CHAPTER 3
They were twenty of us, including girls. The bikes’ sonic exhausts buzzsawed 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.
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