The Motorcyclist

by George Elliott Clarke

  Beardsley swore to never be a victim. He be cut of rougher stuff than most Coloured men. He’s been propelled upward in the world by shitting downward scrupulously.

  Indeed, Beardsley used to sell call girls’ phone numbers to select sleeping-car passengers, on runs where the train would overnight in Montreal, Chicago, New York, or Toronto. For anyone detraining in one of these cities, if only for a night, and needin companionship, Beardsley could furnish a sure-thing phone number for an extra-something tip. Later, after a gent had been entertained, and had paid, the benefactress would wire Beardsley a retainer. Smartly, Beardsley kept a discreet notebook of clients and calls, so that, if he needed assistance with a problem or just extra collateral, he could call quietly to a gent, mention his past help in fixing up a righteous rendezvous, and then make his pitch for aid. Usually, the request was granted promptly by a “Yes, sir” telegram or a wired money order.

  On a 1950 foray to “Naw Leens,” Beardsley ogled Bourbon Street belles wearing baby dolls, the dresses that bare panties deliberately. It so excited him, he brought a consignment to Halifax, for use in the cathouses, where he advised the lady inmates to wear high heels and string pacifiers about their necks. They did, and soon found that jerks adore lavishly the Pedophilia-provoking getup.

  White guys mistake Beardsley for a buffoon; but he’s a czar. He has served every prime minister, from Borden to Diefenbaker. He’s pure starch in his trousers, iron in his backbone, spit on his shoes, and silver in his tongue.

  Not only does Beardsley direct Coloured railway workers, his prominence makes him the natural Maximum Leader of the Halifax Coloured Imperialist League (HCIL), a shadowy, Race-uplift enterprise. Running the HCIL also lets him run Victoria. As a daughter of the now-deceased Rev. Waters, by lending her prestige heritage subtly—nominally—to Beardsley’s board of directors, Victoria ups his status as well as her own. He acquires mo’ legitimacy; she’s acquired a house.

  Being head honcho of the HCIL, a group that views Race Relations through rose-coloured glasses, Beardsley salivates to pose with patricians for photo ops and plead for minor jobs for Scotianers, so long as Coloureds don’t protest their treatment as third-class citizens, subject to cop beatings and store clerks’ snubs. Better to hobnob with paid-off police than berate their shooting down of hard-up Coloureds.

  Being, too, an intent student of The Race, Beardsley knows every Negro prefers Carnival to suck-teeth Survival. Any weekend, Scotianers transform from Saturday-night flash to Sunday-morning best; to go from canvas sneakers to patent-leather heels. The function of the HCIL is not, then, to combat Segregation, but to toast the Queen and pass the marmalade (morning) or caviar (evening). To put on revels, not elevate or equalize.

  Gossip posits that the HCIL is just a prostitution ring, acting to procure brown gals to service sailors of all nationalities once their vessels put into port. If true, then, Victoria shares in the moneys that Beardsley extracts for being a shady pimp for lovelorn Tars.

  Yep, the HCIL is a fusion of opium den, blind pig, and house of ill repute. But Beardsley thrives because times are usually hard, women always soft, and currency best held cold. This combination, fit to docking schedules for ships and the shunting of trains, hither and yon, produces a steady drift—tide—of income into Beardsley’s pinstriped pockets. He is less corporate than Kennedy and less conspicuous than Capone, but still an A1 capitalist Success.

  Seduced by Aunt Pretty’s graces and her luxuries, and cashing in his paper boy—and later sign-painter—coins, and still later his CNR pay, Carl began to make a fetish of purchasing classical music records. Despite a local, scandalous link to jazz—namely Duke Ellington’s ducal-style adultery with the daughter of an Africville man (who’d traded Halifax’s granite curbs for those of Boston)—Carl can’t take black classical music seriously, though he does admire the sartorial panache of the Negro players. No, Carl prefers egghead pianists, those shades of Dr. Piccioni, who tune up the old-time repertoire, rendering it—via Leonard Bernstein and Arthur Fiedler—a cabaret (Fascist critics say “degenerate”) grace.

  Finally splitting from his mother’s Beardsley-financed abode, and moving, to rent, at eighteen, his own Belle Aire Terrace apartment (where Stag mag shares shelf space with The Watchtower Witness screed), Carl devoted a buck or two each week from his CNR cheque to canvassing classical music aisles in record shops. His LP collection thus came to boast Fiedler’s Boston Pops Orchestra recording Classical Music for People Who Hate Classical Music; pianist Amparo Iturbi’s Spanish Music; and Ernest Ansermet conducting L’Orchestre de la Suisse Romande in Stravinsky: The Fire Bird (Complete Ballet). Other albums spin to round off seductions: platters by The Platters, Nat King Cole, Johnny Mathis, and Yma Sumac. Carl is set erect by Sumac’s poignant clarity, her piercingly guttural trill, her ability to reverse from crystalline soprano to smoky contralto, to blend Maria Callas and Billie Holiday. Startlingly black-haired, ivory-skinned, and busty, she’s Peru’s Sophia Loren.

  Carl’s classical predilection means he outclasses most folks (or so he thinks). By playing Beethoven, Bizet, Brahms, and Bach, he announces he’s no layabout beatnik, slapping bongos. Thus, lugging suitcases at the Halifax train station, he whistles snatches of Debussy or fragments of Gershwin. Anything to lift him above the unlettered—and unwashed—herd. Carl loves Copland’s “Fanfare for the Common Man,” but he sure don’t wanna be mistaken for one.

  To subscribe to Tchaikovsky, not Chuck Berry, means that Carl must want a woman who can gussy up, who can wear the black gown, black pumps, and black gloves of the pale brunette gracing the cover of Oscar Levant Plays Gershwin. He desires just such a debonair dame. Yes, he ogles the college gals of Playboy centrefolds, who disrobe their tits to achieve a month’s sum of immortality, but still dwell at home with mom and pop. These suburban sophomores suit Carl’s Licia Albanese (Cio-Cio-san) devotion, his pretension to Wholesomeness.

  Gleaned in part from trashy, yellowed paperbacks featuring hard-boiled dicks and mushy dames, his polysyllabic vocabulary also backs his Elegance. (Better a hardcore paperback commanding, “Let’s do it,” than a hardcover novel asking, “Whodunit?”) Carl relishes his ability to dizzy unsuspecting folks with a flurry of vocables. By speaking before a mirror, he learns to enunciate.

  Later in life, Carl’s friends will be lawyers—men who’d savour his puns, his insinuations, and his enlightened dirty jokes. He don’t say to a she, “Let’s make love”—nothin so vulgar. He say, “Allow me to introduce you to the divine raptures of earthy levitation, the commingling of senses ordained by Eden and sanctified by Heaven.” Sumpin like dat.

  A classical music aficionado because of Aunt Pretty (and Mrs. V.B.), Carl’s become an amateur painter because he wants a trade to transport him beyond his railway luggage and linen-laundry service. Nicely, Art aids seduction as much as does a motorcycle engine throbbing and pulsing neath a lady’s stimulated pudenda. If Carl can’t woo a woman by offering a jaunt, he tenders his rendering her a pastel portrait, a charcoal likeness, or (if she’s willing) a watercolour nude.

  Painting’s become Carl’s forte due to hard-faced Leo Fennel’s eschewal of soft drink. The sign painter—a two-fisted alcoholic always adrift from job to job, flophouse to flophouse—had no pocket money to pay his laundry bills, including those racked up with Victoria. (Whenever Leo acted a “recovering alcoholic,” all it meant was, he’d recover empty bottles—wine, beer, liquor—to exchange for drinkable coins.) Resourceful, Victoria held that, in lieu of paying for his fresh-suds duds, Leo should teach Carl, then fifteen, to illuminate letters. The drunkard’d said, “Aye.”

  Thus, fresh from newspapering his hood with news of the latest killings in North End taverns and in North Korean trenches, Carl apprenticed to craggy-nosed, thin-haired, flush-cheeked Fennel, a stick-skinny man (who drank strength from liquor but also pissed it away). Being a devout drinker, Fennel was a conscientious teacher. Promptly, at five p.m., he’d set down his brushes and paints, his level and
his yardstick, and get he either to a tavern or to his rooming house—wherever there was drink stashed or on tap. Usually, he’d already be shaky and staggering in anticipation of the first steadying drink. Though his alcoholism was a hiccough, Fennel’s fine sign lettering merited emulation, even worship. Trained in a dying branch of deathless advertising, Carl absorbed the tricks of carpentry (crux of Architecture) and illumination (Art). He learned to depict vivid, dreamy life. Too, given Fennel’s stupors, Carl pocketed plenty scratch for helping to finish firm-hand-needed jobs that the grizzled Ol Massa’s drinking threatened to scotch.

  After he got comfy with inking the alphabet’s twenty-six tricky figures, Carl began to experiment with depicting magazine starlets, cutie-pie classmates, or dudes goofing about diamonds or sporting in gyms, dropping barbells on each other’s throats or braining each other with hardballs. He imitated Disney cartoons and the look of comic-strip cowboys and detectives. Pleasure there was in blacking in an image, applying oils or pastels to limn a tree or flower, or simply pencilling the delicacy of a woman.

  For two years out-of-school, aged fifteen to seventeen, Carl lettered signs alongside Fennel, playing his prop and often his crutch. Fennel swayed; he had a cranky list. (He termed it “a limp” so that it would look more like a war injury and less like brain damage.) Still, his eye and hand were gifted enough to guide Carl and keep his throat lubricated. Thus, Carl got expertise in inventing eye-catching signs or luminous drawings or radiant anatomies. A charcoal-ink pen, a maple-clad lead pencil; a pine-colour or cedar-colour crayon. Carl liked most media—watercolours derived from rain (residue washed up from Paris or Venice), or sun-brilliant oils, or the weather-beaten, sun-faded look of pastels.

  With the income got from “signing,” Carl bought model kits and their specialty paints, and learned to wield tiny, pointed, finicky brushes and dab pointillist daubs as he fine-tuned the assembly of a bike, or a buggy, or a bomber, to be sold to a collector for pocket change. Thanks to Fennel’s penchant for painting palm trees and Hawaiian gals on rum bottles, Carl started to apply the cool gleam of model-kit paints to glass. Framed, with tinfoil stuccoed between the glass surface and cardboard backing, the painted scenes could be set shimmering—sights irresistible to many billfolds. Carl owned a good eye, an ogling eye, a for-sale-sign eye.

  When Fennel drank himself to death in 1958 (he stumbled, zombie-like, in front of a freight train), Carl had purchase on a near-monopoly as a sign painter in Halifax. Problem was, the railway pay was too addictive. Because neon and fluorescent tubes were the new fixtures in many store windows, sign-painting assignments had dwindled, but there was still enough for a man to prosper, had he gumption. Maybe Carl did. But he’d have to dicker for painting gigs, whereas the railway cash was weekly and arrived with unemployment insurance, a prized perquisite for Haligonian Coloureds, always cash-poor twixt jobs. (Too poor to even pay on time their pennies-worth burial policies, thus renderin em “non-cents.” Get it?)

  Carl went to Queen Elizabeth High School in 1952–53, for one year, Grade Ten. Gifted with Victoria’s brains, Carl breezed through the curricula but concentrated on Art. He wanted to supplement Fennel’s hand-and-eye instruction with Theory got from classroom praxis and watching pliant teen models: a blue-jean-jacket blonde with a cigarette always pursing her lips; a brown Negro dude with cherry-red lips, gazing off into a blue-sky, skyscraper distance; a sable Negro with a square head, no lips, and frenetic limbs; a cream-faced brunette with curly hair, bright blue eyes, and smiling red lips.

  Although two years older than most of his classmates, Carl did not let his seniority split him from his peers. He won praise by painting animalistic dudes and drawing animated women. He aced the class. Cool it was to spread-eagle an easel; to splay paint, charcoal, ink, or pastels; to master whiteness; to use colour to colonize blank paper or canvas. To make a woman look super and a man look souped-up.

  At eighteen, in 1953, after Grade Ten, Carl quit schoolin. Now, he leafed through art books, but riffled through Rembrandt, whose brooding scenes admit that light is everywhere, but sordid, stewing in shadows. Carl saw, in Rembrandt, the same demented faces that haunt Halifax alleys and hovels. In Halifax, as in Rembrandt’s The Night Watch, one turns a corner and sees a shimmering, half-savage visage looming out of a doorway, a window, or fog, looking ready to kiss, or kill, to be either the Ripper’s victim or the Ripper his hellish self. But Rembrandt’s nudes glow pink, plush like shameless roses. Carl treasures the painter’s zest for light amid all Amsterdam’s sodden, black velvet.

  Carl saw that Art has three stops: Religion, Nature, Woman. Period. Out of chiaroscuro, out of pastels, out of oils, out of watercolour, every feminine form emerges, like a Botticelli Venus, a gorgeous Medusa, to transfix and trouble a dude. Yet, his gaze cannot be sated. A woman’s beauty—her exquisite look and liquid sculpture—is light, brilliant and ephemeral, never to be captured.

  Naturally, Carl’s always idolized the sultry temptresses who beckon paperback readers. Even a high-class author like Billy Faulkner looks more appealing when his novel cover shows a blond, barefoot belle in a skin-tight, crimson dress, leaning against a wooden porch column and eyeing, brazenly, a bare-chested Negro labourer as he passes by, a boy from Ipanema. The book cover is a mini movie-poster, suggesting that black words on white paper can yield as many thrills as silvery light in a darkened cinema.

  So Carl has gravitated toward Alberto Vargas’s pin-ups. The Peruvian’s women model Leda-as-swan, svelte, feather-light, and feather-white. Too, Vargas gals are never girl-next-door average, but shiny and statuesque. His palette is blond—gold, ivory, peach—and his palate favours blondes. Vargas pin-ups look pinned down, arrested in their nudity. It’s difficult to imagine them as physical women, as avoirdupois women; they seem more like soft, thin clouds, pinkish-beige, creamy, but still so incandescently white as to vanish against whatever sheet they could ever be set down upon.

  Carl’s other major model is local—namely, W.R. MacAskill, the Nova Scotian marine photographer, whose scenes of fishermen battling gales are an East Coast version of Walker Evans’s social-realist pictorials in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. In lieu of a dust bowl, MacAskill shows a florid ocean, all ivory spray and charcoal depths. His apple blossoms and clouds are explosively white, but seem as posh and glowing as the innards of potatoes; his seas are lustrously dark—like India ink come fresh from a German pen. Because MacAskill is so unrepentantly Romantic, he is out of fashion in the era of Time-Life. But MacAskill depicts a Nova Scotia of gleaming leaves and of electrified sea-spray. His photos are moody, yes, but supernaturally voluptuous. His cloud banks are so lush as to seem roseate; his waves, violent in pitch, exude a bruising purple; his suns, ostensibly ivory, seem to pulse and throb with gold, vanquishing or dissipating some gathering storm. MacAskill photographs need no obscuring tints: he wrings entire rainbows out of collisions between natural blacks and native whites, orchestrated by sun or moon or rain squalls, and that vast horror that is the Atlantic, seething with sharks and shipwrecks. MacAskill’s photos brood like Hitchcock stills. (Cf. the opening shot in Hitchcock’s I Confess.)

  Carl critiques MacAskill for wasting his talents on sailboats. He should’ve gone to Cannes, shooting starlets whose skin glows like cream. (MacAskill should’ve been a bit more like Vargas: posed a bikini’d babe on a heaving North Atlantic fishing trawler.)

  Carl also copies Alex Colville, the official Dominion World War II artist, now finding acclaim with simple oils such as Milk Truck (1959). The painting could be low-key realism: a small-town truck is out delivering milk, but the black dog gazing gloomily from its rear seems symbolic of dread. Milk is white, but men’s souls remain damned, or so impish Colville implies.

  Carl’s charcoal pencil pays homage to cartoonists, such as Bob Chambers at The Morning Herald, whose métier is hokey caricature. Chambers images the taxpayer as the archetypal little man, nude except for a fig-leaf-barrel suspended from his shoulders and a few sprigs of sweat leapin
g from his forehead and a few sprigs of hair sprouting from his legs. So, Carl doesn’t mind aping Francisque Poulbot of the “Republic of Montmartre.” His pictures of les gosses—Parisian urchins—are dowdy beauty, romanticizing rags and hovels. Carl spies his own childhood poverty in Poulbot’s edgy sketches of naughty waifs and dreaming ragamuffins (the Parisian version of Dixie pickaninnies). If Poulbot’s art remodels slum kids as Hansel and Gretel, so that Deprivation seems endearing, still he’s no Norman Rockwell, flattering middle-class notions of pre-Depression, pre–World War II Normalcy.

  All things considered, Fennel was a good introductory painting instructor, of sorts. And Grade Ten Art taught Carl much. But Carl considers taking a mail-order course.

  The Male ad reads, “Art—Learn at Home,” and showcases a painted robust nude. The come-on commands:

  Enjoy glamorous high-pay career or profitable hobby. Learn Painting, Commercial Art, Cartooning, Fashion, Art, Lettering, TV, etc. We train you at home, in spare time. TWO 22-pc art outfits (worth $25) included, without charge. LOW COST—only 20¢ a day. Write for FREE BOOK describing EASY course. No salesman will call. Lincoln School of Art. Studio 69, Lincoln, N.B. (Estab. 1918). Tear This Out.

  The course is “Easier than You Think!” The ad swears, “You don’t have to be a ‘genius’ to break into art” and “No previous art training is needed.” Promising. But this ad flanks others exhorting readers to “Be a LOCKSMITH” or “Study Law at Home,” or “Be a Fingerprint Expert [There’s a thrill in bringing a crook to justice through Scientific Crime Detection]” or to learn to “Hypnotize Easily,” or, the top choice, to learn “Meat Cutting—The Best Established Business in the World: PEOPLE MUST EAT.”