A HERO FOR THE OPEN ROAD by Peter Nolan Smith
A lice infestation swept through southern Maine in the winter of 1958 and each school district mandated crew cuts for all the boys without explaining why girls were exempt from this edict. Every Sunday night my father sheared his sons’ scalps to the bone with electric clippers and once we passed my mother’s inspection for ‘cooties, my older brother and I ran into the living room to watch DAVY CROCKETT on TV.
Millions of adolescent boys idolized the frontiersman, although our devotion was dedicated to Fess Parker’s Disney character rather than the Tennessee Senator martyred at the Alamo. We wore coonskin caps and sang the theme song on the school bus to Underwood Primary School. No one, not even our parents, could tell the boys in the school apart from each other, since we had the same clothes with the same haircut and shared the same dream of ‘killin’ a bar’.
We were the sons of Davy Crockett. More…
On the 4th of July 1958 my parents loaded our Ford station wagon for a drive to the seashore. My father had installed aluminum bars across the rear windows to prevent his children from falling out of the car and my grandmother Edith joked that we were the youngest reform school residents in the State of Maine. My mother didn’t think her comment was so funny. Four kids were a handful and she had another one on the way.
Old Orchard Beach that weekend was crowded with Canadian tourists, families from Portland, and local residents. The water was cold, the sand clean, and the sun hot. By late afternoon my two younger sisters’ skins radiated a dangerous pink and our parents called it a day for the beach.
My brother and I rushed to the bathhouse, because Old Orchard had more to offer than an ocean. Dressed in identical jeans and Davy Crockett shirts. We ran out of the bathhouse to our father, who lifted his hands.
“Calm down.”
“Yes, sir.” We respected his commands, especially when they were in our best interest.
“You ready for fun?” He looked over his shoulder to the amusement park.
“Yes, sir.”
“Then let’s have a little fun.”
Silvery stars sparkled over the darkening green of the Atlantic beyond Old Orchard’s pier. My father took us on the Mighty Mouse coaster ride and we screamed on the turns. My older brother got lost in Noah’s Ark funhouse and I cut my knee on the giant slide. The carousel was the only ride my mother considered safe for my sisters. At the arcade I tried to knock over milk bottles with three baseballs. My throws barely wobbled the targets. Teenage boys won Kewpie dolls for pony-tailed girlfriends, who rewarded their prowess with kisses from candy-colored lips.
“What you looking at?” my brother asked holding a bag of popcorn.
“Nothing.” I cringed inside my Davy Crockett shirt, for ‘bein’ born on a mountaintop in Tennessee’ had ceased to be as important as knowing the words to the Platters YAKKETY-YAK.
“Yeah, nothing.” My brother also wanted to be older.
“Who’s hungry?” My father gave my mother a stuffed dog. His strength was matched by his aim.
“We are.” My brother and I walked away from the White Way.
“We have a half-hour.” The fireworks were scheduled for thirty minutes after sunset and our family queued before the take-out counter of Gordon’s restaurant. Our mouths watered in anticipation of golden fried clams, French fries, and cold Cokes.
A roaring thunder stopped my father’s order in mid-sentence. Ten motorcycles were rumbling down East Grand Street and screeched to a halt before the restaurant. Not one bike was driven by a policeman. Their riders sported dirty leather jackets and oil-smeared jeans. Sideburns skated down their cheeks and they strode along the sidewalk, as if they had inherited the world from the meek.
“Who are they?” I asked, as my parents spirited us into the family station wagon.
“Trouble,” my mother answered with no uncertainty and a uniformed policeman ran from the Whiteway shouting, “You boys better be moving along.”
“We ain’t breakin’ no laws,” the twenty year-old with a Mohawk replied without any threat. “All we want is ice cream.”
“Then go down to Saco and get some.” The cop wasn’t taking any lip from a boy half his age. Saco was a factory town. The workers didn’t like rebels of any kind. “You’ll get a good welcome there.”
“Ain’t this a free country?” He defiantly stood his ground.
“Not for your type.” Another policeman arrived, his billyclub tapping an open hand. A crowd watched from a safe distance.
“Our type?” The biker with the Mohawk examined our station wagon. “Guess Old Orchard is for the squares. Let’s go, boys.”
Even at age six I knew that squares were uncool and my Davy Crockett shirt crawled on my skin.
The bikers remounted their chrome motorcycles and revved their engines. Our car vibrated with each twist of the gas. The Mohawk biker pointed at our station wagon’s aluminum bars and said with a gap-toothed smile, “Don’t worry, kid, you’ll escape that jail wagon soon enough.”
His friends and he sped away in a swirling nebula of high-octane exhaust. My father had taken off the locks of the doors, so I couldn’t chase them like a boy desperate to join the circus. My love for Davy Crockett was dead.
“We’re going home,” my mother told my father.
“What about the fireworks?” They were the weekend’s highlight.
“We’re going. No telling who else is hanging around Old Orchard.”
There was no arguing with my mother in this mood and we ate fried clams in the car. They were delicious, but I kept looking over my shoulder for the single headlights of the motorcycles. All I saw were cars. Saco was in the opposite direction from Portland.
My mother noticed my vigil and the next morning burnt our blue jeans. The fire saved my brother and sisters, but the blaze was too late for me.
I attached baseball cards to my bike’s rear wheel. Their flapping over the spokes imitated a motorcycle. My best friend, Cheney, did the same. We were the Seagulls. I asked my father to give me a Mohawk. The buzz-cut was the only style available in our house. My mother sent me to the priest. Three-dozen Hail Marys failed to cure my obsession.
I nearly broke my arm biking down the bluff overlooking Portland Harbor. Both knees were scrapped skinless by a failed attempt to leap over a garbage can and the back of my head was scarred by an uncoordinated wheelie. My mother threatened to take away my bike. My father said it was simply a phase, for any native of the Pine Tree State knew there were two seasons in Maine. One of good biking and winter.
Perfect attendance at 1st grade at Underwood Primary School shortened my riding time, as the storms of late October covered the streets of Falmouth Foresides with a thick snow. My bike was retired to the garage and the tattered baseball cards were freed from the wheels. I only kept one of them. It was Pete Runnel.
In the spring my father announced his promotion to a better job in Boston. My mother was happy, because she would be living near her family. I was sad to leave the coast of Maine. My mother promised I would get over it. As usual she was mostly right.
Our home was a pink split-level ranch house in the Blue Hills. The next-door neighbors were Italians. Mrs. Manzi cooked lasagna once a week. My father took my brother, Chuckie Manzi and me to Fenway Park. Pete Runnel hit a home run. We ate three dogs each. My mother drove us to Nantasket Beach for a weekly swim with cousins. Life in the suburbs seemed perfect in the summer of 1960.
In the fall we attended a Catholic School. People thought my brother and I were twins in our identical uniforms. My mother said we were Irish twins, thirteen months apart. Even the nuns laughed at her joke. They taught us that Jesus was our hero, but there were too many choices for heroes in the 1960s.
The town’s teenagers drove souped-up cars. The football captain got all the girls. John Glenn circled the Earth in a rocket. JFK said we were going to the moon. He died young like Buddy Holly. We cried for a weekend and that winter the British Invasion spawned a new army of heroes one after the other.
We became Mods. Our wardrobes mimicked the Beatles and Rolling Stones. Not everyone was a Mod. Greasers didn’t like us. They dressed like bikers in jeans and t-shirts with hair slicked back with Brillcream. I fought three of them at Wollaston Beach. A local teenager rescued me from a beating. Donnie Lianetti was the best of the best, but he disappeared after a near-fatal dive into the Quincy Quarries.
Anti-heroes like Captain America from EASY RIDER replaced local heroes in the late-60s. They lived fast and died young. Thousands of boys obeyed that line in Vietnam. Millions more refused to join the body count. I went to college to avoid the Draft. My hair fell over my shoulders.
Before my junior year at Boston College I hitchhiked to Pomona outside LA to visit a friend. Wayne belonged to the Nomads. His small biker gang criticized the Hell’s Angels for killing people at the Stones concert. They lent me a Harley tricycle and stole it back the next day.
“Sorry,” Wayne said straddling the Harley. “No member has ever finished high school.”
“I understand.” Maybe my father was right. The biker thing was just a phase.
After college I taught English at South Boston High School, only I wasn’t cut out to be a teacher or live in Boston. On a trip to New York I fell in love with an artist. Ro called me an angel under candlelight, then disappeared on Thanksgiving Eve 1976 to Paris. I remained in New York and became a punk. We had no heroes. We had no anti-heroes either. It was every man for himself.
In 1977 I played for CBGBs in a softball game against the Hell’s Angels. I checked the entire team for the biker with the Mohawk. He would have been almost 35. None of their players were over 30 and the best batter was a murderous ball of fat named Tiny. The game turned ugly with the Angels declaring that a 9th inning out at the plate was the deciding run. We didn’t contest the loss, since Punk was more about losing than winning.
In 1982 I moved to Paris. Ro was long gone. Several producers paid me to translate porno screenplays. My French was horrible and I manhandled the stories to fit my fantasies. A Hollywood producer noticed my adaptations and hired me to write an original screenplay. The albino film producer and I spent a New England winter inflating his pitch of a boy meeting a girl during a hurricane to 90 pages. After writing THE END he took me out to his barn. A 1964 Trophy Triumph lay under a layer of forgotten dust. It was my bonus and I fell in love with the bike’s classic lines like a married man unexpectedly meeting his future mistress.
A mechanic from Poughkeepsie started the bike. I drove it to the East Village with a check for $5000 in my leather jacket, convinced that I was finally looking for adventure and whatever came my way.
I was hired to work the door of the Milk Bar. My girlfriend was a wild flamenco dancer from Madrid. The Triumph sat out in front of the club. I wore denims and motorcycle boots to round out my third-rate reincarnation of Marlon Brando in THE WILD ONE evaporated. Life was cool, until the Triumph stalled on 5th Avenue and 10th Street.
I pumped the kickstart without a cough popping from the engine. Passers-by snickered at my ineptitude and I wheeled the inert bike towards my apartment building on East 10th Street.
A motorcycle roared from 3rd Avenue. Its driver had substituted a leather bomber cap for a helmet. A furry dog rode on the gas tank. The black Bonneville stripped of any extraneous part swerved to an inch from the curb. The dog jumped off to pee and his master lifted racing goggles from a Slavic face. “Having a little trouble?”
“Yeah.” I balanced the bike on its kickstand. “Can you bring it back to life?”
“You mean like Doctor Frankenstein?” The driver was my age, but raw-boned under tattered jeans. He unscrewed the gas cap and rocked the bike. The slosh in the tank sounded like a thimbleful. “It’s out of gas.”
“Can you give me a ride to the Bowery gas station?”
“Naw, no need.” He sat on the curb and twisted a spigot underneath the carburetor. “That’s your reserve valve. You got about another ten miles. Give it a kick now.”
I pressed down on the kickstart. The engine shuddered with a bang.
“Thanks, man.”
“The name’s Dmitri.” He stuck out his hand and I introduced myself, “Can I buy you a beer?”
“Not now.” He stripped off the helmet. His hair was spiked stalactites. With a hand cupped to his ear, he said, “You should get that turned soon. The engine is only firing on three cylinders.”
He snapped his fingers and his dog jumped on the bike.
“Good trick.” I had always wanted a dog like that.
“Wilbur’s smarter than me and you.” The dog was a one-man dog and licked his master’s hand. Dmitri patted his head. “Stop by my shop. It’s on East Sixth Street between C and D.”
“There’s nothing there.” The landlords had torched the blocks during the 70s and their ruins served as shooting galleries for the legions of dope-sick junkies plaguing the Lower East Side.
“I am now. Come and see us some time.” He accelerated across 2nd Avenue, his dog howling over the engine.
While not the biker with the Mohawk, Dmitri was another manifestation of the outlaw myth, but I ignored his offer to fix the bike and tooled around the East Village, thinking that his miracle touch would last forever. A week later the Triumph unhealed itself in front of the Hell’s Angels’ headquarters on 3rd Street. The outlaws laughed at the pristine Triumph and my white denims, which sported a rooster tail of black splatter from an oil leak.
A simple screwdriver could have probably solved the bike’s stalling, except I hadn’t a clue as to what I had to screw with the screwdriver, if I had one. I knew who would and pushed the bike to East 6th Street and C. A long Caddy hearse with Vermont plates was parked before a crumbling tenement. Dmitri crouched next to a Norton Commando. Wilbur nudged him with his snout and his master grasped a wrench, then relaxed his grip. “So it cut out?”
“Yeah.” I was slightly annoyed by his being right.
“I bet during that long walk you told yourself that I messed with your bike?” He rubbed his greasy hands on the filthy over-alls. Neither became cleaner or dirtier. A scrawny man in an equally soiled mechanic suit emerged from the basement carrying a shortened exhaust pipe.
“The thought crossed my mind.” The ignorant always blame their troubles on someone else.
“Pushing a bike can inspire paranoia.” Dmitri manipulated several valves on the engine and used a matchbook cover to measure the distance between the spark plugs. “This bike is meant for riding at 65, 70 tops.”
I had it up to 85 on the West Side Highway.
“I wouldn’ta push it that hard.” His partner’s brogue bespoke Glasgow and a love for whiskey.
“You’re too careful, Hugh.” Dmitri straddled my bike and booted the kickstart. A yard-long tongue of flames flared from the pipe. He gave it gas. The rear wheel burned rubber and my bike raced toward Avenue C. His stoic partner pulled the muffler off the Commando.
“Donna worry, he jest checking the beast.”
A half-hour later I asked Hugh, “Where did he go?”
“The brae went out to Ghost. It’s a parts shop in Long Island.” The Scotsman regarded the derelict buildings across the street. The afternoon light painted the fire-scorched ruins Rome circa 451 AD.
“Any idea when he might return?”
“Nae, laddie.”
“Great.” I went to the nearest bodega for a six-pack and called Elana to say I would be late, then returned to the repair shop. Three beers later Dmitri was still MIA. I eyeballed the Norton as ransom against my Triumph. Hugh pointed to the dog. One ear was cocked to steep pyramids of fur.
“He’s coming now.”
My hearing wasn’t canine keen, but within twenty seconds my bike rounded the corner with a box strapped to the backseat. Dmitri apologized, “Sorry, it took me longer to tune it than I thought.”
“How much I owe you?” My anger was dissipated by the engine’s precise hum.
“It was a trade.” He rummaged through the box for an oily valve, which he threw to the Scot. “Check my license plate.”
“Looks good to me.” It was from New York.
“Take a closer look.”
The year on the plastic sticker had been reconfigured from a five to a six with a magic marker.
“Haven’t a license yet. No precinct cops will stop me, since I fix their bikes. I needed a real license plate to get to Ghost, because the cops in Nassau County are p____”
‘Pigs’ was cut short by the arrival of a scruffy Royal Enfield 500. A bandy-legged Cockney pulled off his goggles. Nick and I had worked at the infamous Jefferson Theater in 1980. Internal Affairs raided the club one night. Nick had fled out the fire escape. I wasn’t so lucky.
“When you get a bike?” Six years on Manhattan hadn’t softened his East End accent.
“Last month.”
Dmitri handed Nick a long cable. “You two friends?”
“From the clubs. He’s going out with Elana.”
“Elana?” Dmitri’s eyes narrowed, as if he were trying to find the clue to ‘what is wrong with this picture’.
“You know Elana?”
“I’ve seen her dance at the Baby Doll.”
“Oh.”
“Like a pagan goddess.”
“That’s my girl.” Elana hadn’t mentioned this escapade at the strip club, then again we refrained from asking too many questions. “She is a handful.”
“More like a fistful,” Dmitri stated and his two friends murmured in agreement.
“She’ll be at the Milk Bar tonight.” I sat on my bike. It started without a cough. “I work the door. Come on by.”
That night Dmitri and his partner showed up with a dozen of their friends. I bought them drinks. Elana flirted with them, then again. She flirted with everyone, male or female.
At the bar Dmitri explained how his father had been a KGB colonel. His mother had left him for a famous Russian author. I had read two of his works. They were big books. Throughout the night bikers came up to Dmitri with questions. He answered them without hesitation. Whenever anyone mentioned his father, he didn’t say a thing.
“Everyone thinks it’s great having a famous stepfather. He barely had any time for me. Guess I reminded of the gulags.”
“More like the prodigal son.” Hugh passed him a beer. “How many times you run away from home.”
“I was trying to get back to Russia.”
“Back in the USSR.” Hugh quoted the old Beatles song.
‘No matter how happy you are.” Paul McCartney hadn’t written that line.
Elana asked Dmitri to dance. I went back to work. Dmitri returned at closing and suggested a ride around the city. My bike and Elana were passports into a new world.
They were twenty of us, including girls. The bikes’ exhausts created a sonic buzzsaw through the Village. Dmitri turned south on the West Side Highway toward the Trade Towers.
I imagined myself as an extra in a 1960s acid biker movie. Dmitri and Hugh were the leads. Elana held me tight through the Battery Park Tunnel. We had sex under the Brooklyn Bridge to the overhead hum of traffic on the steel gratings. I was finally who I had wanted to be that 4th of July in 1958. Dmitri was more than my hero. He was my mentor.
My hair grew long and I practiced the backward glance of Danny Lyons’ famous photo of a biker crossing a Mississippi bridge. Elana loved being part of a biker gang and her favorite trip was up the Hudson to West Point, where she broke a dress formation by lifting her skirt. She wasn’t wearing underwear. The lead ranks stepped forward for a closer look. We were escorted off the grounds and asked not to return. Hearing this story Dmitri crowned Elana the biker queen with the Lower East Side as her domain.
It was a good year for bikes in New York. The Sidewalk Café, the Milk Bar, the Baby Doll Lounge, Madame Rosa’s below Canal Street, and Save the Robots welcomed us warmly. Strippers sought rides on our bikes. We drank, did drugs, and drove too fast like we were indestructible without any of us paying attention to the warning signs ahead.
One night Wilbur trotted in front of the Milk Bar minus Dmitri. We followed him several blocks to a gutter. His master had fallen off his bike in a narcotic stupor. X-rays at St. Vincent revealed a broken arm. Three months recovery time. Riding wasn’t the same without him.
In August Elana left to meet her boyfriend in Gloucester. She had been killing time. Mostly mine. She returned within the month. I stupidly held a grudge against her desertion and asked her to leave. The old Puerto Rican woman across the hallway damned me with a Santeria curse and I didn’t sleep with another woman for a full year. Dmitri blamed this celibacy on my pride. “It ain’t like you were a saint.”
“Never said I was.” He hadn’t seen her lips mouthing another man’s name, while we made love.
“You should go on a long bike trip. The longer the better. Time cures all.” He tapped his cast with a beer bottle. “A broken heart is no different than a broken arm.”
The next evening I informed my boss at the Milk Bar I was going on vacation. Two days later I reached Sept-Iles in northern Quebec. The only way to go farther north was by ferry. I stayed at a cheap motel. Outside my window whales frolicked in the St. Lawrence. My only conversations were with the bartender in bad French. I never mentioned Elana’s name.
After a week the leaves changed color and a morning frost covered the bike. Winter was coming fast and I headed south toward Maine. Each mile of the trip was marked by a hundred flashbacks to leaving lovers, mistakes made, and regrets of missed opportunities. I wished someone could silence these voices in my head like the crackers shooting Captain America in EASY RIDER, except every time I steered the bike toward a bridge abutment, Dmitri saying time cured all echoed in my head. I was still young enough to believe it was true.
Upon my return to the city it was easy to pretend everything was all right. No one asked any questions. New Yorkers care for themselves before anyone else. Not all of them, but most.
Dmitri had a Halloween party on East 6th Street. Our friends came as themselves and the girlfriends dressed up as cycle sluts. The DJ played the Dead Boys’ SONIC REDUCER and the MC5’s KICK OUT THE JAMS. We drank beer. Dmitri was the only one on dope.
“What’s wrong?” His words grated out of his mouth.
“There has to be something more to bikes than this.”
“Like a golden answer to the mystery of life. Bikes are bikes. Nothing more. Nothing less. They get you from A to B.”
Dmitri’s face glowed demonically from the bonfire burning in the street. A few bikers were jumping over it. The girls were laughing. It should have been funny, only I didn’t laugh.
“I saw these bikers when I was a kid. They were so free. I thought one day I could be like them.”
“No one was free when you were a kid.” Dmitri knew what America was like in the 1950s, because he had lived in post-Stalin Russia. “Not here. Not in Russia. My hero was my real father. He was KGB. He had everything. My mother told me having everything wasn’t everything and I found new heroes. Not all of them were good. Not all of them had to be. Heroes are only heroes, because other people think they are. My stepfather gets told he’s a hero all the time.”
“He is a hero.” His books had revealed the inside of the gulag empire.
“He’s a hero to millions of people.” Dmitri shifted his cast to get at an itch under the plaster. “Me too, but not to himself. He thinks of himself as a man. A great man and being a great man can cost your soul. Not of who you are, but who you were.”
“So no more heroes.” It was a song by the Stranglers.
“Who needs heroes? You fell in love with a dream and all it takes to live that dream is live it.”
“That’s what I’m trying to do.”
“You have to try harder.”
“Harder how?”
“Watch.”
Dmitri picked up a hammer and cracked open the cast. His arm was white as new snow and he flexed his fingers. “Good as new. Help me.”
We set up a ramp before the bonfire. It would have passed no carnival’s safety inspection. His girlfriend tried to talk him out of what he had planned. Wilbur whimpered to no avail, as Dmitri got on his bike and stuck a pumpkin over his head.
Everyone chanted his name, as he sped down the street. His bike hit the ramp and launched across the fire with an Evel Knievel wheelie. He skidded to a halt on the pavement and fell on his side. We gave him a standing ovation. Dmitri was something else none of us could be, at least not in this lifetime.
I felt a little better over Christmas and quit the Milk Bar after the New Year to write a book at the albino’s producer’s cabin in Catskill. I returned to New York and gave my manuscript to an agent. Nobody wanted a novel about pornography and I worked in the diamond district as a schlepper. I was finished with the nightlife and a lot of other things.
“This life ain’t for everyone.” Dmitri understood my drift away from East 6th Street. I was a loner.
I planned a pre-Spring trip to Florida. I had almost $4000 in my pocket. At the end of March I watched the weather for a break in the cold and set off the first morning the temperature rose over 40. It would be 50 in Washington and in the 80s by Florida. I would get a job in Miami and stay till the Easter break. I never got that far.
The Triumph skidded on an icy patch off Houston Street and I tumbled across West Broadway into a parked car. My body felt like it had been worked over by a right-wing death squad and the accident bent the front steering fork. The bike never rode the same after that crash.
The engine cut out on the Taconic. The electrical faded in the wet. The steering was sluggish at best. Hugh considered it was cursed. After a disastrous sublet in 1989, I sold the bike to ward off an imminent eviction and resumed walking the streets of New York. The bikers from 6th Street regarded my exile as treason. Most of them stopped speaking to me. Dmitri was more forgiving.
“Life is not just bikes.” He told me at a party on 10th Street.
“I know.” I hadn’t found an interim substitute. Not drugs. Not love. Not a profession.
“I’m not sure you do.” He had recently married a beautiful woman from Kansas. She was no Dorothy, but his friends and family hoped the marriage would appease his self-destructive streak. It hadn’t tonight, judging from his clouded eyes. “Somewhere along the line you made a decision to not be like the rest of the world. Why? I haven’t a clue anymore of why I am the way I am. My parents sent me to a shrink to find out the answer. They got more questions. I don’t ask anymore. I accept the way I am. For better or worse. Same as you should do. It’s too late to go back and change.”
“I wish there was a time machine.”
“And you’d go back when?”
“Do I get to go back more than once?”
“Once only.”
“Then I’d listen to my mother saying that the bikers I saw in 1958 were trouble.” My father’s aluminum bars might have protected me if I rolled up the window.
“You saw those bikers as a salvation from the future chosen for you by where and who you were born, but they were only part of it.”
“And what’s the rest?”
“Who the hell knows?” Dmitri drew a circle in the table with a crooked finger. “The world is a big place. I’ve driven to Texas to Kansas to North Dakota. There’s something magical about driving to the horizons, but after the first hundred miles riding a bike feels like a molten lead enema. Still I remember the wind in my face, the sullen faces of the motorists, and the glee of their kids when I waved back to them, plus the hum in my body after stopping the bike for the night. You must have felt it?”
I had in Quebec.
“Where would you go if you had your choice?”
“Around the world.” I stabbed at the wet circle.
“Then all you have to do is go.” He was already nodding in his beer. Dmitri said heroin was the only thing that killed the pain in his arm. Everyone had a different excuse.
I thought more and more about the trip around the world. All I needed was another bike and in the autumn of 1990 I sold a five-carat FVS1 diamond on West 47th Street. The commission of $5000 was more money than I had had in some time. Dmitri had a Royal Enfield in his shop. I told him I was coming to get it.
“Good, I could use the money.”
I should have never read the travel section of the New York Times that morning. A budget company was offering around-the-world tickets for $1300. NYC-LA-Honolulu-Biak-Bali-Java-Sumatra-Malaysia-Bangkok-Kathmandu-New Delhi-London-NYC.
I informed Dmitri about my new plans.
“You can always buy a bike when you get back.” He wasn’t angry. “Just smoke some opium for me in the Golden Triangle.”
With his blessing in mind I free-dove amongst sunken Japanese destroyers off Biak, danced in the rice paddies of Bali, rode ponies across the sand plains of Mount Bromo, ate pig with the headhunters of Lake Toba, tripped on mushrooms at a full-moon party of Koh Phagnanh, and frequented the go-go bars of Patpong. Various ex-pats recommended my heading to Burma, Vietnam, or the Nana Plaza for another ogle at naked girls of the Firepole Ballet.
None of it had anything to do with bikes and an Australian motor trekker at the Malaysia Hotel suggested, “This time of year the dope fields of Northern Thailand are bone-dry as left-over turkey and dust ankle-deep. Very few people have driven through the tribal villages; Akhas, Yai, Karens, Hmong, KMT refugees growing opium for outlaw warlords.”
The next night I rode the sleeper train to the northern capitol, Chiang Mai. I rented a beat-up 125cc Honda XT and set out for the mountains. The paved road ended at a bridge crossing a tea-colored river. A lazy police guard waved me through the checkpoint and I throttled the gas. The dirt bike’s knobby tires churned a thick cloud of red dust in my wake.
The rutted track was trafficked by the occasional pick-up truck loaded with poppy plants. The scowls on the drivers’ faces warned the drug lords considered trespassing a mortal sin in the Golden Triangle. I didn’t care. I was on a motorcycle. The sky was cloudless. The hills stretched in all directions. This was the freedom of the road and I was going to live forever.
My immortality vanished when a pick-up truck rounded a blind turn in my lane. 50 kph was way too fast to avoid the accident. This was how bikers died and I said, “Shit, I’m dead.”
The impact catapulted my body headfirst into his windshield and I somersaulted onto the flatbed. The entire accident had taken less time than the Big Bang and I was shocked to have survived the head-on collision, although my left wrist was out of the socket and blood streamed from the lacerations on my face.
An old lady atop a bag of rice stared into the sky, as if I had fallen from an airplane. I climbed from the flatbed and surveyed the bike. The front tire was bent as a taco and the handlebars peeled onto the gas tank. It wasn’t going anywhere.
“Farang ki. Farang kwaai,” the rat-faced driver raged in rapid Thai.
The truck’s grill was only slightly dented from the collision, yet in his mind the accident was my fault, because westerners had no business in these hills. His screams became more high-pitched and he kicked dust at my feet.
Grateful to be alive I was slow in losing my temper.
He grabbed my shirt.
I told him to calm down.
He was beyond understanding my request and spat in my face.
I yanked his hand off my shirt and he stumbled off the road down the hillside. The old lady ambushed me with a cane. It struck my injured wrist, as the driver scrambled from the slope with murder in his eyes.
Luckily a police truck appeared to stop anyone from getting hurt. The driver explained the accident and my assault. I tried to counter his lie. The policeman lifted his hand to silence us. He inspected our tire tracks.
“Falang, right. Thai man pay for motorsai. Pay for doctor. He sell pig, come give you money. Is okay?”
His summary judgment was more than satisfactory, since normally the farang was at fault for any accidents. The driver had to haul my motorcycle to Chiang Mai and I have a photo of him lifting the bike out of the pick-up, his face seething with hatred, while his mouth is warped by a rigid smile.
The hospital set my wrist. I downed several painkillers. That night my arm throbbed with increasing pain. To this day I can predict wet weather by its dull twinge. Snow brings on a sharper ache.
Upon my return from Asia, I recounted my accident in the Golden Triangle to Dmitri at the Sidewalk Café. He laughed at all the right spots. Someone told me that he had been straight six months.
“Any motorcycle accident you can walk away from is a good one.” He looked better than he had in years. “Any time I have one, I jump on the bike as soon as I can.”
“In some ways I imagined I had died and gone through to the after-life, only the after-life wasn’t any different from my previous existence.” I had no intention on challenging this time-space dimension by getting on a motorcycle.
“You probably did die in several existences, but whatever doesn’t kill you makes you think you might have died. I know from first-hand experience, but no more I’m going to be a father and junkies don’t make good parents.”
“Congratulations.” I would have given anything to have a child.
“Here’s to me. I’ve finally realized the only thing worth living for is life. Someone else’s instead of mine.” We drank to his unborn baby, his wife, and finally our parents, since we had reached the age that you have to admit you’re not too different from them, especially after you subtract the bikes, the drugs, and travel. At the end of the evening he asked, “What about buying a bike?”
“Maybe next year.” My hand was barely strong enough to hold a beer.
“Next year then.”
Only there was no next year for Dmitri.
No next week either, because Dmitri decided to break his exile from drugs. Like many addicts the first shot after the last was too strong for his body.
He was waked on 1st Avenue. His famous stepfather attended the Mass with his mother. His brothers carried his coffin out of the church. This body was buried in a Russian cemetery in New Hampshire. I have stood by Dmitri’s grave. His soul would like it; pine trees and old factories.
After the Christmas selling season on 47th Street I flew to Thailand and rode the night train to Chiang Mai. I hired a 250cc AMX trail bike and in the morning I set off to the spot where I had almost been killed seven years earlier. From the top of the pass I could see Burma stretching into China.
A road ran from Chengdu to Lhasa. Another five days put you at the border of Tajikistan. Within two weeks I could be sitting in Paris. The biker with the Mohawk no longer existed and EASY RIDER had only been a movie. Dmitri had been real and I honored his life by dropping over the border. I might not reach the Himalayas, but the gas tank was full. It would last most of tomorrow and I would have company on the road. You always did when only heroes were your friends.
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