CHAPTER 2

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 every man.

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. No one ever checked our visa.
“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. No one ever checked our visa. We were free in our world. I was only 35.

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