs. Manzi cooked lasagna once a week.
Chaney drowned in June. My mother promised I would get over it. I never have.
My father took my brother, Chuckie Manzi and, me to Fenway Park. Pete Runnel hit a home run over the Green Monster. We ate three dogs each. On the weekends my father drove us to Nantasket Beach for a weekly swim with cousins. My desire to be a biker was an unshared secret. I walked through the woods to the Braintree Twin Drive-In to watch THE WILD ONES. I wanted to be Marlon Brando and swore that one day I would have a motorcycle. Life in the suburbs seemed perfect in the summer of 1960, except to no motorcycle.
In the fall we attended a Catholic School. The nuns thought my brother and I looked alike in our identical parochial school uniforms. My mother explained we were Irish twins born thirteen months apart. Even the nuns laughed at her joke and they taught us that Jesus was our hero, but there were too many other choices for heroes in the 1960s.
The town’s teenagers drove souped-up cars. The football captain got all the girls. John Glenn circled the Earth in a rocket. JFK said we were going to the moon. He died young like Buddy Holly. We cried for a weekend and that winter the Beatles invaded spawning band after band and we grew out hair long and our attire was as Carnaby Street as possible for the South Shore of Boston.
Not everyone was a Mod. Greasers didn’t like us. They dressed like bikers in jeans and t-shirts with hair slicked back with Brillcream. I fought three of them at Wollaston Beach. A local teenager rescued me from a beating. Donnie Lianetti was the best of the best, but he disappeared after a near-fatal dive into the Quincy Quarries.
Anti-heroes like Captain America from EASY RIDER flourished in the late-60s, as hundreds of thousands of teenage boys were drafted into the Army to feed the Vietnam War. Millions more refused to join the body count. I attended college to avoid the Draft. My hair fell over my shoulders. Before my junior year at Boston College I hitchhiked to Pomona outside LA to visit a friend from Weymouth. Wayne belonged to the Nomads. His small biker gang criticized the Hell’s Angels for killing people at the Stones concert. They lent me a Harley tricycle and stole it back the next day.
“Sorry,” Wayne said straddling the Harley.
“I understand.” One day was better than no days.
Not enough to change my life and maybe my father was right. The biker thing was just a phase. Only it was to be a long one.
CHAPTER 2
After college I taught English at South Boston High School, only I wasn’t cut out to be a teacher in such a racist environment. On a trip to New York I fell in love with an artist. Ro called me an angel under candlelight, then disappeared on Thanksgiving Eve 1976 to study art in Paris. I remained in New York and became a punk. We had no heroes. We had no anti-heroes either.
In 1977 I played for CBGBs in a softball game against the Hell’s Angels. I checked the entire team for the biker with the Mohawk. He would have been almost thirty-five. None of their members were over thirty and the best batter was a murderous ball of fat named Tiny. The game turned ugly and the Angels declared that last 9th inning out at the plate to earn a win. We didn’t contest the loss, since Punk was more about losing than winning.
Two years later I moved to Paris. Ro was long gone from the Sorbonne. Several producers paid me to translate porno screenplays. My French was horrible and I mishandled the stories to fit my fantasies. A Hollywood producer noticed my adaptations and hired me to write an original screenplay.
The albino film producer and I spent a New England winter inflating his pitch of a boy meeting a girl during a hurricane to 90 pages. After writing THE END he led me out to his barn. A 1964 Trophy Triumph lay under a thick layer of dust. The English motorcycle was my bonus and I fell in love with the bike’s classic lines like a married man unexpectedly meeting his future mistress.A mechanic from Poughkeepsie started the bike. I drove it to the East Village with a check for $5000 in my leather jacket, convinced that I was finally looking for adventure and whatever came my way.
That summer I was hired to work the door of the Milk Bar. My girlfriend was a wild flamenco dancer from Madrid. I wore denims and motorcycle boots to round out my third-rate reincarnation of Marlon Brando in THE WILD ONE. Life was cool, until the Triumph stalled on 5th Avenue and 10th Street. I pumped the kickstart without a cough popping from the engine. Passers-by snickered at my failures and I wheeled the bike towards my apartment building on East 10th Street.
A motorcycle roared from 3rd Avenue. I expected the gang from Old Orchard Beach, but the driver had substituted a leather bomber cap for a helmet. A furry dog rode on the gas tank. A black Bonneville stripped to the frame swerved an inch from the curb. The dog jumped off to pee and his master lifted
“Having a little trouble?”
“It stalled.” I balanced the bike on its kickstand. His oily fingers betrayed a deep knowledge of bikes and I asked, “Can you bring it back to life?”
“You mean like Doctor Frankenstein?” The driver was my age. Tattered great jean shrouded his raw-boned body. He swung off the bike and strode up to mine, unscrewing the gas cap and rocking the bike. The slosh in the tank sounded like a thimbleful. “It’s out of gas.”
“I guess I’ll have to push it to a gas station.”
“Naw, no need.” He sat on the curb and twisted a spigot underneath the carburetor. “That’s your reserve valve. You got about another ten miles. Give it a kick now.”
I pressed down on the kickstart and the engine shuddered with a bang.
“Thanks, man.”
“The name’s Dmitri.” He stuck out his hand and I introduced myself, “Can I buy you a beer?”
“No, I’m okay, but you should fixed that soon. The engine is only firing on three cylinders.”
“I’ll take care of it, but where?”
“My friend Hugh and I have a shop on East Sixth Street between C and D.”
“There’s nothing there.”
The landlords had torched the blocks east of Avenue A during the 70s and their ruins served as shooting galleries for the legions of dope-sick junkies plaguing the Lower East Side.
“We are now. You can’t miss our shop. It’s the only unburnt building on the block.” He snapped his fingers and the dog jumped on the bike. Dmitri joined him.
“Good trick.”
“Wilbur’s smarter than me and you.” The big mutt licked his master’s hand.
“Like I said. Come by.”
He accelerated across 2nd Avenue, his dog howling over the 650 cc engine.
While not the biker with the Mohawk, Dmitri manifested the outlaw myth of Old Orchard Beach, but I ignored his offer to fix the bike and tooled around the East Village, thinking that his miracle touch would last forever.
A week later the Triumph unhealed itself in front of the Hell’s Angels’ headquarters on 3rd Street. The greasy outlaws laughed at my white denims stained by a rooster tail of black splatter from the rear tire. A simple screwdriver might have solved the bike’s stalling, except I hadn’t a clue as to where I had to screw with the screwdriver, so I pushed the bike to East 6th Street and C.
A long Caddy hearse with Vermont plates was parked before a 6th Street crumbling tenement. Dmitri crouched next to a Norton Commando. Wilbur nudged him with his snout and his master grasped a wrench and two seconds later he relaxed his grip.
“Let me guess. It cut out?”
“Yeah.” I was annoyed by his being right.
“I bet during that long walk you thought that I messed with your bike?” He rubbed greasy hands on the filthy overalls. Neither became cleaner or dirtier.
“That crossed my mind.” The ignorant always blame their troubles on someone else.
“Pushing a bike inspires paranoia.” Dmitri manipulated several valves on the engine and used a matchbook cover to measure the distance between the spark plugs. “Time might cure all ills, but tools cure a bike. Also this bike is meant for riding at 65, 70 tops.”
A scrawny man in an equally soiled mechanic suit emerged from the basement carrying a shortened exhaust pipe.
“I had it up to 85 on the FDR.”
“I wouldn’ta push it that hard.” His partner’s brogue bespoke Glasgow and a love for whiskey.
“You’re too careful, Hugh.” Dmitri straddled my bike and booted the kickstart. A yard-long tongue of flames flared from the pipe. He gave it gas. The rear wheel burned rubber and my bike raced to the corner and turned down Avenue C. His stoic partner pulled the muffler off the Commando.
“Donna worry, he jest checking the beast.”
I sat on a milk crate and read a week-old Daily News.
A half-hour later I asked Hugh, “Where did he go?”
“The brae went out to Ghost. It’s a parts shop in Long Island.”
“Any idea when he might return?”
“Nae, laddie.”
“Great.” I bought a six-pack at the nearest bodega on Avenue C and phoned Elana from the corner phone to say I would be late, then returned to the repair shop. Three beers later Dmitri was still MIA and I eyeballed the Norton as ransom against my Triumph. Hugh pointed to the dog. An ear peaked to steep pyramid of fur.
“He comes now.”
My hearing wasn’t canine keen, but within twenty seconds my bike rounded the corner with a box strapped to the backseat. Dmitri apologized, “Sorry, it took me longer to tune it than I thought.”
“How much I owe you?” My anger was dissipated by the engine’s precise hum.
“Nothing. I scratched your back and I scratched mine.” He rummaged through the box for an oily valve, which he threw to the Scot. “Plus I got to ride your bike and filled the tanks.”
“Why didn’t you use your own?”
“Check my license plate.”
“Looks good to me.” It was from New York.
“Take a closer look.”
The year on the plastic sticker had been reconfigured from a five to a six with a magic marker.
“No precinct cops will stop me, since I fix their bikes. I needed a real license plate to get to Ghost, because the cops in Nassau County are p____”
‘Pigs’ was cut short by the arrival of a stripped to the frame Royal Enfield 500. A bandy-legged Cockney pulled off his goggles. Nick and I had worked at the infamous Jefferson Theater in 1980. Internal Affairs raided the club one night. Nick had fled out the fire escape. I hadn’t been so lucky.
“When you get a bike?” Six years on Manhattan hadn’t softened his East End accent.
“Last month.”
Dmitri handed Nick a long cable.
“You two friends?”
“From the clubs. He’s going out with Elana.”
Dmitri’s eyes narrowed, as if to decipher ‘what is wrong with this picture’. “You know Elana?”
“I’ve seen her dance at the Baby Doll Lounge.”
“Oh.”
“Like a pagan goddess.”
“That’s my girl.” Elana never mentioned any escapades at the strip club, then again we refrained from asking too many questions. “She is a handful.”
“More like a fistful,” Dmitri stated and his two friends murmured in agreement.
“She’ll be at the Milk Bar tonight.” I sat on the bike. It started without a cough. “I work the door. Come on by.”
That evening Dmitri and his partner showed up with a dozen of their friends. I bought them drinks. Elana flirted with them, then again she flirted with everyone, male or female.
At the bar Dmitri explained how his birth father had been a KGB colonel. His mother had left him for a famous Russian author. His first book was genius gulag. Throughout the night bikers came up to Dmitri with questions, which answered them without hesitation.
“Whenever anyone mentioned his father, he didn’t say a word, although later he said to me, “Everyone thinks it’s great having a famous stepfather. He barely had any time for me. Guess I reminded him of the gulags.”
“More like the prodigal son.” Hugh passed him a beer. “How many times you run away from home.”
“More times than I can remember. I was always trying to get back to Russia.”
“Back in the USSR.” Hugh quoted the old Beatles song.
“No matter how happy you are.”
Elana asked Dmitri to dance. I went back to the door. Dmitri returned at closing and suggested a ride around the city. I accepted the offer and we headed to the southern tip of Manhattan at top speed.
My bike and Elana were passports into a new world and no one ever checked out visa, because none of us needed anything more than speed.
CHAPTER 3
That summer the Sixth Street Bikers numbered twenty, including leather-clad women, who were twice the man most men were in their prime. Our bikes buzzsawed through the Village and I imagined myself as an extra in a 1960s acid biker movie with Dmitri and Hugh as the leads.
One night Dmitri turned south on the West Side Highway toward the Trade Towers. Elana held onto me tight through the Battery Park Tunnel. The gang sped ahead and we stopped under the Brooklyn Bridge to have sex listening to the overhead hum of traffic on the steel gratings. I was finally who I had wanted to be that 4th of July in 1958. Dmitri was more than my hero. He was my mentor.
My hair grew long and I practiced the backward glance of Danny Lyons’ famous photo of a biker crossing a Mississippi bridge. Her favorite trip was up the Hudson to West Point, where she broke a cadets’ dress formation by lifting her skirt. The lead ranks stepped forward for a closer look of her bare legs. Upper class cadets escorted us off the grounds with a request to never return. Hearing this story Dmitri crowned Elana the Biker Queen of the Lower East Side.
1986 was a good year for bikes in New York. The Sidewalk Cafe, the Milk Bar, the Baby Doll Lounge, Madame Rosa’s below Canal Street, and Save the Robots welcomed us warmly. Strippers sought rides on our bikes and we drove like indestructible road warriors, but like Uncle Russ’ brother everyone gets into accidents.
One night Wilbur trotted to the Milk Bar minus Dmitri. We followed him several blocks to a gutter. His master had fallen off his bike in a drunken stupor. X-rays at St. Vincent revealed a broken arm and the doctors predicted a three months recovery time.
Riding wasn’t the same without him.
In August Elana left to meet her boyfriend in Gloucester. She had been killing time. Mostly mine. She returned within the month.
I stupidly held a grudge against her desertion and after a month asked her to leave. The old Puerto Rican woman across the hallway damned me with a Santeria curse and I didn’t sleep with another woman for a full year. Dmitri blamed this celibacy on my pride.
“You should go on a long bike trip. The longer the better.” He tapped his cast with a beer bottle. “A broken heart is not much different than a broken arm.”
The next evening I informed my boss at the Milk Bar that I was going on vacation.
Two days later I reached Sept-Iles in Northern Quebec. I stayed at a cheap motel. Outside my window whales bred in the St. Lawrence. My only conversations were with the bartender in bad French. I never mentioned Elana’s name.
After a week the leaves changed color and a morning frost covered the bike. Winter came fast this far north and I headed south to Maine. Each mile of the trip was marked by a hundred flashbacks to leaving lovers and missed opportunities. I wished someone could silence these voices in my head like the crackers shooting Captain America in EASY RIDER, except every time I steered the bike toward a bridge abutment, Dmitri saying time cured all echoed in my head.
I was still young enough to believe it was true.
It was always easy to believe your own lies.
CHAPTER 4
Upon my return I pretended everything was all right. No one asked any questions. New Yorkers care for themselves before anyone else. Not all of them, but most.
Dmitri held a Halloween party on East 6th Street. Our friends came as themselves and the girlfriends dressed up as cycle sluts. The DJ played the Dead Boys’ SONIC REDUCER and the MC5’s KICK OUT THE JAMS. We drank beer.
Dmitri’s Slavic face glowed demonically the flames of a street bonfire. A few bikers tried to jump over the bonfire. The girls laughed at their failed attempts. It should have been funny, only I didn’t laugh and Dmitri asked, “What’s wrong?”
“When I was a kid in Maine, I saw these bikers. They were so free. I thought one day I could be like them.”
“No one was free when you were a kid.” Dmitri didn’t know America in the 1950s, because he had lived in post-Stalin Russia. “Not here. Not in Russia. My hero was my real father. He was KGB. He had everything. My mother told me having everything wasn’t everything and I found new heroes. Not all of them were good. Not all of them had to be. Heroes are only heroes, because other people think they are. My stepfather gets told he’s a hero all the time.”
“He is a hero.” His books had revealed the inside of the Stalin’s gulag empire.
“He’s a hero to millions of people.” Dmitri shifted his cast to get at an itch under the plaster.
“Me too, but not to himself. He thinks of himself as a man, because being a great man can cost your soul. Not of who you are, but who you were.”
“So no more heroes,” I quoted a song by the Stranglers.
“Who needs heroes?” Dmitri picked up a hammer and cracked open the cast. His arm was white as new
We set up a ramp before the bonfire. His girlfriend tried to talk him out of the leap. Wilbur whimpered to no avail, as Dmitri got on his bike and stuck a pumpkin over his head. Everyone chanted his name, as he sped down the street. His bike hit the ramp and launched over the fire. He skidded to a halt on the pavement and fell on his side. We gave him a standing ovation.
Dmitri was something none of us could be, at least not in this lifetime.
Mt darkness disapated over Christmas and I quit the Milk Bar after the New Year to write a book at the albino’s producer’s cabin in the Catskills. I returned to New York and gave my manuscript to an agent. Nobody wanted a novel about pornography and I worked in the diamond district as a schlepper. I was finished with the nightlife and a lot of other things.
That March I had almost $4000 in my pocket and planned a pre-Spring trip to Florida.
When the cold weather broke and I set off the first morning the temperature rose over 40. It would be 50 in Washington and in the 80s by Florida. I would get a job in Miami and stay till the Easter break. I never got that far.
My Triumph skidded on an icy patch off Houston Street and I tumbled across West Broadway into a parked car. My body felt like it had been worked over by Hell’s Angels and the accident had bent the front steering fork. The bike never rode the same after that crash.
After a disastrous sublet in 1989, I sold the Triumph to ward off an imminent eviction and resumed walking the streets of New York. The bikers from 6th Street regarded me as a traitor. Most of them stopped speaking to me. Dmitri was more forgiving.
“Life is not just bikes,” he told me at a party on 10th Street.
“You’ve said that before.” I hadn’t found an interim substitute. Not drugs. Not love. Not a profession.
“I’m not sure you do.” He had recently married a beautiful woman from Kansas. She was no Dorothy, but his friends and family hoped the marriage would appease his self-destructive streak. It hadn’t tonight, judging from his clouded eyes.
“Somewhere along the line you made a decision to not be like the rest of the world. Why? I haven’t a clue anymore of why I am the way I am. My parents sent me to a shrink to find out the answer. They got more questions. I don’t ask anymore and I accept the way I am.”
“For better or worse. Same as you should do. It’s too late to go back and change the past.”
“That’s true, but I wish there was a time machine.”
“And you’d go back when?”
“Do I get to go back more than once?”
“Once only.”
“Then I’d listen to my mother saying that those bikers were trouble.” My father’s aluminum bars might have protected me if I had rolled up the window.
“You saw those bikers as a salvation from the future chosen by where and who you were born, but they were only part of it.”
“And what’s the rest?”
“Who the hell knows?” Dmitri drew a circle in the table with a crooked finger. He had fallen in love with dope. “The world is a big place. I’ve driven to Texas to Kansas to North Dakota. There’s something magical about driving to the horizons. The wind in my face, the sullen faces of the motorists, and the glee of their kids when I waved back to them, plus the hum in my body after stopping the bike for the night. You must have felt it?”
“I did on the drive up to Quebec.”
“Where would you go now if you had your choice?”
“Around the world.” I stabbed at the wet circle.
“Then all you have to do is go.” He nodded in his beer. Dmitri said heroin was the only thing that killed the pain in his arm. Everyone had a different excuse.
In the autumn of 1990 I sold a five-carat FVS1 diamond on West 47th Street. The commission of $5000 was more money than I had had in some time. Dmitri had a Royal Enfield in his shop. I told him I was coming to get it.
“Good, I could use the money.”
I should have never read the travel section of the New York Times that morning. A budget company offered around-the-world tickets for $1300. NYC-LA-Honolulu-Biak-Bali-Java-Sumatra-Malaysia-Bangkok-Kathmandu-New Delhi-London-NYC. I informed Dmitri about my new plans.
“You can always buy a bike when you get back. Just smoke some opium for me in the Golden Triangle.”
“With pleasure.”
Pleasure was something I planned to enjoy, especially with the blessing from a man of the road.
CHAPTER 5
On the other side of the world I free-dove amongst sunken Japanese destroyers off Biak, danced in the rice paddies of Bali, rode ponies across the sand plains of Mount Bromo, ate pig with the headhunters of Lake Toba, tripped on mushrooms at a full-moon party of Koh Phagnanh, and frequented the go-go bars of Patpong. Various ex-pats recommended my heading to Burma, Vietnam, or the Nana Plaza for another ogle at naked girls of the Firepole Ballet.
None of it had anything to do with bikes and an Australian motor trekker at the Malaysia Hotel suggested, “This time of year the dope fields of Northern Thailand are bone-dry as left-over turkey and dust ankle-deep. Very few people have driven through the tribal villages; Akhas, Yai, Karens, Hmong, KMT refugees growing opium for outlaw warlords.”
The next night I rode a north-bound sleeper train to, Chiang Mai. I rented a beat-up 125cc Honda XT and set out for the mountains. The paved road ended at a bridge crossing a tea-colored river. A lazy police guard waved me through the checkpoint and I throttled the gas. The dirt bike’s knobby tires churned a thick cloud of red dust in my wake.
The rutted track was trafficked by the occasional pick-up truck loaded with poppy plants and drivers’ scowls warned the drug lords considered trespassing a mortal sin in the Golden Triangle. I didn’t care. I was on a motorcycle. The sky was cloudless. The hills stretched in all directions. This was the freedom of the road and I was going to live forever. A pick-up truck rounded a blind turn in my lane. An accident was unavoidable at 50 kph and I said, “Shit, I’m dead.”
The impact catapulted my body into his windshield and I somersaulted onto the flatbed.
The entire accident had taken less time than the Big Bang and I was shocked to have survived the head-on collision, although my left wrist was out of the socket and blood streamed from the lacerations on my face. An old lady atop a bag of rice stared into the sky, as if I had fallen from an airplane. I climbed from the flatbed and surveyed the bike. The front tire was flat as a taco and the handlebars peeled onto the gas tank.
“Farang ki. Farang kwaai,” the rat-faced driver raged in rapid Thai.
The truck’s grill was only slightly dented from the collision, yet in his mind the accident was my fault, because westerners had no business in these hills. His screams became more high-pitched and he kicked dust at my feet.
Grateful to be alive I was slow in losing my temper.
He grabbed my shirt.
I told him to calm down.
He spat in my face.
I freed his hand off my shirt and he stumbled backward off the road down the hillside. A fire-scarred tree stopped his tumble. The old lady ambushed me with a cane. It struck my injured wrist, as the driver scrambled from the slope with murder in his eyes.
Luckily a police truck appeared to stop anyone from getting hurt. The driver explained the accident and my assault. I tried to counter his lie. The policeman lifted his hand to silence us. He inspected our tire tracks.
“Falang, right. Thai man pay for motorsai. Pay for doctor. He sell pig, come give you money. Is okay?”
His summary judgment was more than satisfactory, since in Thailand the farang was always at fault. The driver also had to haul my motorcycle to Chiang Mai and I have a photo of him lifting the bike out of the pick-up, his face seething with hatred, while his mouth warped by a rigid smile.
The hospital set my wrist. I downed several painkillers and then got a bag of China White..
That night my arm throbbed with increasing pain. To this day I can predict wet weather by its dull twinge. Snow brings on a sharper ache.
Upon my return from Asia I recounted my accident in the Golden Triangle to Dmitri at the Sidewalk Cafe. He laughed at all the right spots. Someone told me that he had been straight six months and I
“Any motorcycle accident you can walk away from is a good one.” He looked better than he had in years. “Any time I have one, I jump on the bike as soon as I can.”
“In some ways I imagined I had died and gone through to the after-life, only the after-life wasn’t any different from this existence.” I had no intention on challenging this time-space dimension by getting on a motorcycle.
“You probably did die several times, but whatever doesn’t kill you makes you wish you had died, but no more since I’m going to be a father and junkies don’t make good parents.”
“Congratulations.” I would have given anything to have a child.
“Here’s to me. I’ve finally realized the only thing worth living for is life. Someone else’s instead of mine.” We drank to his unborn baby, his wife, and finally our parents, since we had reached the age that you have to admit you’re not too different from them, especially after you subtract the bikes, the drugs, and travel. At the end of the evening he asked, “What about buying a bike?”
“Maybe next year.” My hand was barely strong enough to hold a beer.
“Next year then.”
Only there was no next year for Dmitri.
No next week either, because three days later Dmitri died in his sleep.
The family said ‘heart attack’.
None of us questioned the cause of death.
He was waked on 1st Avenue. His famous stepfather attended the Mass with his mother. His brothers carried his coffin out of the church. This body was buried in a Russian cemetery in New Hampshire. His children cried. His wife held their hands Wilber lay on Dmitri’s leather, smelling his master’s scent of oil and sweat. I stood by Dmitri’s grave. His soul would have liked it; pine trees surrounded by old factories.
After the Christmas selling season on 47th Street I flew to Thailand and rode the night train to Chiang Mai. I hired a 250cc AMX trail bike and in the morning I set off to the spot where I had almost been killed seven years earlier.
From the top of the pass Burma stretched into China.
A road ran from Chengdu to Lhasa.
Another five days to the border of Tajikistan.
Within two weeks I might be sitting in Paris.
The biker with the Mohawk no longer existed and EASY RIDER had only been a movie, but Dmitri had been real and I honored his life by dropping over the border. I might not reach the Himalayas, but the gas tank was full and I would have company on the road.
You always did when heroes were your friends.
THE END
In 1986 Hugh Mackie and Dmitri Turin opened the Sixth Street Specials, specializing in the repair of Triumph, Nortons, Royal Enfields, and various other English motorcycles. The blocks surrounding the shop had been burnt to the ground like Berlin after a bombing raid. The bikers frequenting the Sixth Street Specials, looked down on my stripped down Yamaha 650 XS, because I ran the door of the Milk Bar and I granted entrance to anyone who was a friend of Dmitri and Hugh. It was a good time to be riding bikes. The city was ours and Dmitri ruled the streets. There were few people like him. Not then. Not now.
Dmitri lives forever on the road.
As do all bikers from past, present, and future.
THE END
In 1986 Hugh Mackie and Dmitri Turin opened the Sixth Street Specials, specializing in the repair of Triumph, Nortons, Royal Enfields, and various other English motorcycles. The blocks surrounding the shop had been burnt to the ground like Berlin after a bombing raid. The bikers frequenting the Sixth Street Specials, looked down on my stripped down Yamaha 650 XS, because I ran the door of the Milk Bar and I granted entrance to anyone who was a friend of Dmitri and Hugh. It was a good time to be riding bikes. The city was ours and Dmitri ruled the streets. There were few people like him. Not then. Not now.
Dmitri lives forever on the road.
As do all bikers from past, present, and future.
