1969 and Then Some

by Robert Wintner

  We pledged our sincere hope that we were not chickenshit and said we needed to get back. To our amazement, Janis and Grace were up and out and taking us back to Marcia’s. We picked up a hitchhiker with a backpack on the way whose name was Clem or Zeke or Luke, who said he wasn’t too sure where he was headed, except for into the future, unless we were going backward, and nobody could be sure we weren’t. Clem was a hayseed who’d been to town and gone home but couldn’t stay home, because of what he’d seen in town. Oh, those were the days, my friend. He too seemed uncertain on the plains of reality awaiting discovery. So his backpack preceded him into the backseat, where it and the three of us got squeezed like sardines as Janis showed us what that li’l sumbitch could do. It was her turn for a hyena chorus, spinning snow brodies between the ditches.

  Clem got out with Kenny and me practically bonded by peril. We trooped into Marcia’s where the gang had leveled at ninety thousand feet. Seated around the big dining room table, everyone listened to Ray Haney’s instructions for capping his acid. “It ain’t nothing to it. You just scoop a little fucker in a powder ‘n ‘en you scoop a other half ‘n ‘en you press ‘um together. Like so. Don’t lick your fingers. It gums everthang. ‘N don’t worry. You’ll git off on account of what soaks in. I mean this shit’s a McCoy.”

  Clem wanted to try this intriguing task, capping the magic and absorbing the dust on his fingertips. He broke into high-speed hayseed with Ray Haney like it was old home week for a couple cuzzins from the liberated side of Podunk Holler, and soon enough he reckoned Ray had a thing or two coh-rect. Then he too climbed to orbital altitude. Or maybe he only remembered what it had been like or how he imagined it to be. He glanced toward the kitchen at the sound of tiny clattering—a sound we’d long ignored, because it was only the mice playing hide and seek among the dinner dishes and pots and pans. Lindsay explained that they made more noise at first because they had to get a salad bowl moved over in the sink right under the faucet, so they could fill it with water and then dive off the faucet. Sometimes they liked to put a coffee cup right next to the salad bowl, you know, for the smaller mice who might need shallower water and a rim they could grasp more easily.

  Clem looked serious, taking Lindsay at face value and holding the thought, like he needed a minute to actually paint this picture on his brainpan. He finally got up and walked over to his pack, where he retrieved a collapsible fishing rod with a small reel, a block of cheese and a knife. He stretched the rod out and strung the line through the eyelets and cut a cheese cube to bait his hook, and he cast it into the kitchen. We laughed, welcoming Clem to our world of commitment to anything that might goof on reality. We were soon humbled by Clem’s commitment; he was dead serious on the vermin issue. So Marcia offered him a glass of wine and a joint, which he stared at for a long moment and then accepted as if accepting the future as Marcia explained to him the difference between varmints and critters, and the sameness of critters to creatures, of whom the mice and we were one, demonstrating yet again that love was all around us.

  I remember the moment as microcosm of the age, an ideal verging on naiveté, yet given the context it was an ideal that glowed in the dark or the light. Viewing the mice as social contemporaries was a wild step beyond Disney, a giant, blessed step that we embraced, and in so doing became present in the 60s.

  I don’t wonder where Clem is now. I think often of Marcia and Kenny and that long, lovely night as a rare interlude. The world lit up in wonder and amazement with magic at every turn of every moment. The magic had been right there all along, waiting on the interface for a catalyst to set it free.

  Six Months Earlier

  IN JUNE OF 1969 Old Mom drove me to the airport more anxious than usual. I’d always seemed hell bent on self-destruction, but this outing was, to her, more focused. She had no doubts that this time I was out to kill myself. She just knew it, though she repressed her anxiety admirably, telling herself out loud that I was only fitting in with the other kids.

  That is, a few would-be entrepreneurs across the land had discovered how to charter commercial jets and actually make money selling round trip flights, New York/London, by the seat at two hundred forty dollars each. This was long, long ago, way before the world got terrorized and then got protected by security, and adventures got shut down or rendered tediously humiliating.

  Meanwhile, what did you say? Round trip New York/London for two forty? Well, so it wasn’t a jet. It was a Scottish Airlines plane that went north to Nova Scotia to minimize over-ocean time and took sixteen hours. No frills? We didn’t even know what a frill was. We napped on the floor. So what? And you still had to get to New York. So? You got ninety days of the whole wide world in the bargain, which was as different as Paris, Illinois from its namesake in France.

  Anyway, Old Mom was only about fifty then, and though prone to nervous energy, she mostly had her emotions under control. But then she cried, broke down and sobbed, driving and reaching into her purse for five big ones folded neatly into a wad. Five hundred dollars was another world unto itself in those days. She handed it over boo hoo hooing, admonishing me to be safe and have a wonderful, safe time, and to get this . . . this . . . this thing out of my system and come home safely. “This is not to spend. It’s for emergency. Keep it in a safe place.”

  Credit cards were for rich kids, kids who got new cars for a sixteenth birthday or a half-decent report card. Cell phones were still three decades away, even for rich kids. I guess Old Mom could have bought some traveler’s checks if she thought I might lose the money, but she didn’t think of that, or maybe she didn’t want to pay those bastards the five or ten bucks for their fake money. Mom had lived through the Depression and knew what five or ten bucks could buy. Never mind. I spent the cash on day three, all of it, quick and neat, straight up.

  You bounce back easily at twenty from sixteen hours of engine noise, stale air and seats as unforgiving as church pews. Halfway into the tortuous crossing most kids lay on the floor to get some Zs, and a lasting image of the times was an old Scottish turbo-prop droning across the Atlantic with its engine cowlings streaming fine rivulets of oil, its seats empty and its floor covered with youthful adventurers in fetal positions, hugging knapsacks and stuff. It could never happen again for practical reasons, with a world so much more aware of what might go wrong. But back then it was all right.

  I traveled with a fellow student, a poet and adventurer, David Rayall, though David was more attuned to verse than horizons. A wanton intellect and surly thinker, David already shaved twice a day at twenty and was good and goddamn ready for a liberal dash of worldly spice in his cadence and meter. He envisioned pubs abuzz with lively discourse, literary annotation and Joycean ambience. From within the din he would find meaning and transpose it to lyric and round it out with artistry.

  We found a pension in Russell Square—actually found it in Europe on $5 a Day, the student adventure bible of those days. Everyone read it religiously, because if you got careless for a blink, you were on your way to purgatory at $10, $12, even $20 on a single day with eighty-nine days to go. Fuck that.

  On a lark, without a care, out in the world, on our own with nowhere and everywhere to go, we cruised London at random for the next few days. By chance we happened onto Pride & Clark, Dealers of Fine Motors, including four-wheeled motors and a vast array of two-wheeled motors. The motorcycling scene then was three-tiered and simple. Hondas weren’t exactly for pussies, not like they would become later, with massive plastic engine covers and Winnebago travel trunks, the pinstripes, stuffed toys, reverse gear and the ultimate insult to the road gods: trailers. In fact, many high-mile riders over the years first felt the magic of motorcycling on a Honda. My first taste was a Super 90, soon followed by a dose of 160 Superhawk—it seemed like a major machine at the time, especially with a name of Superhawk. Both those Hondas belonged to a friend, one of the first kids at our high school to discover pot, so he didn’t mind sharing his motorcycles. I probably had fifty or a hundred miles o
n those rides, enough to want back into that dimension soon and often. It was a feeling, systemic, in the bloodstream straight away for some of us. Wanting in became a craving, which, in youth, became the objective of life. Honda came out with a big, clunky 400cc model about then, but it had none of the pizzazz, color or flair of the British bikes.

  Harley Davidson was still decades away from the mass market—not yet glommed on to the vast underbelly of suburbia. In the years ahead Harley Davidson would capture key market segments, beginning with young, urban professionals with oodles of leverage. Then came the overweight, hen-pecked crowd craving identity other than the one that befell them. Unavoidably, a tawdry disjunction emerged between appearance and reality, as the byways got crowded with suburban desperados—stable, secure guys with a hundred fifty bucks down and permission from the wife. Motorcycle traffic would get thick with non-riders—poseurs with props. Men seeking meaning would cast cash to the wind, to suit up for “the lifestyle;” live to ride, ride to live, with leathers and fringe, conchos and triple chrome bolts and cover plates, the patches and pins proclaiming Genuine Harley Davidson. Do you really need nine hundred pounds and 1600 cc for the short trip to the fern bar, to back in for the admiration of pedestrians? No, you don’t, but then staying in town makes the lame swing arm more acceptable, since it won’t likely fold up on a left turn yield into Whole Foods.

  But I digress; back then Harley Davidson was for greasers. Even then they cost twice as much and were out of our range.

  The motorcycle of choice for first-wave baby boomers on the tail end of adolescence and wanting to cross nations on two wheels was British. Royal Enfield was old, obscure and demanding but not demanded. Norton was very fast, nimble, exotic, dependable and in demand but not as popular or readily available as Triumph and BSA. Triumph was on top, first with a single carb Tiger but ultimately with the twin-carb Bonneville. Looking back, they seem simple, small and quaintly classic. Then they looked perfectly big. BSA followed suit with a single carb Thunderbolt and a twin-carb Lightning Rocket. These models all went 650 cubic centimeters and ran eight hundred fifty bucks brand new for the twin carb. Seasoned veterans of all ages recall that generation of British bikes for speed—one sixty to one seventy-five mph was attainable right out of the box for the truly crazy. Those were the days of fanciful engineering. The Triumph had double downtubes in front of the engine, while the Beezer had a single downtube. Both frames were hollow and were rumored to be part of the oil circulation system in an early, primitive approach to oil cooling as a means of reducing engine heat. I don’t know if that was true. I saw a wreck once with a frame mangled in pooling oil but didn’t have the nerve to go in close, to see if it was oozing out the bones.

  The Beezer was renowned for vibration, and a day of cruising at sixty could shake your brains looser still. But it could get up and go faster than anyone should go. Back then, BSA made a one cylinder model, the 441 Victor, with a panache all its own. No motorcycles had electric starters; all required a kick-start. And the 441 Victor’s one big jug could catch on the compression stroke and not only kick you back; it could throw the unwary over the handlebars. Then again, taking the handlebar vault on a 441 kickback was the mark of experience. I took the dive and came up laughing about it and still laugh at the utter hazard and unnecessary risk of the thing. But then unnecessary risk was the risk most valued. The 441 Victor came only in yellow, and actually owning a 441 was a yellow badge of machismo—a pogo stick with incredible low-end torque.

  We rode long hours with no windshields in those days, camping out and waking up in dew soaked bags on the stone cold ground, mustering the umph to rise to the frigid morning for a whiz, then firing up the camp burner for coffee, stoking a chunk of hash, blending into the mists and knowing the day ahead for what it would be worth, which was everything it could be. But I get ahead.

  As if serendipitously parked in my path there on our walk of discovery into Pride & Clark, Dealers of Fine Motors gleamed a BSA Lightning Rocket hardly two years old—used but looking brand new. And what did the price tag say? Five big ones on the button. That kind of money would have seemed as insurmountable as a twenty-foot wall with barbwire on top, yet the bills lay neatly folded in my pocket as if ordained, or at least given by Old Mom, which was kind of the same thing. And yes, the elegant paper price tag dangling from the handlebar was in dollars; such was the rush of American boomers in rebellion, taking to the roads of Europe on two wheels—taking over those roads to show the locals how truly liberated anarchists could take the money their parents had given them and tear up the countryside as only free-wheeling Yanks could do. We were loved, because we had the credentials, the money and a war in Vietnam as the basis for Revolution.

  I did take a minute or two for practical calculation on the savings available with a motorcycle. It was mostly on transportation, doing away with the need for train tickets or wasting time hitchhiking. I also factored a rare chance in life: before me sat a dream come true, so I woke up and lived it.

  That Lightning Rocket was a glowing opportunity easily realized. I would ride it five thousand miles and know it intimately. Plagued with vibration, it could go as fast as I could imagine with a half inch of throttle remaining. Two carburetors, chrome fenders and a bulbous tank that was chrome on top and red on the sides identified the Lightning Rocket. Gold starbursts on red backfields on either side of the tank shot lightning bolts forward and back. Gold flames blew out the pipes, or so it seemed. I would drive it one-forty once, somewhere near seven grand—that’s miles per hour at seven thousand rpm—before a curve came on quick as Earth in freefall at maximum velocity plus twenty. Increasing G-forces measured the sensation of speed and limitless acceleration to ninety or a hundred. Urgency to reach top end was driven by fear of running out of straightaway. Near a hundred came certainty that helmets would be incidental to starbursts and flesh melted over bent steel. The lumpy fondue imagery was satisfying, a notch up for an aspiring young daredevil.

  Rising rpm whines to inaudible ranges over five grand in fourth gear, where things go perversely quieter. Back then, fourth gear was it. Over a hundred miles per hour the word becomes Om in a searing vibration around six thousand rpm, and the din becomes eerily calm. A rider must crouch into the tank or become a scoop for an instant before the wind scoops him off. Cheeks and wattles flop like crazy at seventy, but over a hundred the breeze can take your face off, so you stay low.

  At one-twenty the air tingles. God speaks at one-forty with a question: You wanna die, boy? Deceleration takes as much focus as getting top end—on the way down one-ten seemed eminently controllable, except that one-ten is holy screaming Jesus fast enough to end in a blink.

  So the future began at Pride & Clark in a similar blink, in hardly the time it took for a wild boy to forget everything his poor mother ever taught him about horse-trading. I counted out the five big ones and never looked back. I scanned the horizon out front and felt the urgency to catch up with the motorcycle wave breaking over Europe. David and I rode back to Russell Square, wobbly here and there but keeping things rolling. I parked and stared at my new meaning in life until David insisted that we celebrate my breakthrough by heading down to an area known for clubs. The world made such easy sense, and on a lovely stroll we found a fish and chips vendor for newspaper cones of greasy, salty cod. At 50p each, we were feeling more efficient all the time.

  Making our way to the lively block where the music lived, we met a fellow about nightfall offering a small bag of opium for six pounds—about twelve bucks, or fifteen. That amount represented two and a half to three days of Europe, but we bought it, because this was the world.

  Did we really want to meet it on opium?

  Are you kidding?

  We walked down the alley past a few bars and stopped at a place with a band playing One is the Loneliest Number. David had that album and out of his daze exclaimed, “It’s them!” He meant Three Dog Night. That’s how it was back then, in a world where reality was real and accessib
le, even on opium, or maybe especially on opium. I remember nothing after that but loud music, a long walk back to the pension and great relief at finding my new motorcycle where I left it.

  We cruised a few days more and soon felt the itch to get out of town. So I lashed my backpack on back. David wore his. We got coffee and rolls and headed out with David riding bitch, though we didn’t call it bitch then; we called it on back. He tried to keep the map from flopping out of control while I tried to keep us from dying as we wended our way through London, veering east-southeast for Dover and the bonnie cliffs and the ferry to the continent.

  In a densely populated area on the outskirts of London we drove up a wooded road on David’s insistence, arriving at a heavily wooded cul-de-sac, where he demanded that we stop immediately because he had to take a dump right now, because he ate too many crumpets, or trollops, or treacle, or buns, or rashers or any of those strange things the English eat. Squatting indelicately under a tree, just as a strange white man would plant a flag on the moon only a month hence, David laid claim for America. He draped his handkerchief over the top of it like a flag, sort of, though it lay limp, hardly discouraging the fly swarm or constraining the stink.

  “I know I should be proud of you,” I said, “but that’s disgusting.”

  David was in no laughing mood, coming so close to a breach as I had caused him to do, and he assured me that it wasn’t nearly as disgusting as some of the stuff I did.

  “We could look at it. Poetically, I mean. We could call it the waste of wasted youth left behind for distant lands and a more brilliant wasting yet to come. Or some shit.”

  He didn’t think that was funny either. The exchange was a symptom, a first friction between friends traveling together.