The Motorcyclist

by George Elliott Clarke

  Carl sets down the Chinese takeout and scoops up his Mississippi angel, his Vargas pin-up. Her kiss smoulders with whiskey. The queen bed awaits a bumblebee. When she falls against him, he smells sweetness akin to Peek Freans’ biscuits.

  For Avril, too, this dusk means Liberation. If she was once the prisoner of a KKK fairy tale, in which black men and white women meet and fuck—and are executed if discovered—she now feels the pleasure of choosing a man for herself, one necessarily superior to those scoped out for her to marry, back in Natchez, Mississippi (fictitious locale of Show Boat and true location of a mass lynching).

  The two kiss deeply. Carl notices the white stucco, the mahogany furniture, the brass fixtures, the indigo and gold wallpaper, all the monarchical touches of the royal-welcoming room. Still, the contrast between Avril’s lodging and Muriel’s rancid, ratty hole is pungent: whiskey versus boiled cabbage; soap versus wet newsprint; perfume versus pepper. How sweet to lie with a woman who knows her value in the world—cos she be valued by the world.

  Carl slips a hand south, to sweep away fabric and to finger, gingerly, Avril’s slit. He kisses, nips slightly, the creamy prow that’s each breast; suckles each supple nipple until each pink tidbit is stubbornly straight as a mast. Avril feels a dark thumb press against and slightly indent her sex; she swoons.

  Now, her nightie’s off and lovemaking on. Furious—like Casablanca clutching at Gibraltar. There’s no top limit to their desires. Avril accepts Carl’s pivotal direction, to turn on her belly and lift her bum. An incriminating smile reveals her teeth as sweat drips from Carl’s face onto her ass, and she moans, “Oh God oh God oh God,” sounding awfully like a church lady.

  Thus, Rilke’s “two solitudes” kiss. For Carl, this night redeems the trauma that was his youthful study of the Lust and Rage exemplified by the black Mr. Paris and the white Mrs. Naas at Italy Cross. Avril also fulfills for Carl the doomed wishes of all those poor Dixie Negroes who got strung up, with their dicks cut off and stuck—like drooping cigars—in their mouths. This night, Carl’s a combo of Nat Turner and Nat King Cole: simultaneously natty and a dastard.

  Avril’s panting is a scorching tempest. She believes her sweat, right now, is the most honest gift she has ever allowed herself.

  After: the moon pours its light onto the bed, where the pair snooze, chaste in restored nightie and uncloseted hotel robe. Carl is cast iron next to Avril’s chrome. She snuggles herself into his arms. The Solid South gone molten.

  Carl’s got safes: he can do it again safely. Does he ever want to! Muriel and Mar are frustrating, and Laura’s afar. But Avril’s playful girlishness and funky wit grace mature, confident Womanhood. She’s not a frisky little flirt. No, she’s simply not Mar. Nor is she as depressing—or as depressed (because she’s not oppressed)—as Muriel. The Surplus Value of white skin renders her freer to be careless, to be experimental, to be spontaneous, to be—golly—a female beatnik. Herself.

  Yet, Avril scorns the icy chivalry that places her in an Untouchable caste. As a Mississippian, Avril’s heard that solemn drawl bout “pro-tek-tiiing whyte woo-mun-hoood,” that code that lets white men reserve to themselves select brothels, where Coloured girls work shoulder-to-shoulder, on their backs, with white ones, while Coloured men are forbidden any contact with any.

  Too, Avril suspects she ain’t the only Dixie deb to pass a chain gang and witness Negro men, half naked, sweat showering their tasks, and to wonder about the power present in those iron-coloured, bull-muscled torsos. Thus, Carlyle be her case-study Negro.

  Avril’s dark-complected eroticism would get her tarred and feathered down South. Worse, her suspect interests in Russian literature would see her branded a Commie. (Cf. Nancy Cunard.) Truly, she loves Pushkin, borscht, Dostoevsky, caviar, Tolstoy, vodka, Pasternak, mink, Fabergé, the whole shebang. Given her predilections, Avril—a descendant of displaced Acadians, anyway—is lucky to be in Nova Scotia and at Dalhousie (she says “Da-lousy”) University, and taking nursing and Russian—and taking (to bed) Carl.

  Carl lands, in Avril, a woman who also adores classical music (Shostakovich and Sibelius), art (Picasso and Warhol), letters (Mailer and Nabokov), and who can speculate about geopolitics (West and East Berlin, and “Naw Leens” and “Joe-jah”). Talkin with Avril, Carl don’t need to drop his g’s, dot his i’s, and cross his t’s. Even if he do. Sumtime.

  Still, Carl is not the simon-pure Negro that Avril lusts to try. He’s for starters, not for keeps!

  Carl’s oblivious to Avril’s true mania. She is his Darlin Naas (the belle dame sans merci of Italy Cross), his Liz Publicover (his junior-high crush), and even his adult version of the red-haired, hot-lipped harpy who’d jumped on his lap on the Halifax trolley ten years back. Yahoo!

  Avril knows Carl’s sweet on Marina, but she slights it as puppy love. Yes, Mar’d make a fine trophy as a Coloured wife, but she’s nothin special qua woman. Avril’s sure that Carl needs a real lady, just as she—Avril—needs an unambiguous, unadulterated, black man. Coal-coloured in groin, iron-firm where it counts, mustang-wild in the clinch, mustard-tang in odour.

  Too, Avril deems Mar a hoity-toity hypocrite. She suspects the goody two-shoes is enticing Carib peacocks (studs masquerading as students) and promising em more than a good-night kiss. In hope of a hyped-up white wedding in Ocho Rios or May-he-co.

  Yet, Avril desires Island Negroes less than she does the Yankee version—though so, so, so bleached out in Nova Scotia. The West Indies gents are sophisticated, brash, bold, elitist, and Race-proud, if also (Episcopalian) Anglican. Hailing from Coloured-run proto-nations, they see themselves as equals to whites—or superior. Surely, they do better than most Canucks because they have more money, more knowledge, plus more panache, and are closer to unadulterated Independence. While a Canadian woman could bestow the gift of her citizenship upon them, they could bestow upon her a coveted middle-class status, complete with servants, either in Canada or back home in Barbados, Jamaica, or Trinidad. In short, their psychological health does not require seduction of white women. In contrast, for Avril, the ecstasy of sleeping with a Negro American (or Canuck) derives mostly from the frisson of putting to bed a taboo.

  So, Avril relishes being with Carl. With him, she be part–artist’s model, part–motorcycle moll. When Carl peels off his denim or light wool trousers, then cotton briefs, she views lean, tense mahogany and burnished bronze. His groans and moans echo rumbling, earthy machinery—what arranges her ascension. Peace! But never enough!

  Sunday, May 31

  Restless after the joys of clandestine lovemaking with Avril, and curious about how he’ll feel about seeing her colour-and-class opposite, Muriel, Carl decides to exercise a Playboy prerogative and zip over to see the maid. It’s Sunday; as Baptist Youth Fellowship president, he should be in church. But he wagers that Muriel won’t be. So he pours himself into his blue jeans and black leather and kick-starts his purple and chrome machine and rolls over to those peppery, curry-scented quarters that corner Maynard and Cornwallis.

  Carl brings along his paints because he wants to ask Muriel to pose for him while he limns her portrait. If he’s honest with himself, he’ll admit that painting—Art—is an extension of his basic interest: to whore and wine. From a Christian perspective, Carl knows he blazes so much with sin, his black leather duds almost glitter. If only he could see loving as being more than a game, see coitus as being more than a woman’s subduing unto his own satisfaction. Like quicksand, he empties himself into ladies’ laps but remains as self-contained as an hourglass. And yet, Intercourse is the concourse to Love, he doth believe.

  Carl does find Muriel home and kisses her as if she’s his one-and-only. She’s thrilled—in part because Frederickson Dent is again away, aboard his ship, and out-of-the-picture. It’s tricky for Carl to set up his paints and canvas in Muriel’s kitchen, which is more a nun’s cell than it is a garret. But there’s a wedge of light in the window over the sink, and Muriel’s lily perfume accents the gleaming, swee
t-sweet chocolate of her chassis.

  So, Carl paints Muriel, depicting her sunlit crowning as a virtual Madonna, pinpointing lips like sanguine strawberries. He asks her to unbutton two more buttons on her filmy, white cotton blouse, to bring out better the contrast between her dark-lightning cleavage and the ivory cloud of her top. Muriel smiles coyly as she acquiesces: she knows that Carl is intrigued by her measures, the S-swish of her curves, the most mystical algebra to his paint-by-numbers aptitude. Indeed, Carl’s brush swoons to bring out the full beauty of Muriel’s breasts—two Moirs chocolate-box bonbons cupped by pale paper.

  Muriel is pleased, yes, to be the subject of artistic focus—not just in the snapshots of casual parties, picnics, frolics, fairground jaunts, and holidays, sometimes picturing her, qua maid, in the precincts—or on the fringes—of Dr. Fullerton’s household, where her image as family servant—if subversively sexual in her uniform—is background assertion of the clan’s upper-middle-class position. Today, she sees herself in Carl’s eyes as Beauty, consecrated by paint, elevated by light, as if his canvas were really stained glass. Her familiarity with Art is limited to the reproduced Mona Lisa and La Maja Desnuda that Fullerton, M.D., keeps in his home to signal his safe, domesticated sexuality. As a “Negress” model, Muriel disturbs and upsets all the European protocols and Caucasian aesthetics—perfectly, as Carl sees.

  Carl now knows that he can picture Halifax as an unpicturesque Avignon, a mirror Naples (scuzzy, lurid). He wants a Haligonian Harem the colour of Neapolitan ice cream: Negress, Caucasian, Indianess. He can envision himself canvassing sparks of oils to display Haligonian Negroes as transparently colourful as Neapolitans. His master will be the crème-de-la-crème Rockwell—namely, Rockwell Kent.

  (Kent’s inking of Boccaccio’s Decameron is sculptural, stressing right angles and straight lines. Yet, his women are dramatic: Their breasts are not merely round, but circular, throwing the encasing straight lines for a curve. The disconcerting aspect of Kent’s nudes is that their heads seem canine, their faces masculine, and their limbs mannequin-stiff.)

  Carl asks Muriel if she can feel his brush as he figures her on paper, with sympathetic magic, simultaneously stroking her face. She answers, with a breath, “Yes, oh yes,” trembling at the silky feel of the invisible bristles.

  After an hour, while church bells chime through the Sunday noon, heralding the closure of the Lord’s Morning, the end of services, with all the various denominations flocking and scattering from their respective portals of Confession and Redemption, Carl reveals his portraiture to Muriel, who is affected, just as he has prayed. A hand caresses a back; another brushes a knee; a bold palm cups an ass.

  Muriel squirms laughingly out of the embrace, the squeeze, and switches on her hi-fi. The sudden, secular music is amenable to Carl’s touches; it conducts and it ameliorates. It’s doo-wop cruising bluesily from the speaker. It’s the blues of New York and Detroit and Chicago, imported by black magic locomotives to Halifax. Now, The Platters are crooning, not at all blasphemously, “My Prayer,” and soon two faces sweat in a snuggling clinch, while Muriel keeps one satisfied eye on her satisfying portrait.

  Roaring back to his digs, Carl ponders his Friday night with Mississippi’s Avril and his Sunday afternoon with Scotia’s Muriel. He figures that Avril can take portraiture for granted, that there’s a Richard Avedon—to be paid (of course)—somewhere in her future, while, for Muriel—and Marina and Laura—there’s no James Van Der Zee (the Harlem photog) to show off their beauty, to preserve it for ogling Posterity. Such could be his—Carl’s—role, and the benefits and pleasures incalculable . . . Carl smiles, and a mosquito smacks his upper front teeth.

  Over some six weeks, May through July, Avril and Carl lie-down-as-one some two dozen times, twice per meeting. Avril—the daughter of April, of Bolshevik April—yearns for Carl as much as Carl loves indulging her. How she revels in the work of his ebony transfixing her ivory, with dark hairs marking the moment at both ends. Going to meet Avril, Carl’s step is jaunty; he swaggers. To hear a white woman, a student of human reproduction and an acolyte of Pushkin, converse avidly with him about his pet topics (classical music, world politics, Art), and then go avariciously—after kissing, petting—to bed is miraculous to Carl. Avril is a Playboy pin-up without staples and without scruples. Too, Avril’s purse buys ale and vodka, wine by the case, and it lets her encase herself in lacy, racy lingerie. Carl is suckled by her amplitude (bust and butt) and sucks down her plenitude (drinks and kisses). Sincerely—as the McGuire Sisters sing—Carl’s never felt, with a woman, freer.

  But Avril craves to try a gold-standard, unqualified buck, a dude untainted by Christian mores, a man who is all Moor, always Moor, and nothing less. She wants Fornication, not just dirty, but muddy, sloshing juice and stink. A spurious Dixie stanza haunts, spurs her on:

  In the evening, by the moonlight,

  Juanita loved her old black Joe.

  Man or horse? She couldn’t say quite.

  Sighing, she didn’t need to know.

  DETOUR

  The only thing to do was to go.

  —JACK KEROUAC, ON THE ROAD

  TRIP DIARY

  Property of Carl A. Black,

  1½ Belle Aire Terrace, Halifax, N.S.

  (If lost/found, please return.)

  Saturday, June 13

  Corkum shows at 8 a.m.: Liz II is ready. I dress hastily, eat, say, “So long,” to Muriel, passing by. Off at 9 a.m. sharp. Like Jesse Owens, racing. Mileage reads 1,492 (or magic #7).

  Truro by 1:15 p.m., Amherst at 2:55 p.m., cross the Nova Scotia–New Brunswick border at the Tantramar Marshes, skip through Sackville, parade past Gothic-style Dorchester Penitentiary (jailbirds always inhabit monster-movie castles), on to Moncton. There at 3:55 p.m. Not bad time. Stop for rain. Not too long.

  (New Brunswick is a realm of saints—St. Andrews by-the-Sea, Saint John, St. Stephen—all along the Fundy coast. Too bad the saints be impotent and the Devil vigorous.)

  Exit Moncton for Salisbury, Sussex, Saint John, then St. Andrews by-the-Sea, and next St. Stephen; cross the Canada-U.S. border here. Exchange Her Majesty’s nickel beaver for the President’s silver eagle.

  Highway 1. Roll coastal from Ellsworth to Belfast. Silvery-green forest fronting green-silver sea. Pick up Highway 3, to Augusta, Me. Weave among silvery birches. Ceaseless rain. Hear the lilt of leaves under the rain’s light rhythm. That’s “Me.” Free (again) at last!

  Hit Augusta at 9:45 p.m. E.S.T. Put up at Ralph’s Tourist Home for $2.50. (The guy who runs this place uses a 1958 Cadillac Fleetwood hardtop model for a taxi.) Look out the window, all I see is framed oblivion. Beautiful nothingness.

  The motel is scrupulously—conspicuously—clean like the scene of a gore-and-guts homicide that the murderer has set to rights. The tap drips a remorseless Morse. Water is as “hard as nails”; the rubbery soap grudgingly sloughs off its cleansing film. (In the shower, the water strikes like wet fire.) The bed is suspiciously soft. Once the lights are off, I worry a cockroach troupe will invade to claim whatever crumbs my snacks have deposited in the sheets or on the floor. Improbably immaculate, the room’s also distressingly shabby; the carpet is worn out almost to the soil beneath the floor, and the cigarette burns are practically peepholes, including an odd one in the shower curtain. Well, the radio works: siphon enough music into the room that I, somehow, sleep. Notes scurry—if not roaches. The Flamingos: “I Only Have Eyes for You.”

  In Maine, I buy ready eatables: big roll of bologna, some canned fruit, nuts, a half-pound of pepperoni. Can’t stay in most Maine hotels and motels. (One Maine postcard shows a flock of white sheep and one black one. The slogan? You’s in Maine.)

  Number of miles totals 1,552. Travel 500 miles plus in one day. Try to make Washington, D.C., tomorrow. Hope rain lets up. Gas costs $3.98.

  Sunday, June 14

  Shave in cold water. It ruins smooth skin. Face copies a coral reef!

  Exit Ralph’s at 8:50 a.m. Weath
er awful. Keep off turnpike until free of Maine. Rain pastes clothes to body. Rain’s my raiment. Visibility nigh nil.

  Make New York City at 7:45 p.m. Traffic snarl up to New Jersey Turnpike. Cross George Washington Bridge and hit 8 congested lanes. The glamorous, terrifying, canyoned labyrinth of Malcolm X Town! But, yessiree, N.Y.C. has the sun! (Spy X on TV: Redskin Muslim in a natty, mohair suit. Surprise chic for a “hatemonger.”)

  Leave Manhattan at 8:20 p.m. Like MacArthur said, “I came through and I shall return.” Good weather past Hartford, Connecticut. Flood of rain yesterday; now sun. La fleur de mon désir.

  Monday, June 15

  Washington, D.C., at 12:50 a.m. Poet Pound’s ex-prison is fog or bonfires: a faux-Monrovia (Liberia) surrounded by a faux Vienna (Virginia). See bronze horses et bronze eagles. Imperious. Bellicose. Imagine desperate bigots staffing lynch mobs. Streets carry the stink of sewers, the stench of earth, the odour of bones.

  Room in a Coloured hotel—The Dunbar (after Negro Poet Dunbar)—on 15th Street between U and V Streets, NW: for the usual Negroes bent on fucking, it’s no more than a place to take a woman. (Night manager offered me one, but I said, “No, thanks!” Virtue by necessity, sadly.)

  Draw blind against sight of polka-dot-dress tarts lounging under street lamps. Gaudy mosquitoes. Unhealthy whispers. Sordid guffaws.

  Toilet exhales yelping funk, strong enough to stun a rat. Yet, a book rests atop the john ledge: Pound’s Selected Cantos. Newspaper page, torn out, reminds us Emmett Till’s papa got hanged at Pisa, while cellmate Pound got sprung.

  Quit hotel at noon. Try to find a decent tourist home: economic, non-erotic.

  The Capitol’s a mosquito mosque. (They’re thick, hungry, curtaining the Potomac, that miasma.) Inside the dome, politicos bawl like brats: clandestine sodomy. In its corridors—as on the obedient radio waves—asinine, asphyxiating speech. Ghastly stupidity is aired, so long as it’s “anti-Communist.” Fascism masks as Schmaltz, Kitsch, glitz. Overhead, an arrogant copter clips twixt the White House and Camp David?