The Motorcyclist

by George Elliott Clarke

  Weirdly, at this triumphant instance, when Carl has the nurse-to-be, bourgeoise-to-be, on her knees, misgivings cloud his mind. Any sex act between them will be heavenly, but Carl would like Mar to be committed to him, by official ink or precious metal, so that he need not fear her applying her sultry ministrations to another male human.

  But Carl’s hesitation is thwarted when, in addition to his exposure to her mouth, Mar applies a vigorous—if by-the-book—manual stimulation. She jerks him off as if he were a bull, a science project. Despite his sharp odour, her worry at his cleanliness or lack thereof, Mar thrills at her hands-on command of the man. Yet, Mar’s manipulation of Carl—literally—leaves him feeling a waste. Her forwardness bothers him, despite his Pleasure.

  For her part, Mar had figured that any other intimacy could jeopardize her health and reputation. She won’t risk either for Carl, for who knows how he’d view her if she got pregnant?

  But, in Carl’s view, her deed is a pissoir act, not his victoire. He’s not had her.

  Suspiciously too, Mar has ready a dainty serviette; she wipes clean Carl’s organ, even as it begins to curve down. Her conception—her plan—has proven immaculate.

  So, Carl’s climax marks Sorrow and Regret. Contradictorily, Carl deems Mar no longer 100 per cent virginal, if still—cynically, hypocritically—“intact.”

  Carl lies beside Mar on the springy turf. Murmurs ensue. He could right now roll atop her and grind her ass into the grass, giving their affair some true, Adam-Eve lineage. Instead, they doze. She rests her head on his belly. He wonders if the moment is Edenic, after all.

  He feels arousal again as soon as he sees the wakened woman smile. She senses his refreshed vigour, but Mar stands, smiles, and buckles her watch about her wrist again.

  2 p.m.: They hustle back to Halifax. Wind grumbles as Carl cleaves ninety miles in scorching chill. Mar wears his jacket on the return, so as not to be too cool as they attain the top, two-passenger speed. She grasps Carl with the anti-gravitational hold of a ballerina.

  Back in Halifax, after the fast, cool trip, the sun soon sets them sticky and hot. Carl crosses the peninsula, back to the Miramar.

  At her door, disembarking, Mar grants Carl an amiable kiss. Three-thirty p.m. is a bright inferno. Instantly, a car pulls flush across the street from the couple; its strident horn blasts, swivelling their heads.

  Carl sees a white-suited, tony black man, an obvious foreigner, glaring out a rolled-down window, his scarred face resembling a ventriloquist’s dummy’s square-lined mouth and jaw. The stranger yells, “Marina, we got a date! Who’s this chap?”

  Mar breaks away from Carl. Sheepishly, Carl asks, “Who’s he?”

  Mar shouts across the street, “This is Carlyle Black. We’re best friends. Today’s his birthday.” Mar studies Carl: “Leicester Jenkins is a medical student. He’s from Grenada. We’ve taken a class together.”

  Carl feels sick: I don’t like that you’ve suddenly got all these friends. He imagines Mar on her knees before Leicester.

  The M.D.-to-be rises from his late-model car, a green Cadillac convertible (the exact same model as Martin Luther King’s snazzy auto); sunlight jumps from the verdant metal as atomic-age photosynthesis. His suit is dollar bills repurposed into silk. He greets Carl; his handshake is steel, but his smile projects a billboard’s trickster gloss: “So, you’re a birthday boy! Congrats. Marina is so generous with her time—as charitable as the nurse that she will be. But now it’s my turn.”

  Carl frets that Leicester—a man with no-nonsense, Malcolm X glasses and a cool, Sidney Poitier grin—is tutoring Mar in sex tricks. Detestable implication!

  Mar is all smiles: “You two should be friends. Leicester, Carl’s the smartest person I know.”

  Leicester asks the mean question: “What’s your field?”

  Carl can’t say, “Nuclear physics.” He won’t say, “Linen cleaning and baggage lugging.”

  Mar rescues him: “He’s a motorcyclist; he’s been everywhere: Montreal, New York City, Boston.”

  Leicester slaps Carl’s back: “I see you’ve a quality bike. Maybe we can trade for a day: you’ll drive my Caddy; I’ll take your cycle. Mar can take turns riding with us both.”

  Carl loathes Leicester for calling his Marina “Mar.” He feels now might be the time for him to serve Leicester a two-by-four length of wood—to strike the dolt in the ass. Or just splash his gloved knuckles into Leicester’s cologned, mouthwashed, and blandly sweaty face. Instead, Carl’s Revulsion evaporates into mere, dutiful Distaste.

  Mar revels in attracting the attentions of a good-lookin Med student with cold cash and a Cadillac. Perhaps she could be Coretta Scott King, a reasonable helpmate to an above-average man, rather than a tan doll straddling the rump of a motorcycle. Yep: she got options.

  Marina kisses Carl on the cheek: “Happy birthday, again.” The action is chaste. But Carl recalls Mar’s hand frigging his member and his member jigging in her mouth.

  Leicester smiles and clasps Mar’s hand: it is a friendly gesture, not necessarily that of a lover. Nimbly, she is gone to his side to sit in his car and purr away to some velvet event. She waves at Carl. He wants suddenly to kick Liz II into the gutter.

  Carl senses Mar has treated him like a jerk. He has literally been jerked about—and on his twenty-fourth birthday, too. The solution to his woe is as clear as the strength-inducing feeling-emotion of the engine again roaring at his crotch. He will not hesitate.

  Carl zips toward Muriel: his dependable, “bottom” girl; fundamental lover.

  The thought of Muriel is an electrical surge from his spine to his brain, from his brain to his groin. The memory of her peppery atmosphere is already pepping his lungs and prepping his sex. He thinks, Marina sins with her clothes on, but Muriel sins with hers off. She goes as naked as the wind.

  He arrives at that ramshackle tenement, wood-shingle fossil from Queen Victoria’s era of widowhood, and clatters up creaky, musty stairs. The outdoor reek of pepper, as Carl approaches Muriel’s cinnamon beauty, melds into her room’s pungent scent of ginger.

  She clasps him: no reluctance. It’s his birthday, after all.

  Hers are diabolical caresses. Her lips go everywhere. Her ale is citrus; her fish is softness. Soon, that rickety property—her bed—shakes as the candle flame shakes. Muriel is giggles and gasps as she falls upon Carl and he thrusts upwards. They act chummy, clammy lovers. Then snooze together, their natural, lonely-hearts sex fluids oozing.

  Carl dreams: Mar is naked and plastering her gold self with a rainbow of paints as she undulates against a blank, hanging canvas, thus orchestrating smears that resemble a life-size Rorschach test. Her teats equal small but pointed brushes as she presses her writhing body all over the canvas as the Miles Davis Quintet spouts blue trumpet and black sax from a radio. Every few minutes, Marina pours a different colour of paint over herself, then gyrates against the now soaking, dazzling canvas. Carl grabs hold of her, thus slashing colours all over his clothes. He tells her, “I’m an artist.” The scene shifts. Carl and Mar lie together on a plush, pink bed in a pink cave. Mar yells, “I protest!” So what? Carl pushes apart her legs—bullishly—and thrusts himself to the heart—the crux—of the matter, and she is moaning as he, groaning ecstatically, awakes, pleased that he has finally asserted himself—though uselessly—in a dream.

  After his accidental nap, Carl hauls on clothes and stops at Muriel’s WC, to scour the pepper reek from his penis and his backside. But it’s almost as gritty as Snap, practically impervious to soap.

  He repairs to Liz II, but takes a jaunt, east to Gottingen and its macédoine, sans-culottes, razor-cut-up, and odoriferous folk; its Babel of French, English, Yiddish, Italian, Greek, Chinese, Soviet, and Dixie dialects; plus the off-colour tongues of sailors shit-faced drunk. But no respectable woman is out at one-thirty a.m., who he might try to seduce, or dragoon, and so Carl zooms back to 1½ Belle Aire Terrace. Solo.

  He could have, he should have, he would
have, he can have, he shall have, he will have brown-skin Miss White. At last! If she’s truly still pure.

  Well, Romance has as many angles as a woman has curves. To succeed at courtship, Carl frets, he gotta be an optimist in Hell.

  Muriel is pliable, for she can’t demand the simple-simple Respect that Marina, a bourgeoisie-bound nurse, expects. Muriel is fuckable: she’s a maid. Nor is the equation false. Negro gals who work as white folks’ housekeepers get fingered—literally—as casual sluts, subject to manhandling, digital insertions, thumb-and-index-tweezered nipples. After all, a white husband can silkily bribe his black maid and pump her up with a child, much lighter in shade than her other children. Or a white lady’s spouse, brother, or son can just trip the maid, tup her, and next romanticize dreadful Rape as “drunken Rapture,” thus exonerating his ass.

  (Carl swears no wife of his will be a maid. Her place will be at home, caring for his children. She’ll not suffer Coercion perpetrated—or private Rape sheltered—by the Caucasian wallet. Being a black husband, he’d want to avert, in his household, the sullen silence that’d greet the arrival of a white man’s whelp gobbling up already niggardly stores.)

  Carl’ll save one woman for wife, take others for playmates. At least until he can more-or-less settle, i.e., accept the ball and chain of Monogamy.

  Yet, Muriel is more his natural spouse than is Marina. The alliance of Coloured maid and Negro railway worker befits their shared class. In contrast, the congress of Negress nurse and black (Beat) biker is a page torn from Porn’s shiftless scenarios.

  Though her employ seems elementary, Muriel’s life is complex. A magnet-black woman so magnetically lovely, Muriel’s black Beauty flouts Renaissance aesthetics. European propaganda says “big bones” signal unsavoury fat, that dark skin is blemish, that curly wires of Negro hair must be pressed and straightened, that a flat nose is ugly, and that a capacious bottom signals Sloth and Lust. Muriel notices this negation of her physique in ads that parade Aunt Jemima and Mammy as icons of Mirth. Likewise, movies project blonde dancers and brunette starlets as the apogees of Femininity. Occasionally, the brown-skin Josephine Baker or the beige-skin Dorothy Dandridge is touted as an almost beauty queen.

  Yet, Muriel knows that men—white and black—see her Beauty. She is a woman who, waiting for a trolley and dressed demurely, will get propositioned to party with an anonymous white man—and his buddies—for a few bucks. Nor is she unaware of the spectacle of Dr. Fullerton eyeing her derrière as she stoops to wash or dust items in his home. More than once, she has caught his ruddy flush in colour and quavering fluster in voice as he recognized that she caught him, staring openly, lusting. Nor is she oblivious to her attraction to black men, albeit working-class, just like her. While some are locals, others are West Indian—or Negro Yank—sailors, thirsty for drink, hungry for excitement, hankering for company.

  Muriel is thought no rival to white middle-class women or well-schooled black women (like Marina) in winning a man’s affections. Yet, she is their greatest threat, for she has no illusions about men (“they’re pigs”), nor about her marital prospects, should she refrain from coitus (as Marina is striving to do) until Mr. Right materializes, as blue-eyed as Jesus and just as supposedly capable of miracles.

  Ironically, by vaunting Marina over Muriel, Carl is wishing for someone “better.” But Marina can classify him as precisely as he classes Muriel: he’s okay for now, for some thrills and some laughs, a snack and a show, or a sip and a puff, but not for the role of a baby-making, child-rearing, day-and-night companion.

  Open to various proposals, Muriel maximizes her chances for scoring an engagement ring. She could (1) escort—um, comfort—a white tycoon; (2) undertake an impromptu coupling with a snappy Negro gent; (3) play happy hostess to Coloured sailors—Wessindians from the Caribbean or Jack Tars from the States. Because she has no illusions, no Romanticism, she can allow a man the romantic illusion that she be open to his Seduction.

  Friday, May 29

  After his birthday and Marina’s abrupt fall from Grace—by pleasuring Carl, then rushing off with Leicester—Carl must see Avril again: she don’t seem restricted or reticent or hesitant or hypocritical in any way. Together, they’re black leather and white silk—or iron and chrome. Maybe, baby?

  She calls; he prepares the arsenal—wallet, cologne, the hard-to-come-by condoms, tie clip, cufflinks, etc.—while he whistles along to calypso, the black-bottom balladry of Trinidad, by Lord Invader: a carnival study in high-fidelity sound. Carl peers into the mirror, not the dark glass of James the Apostle, but the looking glass of a dark-complected James Dean.

  8 p.m.: Carl trolleys down to Barrington at Spring Garden and enters the lobby of the Capitol Theatre. The red and gold interior resembles a dwarf fairy-tale castle, suiting the South End and its gold bug, humbug, Victorian-era capitalists, still preferring Ricardo to Keynes.

  Here’s Avril: dame all dolled up. They’re in public, but Carl’s gotta kiss her cheek, ogle all her glamour. She’s in a black top and a beige skirt, plus a beige beret and a long, white, all-weather coat.

  They catch Frankenstein 1970. The Monster is as dehumanized and as inhumane as a beast. Its face shakes em up. But Boris Karloff, as Doc Frankenstein, is scary because he looks just like Prime Minister Diefenbaker. His character fashions new people by knitting together organs and electrifying bones.

  (But Coitus is the better way: each infant is only a new Frankenstein amalgam of parts of the dead.)

  Carl and Avril exit onto the street. As Carl inhales her perfume, he also sniffs chocolate whiffs from the Moirs factory just blocks away. The chocolate is disorienting; the perfume is persuasive.

  Carl reflects on the divisions between his buds and bros (bankrupts) who patronize North End Got’gun Street, and the old-money WASP mountebanks who patronize South End Spring Garden Road. The class divide traces the lay of the land, with the old fortress of Citadel Hill, a grassy armoury bristling with cannon, splitting the statue-less North End and its rough workers from the statue-overrun South End and its Richie Rich retinue. The fortress hill also truncates Gottingen, forestalling any bastardizing intercourse with Spring Garden.

  Avril pooh-poohs Halifax stigmas of Class and Race. She’s a plantation landlord’s daughter, outta The Most Powerful Nation on Earth (alongside the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, lest we forget), now studying for entrée into a lab-coat profession. Being Mississippian, her world is only oysters Rockefeller and Eisenhower fallout. Still, she’s enticed by the posh manner of a Coloured biker with an Encyclopaedia Britannica vocabulary—so unexpected in a dead-end enclave like Halifax, the Alamo of the North Atlantic.

  Avril’s black heels (sheltering nice, pink toes) click along the sidewalk, telegraphing (Carl prays) a sexual intent, an ideal underlined by the flow of her breasts forward and her backside upward. Her perfume wafts lemon and lily, thus warding off the eve’s otherwise chocolate and mackerel scent. Sassy smells: Carl can’t stroll beside her and not crave to be inside her.

  The impulse is, actually, mutual. Carl’s poise, his striding step, the black leather jacket polishing the night, his burnt copper skin that she suspects might just taste like caramel, all please Avril’s four alert senses—sight, smell, sound, touch: the census—account—of the man.

  The mild, starry night, a periwinkle and azzura-negra sky, with its colliding accents of cocoa and Chanel, is promising as the pair strolls, now arm-in-arm, up Spring Garden, heading for the Lord Nelson Hotel at the cross street of Park. The squawks of raucous seagulls and the warble of dusty, dirty pigeons serenade their promenade.

  They shan’t enter the hotel together. One block away, Avril tells Carl her room number. Carl will hang back, then pick up Chinese food to “deliver” to her room. They both chuckle over this ruse—though they rue its necessity.

  They kiss, and then Avril canters on ahead of Carl. Her tilted nose and the white mouse fur of her April coat saunter toward the hotel.

  Carl repairs to t
he Garden View Restaurant to order egg rolls, chicken chow mein, chop suey, and sweet-and-sour spareribs: takeout. He knows Avril will have U.S. whiskey at the ready. Boy, is he ever ready!

  Thirty minutes later, playing the eunuch Uncle Tom, Carl steps into the ritzy hotel, passes under the lobby’s lustrous chandelier, approaches the mahogany-panelled front desk, and tells the officious clerk (who is so prejudiced that he doesn’t even look at Carl) that he has an order of Chinese to deliver promptly to Miss Beauchamps. (Carl mispronounces the surname deliberately as “Bow-champs” to seem even more a poor, illiterate Coloured chap.) The gent sniffs that he’ll call Carl a bellhop, but the “boy” pleads, joshes: he “really need dat tip, boss.” The clerk grants Carl egress—to extend him Charity (the cat’s paw of White Supremacy).

  Now, Carl stands, glimmering, before the polished brass elevator doors. He smiles at his doubled, brass self. The doors open; he ascends—uplifted—to the seventh floor. The rise equals a hike in income—or the heightened esteem he’ll feel if (no, when) Avril hikes her legs to welcome him. At Avril’s door, he raps seven times—da-dadadada-da-da—rhythmically, rapidly.

  When Avril opens the door, she’s invisible at first, for she is standing behind it, to up his suspense and eagerness. When he sees her at last, he hath Joy: between he and her nakedness, there’s only a midnight-black nightie (a filmy cloud of chiffon nylon from Frederick’s of Hollywood) that glorifies her incandescent skin.