The Motorcyclist

by George Elliott Clarke

  DEDICATION

  For William Lloyd Clarke (1935–2005),

  artist and motorcyclist

  EPIGRAPH

  Not only pain

  There was beauty and longing.

  —LORENZO THOMAS, “HISTORIOGRAPHY”

  Muore per metà chi lascia un’ immagine di se stesso nei figli.

  —CARLO GOLDONI, PAMELA

  CONTENTS

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Proviso

  Determination

  Tour I

  Determinations I

  Tour II

  Detour

  Tour III

  Determinations II

  Termination

  Acknowledgements

  About the Type

  About the Author

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  PROVISO

  Tell him Mr. Clarke sent you there—

  Mr. William Clarke—

  He’ll fix you up all right.

  —STEPHEN VINCENT BENÉT, JOHN BROWN’S BODY

  The unpublished 1959–60 Diary of my father, William Lloyd Clarke (1935–2005), informs this novel. Because his Diary chronicles the year of my conception, it is the catalyst for my story. Moreover, the Diary relates my father’s endeavours to secure Love and a sustaining and satisfying wage. Still, his Diary only hints at my novel: I have rendered the Diary’s subtleties explicit and fleshed out its abbreviated episodes. I have also guessed at some motivations and invented others, just as I have wilfully altered names and redacted characters. I have also exaggerated or minimized real-life flaws and virtues. The story reflects upon Race and Romance in an era when Chance governed family planning and Prejudice determined social status. I describe, then, the quandaries of courtship pertinent to a Cold War generation. So, the novel is faithful to the truths in W.L.C.’s Diary (and his Trip Diary, a chronicle of his 1959 U.S. Eastern Seaboard tour)—such as street names, movie titles, girls’ initials, weather conditions, world events, and, crucially, the motorcyclist’s actual life. This novel is neither biography nor history, but it does sketch the he-said, she-said, black comedies of coupling and their personal consequences. All open to Interpretation. As usual . . .

  George Elliott Clarke (X. States)

  Toronto, Ontario

  Nisan XV

  DETERMINATION

  And before I’d be a slave,

  I’ll be buried in my grave . . .

  —AFRICADIAN ANTHEM, “O FREEDOM”

  A most honest thing is pavement. It doesn’t go wrong, even when it curves. It’s always taking you somewhere, even if you are clueless about a destination or just insouciant, letting miles lap and lapse, lap and lapse, so long as the road is always more highway and freeway than it’s ever a strict street or—worse—a blankety-blank dead end.

  And pavement is hard, serious; it doesn’t let you down. If you spill, then rub and smear your face against it, scraping even your teeth. You know the incident is fact; there is no fakery. It slaps you awake brutally. You can’t daydream when it comes to navigating a motorcycle over the potholes and the busted bits of truck tires and even broken parts of cars or dead creatures, their bodies pierced and exploded by tons of chrome simultaneously battering and skewering, or simply smashing and splattering such unlucky critters.

  (It be sad Art: the ruddy incineration of fur, skin, and bone upon collision with chrome, so living blood becomes tarnish, and chrome looks muddied once blood dries.)

  You need a cold eye, a clear eye, to avoid the random annihilations that pavement permits. You need a steady hand, an iron grip, to steer yourself over that tough surface: to intact arrive, wherever. Stately, prancing, stately.

  Pavement will never let you take it for granted. It is what you’ve always wanted, in launching yourself, Coloured chap, out a harsh burgh, that East Coast city prospering most when at war, embarking sailors to preserve the English King and Queen, keeping the world “safe” for Empire, if not “democracy.” Eh?

  It’s not pavement that throws you for a curve, a loop, but the cemetery at the end of it all, all that racing and passing. Or it’s the traffic jam that troubles: it’s always as long and as hard to sit through as a pregnancy.

  Good thing that the wind is almost a spectral femininity, caressing and mollycoddling as it slips across helmet or open face, nipping and tucking, kissing and enfolding. The wind cradles and nurses. It touches intimately, even whistling about your crotch, for no denim or leather can resist its fluid penetration.

  And that’s what an engine is good for: to greet and pet the wind, to move in tandem with it as suavely as a beau and a beaut. There is a marriage of sorts, or, a flirtation. Man and machine hurtle forward in a non-stop attack that is also surrender, a yielding to the atmosphere about, the sumptuous tang of cow shit and apple blossoms, gasoline and engine oil.

  Yes, pavement is terminal—somewhere, sometime—but the deferment is vertiginous. You think you can reach an end, but there are reversals, switchbacks; or you stop short, while still steering forward.

  But as you look out over the pavement, or dismount and stand upon it, it is both ephemeral Possibility—just like the horizon—and as solidly factual as answered prayer, or, maybe, as arrival. Fascinatingly, even a humdrum alley, an oasis of garbage and rancid smoke, bleeds into the higher order of the street, its curbs and gutters and sidewalks, controlling and facilitating the movements of vehicles and pedestrians, and then bleeds yet farther into the ascetic aristocracy of freeway and highway, where advertising almost vanishes and whole cities and towns appear as exits or rest stops, utterly vacant of Glamour.

  The cars—always sleek, stretching, capacious, built to carry a brood of oral-oriented consumers (babes at teats, men chomping cigars, women sucking candies)—represent every income paid out, from wheezing jitney to bounding Jaguar. Indeed, this year, 1959, cars are so spacious that meals are served in them, movies are watched from them, and babies are conceived—and even delivered—in them.

  One hears, at times, the backfire of a cut-rate auto, half-rust and half-paid-for, lurching down a street: a sad-sack Looney Tune come to Li’l Abner life.

  A vehicle’s leather seats prove the triumph of the industrial city over the church-and-cattle countryside. The city doesn’t see a cow, only comfy fashion. Headlights show off secular transcendence, an incandescent halo that transforms autos into godly chariots come down to earth.

  Of course, the motorcycle’s an impractical machine, compared to the automobile: Detroit bodies and Hollywood interiors, chrome and dream. But the cycle means purity—of one-man or one-duo transpo. Cars imply—usually—family or the whole gang tuckin in.

  Intriguingly, a weird democracy governs the highway: every destination is as valid as any other. New York City has more exits, more on- and off-ramps, than does, say, Halifax, Nova Scotia. Yet, each is a terminal capillary of a road that skirts it, bypassing it, leaving it to shrink in a rear-view mirror, and either city—whatever its magnitude and vitality—will shrink until it is only a blur, a haze, a map dot.

  But the long-distance highway—turnpikes, interstates, the Trans-Canada, etc.—are also working-class in mood, so brazenly Stalinist, for they are controlled by truckers and trolled by police. All other drivers and vehicles are second-class and third-class interlopers—in contrast to the true lords of the freeways, and all the pit stops, rest stops, and garages built for their benefit and to attract their largesse.

  No wonder Rébecca Nul, the bourgeoise, adulteress heroine of La Motocyclette, dies trying to pass a transport truck. The act of passing, of overtaking another vehicle, is class warfare, a bit of Marxism-Leninism that the overtaken never take in stride.

&nbs
p; All roads lead to Rome, but a few shunt to Damascus. Before you, always, in whatever direction, lies Perdition or Salvation. Just start your engine. Go.

  TOUR I

  ‘Perhaps we could look each other up.’

  ‘It’s a date. 1959.’

  —JOHN GLASSCO, MEMOIRS OF MONTPARNASSE

  Saturday, May 9

  Carl thrusts back bedclothes—a bristling surf—and leaps up, ascendant, urgent to start motorcycling afresh: to get from Easter to Christmas, astraddle. He dabs Brylcreem on his Negro curls; he slaps Snap on his hands, to scour off even invisible grit. Quick, he sheathes himself in black leather chic, from boots to jacket. The boots are so polished that sunlight, enmeshed in that dark dazzle, mirrors a solar eclipse. He’s had the toggery ready weeks now. He picks up his black helmet that he’s painted so edgily, flames fringing the face area. Apollo Negro, he audits his flash in a full-length mirror, then strides—no, struts—out the door, awaiting, expecting, plaudits. Practically jogs to the Halifax Motorcycle Shoppe. Motorcycle man is slick; just sharp style—like Lee Van Cleef, only more coppery, less devious, in look. Rough trade, he could be, forwarding such svelte, sporty black, a blackness that radiates—he posits—both immaculate macho and charismatic charity.

  9 a.m.: Punctual, pale, reedy, spectacled, jet-haired Corkum enters the backroom and flicks on the lights. He whooshes open the front door to his sable-leather patron; exchange of hands. Bamming a screen door, Corkum leads Carl through the shop and out back. Primed to go is “Liz II,” as Carl has named his motorcycle, out of fealty to the Queen. An act of sweet, beatnik Irony.

  Carl doth got royalist predilections: He likes Nat King Cole, just for the middle name of the crooner. He’s no jazz fan, but lauds the monikers of Duke Ellington and Count Basie. Why not? His natty aunt Pretty, the worldwide-famed contralto, has scored the hat trick of serenading Edward VIII (thus becoming the only Canuck and only Negro to have an audience with the ephemeral monarch), then George VI (though he coughed throughout her performance, due to his royal prerogative of lung cancer), and, most recently, Queen Liz II herself, whose tiara boogie-woogied when she heard Pretty’s show-stopping aria as Carmen.

  The bike’s fresh polish is transparent silver. Liz II blazes; Carl beams. Offset by chrome parts and black rubber tires and grips, her purple shade flares gloriously, shaming the dull light of morn. Carl walks her down the driveway—like a groom takin his bride down the aisle. Boy oh boy, he thinks as he straddles the bike. Mine—and does it ever feel good to be back on her.

  So pertinent is the machine to his being, his bearing, his antipathy for Ennui and Ignorance, that he’s told some friends that he got to Bavaria, personally, to oversee the final tinkering in the crafting of this motorcycle. Carl don’t care that he’s turned to German engineering to realize Excellence at a time when the propaganda adjective jerry-built presupposes poor construction. His purchase flouts Prejudice; his profile, astride the machine and gliding black leather and purple metal, through Halifax streets must give whites-only segregationists serious heart attacks. Or so he grins to himself, imagining such a scene.

  Liz II gleams gorgeous, in that violet paint and loud, spanking chrome. The Big Marvellous Wonder (BMW) boasts huge black fenders, with C.A.B.—Carl’s initials—flagged atop the front fender. No mistaking that she’s his. Like Aladdin rubbing the genie-laden lamp, Carl will hand-scour Liz II until her sheen slashes every stray eye. The machine is lean power; Carl is now bluntly male. Buffed. Not to be rebuffed.

  And don’t the world look better—sliding, guying, giddy—mirrored in chrome? Kids love to see their faces stretched or squashed, depending on how near or distant they are to this wondrous element—a silvery mirror—that proves that shapes are never as steady as geometry alleges. The machine’s chrome whirls and swirls the surrounding vista as Carl leans forward, projecting himself into wind; but the bike’s silvery, mercurial finish also lends the world a fanfare of colour: a rainbow fringes all.

  Carl steers the sporty R69 model Bayerische Motoren Werke (600 cc), a first-class bike that seats two superbly. The two-cylinder, four-stroke engine, plus four-speed gears, lets a solo rider, scrunched low, in snug clothing, attain 102 mph. Add a passenger, and the top speed drops to 90 mph. The R69 BMW is Beautiful Motorcycle Work. This majestic bolt of aluminum darts through streets that got no choice but to yield.

  After scrimping, scraping, and scavenging for railway-job tips, Carl motors—masters—the first brand new BMW in Nova Scotia. A shining, purring thing! The machine enthrones him: black prince of the roads. He attains that great object: Majesty!

  Hotly, the trim machine glitters. The tail lights, bunched together, offer a cornucopia of potential directions. Yet, the R69 is sleek, clear of unnecessary ornament, save for the saddlebags, which Carl has decorated to accent the aerodynamic aesthetic of her suspension, engine, and exhaust. Liz II is as intricate as a lithe, nimble insect, but far gaudier, as if animated da Vinci–drawn musculature. Carl relishes the ingenious poise of pistons and gears, the innumerable Eiffel Towers figured in the wheel spokes.

  The ignition key is in the centre position and the neutral indicator shows a green-for-go glow. Exultant, Carl leaps up, thrusts down, kick-starts the engine that now roars and snorts, born again, bawling, and ready for brawling. He buckles on the helmet; the red, yellow, and white painted flames, licking back from the black face opening, look as proud and as incendiary as the flag of any new African state. Yep: here be liberated Ghana, a one-man motorcade.

  Carlyle—a.k.a. Carl—Black whistles as he manoeuvres his machine over the gullies of this dirt driveway in which every rainstorm gouges new furrows. He nods at all who pass, all who eye him, handsome, with a lean, iron-dark frame, fierce eyes, and a steel-jaw look. His speech sounds suave; his wardrobe models dapper.

  The man be Coloured, but not colonized, not totally. Unlike his buddies, he can escape, temporarily, the Drudgery that traps so many “Nofaskosha” Negroes: from the red-uniformed man with a flashlight, ushering kids into a cinema (the closest a dark dude can get to being a cop), to the shoeshine boy, or waitress, whose tips are the reward of a sultry smile, to the folks aching in Labour that shatters souls. In contrast, Carl can be a cavalier, a “cat” privy to cathouses.

  This Year of the Pig, Carl be twenty-three (and soon twenty-four), a Grade Ten dropout (at age eighteen), and a linen-and-equipment checker for the Canadian National Railway. He seems a helluva hail-fellow-well-met, a guy who whistles as he totes baggage and bedding to and fro night-train sleeping cars. But Discontent nudges him to leaf through Ian Fleming at lunch and warble Sibelius when he’s grooming the sleepers, preparing them for the next outing to Montreal or the Boston States.

  So he desires Coloured chicks and white dolls (the Playboy school of Integration). He loves Beethoven, Bach, and his BMW. He classifies himself as the most incongruous—most conspicuously debonair—Negro in all of Nova Scotia.

  Carl suspects: to advance is to recreate the Self—in a chrome mirror.

  Wavin at Corkum, Carl rumbles—Hurrah!—down the H.M.S. driveway and onto the easy slope of Cunard Street, blasting east (the machine rattles like a Gatling gun, but much less so than other bikes) two blocks to Gottingen—that German-branded—Street, and then executes a right turn that dashes him south to Cogswell. Now, Carl takes a left that dips him east again, downhill toward the deadliest naval harbour on the North Atlantic. (Halifax berths a hundred warships easy.) At Brunswick Street, with the wind bawling—banshee—in his ears, Carl veers south, then flies east down Buckingham Street, straight to harbour-hugging Water Street. (Because the wood-frame houses are painted a kaleidoscope of colours, each Haligonian rue is a Red Baron–style flying circus, albeit grounded.) Carl streams south again, all along the waterfront, following the zigzag promenade, with its sail-and-rigging shops and Red Ensign–flagged government edifices on his right.

  To his left, Carl spies the harbour piers, docks, wharves, storage tanks (here oil, there molasses), and mult
ifarious vessels, some flapping sails and others belching smoke. The smell is rousing, too: fresh-caught mackerel vies with the Moirs Chocolates factory aroma; and there’s the salt-water-laden gusts off the Atlantic, plus the diesel fumes of some cargo ships and the oily odours of other vehicles. At the water’s edge, Halifax feels like Istanbul: Dartmouth’s minaret is the Imperoyal gas flare.

  Sensual scents inundate downtown. Streets reek of mussels and lobster; smells of salt water, tobacco, beer, fish—mackerel, trout, perch, cod, and eel—and bread abound; and then whiffs of sidewalk-side perfume. A brick smells like apple blossoms; a leather coat decants burgundy.

  The burgh is a city of fumes—and of nylons that can be oil, so sheer as to be liquid. A guy hugs on a dame, and she either writhes away like smoke, or slips away like wet glass. Halifax is, say sailors, Babylon on the Atlantic: any Vice at any price. But the city pretends to be Salem, jailing fly-by-night whores the way the Massachusetts town hanged witches.

  The elongation of Carl’s arms to the handlebars, the pistoning of his feet (when required), the instinctive, adept agility of his body, torquing to the needs of speed and grace-in-space, jitters him with ecstasy. Liz II connects him to the world: his feet are bare inches from pavement or soil or grass; the wind licks him with rain and peppers him with bugs; the sun heats even as the breeze cools. So much is he an articulate extension of the muscular machine (or vice versa), Carl feels his driving merges boxing and ballet. How he anticipates gliding brazenly—black in black on black—through a city whose billboards and posters glorify pallid London and alabaster Hollywood. Carl will hurtle into view—a dark flash, a glimmering figure—seizing a corner, loping a boulevard, hovering above a hill, his wheels taking briefly to air.

  Other vehicles are hindrances and obstacles, but they also vanish in the wake of his gleaming, “Johnny Angel” passage. His lungs seem to enlarge, engorged by the oxygen of speedy flight. The exhilaration is hearty, bullish—like how Lazarus felt when he limbo’d up from his grave.