The Motorcyclist

by George Elliott Clarke

  Farewell to Frank and Dallas. Last supper is at a restaurant.

  Later, the rain is black, the night is black, Cathy’s eyes are black, her hair is blonde. I do not recoil from such gold. (After the cascades quiet, light-grey clouds scuttle before a white moon in the brilliant, black night.)

  Monday, June 22

  Ezra’s snoring when I wake and leave. Quick gait to the garage at 8:30 a.m.

  Am shocked to find the gas tank cover off, the steering clamps loose, and a bolt loosened off the front generator cover. Maybe the oafish, beer-bellied, cock-eyed mechanic schemed up sabotage? Maybe he’s a hillbilly Klansman? He fixes up everything quietly though, no explanation, and I quit town at 9:30 a.m.

  To Bar Harbor, Me., then cross on the ferry to Yarmouth, N.S. At first, I see only a streak of blue beyond hills. Then, suddenly, the Atlantic widens into a world. Then, I’m back in Canada—parochial Europe. Elizabeth II—unspoiled monarch—beams upon Liz II and I.

  List of Articles Purchased in the U.S.A.

  2 Girls’ Bracelets @ $1 each

  1 Girls’ Bracelet @ $2

  2 Perfume @ $5 each

  1 Letter Opener @ .88

  1 Bottle Opener @ .88

  2 Plaques (N.Y. State) @ .98 each

  3 Belts @ .79 each

  1 Belt @ .59

  1 Box/Handkerchiefs @ $1

  2 Rubber “Heads” @ .99 each

  4 Sets of Earrings @ $2 each

  1 Stuffed Toy @ 3.98

  2 Cartons Cigarettes @ 2.50

  1 Cushion Cover @ 1.49

  3 Boxes/Chocolates @ 5.27

  1 Box/Lollipops @ $1

  5 Tie Bar & Cufflinks @ $1 each

  7 Pairs/Socks @ .39 each

  1 Metal Crucifix @ $1

  TOUR III

  My wrong, my wrong, my most grievous wrong.

  In which comes this beauty.

  —ROBERT DUNCAN, “IN MEMORY OF TWO WOMEN”

  Friday, July 10

  Though Carl is squiring Avril about, and aiming to keep the tryst secret, he’s turned up at Muriel’s premises (on spurious premises), severally since his U.S. trip. Now, he and Muriel are dubbing each other “boyfriend” and “girlfriend,” but guardedly, casually, because each knows that the terms really mean “bed buddy, occasional.” Still, Muriel’s more serious about this nomenclature than is he, for Carl desires other women—Avril before Laura, and Avril before Muriel. He yet hopes to ram Mar—if possible, to secure her, and then marry her—but other women must do service in the interim. Cognizant of Carl’s plays, Muriel knows he’ll never engage her own fine self for a wedding. So, she needn’t show him Loyalty.

  In due recompense, then, this night, Muriel’s minuscule apartment becomes the port of choice for seemingly—in Carl’s jealous eyes—dozens of bull-bodied, snow-uniformed sailors in Halifax on naval exercises, as it is for Fred Dent, whenever his sugar-and-gypsum Sunflower docks. Muriel calculates her marital prospects as superior with a Wessinjun or a Yank sailor than with a fly-by-night, smooth-talkin Scotianer, motorin—yessum—a getaway bike.

  She’s not wrong. Black fellas surfing the Atlantic’s white tufts are more amenable to marriage than are Coloured guys manning the iron horses with their moonlit wheels, always riding off. Railwaymen like to keep two families. Sailors are more honest: adulterous, yes, but not bigamists. Except that, when they choose to disappear—like Locksley Black—they vanish completely. (Cf. Tom Wingfield in The Glass Menagerie.)

  Truly, once the Yankee ships float in, Haligonian Negroes run short of women. Problem is, the Americans spend money like a government. Their smiles are chrome; their chewing gum is platinum. All em know “Slackers” be a stack of gaily painted, wood-frame, three-storey-high whorehouses, a clapboard Venice-on-th’Atlantic.

  So, Yanks treat Halifax like Whitman treated Tennyson: as an entity requiring a good beating, a good airing out, and then a re-education. They cast themselves as heroes who burn through cash, not as Ku Kluxers who burn books and torch “niggers.”

  Suddenly, North End Halifax is seasoned with old salts and peppered with U.S. Tars. Craving a meal ticket to the Great Republic, Haligonian chicks flock to the pubs, but first stow their panties at home. Carl guesses this situation suits Muriel: he wonders how many sailors have already seen her backside and the soles of her feet.

  Muriel’s rooms are prohibitively cramped, due to the nightmarish horde of sailors—dark, drawling, brawling, and drunk—pressing into her rooms in their dress whites. (Their salty speech and sugary uniforms complement the reek of pepper out the Schwartz smokestack.) They hog the kitchen; they horse about in the bedroom; they tomcat in the hallway. NATO just means “Negro Americans Take Over.”

  Muriel’s viral flirting guts Carl’s heart. So many sailors stagger about, their giant hands clutching their humongous, Tom-of-Finland crotches. Carl tries to be as raucous as the gum-chomping, tobacco-drooling, Coke-gulping Allies. But his pedigree is more Halifax than Harlem. Though Carl reveres Yankee culture, the funnies and the flicks, he knows that Superman is a Canuck (not Nietzsche’s hero) and that America’s Sweetheart—Mary Pickford—is a Hogtown pixie. So, it ain’t credible for Carl to kowtow to big-spending, big-talkin Negro lugs. He likes wielding his own big words—that dictionary vocabulary—so he deems Coloured Uncle Sam lingo a lot of bigmouth cuss. They’re almost as incomprehensible as Newfies and have the same disconcerting habit of pronouncing Eisenhower as “Icin’ Whore.”

  Saturday, July 11

  This night of jitterbugging June bugs, black insects creepin bout fluorescent-incandescent concrete, Carl cruises to Cornwallis Street Muriel, but finds her apartment and her entire building clogged wall-to-wall with whitewashed-uniformed Negroes—just like last night. Every single Tar in Halifax seems to be droning and moaning in Muriel’s tiny rooms, as if her apartment is Harlem shrunk down into the bell-jar-size Kryptonian city of Kandor.

  Carl fakes cool, but he’s totally cheesed off (as he tells himself) that Muriel’s attractin such questionable Bros. & Co. Worse, in his eyes, she’s nastily provocative, wearing a white cotton top sheer enough to show a white bra, which is itself sheer enough to allow two nipples to poke teasingly through the fabric like two tasty macaroon tips. She hasn’t dressed this way for Carl’s peepers, but rather as a tonic for sore Yankee eyes, to persuade them to quit sweethearts back in Chi-Town or L.A. or Harlem, and to invite her, instead, to see “the stars and bars”—the stars of Hollywood in the bars of Manhattan. Carl watches her smear cherry-red lipstick on her lips. Damn! Her eyes are coal-black, coruscatin diamonds.

  Muriel senses Carl’s upset. He tries to hide it, but he’s a miserable actor. His smile contorts to a blackface grimace. He’s as fang-mouthed as Othello facing Desdemona in their Cypriot bedroom. If Muriel acts Shakespearean, she’s either Cleopatra or Lady Macbeth, those strategic seductresses, survivin “by any means necessary” (to quote ex-con X).

  Despite the throng of U.S. Coloured guys lookin on, cigarettes boogyin in their choppers, their hands hoistin beer bottles or slappin down playing cards, Muriel stretches out her arms to beckon Carl to her. The Yanks figure Muriel means sumpin to Carl and he to her, but they couldn’t care less: “Any port in a storm” has been a true statement since Christ stomped down the waves of Galilee.

  Carl accepts Muriel’s embrace, but he’s angry, jealous, haughty. Muriel tries to kiss him playfully. But he wrenches himself out of her arms, sucking his teeth but still trying not to appear flustered before the Yank phalanx. He fails in that effort, for he—very ungentlemanly, very uncoolly—pushes Muriel, brushing her aside, then goes bounding down the squeaking staircase with its shaky banister, clattering down two storeys, two steps at a time, as yet another taxi, ferrying more sailors, zeroes in on Muriel’s ramshackle pile.

  Deliberately crunching too-slow June bugs, relishing the splattering of their blood and bile, Carl exits. He inhales fresh pepper from the Schwartz warehouse. It is his equivalent of battlefield gun smoke. Sneezing but invigo
rated, he jumps onto his June bug–black, peacock-purple, fluorescent-chrome machine. He hears Lola guffaw at some moose-coloured man’s pungently blue parley, all “effin” this and “effin” that. The dude’s cussin as loud as a priest atop an altar boy. Carl bristles; he fears the sailor be laughin at him. His German engine thundering, he roars off, his Scotianer heart roaring. Battle stations, mate!

  In crises like this, Carl is sure he loves Mar. She’d never cause him such heartache, he imagines. But what if she’s been nursin “Doc” Jenkins?

  Sunday, July 12

  Carl’s worry over Muriel’s possible sluttery gets justified, or so he figures. Visiting the USS Valley Forge, the vast anti-submarine warfare support aircraft carrier (which has helped to ejaculate many of the four thousand cocks-o-the-walk now striving to inseminate every Non-Aligned female in Halifax until July 16), Carl encounters one of Muriel’s U.S. pals.

  He’d gagged at the harbour’s raunchy stench as he clambered aboard the expansive ship. He noted where the carrier’s open-bow design had caused her to incur heavy damage in heaving North Atlantic seas last January: waves had broken over her forward flight deck, ripping away part of her port side. The wreckage be cleared now.

  Aboard ship, a Coloured seaman—Toe Joe—recognized Carl. Toe Joe’s uniform flagged his surname as Washington. Black-to-the-bone and electric in his eyes, the wiry, rock-jawed man saluted Carl: “Carlyle, you’s one helluva dude. Tried my damnedest to pull Muriel, but she told me square, ‘Carl be my man!’” Toe Joe slapped Carl’s back: “Got quite a gal there, Carlyle. No skin off my ass to say it!” He grinned, saluted again, maybe mockingly, and swaggered back to his duties.

  Carl wanted to feel flattered by Toe Joe’s statement. But he distrusted this news as much as he distrusted Yanks in general and West Indians in particular. He was now convinced that Muriel’s legs had criss-crossed Toe Joe’s extra-broad back.

  So, Carl felt like kickin in Toe Joe’s Jap-war-crook-branded mug. But he knew that a brawl aboard the atom-bomb-laden ship would be suicide for him, even if he lived. Better to grin niggerishly and haul ass. So, he did.

  Sides, the Negro Yankees were known to stick razors in their shoes. You’d challenge one to fisticuffs, and—shick, shick, shick—you’d lose your eyes and your nose: two out of five senses gone in one tussle. Or, if the spat occurred in a bar, broken glass would suddenly splinter jagged into your face (all this troop got as many scars as tattoos) and you’d sway as if drunk. Or if the fight shook up a shack, expect a hammer to crack your skull or a saw to be struck—stuck fast—into leg muscle, as if a leg were a log. Martin Luther King is into Non-Violence, but these seamen, by definition, can’t be. They’ve spent their lives battlin cracker cops and kamikaze Commies. Their singing is that of choirboys, but they fight as dirty as cowboys wielding rakes, battering down a cow. Some of em are Korean vets, with flame-thrower-charred lungs and bayonet-slashed faces. Look out!

  Night: stiff lights melt Dali-like in the water that, beyond McNabs Island and Eastern Passage, tracks the Atlantic’s sprawling dark and glare. Carl imagines the U.S. sailors trading limericks about Muriel. He gets low-down blues high up in his lungs:

  Moon is big and silver—

  A death-head in the sky;

  The moon’s too big and silver—

  A white skull way up high:

  If you won’t tell me you love me,

  Baby, I’ll tell you goodbye.

  Translation: His head conjures a Harem; his heart succours a brothel. To have many lawful wives, rather than several furtive lovers, that’d be Heaven.

  Frustrated by his suspicion of Muriel’s playgirlism, Carl paces a brooding constitutional. He don’t wend home (where he’s left Liz II) straight off, but crosses Park Avenue into The Commons and drifts diagonally, still within the dark North End, to head north up Robie—the spine of Halifax.

  The city’s slim harbourfront is a flood plain that suddenly rises up to terraced streets, and then rises again to the vast plateau of The Commons and the North End. (Hulking in the central harbour, the USS Valley Forge is an island dwarfing Georges Island.) Moving west, the city ascends to the ridge and plateau defined by Windsor Street, then descends to the Northwest Arm and the adjacent plateau of the Bayers Road plaza (bowling alleys displacing trash-strewn alleys). West of the Armdale Rotary and northwest toward Rockingham and north to Bedford, the city rises again into hills. Africville—the Coloured, seaside village—is tucked under the northern slope of the city that descends toward Bedford Basin.

  At North Street, Carl veers east past the radio tower of the Maritime Telegraph and Telephone Company, where his mom, Victoria, has telecommunication, elocutionary employ (thus replacing soap flakes with coiled wires), and steps smartly down to Belle Aire Terrace. Smells of stove oil mix with the grease stench of bacon and eggs slapped down in a heavy black iron pan (excellent for true domestic murders too). Or there’s firewood hissing like gossip. The tang of woodsmoke hovers over all, makin neighbourhood coochies seem smouldering, tantalizing.

  His zigzag perambulation reminds Carl that Halifax is a city divided into Upper Crust and Burnt Bottom, between ass-kissing attorney and cock-sucking sailor. Turning left onto his ulica, Carl looks east, down North, and sees the four-year-old Macdonald Bridge beckoning suicides to drown their sorrows in the dark, seething Lethe below. He gotta feel for such sad souls: they lack—clearly—a van Gogh–style, movie-star-Kirk-Douglas-affirmed Lust for Life.

  Carl wishes he were better-fisted. He recalls visiting Pow-Pow Prevost on May Day, for a haircut, yes, but also to catch the London vs. Patterson bout on TV.

  Survivor of a U-boat torpedoing that sank his merchant ship, Pow-Pow’s feet got badly damaged in the fray, so, he clicks about his tiny studio on crutches. He allows only the precise intelligence of scissors and clippers going about their business of slicing through knots and naps or cleaving parts into skulls, or unravelling whatever is untidy. His shaves and cuts mimic strafes and bombings. On May 1, Pow-Pow had his telly on.

  Carl saw two shadows, one Negro, the other Brit, trade blizzards of punches in a snow-white ring in Indianapolis. The crowd was a flat field of grey hats, cigar smoke, white shirts, black suits, black ties, plus black and white faces. Greek tragedy ensued. Bloody fists rushed to batter London. In the eleventh round, “Pretty Boy” Floyd put Sir London down—smack—onto the canvas. The punch was like a karate kick: London’s legs flew up as his head hit the hard ring surface, and a dark liquid ejaculated into air. A sheen of mud. The drift of Patterson’s fists had hit London like a buzz bomb striking the City of London. Carl didn’t think that London heard the blast inside his head until he was being counted out. He became ruins—like yesterday’s newspapers. He looked as stunned as if he were watching Malcolm X escort Jackie Kennedy to a Las Vegas bordello. The Negro barbershop cheered on Patterson lustily.

  If only Carl could hit a Fred Dent or Toe Joe Washington or Leicester Jenkins just as hard! To keep Mar and Muriel his—in his corner only. Reserved! Though he hath Avril . . .

  Monday, July 13

  Carl loathes sharin Muriel with other men. But, she must share him with other ladies. Them be his (would-be) Harem rules.

  Squaring off with B.W.I. Fred and U.S. Toe Joe, set to prove that he be The Man, Carl summons Muriel to his place. Her visit means one thing: drawers droppin down.

  Carl’s groin twitches and jerks with anticipation. He tidies up. Oysters slide from tins; crackers shake from boxes; beer grows frosty in the fridge. The man has he-man expectations of Muriel: Me Tarzan, you Princesse Tam-Tam.

  Nigh midnight, she shows. Gee whiz, but the girl—my gal—is vehemently voluptuous. Off falls her pink summer jacket. Carl beholds white lace trimming a shipshape self. He sure as heck doth feel beholden.

  Muriel resembles a mahogany-complected “Eskimo” doll: a lady with a big bust, straight black hair, big eyelashes, and plush lips. Magenta fingernail polish gleams from the tips of her digits, so ten look twenty. She is har
d to resist, impossible not to desire. Free of the jacket and her magenta sandals, every time she moves, Carl glimpses intense-gold-licked skin. Simultaneously, a spindly filigree of gold runs up his living room walls due to the single candle shedding light.

  Muriel reveals that Mr. Dent has set sail this very afternoon. Her left hand wafts no ring.

  “A drink?”

  “To start.”

  “The usual?”

  “Yeah. Muddy champagne!”

  Carl pours down iced, dark rum. A hot kiss.

  Muriel demands, “Is Marina as good to you as me?”

  Carl snaps back, “What bout Freddy ‘Ever-ready’?”

  “He’s almost dead to me. I treated him like gold; he treated me like dirt.”

  Carl heard that “almost”; it echoed like never. But Muriel is molasses candy, sticking hot to him.

  Carl doesn’t ask about Toe Joe Washington, the back-slappin Tar. No, he puts Tommy Edwards (“It’s All in the Game”) and Perez Prado on the hi-fi, plus the refreshing rum bottle gets set on the coffee table. Muriel sashays into the bathroom and emerges in a sheer black nightie that she’s (smartly) brought along. Carl can see but not hold (yet) just bout everything. Wow! Her cigarette smoke is as slender as the tie that Carl removes.

  Soon, Muriel is shimmering as the candle canters low. She means to forget her long-gone sailors, those fickle suitors. Carl’s fickle. But he’s here and hers—right now.

  Carl kisses her as rum burns in their bellies. Her hands clutch his head, his shoulders, his manhood, as if to baptise him in marriage to her. Then, Muriel’s weeping and clutching him, telling him how lonely she feels.

  Carl suspects that, like a feral cat crazy for fish, Muriel’s consumption of men has made her a little mad. He holds himself, shamelessly, blameless for her woes.