CHAPTER 4

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 pleasure.” I said with a smile, for pleasure was something we all understood better than most.

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