August 3, 1994 - East Village - Journal Entry - Dmitri Turin

When I caught a ride with my sister Pam to attend Debbie Greer's funeral, I didn't tell anyone where I was going. After the service we went to her house. Her husband, an Army artillery major, was rightly distraught as was my sister-in-law and her family and friends and CIA co-workers. Her boss, the CIA director suffered from the same disease and there were already rumors that their illness had been caused by radio waves aimed at CIA headquarters by the Russians. The CIA agents huddled in groups and spoke secretively amongst themselves. I avoided any contact. They all looked like squares and I couldn't imagine these Ivy Leaguers skilled at anything other than pushing cocaine to finance the Contra War in Central America, ordering assassinations if Muslim militant leaders, and the torture of those damned to know something about nothing. We left before the arrival of President George Bush, for whom Debbie has also worked as secretary. She was a good soul.

Her mother Zsa Zsa thanked me for coming and I said my goodbyes.

It rained all the way back to New York.

My sister dropped my at the George Washington Bridge and I caught the downtown A train.

Arriving at my East 10th Street apartment I checked my answering machine and heard calls from Rick Temerian and our Tante Jane asking me to call them. I thought that maybe Jane's step-mother had passed in Maine, but a phone call to Rick told more tragic news.

Dmitri Turin had ODed and already been waked and buried up in New Hampshire across the Connecticut River from his famed stepfather's residence.

"Dead?"

I had thought that Dmitri like myself were immortal, despite our self-destructive behavior. His was a demon on a bike. The Russian born son of a KGB colonel had survived numerous motorcycle accidents and had been clean for months. Dmitri was cut out of a 1960s biker movie, but never sought to join a gang, although he was friendly with the Hells Angels and every other biker in New York and Beyond. The English bike enthusiast even let me ride along with his Scottish partner Hugh on my Yamaha XS 650. He was a benevolent soul.

I met him through my East End friend Nickie Banks, a true Cockney lad, when the East Street crowd was forming across from the burnt out blocks below 6th Street. My stripped down to the bones dependable Yamaha was a English bike wannabe. We called it the Road Warrior. Its top speed was 86 MPH on the after midnight ride from my place of employ, the Milk Bar, down the Westside Highway around Battery Park and north up the FDR with the East River on my left. I was free.

Inspired by Dmitri's long rides to Deadwood and bike rallies, I solo drove up to Maine on several occasions, keeping off the highways. We were all bike Buddhas, although none more than Dmitri, whose faithful canine bitch, Wilbur, rode atop his Triumph's tank.

One night the bike crew arrived at the Milk Bar minus Dmitri. Several minutes later Wilber showed up in a state of distress. Hugh jumped on his Norton and roared off to retraced their path to find Dmitri and his bike sprawled on a nearby street. He was uninjured, except for a few scraps, and blinked himself into awareness. Everyone laughed at Hugh's recounting the story, especially about his asking about Wilbur. They were inseparable.

I retreated down into the bar and drank myself into a drunken state. I drove back to the East Village the short way, right across 10th Street. I wasn't taking any chances. Indestructible or not.

In the winter of 1989 I left the faithful Road Warrior in Florida and sold my Triumph to Rick to pay my rent for a junkie subleasee during an extended stay in France. I regularly saw Dmitri and Hugh, but I was strictly a pedestrian.

The bike shop on East 6th Street flourished under the two partners. Everyone loved them for their laissez-faire professionalism. Dmitri started shipping Harley-Davidsons to Russian millionaires and was known for his writing in IRON HORSE. Everything seemed to be going his way.

Loving wife, two kids, a famous stepfather, travels to Russia, his famous stepfather's return to Rodina, but things were never what they seem on the surface.

In 1990 I traveled the world, riding bikes in Indonesia and Thailand.

I saw Dmitri the Sidewalk Cafe on Avenue A.

Above the bar a huge mural portrayed the Sixth Street bikers. Dmitri was immortalized for the moment. We fantasized about international sagas. London to Singapore. Across Africa from Nairobi to Dakar. East from Moscow to Kamchatka. These dreams were easy to believe on drugs. It was the 1990s and I was still in my 30s.

Every year i took off around the world. Bikes were part of the thrill. In 1994 I went to the shop with a friend looking for Triumph. Something was different. The place was more popular than ever, but the crowd was disheveled and hollow eyed. Heroin. Everyone was jacked on dope, except for Dmitri. He was proud to have been clean for months. He looked tanned and healthy for the first time in years. I had done some pink in Penang with two rickshaw drivers, but nothing since. I was almost straight after six months in the orient, although still a drunk.

Randy bought a Thunderbird 500 cc. I bid Dimi goodbye without saying that I was going up to Boston to drive my older brother's two children to their aunt's funeral in DC. That sad affair had me dreaming of the mosques of Samarkand. Dmitri needed to hit the road. So did I.

Tante Jane told me about Dmitri being found in the bathroom by his wife. OD. I was pissed that I hadn't been at the funeral and vowed to visit his grave.

I drove up to Maine the long way with Ms. Carolina, my married mistress, in her Lexus. Up along the Housatonic River along the Berkshires across lower Vermont to his grave. It was quiet. Grass covered the place of his internment. Putney VT lay across the river. His mother lived there with his famous stepfather. The land of his exile childhood. Funny Claremont NH had a Russian cemetery. Ms. Carolina cried. She had never met Dmitri. I shook my head. This fate awaited us all and I poured vodka to say to Dmitri I was bound for the road. destination unknown.

Dmitri Turin - Still On The Road

Dmitri Turin was born in Russia. His mother was a mathematician. His father was reputed to have been KGB. Natalia Dmitrievna Svetlova left him to marry the legendary Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. The Politburo exiled the writer and his family in 1974. They moved to America.

Vermont to be exact.

Dmitri left the family compound and moved to Boston.

He drove taxi there.

So did I, but we never met in my hometown.

By the late-1970s everyone was in the East Village.

Indian Larry loved bikes.

He drove almost naked in the snow.

Dmitri did wheelies in the white powder of East 6th Street.

No one could get Indian Larry to put on some clothes.

Demmie liked racing.

So did his partner Hugh Mackie.

They opened East Street Bikes beyond Avenue B.

I helped put in the ramp.

Everyone liked riding with them.

English bikes only.

Things were going good.

It was all too good to be true.

In 1994 Dmitri passed before a trip to Russia.

Heart attack.

I was in Thailand.

I said my goodbye at his grave.

It was in New Hampshire across the river from Vermont.

I miss riding with him.

And my old Yamaha XS 650.

Dmitri left before his time.

Many bikers do.

>

Bikers.

My son Fenway thinks there is nothing like them.

Same as me.

It's just the way things are.

A HERO OF THE ROAD by Peter Nolan Smith

A HERO OF THE ROAD

by

Peter Nolan Smith

Anybody can jump a motorcycle. The trouble begins when you try to land it. – Evel Knieval

MANGOZEEN BOOKS 2022

CHAPTER 1

A lice infestation swept through southern Maine in the winter of 1958 and every 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 slaver 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 in our identical outfits.

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. My grandmother Edith joked that we were the youngest reform school residents in the State of Maine. My mother didn’t find her comment funny. Four kids were a handful and she had another one on the way.

That weekend Old Orchard Beach was crowded with Canadian tourists, families from Portland, and local residents. The cold Atlantic washed the sand clean under a hot sun. By late afternoon my two younger sisters’ skins radiated with a pink bordering on red 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 tee-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 interests. He looked over his shoulder to the amusement park.

“Are you ready for a little fun?”

“Yes, sir,”

Silvery stars sparkled over the darkening Atlantic beyond Old Orchard’s pier. My father accompanied us on the Mighty Mouse coaster ride and the three of us 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 failed to knock over milk bottles with three baseballs. My strikes barely wobbled the targets, while 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’ suddenly ceased to be more important as knowing the words to the Platters’ YAKKETY-YAK.

“Yeah, nothing.” My brother understood the desire to be older.

“Let me have a go at this.” My father’s strength matched by his aim and his second throw cleared the dais. He had won a stuffed dog for my mother.

“Who’s hungry?”

“We are.” My brother and I walked away from the White Way.

Our family queued at the take-out counter of Gordon’s restaurant, our mouths watering in anticipation of golden fried clams, French fries, and cold Cokes.

A roaring thunder stopped my father’s order in mid-sentence. Ten motorcycles rumbled down East Grand Street and screeched to a halt before the restaurant. 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.

“We better go?” My mother spirited us into the family station wagon.

“Why?”

“Because those thugs are trouble,” my mother answered with no uncertainty and a uniformed policeman ran from the Whiteway to shout, “You scum better be moving along.”

“We ain’t breakin” no laws,” the twenty year-old with a Mohawk replied, leaning on the metal counter. “All we want is ice cream.”

“Then go down to Saco and get some with the rest of your white trash friends.” Saco was a factory town. “Scum like you are welcome there, but not here.”

“I thought this was a free country.” The biker defiantly stood his ground.

“Not for your type.” Another policeman arrived, tapping his billyclub into an open palm.

“Our type?” The biker with the Mohawk examined our station wagon.

“Guess Old Orchard is for squares. Let’s go, boys.”

Even at age six I knew that squares were uncool and the Davy Crockett shirt crawled on my skin. The bikers mounted their motorcycles and revved the engines. Our station wagon vibrated with each twist of the gas. The Mohawk biker pointed at the aluminum bars and said with a gap-toothed smile, “Don’t worry, kid, you’ll escape that jail wagon soon enough.”

My hero worship of Davy Crockett died in the bikers’ swirling nebula of high-octane exhaust.

“We’re going home,” my mother told my father.

“What about the fireworks?”

“We’re going. No telling what other trash is hanging around Old Orchard.”

My father to drove away from the White Way. We ate fried clams in the car. I kept looking over my shoulder for the single headlights of the motorcycles. All I saw were cars, then againSaco was in the opposite direction our home on Falmouth Foresides. That night I asked my father about motorcycles.

“I never had one, but your Uncle Russ bought one after he returned from Japan.” Russ had been stationed in Nagasaki after the surrender. “He was a good driver, but his older brother wanted to try. He had never taken a lesson and drove down the street straight into a stone wall. He broke his leg and still walks with a limp.”

My mother had overheard our conversation and said sternly, “No son of mine will ever ride a one of those devil machines. Say your prayers and go to sleep.”

The next morning my mother burned our blue jeans. The fire saved my brother and sisters, but the blaze came too late for my soul. I attached baseball cards to my bike’s rear wheel. Their flapping over the spokes imitated a motorcycle. My best friend, Cheney, copied this style. We called ourselves the Seagulls and I asked my father to give me a Mohawk. A buzz-cut was the only style available in our house.

Within a week both my knees were scrapped skinless by a failed attempts to leap over a garbage can and my head was scarred by a failed wheelie off a bluff overlooking Portland Harbor at the end of our street.

My mother threatened to take away my bike. My father said it was simply a phase, because any Pine Tree State native understood there were two seasons in Maine. One of good biking and the other of bad biking. A late October blizzard 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 kept one. Pete Runnel, the Red Sox ace fielder.

The next summer my father announced his promotion to a better job in Boston. The move brought my mother closer to her family in Jamaica Plains. I was sad to leave the coast of Maine and Cheney. He waved good-bye from the lawn.

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.

Chaney drowned in June. My mother promised I would get over it. I never have.

My father took my brother, Chuckie Manzi and, me to Fenway Park. Pete Runnel hit a home run over the Green Monster. We ate three dogs each. On the weekends my father drove us to Nantasket Beach for a weekly swim with cousins. My desire to be a biker was an unshared secret. I walked through the woods to the Braintree Twin Drive-In to watch THE WILD ONES. I wanted to be Marlon Brando and swore that one day I would have a motorcycle. Life in the suburbs seemed perfect in the summer of 1960, except to no motorcycle.

In the fall we attended a Catholic School. The nuns thought my brother and I looked alike in our identical parochial school uniforms. My mother explained we were Irish twins born thirteen months apart. Even the nuns laughed at her joke and they taught us that Jesus was our hero, but there were too many other 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 Beatles invaded spawning band after band and we grew out hair long and our attire was as Carnaby Street as possible for the South Shore of Boston.

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 flourished in the late-60s, as hundreds of thousands of teenage boys were drafted into the Army to feed the Vietnam War. Millions more refused to join the body count. I attended 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 from Weymouth. 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.

“I understand.” One day was better than no days.

Not enough to change my life and maybe my father was right. The biker thing was just a phase. Only it was to be a long one.

CHAPTER 2

After college I taught English at South Boston High School, only I wasn’t cut out to be a teacher in such a racist environment. 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 study art in Paris. I remained in New York and became a punk. We had no heroes. We had no anti-heroes either.

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 thirty-five. None of their members were over thirty and the best batter was a murderous ball of fat named Tiny. The game turned ugly and the Angels declared that last 9th inning out at the plate to earn a win. We didn’t contest the loss, since Punk was more about losing than winning.

Two years later I moved to Paris. Ro was long gone from the Sorbonne. Several producers paid me to translate porno screenplays. My French was horrible and I mishandled 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 led me out to his barn. A 1964 Trophy Triumph lay under a thick layer of dust. The English motorcycle 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.

That summer I was hired to work the door of the Milk Bar. My girlfriend was a wild flamenco dancer from Madrid. I wore denims and motorcycle boots to round out my third-rate reincarnation of Marlon Brando in THE WILD ONE. 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 failures and I wheeled the bike towards my apartment building on East 10th Street.

A motorcycle roared from 3rd Avenue. I expected the gang from Old Orchard Beach, but the driver had substituted a leather bomber cap for a helmet. A furry dog rode on the gas tank. A black Bonneville stripped to the frame swerved an inch from the curb. The dog jumped off to pee and his master lifted

“Having a little trouble?”

“It stalled.” I balanced the bike on its kickstand. His oily fingers betrayed a deep knowledge of bikes and I asked, “Can you bring it back to life?”

“You mean like Doctor Frankenstein?” The driver was my age. Tattered great jean shrouded his raw-boned body. He swung off the bike and strode up to mine, unscrewing the gas cap and rocking the bike. The slosh in the tank sounded like a thimbleful. “It’s out of gas.”

“I guess I’ll have to push it to a 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 and 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?”

“No, I’m okay, but you should fixed that soon. The engine is only firing on three cylinders.”

“I’ll take care of it, but where?”

“My friend Hugh and I have a shop on East Sixth Street between C and D.”

“There’s nothing there.”

The landlords had torched the blocks east of Avenue A during the 70s and their ruins served as shooting galleries for the legions of dope-sick junkies plaguing the Lower East Side.

“We are now. You can’t miss our shop. It’s the only unburnt building on the block.” He snapped his fingers and the dog jumped on the bike. Dmitri joined him.

“Good trick.”

“Wilbur’s smarter than me and you.” The big mutt licked his master’s hand.

“Like I said. Come by.”

He accelerated across 2nd Avenue, his dog howling over the 650 cc engine.

While not the biker with the Mohawk, Dmitri manifested the outlaw myth of Old Orchard Beach, 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 greasy outlaws laughed at my white denims stained by a rooster tail of black splatter from the rear tire. A simple screwdriver might have solved the bike’s stalling, except I hadn’t a clue as to where I had to screw with the screwdriver, so I pushed the bike to East 6th Street and C.

A long Caddy hearse with Vermont plates was parked before a 6th Street crumbling tenement. Dmitri crouched next to a Norton Commando. Wilbur nudged him with his snout and his master grasped a wrench and two seconds later he relaxed his grip.

“Let me guess. It cut out?”

“Yeah.” I was annoyed by his being right.

“I bet during that long walk you thought that I messed with your bike?” He rubbed greasy hands on the filthy overalls. Neither became cleaner or dirtier.

“That crossed my mind.” The ignorant always blame their troubles on someone else.

“Pushing a bike inspires paranoia.” Dmitri manipulated several valves on the engine and used a matchbook cover to measure the distance between the spark plugs. “Time might cure all ills, but tools cure a bike. Also this bike is meant for riding at 65, 70 tops.”

A scrawny man in an equally soiled mechanic suit emerged from the basement carrying a shortened exhaust pipe.

“I had it up to 85 on the FDR.”

“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 to the corner and turned down Avenue C. His stoic partner pulled the muffler off the Commando.

“Donna worry, he jest checking the beast.”

I sat on a milk crate and read a week-old Daily News.

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.”

“Any idea when he might return?”

“Nae, laddie.”

“Great.” I bought a six-pack at the nearest bodega on Avenue C and phoned Elana from the corner phone to say I would be late, then returned to the repair shop. Three beers later Dmitri was still MIA and I eyeballed the Norton as ransom against my Triumph. Hugh pointed to the dog. An ear peaked to steep pyramid of fur.

“He comes 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.

“Nothing. I scratched your back and I scratched mine.” He rummaged through the box for an oily valve, which he threw to the Scot. “Plus I got to ride your bike and filled the tanks.”

“Why didn’t you use your own?”

“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.

“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 stripped to the frame 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 hadn’t been 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.”

Dmitri’s eyes narrowed, as if to decipher ‘what is wrong with this picture’. “You know Elana?”

“I’ve seen her dance at the Baby Doll Lounge.”

“Oh.”

“Like a pagan goddess.”

“That’s my girl.” Elana never mentioned any escapades 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 the bike. It started without a cough. “I work the door. Come on by.”

That evening 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 birth father had been a KGB colonel. His mother had left him for a famous Russian author. His first book was genius gulag. Throughout the night bikers came up to Dmitri with questions, which answered them without hesitation.

“Whenever anyone mentioned his father, he didn’t say a word, although later he said to me, “Everyone thinks it’s great having a famous stepfather. He barely had any time for me. Guess I reminded him of the gulags.”

“More like the prodigal son.” Hugh passed him a beer. “How many times you run away from home.”

“More times than I can remember. I was always trying to get back to Russia.”

“Back in the USSR.” Hugh quoted the old Beatles song.

“No matter how happy you are.”

Elana asked Dmitri to dance. I went back to the door. Dmitri returned at closing and suggested a ride around the city. I accepted the offer and we headed to the southern tip of Manhattan at top speed.

My bike and Elana were passports into a new world and no one ever checked out visa, because none of us needed anything more than speed.

CHAPTER 3

That summer the Sixth Street Bikers numbered twenty, including leather-clad women, who were twice the man most men were in their prime. Our bikes buzzsawed through the Village and I imagined myself as an extra in a 1960s acid biker movie with Dmitri and Hugh as the leads.

One night Dmitri turned south on the West Side Highway toward the Trade Towers. Elana held onto me tight through the Battery Park Tunnel. The gang sped ahead and we stopped under the Brooklyn Bridge to have sex listening 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. Her favorite trip was up the Hudson to West Point, where she broke a cadets’ dress formation by lifting her skirt. The lead ranks stepped forward for a closer look of her bare legs. Upper class cadets escorted us off the grounds with a request to never return. Hearing this story Dmitri crowned Elana the Biker Queen of the Lower East Side.

1986 was a good year for bikes in New York. The Sidewalk Cafe, 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 and we drove like indestructible road warriors, but like Uncle Russ’ brother everyone gets into accidents.

One night Wilbur trotted to the Milk Bar minus Dmitri. We followed him several blocks to a gutter. His master had fallen off his bike in a drunken stupor. X-rays at St. Vincent revealed a broken arm and the doctors predicted a 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 after a month 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.

“You should go on a long bike trip. The longer the better.” He tapped his cast with a beer bottle. “A broken heart is not much different than a broken arm.”

The next evening I informed my boss at the Milk Bar that I was going on vacation.

Two days later I reached Sept-Iles in Northern Quebec. I stayed at a cheap motel. Outside my window whales bred 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 came fast this far north and I headed south to Maine. Each mile of the trip was marked by a hundred flashbacks to leaving lovers and 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.

It was always easy to believe your own lies.

CHAPTER 4

Upon my return I pretended everything was all right. No one asked any questions. New Yorkers care for themselves before anyone else. Not all of them, but most.

Dmitri held 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’s Slavic face glowed demonically the flames of a street bonfire. A few bikers tried to jump over the bonfire. The girls laughed at their failed attempts. It should have been funny, only I didn’t laugh and Dmitri asked, “What’s wrong?”

“When I was a kid in Maine, I saw these bikers. They were so free. I thought one day I could be like them.”

“No one was free when you were a kid.” Dmitri didn’t know America 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 Stalin’s 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, because being a great man can cost your soul. Not of who you are, but who you were.”

“So no more heroes,” I quoted a song by the Stranglers.

“Who needs heroes?” Dmitri picked up a hammer and cracked open the cast. His arm was white as new

We set up a ramp before the bonfire. His girlfriend tried to talk him out of the leap. 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 over the fire. He skidded to a halt on the pavement and fell on his side. We gave him a standing ovation.

Dmitri was something none of us could be, at least not in this lifetime.

Mt darkness disapated over Christmas and I quit the Milk Bar after the New Year to write a book at the albino’s producer’s cabin in the Catskills. 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.

That March I had almost $4000 in my pocket and planned a pre-Spring trip to Florida.

When the cold weather broke and I 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.

My 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 Hell’s Angels and the accident had bent the front steering fork. The bike never rode the same after that crash.

After a disastrous sublet in 1989, I sold the Triumph to ward off an imminent eviction and resumed walking the streets of New York. The bikers from 6th Street regarded me as a traitor. 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.

“You’ve said that before.” 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 and I accept the way I am.”

“For better or worse. Same as you should do. It’s too late to go back and change the past.”

“That’s true, but 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 those bikers were trouble.” My father’s aluminum bars might have protected me if I had rolled up the window.

“You saw those bikers as a salvation from the future chosen 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. He had fallen in love with dope. “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. 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 did on the drive up to Quebec.”

“Where would you go now if you had your choice?”

“Around the world.” I stabbed at the wet circle.

“Then all you have to do is go.” He nodded in his beer. Dmitri said heroin was the only thing that killed the pain in his arm. Everyone had a different excuse.

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 offered 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. Just smoke some opium for me in the Golden Triangle.”

“With pleasure.”

Pleasure was something I planned to enjoy, especially with the blessing from a man of the road.

CHAPTER 5

On the other side of the world 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 a north-bound sleeper train to, 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 and drivers’ scowls 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. A pick-up truck rounded a blind turn in my lane. An accident was unavoidable at 50 kph and I said, “Shit, I’m dead.”

The impact catapulted my body 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 flat as a taco and the handlebars peeled onto the gas tank.

“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 spat in my face.

I freed his hand off my shirt and he stumbled backward off the road down the hillside. A fire-scarred tree stopped his tumble. 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 in Thailand the farang was always at fault. The driver also 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 warped by a rigid smile.

The hospital set my wrist. I downed several painkillers and then got a bag of China White..

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 Cafe. He laughed at all the right spots. Someone told me that he had been straight six months and I

“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 this existence.” I had no intention on challenging this time-space dimension by getting on a motorcycle.

“You probably did die several times, but whatever doesn’t kill you makes you wish you had died, but no more since 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 three days later Dmitri died in his sleep.

The family said ‘heart attack’.

None of us questioned the cause of death.

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. His children cried. His wife held their hands Wilber lay on Dmitri’s leather, smelling his master’s scent of oil and sweat. I stood by Dmitri’s grave. His soul would have liked it; pine trees surrounded by 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 Burma stretched into China.

A road ran from Chengdu to Lhasa.

Another five days to the border of Tajikistan.

Within two weeks I might be sitting in Paris.

The biker with the Mohawk no longer existed and EASY RIDER had only been a movie, but 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 and I would have company on the road.

You always did when heroes were your friends.

THE END

In 1986 Hugh Mackie and Dmitri Turin opened the Sixth Street Specials, specializing in the repair of Triumph, Nortons, Royal Enfields, and various other English motorcycles. The blocks surrounding the shop had been burnt to the ground like Berlin after a bombing raid. The bikers frequenting the Sixth Street Specials, looked down on my stripped down Yamaha 650 XS, because I ran the door of the Milk Bar and I granted entrance to anyone who was a friend of Dmitri and Hugh. It was a good time to be riding bikes. The city was ours and Dmitri ruled the streets. There were few people like him. Not then. Not now.

Dmitri lives forever on the road.

As do all bikers from past, present, and future.

THE END

In 1986 Hugh Mackie and Dmitri Turin opened the Sixth Street Specials, specializing in the repair of Triumph, Nortons, Royal Enfields, and various other English motorcycles. The blocks surrounding the shop had been burnt to the ground like Berlin after a bombing raid. The bikers frequenting the Sixth Street Specials, looked down on my stripped down Yamaha 650 XS, because I ran the door of the Milk Bar and I granted entrance to anyone who was a friend of Dmitri and Hugh. It was a good time to be riding bikes. The city was ours and Dmitri ruled the streets. There were few people like him. Not then. Not now.

Dmitri lives forever on the road.

As do all bikers from past, present, and future.

SKATING ON THIN ICE 2011

Thailand's monsoons arrived at the end of the Pattaya's low season in April 2022, but none had ever been lower than this Covid season. Hotels offered special rates and the few working girls at the even fewer bars and go-gos called everyone 'sexy', but the global travel chaos due to the deadly pandemic has forced the Thai Tourist Board to revise their typically optimistic projection for arrivals to the Land of Smiles, especially after monumental rains flooded the center of the country.

Cities and villages were underwater. Transport was impossible on the inundated highways. Food grew scarce to find and the monsoons weren't expected to ease until October.

My family and I lived up the coast from Pattaya and news of the empty bars filtered north.

"Thailand not have farang," said Mam, as we drank Leo Beer at our small house in the hills.

"You have me and so does Fenway." And the rest of our clan.

My son was happy. Fenway had his father to drive him around SriRacha.

"Many girl go back home."

"To Isaan?" The impoverished plateau had supplied Bangkok, Pattaya, and Phuket with a steady crop of bar girls for decades.

"Better now live on rice farm. Pattaya not have old men. Not have young men. No men. No money. No rice. Everyone get skinny.

"But never as beautiful as you." We had been together for years, although most of those year I worked in Europe or the USA. I had two families to feed.

"Barg wan."

"Yes, I have a sweet mouth. More beer?" I regarded the sky. Dark clouds approached from the Gulf of Siam. Black lined the bottoms. Lightning crackled through the air and Mam ran inside to unplug the TV and fridge. I shut off my cell phone. Electrical storms were a force to fear in Thailand.

A minute later the rain fell hard, then harder, and even harder. I lit a kerosene lamp. Fenway didn't like the dark and I held him close. Thirty minutes later the storm passed over SriRacha heading inland.

The sun came out and the street steamed with a rising mist. I turned on my phone and it rang immediately. Sam Royalle was on the other end.

"Did it rain by you."

"Not a drop." Sam resided in Pattaya.

Twenty miles to the south.

"Bucketed down here." I hadn't seen Sam in a while. He had been working on a new website.

Sixteen hours a day, so I was surprised when he asked, "Feel like coming out for a beer tonight?"

Sam Royalle liked go-gos. We normally drank shots of tequila. He conversed with people despite 110 dB levels. His Bedford accent worked well in loudness.

"If it isn't raining."

"No excuses. I'll take you out for a steak."

Sam had been living in Thailand over ten years, but remained a boy from Bedford.

"You ever think about changing your diet?"

"What you expect me to eat? Thai food?"

"It's good enough for sixty million Thais." Few of them were overweight.

"I'm British. We eat British food. Only British." The Brit did like a good plate of curry and pad Thai, which I never ate. It had no kick.

"So see you around 7." He gave the address of a new steakhouse. "It's very classy."

"I remember classy. Seven, then." Classy for farangs in Pattaya meant no wife-beater t-shirts.

Back in the last century only the Dusit Thani was the only classy resort in Pattaya, but times had change.

"You go out with friend?" asked Mem.

Fenway was eating chocolate ice cream.

"Sam wants to have a drink."

"Go-Go bar."

"I guess so, but I only think of you."

"Hah, all men lie. Think of me with naked lady. You very funny."

"It's the truth." My thinking only of her was the truth, but no women will believe that.

"True not true. Same same. I know you. One drink look lady. Two drink talk with lady. Three drink only think drink. That truth."

"Yes, it is." I liked holding hands with a glass of gin-tonic.

A little later Mam, Fenway, and I ate at KFC. She dropped me at the bus stop at Tuk Com on Sukhumvit. Traffic was heavy and the sun was going down. I kissed her and hugged Fenway.

"Mai mao, papa."

"No, I won't get too drunk."

Mam gave her blessing.

"Sam take care you. You take care Sam." Her spies covered Walking Street. Their network posted agents on every soi. I was a good boy and good boys never get caught doing bad.

"Chan lak ter."

And I did love her, as I jumped on the bus.

Thirty minutes later I got off at Pattaya Klang and hopped on a motorsai, telling the taxi driver, "Walking Street."

The ride to Pattaya's Second Road took less than ten minutes. I walked over to Walking Street. Farangs were a rarity on that gauntlet of lust. The desperation on the go-go girls' faces was a cruel mirror of hard times. Every girl sang the same chorus "Take me home."

"Bang thi teelang."

"Maybe later. Maybe never. All farang kee-nok."

Sam and I ate a great ribeye steak at the classy restaurant.

He looked healthy for the first time in years. His new business venture was off the ground. Sam was looking at a million dollars in two years time. It all sounded good in a go-go bar.

Sam suggested hitting Heaven A Go-Go. The upstairs bar was the best in Pattaya. I hadn't been there in months, but several girls knew my name. They were friends of Mam. We drank beer. Two bottles. The owner of Heaven bought several rounds of tequila. Paddy had run a pimp bar in East St. Louis. He was most men's hero.

Sixty-five and running a go-go bar. He was my hero too. East St. Louis was tougher than Pattaya back in the early 1970s.

"Any girl you want. No bar fine." I thanked Paddy for his generosity, but refused about twenty nubile dancers before midnight. I told them the same story.

"Mai mii keng leng."

"I can give you power." Their bare bodies smelled of youth and a promise of a trip to heaven or hell. I wasn't interested in either destination after ten beers and deserted my bar stool at Heaven Above a Go Go, telling Sam Royalle that I was going to the bathroom. Three naked girls were on his lap. He wouldn't notice my departure.

The night air on Soi Diamond was strangely cool. The moist wind carried the threat of rain and I walked to 2nd Road rather than be tempted by another drink on Walking Street.

Two transvestites grabbed my arms at the top of the alley. The pair were armored in black shiny leather. They towered over me in their spiked heels. Masochists would have paid to lick the their feet. A hand slithered into my pocket. Her fingernails raked my thigh for plunder. The Shim found my wallet. It only had 2000 baht, but all my ATM and credit cards. My struggle to break free was futile, until the pickpocket yelped with pain.

"Pai loi." The voice belonged to Jamie Parker, a friend from the Lower East Side. "Get fucking lost."

"We go. Come back too." The taller TV sneered with a helium alto. Her manhood throbbed in a leather bikini. I felt inadequate.

"Good luck then." Jamie stood his ground. Almost sixty he carried the menace of the killer paroled after eleven years hard time.

"Yet mun." The she-boys strode off to find easier prey.

"I had things under control."

"Didn't look it to me." He handed back my wallet and coughed like a backfire from an out-of-tune Harley, although I suspected his hack hadn't come from smoking cigarettes.

"You're right. Those ka-toeys are tough." I count on bruises on the tomorrow. The indentation from their nails would fade faster. Mam's suspicious mind wouldn't clear for months. I asked Jamie, "What happened to you?"

Jamie's body had been perennially thin. Drugs and diet, but his face was gaunt and Panda black circles masked his eyes.

"I look that bad?" He stared at his reflection in the 7/11 window. He wasn't the type to lie to himself about his looks.

"Yes, you look that bad." Ja-bah was bad. The cheap speed was addictive. "You need some money?"

"A thousand wouldn't hurt, but it isn't for what you think."

"Jamie, you can do what you want with it." I was no angel.

After dark any money you give a friend had to be consider a gift. I pulled out a purple note.

"I don't feel like it, but then I'm not the boss." He stuck the bill securely in his jeans pocket. "Mind if I walk with you a bit?"

"I'm just going to get a taxi."

The eyes of a passing policeman convicted Jamie of several crimes. He could never go back to New York. His sin against the state had a long statute of limitation.

"Let me give you a ride somewhere."

"Yeah, there's too much light here." He lowered his head like someone might be following him. I fought the temptation to look over my shoulder. A taxi took us to 3rd Road for 200 baht. It was safer than a motorsai taxi.

At the Buffalo Bar I ordered him a beer and waved for the girls to leave us alone.

"Man, it's been a hard month." He sat on the stool as if he had been on his feet for days. "But you don't want to hear about it."

My mother had prayed for her second son to accept an avocation to join the Cloth. I refused the priesthood after hearing Led Zeppelin's first LP in 1969, but she had been right. I would have made a good priest or at least a confessor. Everyone liked to tell me their secrets.

Jamie drank his Chang beer in less than a minute.

"I'm all ears." I downed my first in sixty-five seconds.

"You ever hear of Ice?" he whispered the word with guilt-ridden worship.

"Crystal Meth." The drug had hit the fly-over of America hard. The cops had cracked down on traditional drugs and the dealers synthesized a smokeable speed from ephedrine, the basic ingredient for over-the-counter cough medicines. The substance was equally available in Thailand. Big Pharma was behind it all.

"That's the one. The Nazis used to give chocolate bars laced with the stuff to Luftwaffe pilots." Jamie was a vast abyss of useless knowledge. "Kept them flying for days."

"And you started smoking it here?" Drugs are readily available in Thailand, although opium, heroin, grass have been supplanted by ja bah and ice thanks to the repressive interdiction of the Thai Police and DEA.

"With Ort." He shrugged to indicate his complete surrender.

"Ort?" I knew Ort from Soi 6. I hadn't seen her since her boyfriend left her for a transvestite five years ago. The little vixen wanted to be my geek. I had refused with deep regret. Ort was very sexy. 23 and looked 16. She was every man's vice.

"How you run into Ort?" She was a girl around town. I stayed out of her path. Even her saying the words 'I have' got me hard with the thought of the pipe.

"She was dancing at Paris A Go-Go. Told me to meet her after work. We went back to her place. A little furnished studio. Bed, TV, AC. She asked if I minded if she smoked some ice. You know me. Anyone can do what they want as long as it doesn't hurt someone else." Jamie's heroin addiction had stolen his youth. Cocaine took away his edge as a comedian. His taking up with speed in his fifites could be a show-stopper. "Don't look at me like you were a Parole Officer, who discovered a bad blood test. You're no angel."

"You're right." I had disappointed Nancy Reagan too many times by saying 'yes', instead of 'no' to throw any rocks without breaking windows in my own house of glass, but I tried my best to avoid drugs in Thailand. Prison here was worse than any of Jamie's stateside time.

"And you're right too. I knew it was dangerous, but did it anyway."

"And how was it?" Jamie didn’t need a lecture and I was curious about ice and Ort.

"Ice is nothing. No rush. Shooting speedballs is a thousand times better for a high."

"So what the attraction?"

"Sex." Jamie spoke low, which was a little strange in a bar, where every girl was looking for a date. "I thought she wanted me only to buy some ice. 1000 baht. But once we had a few pipes, she said she was hot and asked if I minded if she took off her clothes. Another bowl and mine was off. A day later and we were still at it."

A binge. "How many days?"

"3-4. I took Cialis to keep up my strength." Speed and Cialis were tough on the heart, however Jamie was hardy enough to survive hardcore XXX games. "And then another four days and we had sex the entire time. I had to stop because the skin on my penis wore off. Ort wasn't happy and started screaming for it. It was like being with a nymphomaniac. A tyranny of sex. I told her I was going to the ATM. I didn't come back."

"How much money you spend?"

"About 15000 baht and I lost about 5 kilos."

"Cheaper than Jenny Craig's or Weight-Watchers."

"I don't have the weight to lose like you."

A loss of five kilos would put me close to the fighting weight of my early 40s.

"And you didn't go back?"

"Don't trust myself. It's not the Ice. It's the sex, the ice, the lying in bed with nowhere to go." He drank his beer with a thirst to quench another demon. "Sawan."

"Heaven." I was impressed Jamie knew the Thai word for paradise. Nah-Lok meant 'hell'.

"A little hell too, which we both like."

"Without sin, there is no pleasure," I loosely quoted Luis Bunuel, the Spanish surrealistic film director. "So now what?"

"I changed my SIM card # and started clean again." He ordered another beer. They were going down smooth. "Not 100%, but close enough. Another few days and I'll be back on top of the world."

"More like top of the slag heap in this town."

"As long as it's a foot higher than anyone else, you can see the stars." Jamie had a way with words, which slurred after our fifth beer.

I invited him up to Sri Racha. He made Mam laugh. Fenway liked playing with him. On the third day he left for Pattaya. I drove him to the bus stop on Sukhumvit.

"Take care."

"I know how to do that."

"And how not to too."

"Something else we have in common."

At the end of the week I was packing my bags for New York. I had to go back to work at the Dimaond Exchange. My flight left in the morning. Mam hated being alone. Fenway is a very busy boy.

The phone rang in my pocket. It was Jamie.

"Are you okay?"

"Excellent." He was running promo events for bars and restaurants during the low season. The next is an erotic hot dog eating contest at TiggleBitties Tavern.

"What about Ort?" I whispered the name. Mam has good ears and a jealous soul. Some people question her love. I know better.

"Haven't seen her or been to anywhere she goes."

"Smart move." Ort was a girl to avoid, which is why I no longer answered her calls anymore. "I'll see you next time around."

"Send my love to Mam and little Fenway."

"They will like that."

I went into the living room. Fenway was trying to load two discs at the same time into the DVD player. I told him, "No."

He didn't like hearing that word in either Thai or English, but just saying 'no' can save your time these days, especially when you're skating on thin ice.

A Story Of O - 1991

In 1994 Crazy Santa possessed a special guest card to the Russian Baths on East 10th Street. The steam room crew began to heat the river boulders at 6am. The two-ton stones glowed red by 7:20. The Schvitz opened at 8 AM, but Crazy Santa was in the dry steam room at 7:21. He was a rich junkie, who was the last family member of an 18th century fortune. Heroin had not ruined his sense of entitlement.

As a permanent member I could have entered the Baths at that bastardly hour, except my alarm clock was set for the opening. At 8:10 I exited from my apartment two doors down from the entrance with a towel over my shoulder and strolled east rain, sleet, snow, or sunshine.

Every morning day on my short walk I witnessed autumn's surrender to Winter, the snow on the sidewalk, the ornamental pears blooming in Spring and the return of the hot sticky Summer.

I liked the look on the day workers' faces headed to the subway. Their eyes questioned my destination. The Baths weren’t for everyone. It was a temple to cleanliness and rejuvenation, in which the weight of a night’s hard drink evaporated after thirty minutes in the 180F heat.

One Spring morning I entered and spotted Crazy Santa on the top tier of the heat room. His white beard remained fluffy, despite the Venusian temperature, then again his body fat was less than zero.

I knew the Jersey heir to a deodorant fortune through my Uncle Carmine, a Sicilian plumber married to a Aunt Jane, a distant aunt from Maine's Cumberland County, which she called 'the last place on earth created by God'. We weren't really blood, but Carmine and I conducted business on various projects hidden from the rest of the family. Crazy Santa had a small room in Uncle Carmine’s basement. The walls were covered with torn hippie posters. He paid no rent.

Crazy Santa’s real name was John Lyon. His other alias for the addicts of the Lower East Side was Junkie John. He was a sucker. His family had had big money. THe sole heir Crazy Santa inherited the remains, which had mostly been invested in his veins.

The previous Christmas I helped him turn $80,000 of stock into gold coins, which wasn't an easy thing in 1993, since the Feds were after drug dealers laundering money. Collecting the coins on West 47th Street took a little time. Returning to his bullding between B and C Avenues, I asked Uncle Carmine, if I should fuck him.

“He’s going to get $2 million at 50.” Uncle Carmine was patient. “We’ll get him then. He promised to take care of me.”

Trusting junkies was a losing proposition. I said nothing. Carmine also knew the risk.

Crazy Santa lost the gold coins to his crackhead girlfriends within a month. We hadn’t spoken since the sale.

The near-albino nodded, as I sat opposite him in the gaseous vapors hovering under the ceiling ceiling. Crazy Santas’ skin was parched dry as a Death Valley corpse. Junkies like vampires don’t sweat, unless they are jonesing.

“Hot, huh?”

“Always hot this hour.”

He spat on the floor.

"Do me a favor. Don't spit on the floor."

"You don't own this place. You don't make the rules."

I grabbed him by the hair and shoved him.

"You're right. Just don't do it again."

“Sorry, you wanna smoke some O?” Somewhere in his head he suspected that I had ripped him off on the coin deal. I had only taken a 5% commission, but the only truth junkies believe are the lies they tell themselves He wasn’t man enough to blame himself and stood up with a towel around his waist.

“It’s a little early.” I wore a fluffy towel and my own flip-flops. The ones at the Baths were cheap. Like wearing paper towels and cardboard sandals.

“No one’s here and anyone who is here lets me do what I want. Money buys freedom.”

I remembered how he talked about his money. I should have left, but followed him to the front of the Baths. I hadn’t smoked opium for years.

"You know I know you and Carmine are waiting to rip me off. You think you're so smart, but I went to Harvard."

"Did you finish?"

"No, but I know your type. A loser from the lower classes just likeCarmine. You'll both get nothing in the end."

We entered the bathroom and he pulled out a glass stem. We lit up a small ball of black tar. The Tongs had run thousands of opium dens in New York. Chinese rocks had killed off most of their clientele, but this morning Crazy Santa had opened one on East 10th Street. The aroma was Golden Triangle, although the country of origin was Mexico.

Tijuana black tar.

Heroin.

I faked my inhale. John like most junkies only cared about his high. The heroin flitted through his blood and he sagged against the wall in a nod. I took off the key wrapped around his wrist and went upstairs to his locker, quickly rifling through his clothes. I left the dope and pilfered half the money. I returned to the bathroom. He was still breathing and I slipped the key back onto his wrist. Upstairs I showered, dressed and said my good-byes to the owner.

“Where is Crazy John?” The owner had another name for Crazy Santa Claus.

“In the bathroom?”

I nodded, wiping the sweat from my face. A little of the D ranin my arteries. Work would be tough for the first hour.

“High?” asked David.

“Yes.”

“I will make sure that he doesn’t die.” Dead people were never good for business.

“I could care less.” That was the drugs talking and a little bit me too. David and I spoke the same language. Always apathetic to junkies. They were their own worst enemy and ours as well, but he was right, given the chance I would take him for it all, then again losers are never that lucky.

Nacht Und Nebel 2011

In the summer of 1982 Count-No-Count phoned my East Village apartment. Kurt was calling from Hamburg with an offer of a job as 'tursteher' at his nightclub BSIR. The pay was $150 a night, free accommodations, and all I could drink. Being dead-broke I answered, "Ja."

I spoke bad German with a Boston accent thanks to an ancient Bavarian teacher Bruder Karl at my high school south of Boston. My stay in Hamburg was pleasant throughout the warm season, but the coming of autumn brought the cold rain, gray fog, and dark days. The sun's traverse of the sky descended each day approaching the winter solstice like a frisbee weakening in flight. Even worse was how German the Germans became once the tourist had fled south to southern climes.

There were old Nazis on the streets. The bad weather brought these arrogant fascists out of their hiding places and I walked through Jungfernstieg spotting various members of the Waffen SS and Gestapo. Maybe it was my imagination playing tricks with the shadows, but their eyes didn't lie about what they had seen in Russia, Poland, France, or Germany. They were not extras in a Hollywood movie. These men had not only obeyed orders, they had carried them out to the letter.

Of course the young Germans were obsessed by the ghosts of the pasts.

"We are the Porsche Reich, not the Fourth Reich," Count-No-Count told me on many occasions in Paris. The Telex millionaire's best friend was a Reeperbahn pimp, Nigger Kalle, the son of an American sergeant from Harlem and a local woman from Hafenstrasse on the harbor of Hamburg. A black Zuhalter was an anomaly in Hamburg, but his right-hand man was SS Tommy, a deadly killer without any humor. The two of them controlled the notorious Eroscenter's six-floors and the thousands of Huren or whores for their boss Thomas Baker. Nigger Kali was always good to me. In truth he was my boss and not Count-No-Count.

SS Tommy believed in the Second Coming of the Third Reich. The original Thousand Year Reich had lasted twelve years, but he was not a real Nazi. Not like those old men who had done things no one liked to speak about at parties or even behind their backs. Still when SS Tommy presented me a large bill for having sex with a blonde girl at BSIR, I handed him the keys to my car and left Hamburg that evening without saying good-bye to anyone. The Rechtung was for 20,000 DMs or $12,000. Everything had been itemized on his list.

Everything. Every sex act in five words or less. He had charged twenty DMs for holding hands. Nothing was left off the list.

A midnight train pulled into Hamburg's Hauptbahnhof a little after midnight on time. I expected SS Tommy's to grab me from the platform or at the Belgian frontier, but I reached Paris at dawn and I felt lucky to be in France. Everyone does if they left someplace else in the middle of the night.

In the autumn of 2011 I had been living at the British Embassy in Luxembourg. The old fortress city was centrally located in Europe and I had visited to Paris, Brussels, and Charleroi in the first month. I googled Germany.

It was very close and I planned a trip to Trier, the ancient Roman city of 70,000, only a forty-five minute ride on the train. Telling the Ambassador my plans, I caught the morning express to the Moselle and ferried across the river to Konz for a short ride to Trier. At my arrival I half-expected SS Tommy to be waiting on the train platform, but several years ago we had met in Pattaya, Thailand. The criminal had aged into a stone-cold killer and was threatening my dear friend, Fabo, and pretended to be a friend. He hadn't recognized me and I hadn't bought the act. Fabo's French friend confronted the killer with the fury of an ex-legionnaire. I was lucky not to have been involved in the confrontation and had later heard that the monster had been arrested for a solo bank robbery in South Africa. Still I feared he might be out and sighed relief leaving the train station.

Germany had changed in the last thirty years.

The old Nazis had died off and while the young Nazis had become very active in the East, they weren't here, but I kept my eyes open. Walking through the old Roman ruins I studied the faces of the young and old. I didn't spot a single Nazi. It was, as if their genes had been erased from the Germanic race.

In town the only broken glass were from broken bottles and not the windows of Jewish homes and synagogues. I ate a bratwurst and drank a Kloster beer.

I visited Karl Marx Haus. The creator of Communism had been born in the old city. The street was in the heart of the sex zone. Nothing was happening in the afternoon. As I stood outside the house and old man passed and muttered under his breath, "Juden."

"And fuck you, you old Nazi." My comment made him turn his head. "Ja, du alte arseloch."

I rushed him and he cringed in expectation of a blow. His uplifted arm stopped my blow.

"Gehst heim," I said with Boston accent.

He was about 91. I was 59. One blow would have put him in the hospital and I would have gone to jail. He was still a Nazi and I was me.

Some things never change.

"Nicht war."

Gator Hole Bar Okeechobee - 2008

The world has been changing with the man's desire for mass suicide. Florida's Okeechobee Swamp has been imprisoned by interstates and poisoned by the evil Sugar Barons, such as the Fanjuls. Its water level has dropped drastically in the preceding years of drought.

"In 1970 something a flood lifted off the roof," The beehived bartender of the Gator Hole said through an exhale of smoke. Sun-bleached swamp grass spread across the arid wetlands. "Day like this four years ago we'd all sorts of boats tied up to the docks."

She looked out through the mozzie screens to the boat ramp. Thick algae covered the inlet's surface, fed by the fertilizers of the sugar fields. Dragonflies buzzed through the air. The water was about five feet short of full.

"Pretty low." I drank my Corona. It was cold, but I wished I was back in Thailand with my family.

"Before the rainy season there was no water. Only mud. Gators liked it." She pointed out two baby 'gators hiding under the dock. Their snouts were the size of size 42 boots.

Liza and her son played pool. Their mother-child rivalry was transferred from words to the sinking balls on the table. My old friend from Paris was better than her teenage son. She sunk the eight ball. Krys dropped the cue and went to the jukebox. Jimi Hendricks. Lisa hated the left-handed guitarist.

"I haven't seen a juke box in years." I couldn't recall ever running into one in Pattaya.

"You want another beer?" Lisa waved the cigarette on my face like a wand.

"Sure." She was paying.

I got a handful of quarters and played THE BEST OF GRAND FUNK RAILROAD. The trio from Flint, Michigan were huge in the 1970s.

"I'm your captain, oh yeah." I loved Grand Funk and knew all the words, if their song was playing.

By the bar Lisa hugged her son. He hugged her back. They were happy here.

I loved the Gator Hole Bar.

It was all so eternal.

One day in the future it will be under sea water.

2034 I figure, but no one can see into the future and 2034 was a long way from today.

2008 Peter Nolan Smith