The Flamethrowers Part 2

The drivers collected along the curb near the cafe, some popping up onto the sidewalk, spoked wheels and hot exhaust pipes in one tangled ma.s.s under the orange neon letters CINZANO. The s.h.i.+ny metal of gas tanks, fenders, carburetor covers, headlamp rings, and wheel rims sent the orange neon skidding over chrome and steel and suffusing everything-the atmosphere and the charge in the atmosphere, this feeling of sedition-in ember orange. For the first time in his life he found the neon, and the way it bathed those s.h.i.+ny machines parked below it, dazzling. Something was coalescing, an energy transfer from the cyclists to his own spirit. Life is here, he thought. It is happening now.

People were trading cycles, letting others take turns.

Valera stood.

"You want to give it a go?" A chrome pudding-bowl helmet was placed in his hands by a rider who had just dismounted.

Valera put on the helmet, looping the chin strap. He climbed onto the cycle with what he hoped was the elan of Marie's companion on the seawall in Alexandria, with his wet hair and those hard-click shoes, who had seemed completed by his machine, as if together they made one thing.

You start it like this, see? It's in neutral. Pull the compression lever. A downward thrust of the body's weight on the kick-starter, and release compression. Bub-bub-bub-bub. Careful not to pop the clutch. Ease off it gently. First is down. Second, third, and fourth are up. Here's your hand brake and there's your foot brake. Don't pull the hand brake alone without your foot brake, or you'll be over the handlebars like a pole vaulter.

Valera stalled the motor trying to s.h.i.+ft from neutral into first. His face went red.

It's okay, just put it back in neutral and give it another kick start. . . . Yes, good. . . . Now into first. Pull in the clutch so you'll be ready- The cycles began to move and thin. They were off!

Go! That's it-go!

The cycles were dispersing. Valera pushed on the s.h.i.+fter with the sole of his shoe, gave the throttle gas, and eased off the clutch, understanding, this time, that it was a two-part invention: the gas flows and the clutch releases as one movement, but each part is controlled independently, the two meeting at a fluid halfway point.

The cycle burped forward, not at all gracefully, but he felt the essence of what was required, control with the wrists. After a few erratic lunges, learning the stiff springs of clutch and throttle, he was able to go along more smoothly and to follow the movements of his fellow riders, each reacting to the next as fish do, swimming in a school, auto-ch.o.r.eographed in one undulation, fish to fish, rider to rider, as they threaded the narrow streets beyond the Corso.

He grew bold and began moving forward between riders, under neon signs that looked like bright, hard candy, reflecting from the tram wires and the tracks in smears and gleams. He was making his way to the front of the pack.

As they cornered the roundabout of the Piazza Venezia, Valera reached the front. He and three others formed a motorcade. Light and noise, and the damp air on his face, the helmet making him feel like a brave soldier. Four cycles across, vanguarding.

As if they were both in an official capacity and yet undermining all.

Hunched over the handlebars above a blur of paving stones, flinging off their burdens behind them.

A night junta.

Amid the growls of so many engines echoing through the streets, the rider next to Valera yelled, "Let's take the city!"

They swerved down Via di San Gregorio, past glimpses of the exterior wall of the Colosseum, whose ma.s.sive belly was lit with electric light leaking through its dark and crumbling walls, turning the Colosseum into a broken and blazing lantern.

They were on Via n.a.z.ionale, streaming through the dark in a cavalcade of motorbike headlights, under the glow of argon and neon.

RINASCENTE FARRINI FALCK.

BAR TABACCHI CAFFe.

CINZANO CINZANO CINZANO.

He could see the dim lights in the fountain up ahead, in the vast Piazza Esedra. The night felt like it would burn. It was burning. Why had he waited so long?

He surged into it.

4. BLANKS.

I had moved to New York from Reno just over a year before my Bonneville trip. I'd found an apartment on Mulberry Street and planned to make films with the camera I never returned to the art department at UNR, a Bolex Pro. I arrived with the camera and Chris Kelly's telephone number and little else. I was twenty-one. I figured I'd wait to call mythical Chris Kelly, shot in the arm by Nina Simone. I'll get situated first, I thought. I'll have some sense of what I'm doing, a way to make an impression on him. Then I'll call. I knew no one else, but downtown New York was so alive with people my age, and so thoroughly abandoned by most others, that the energy of the young seeped out of the ground. I figured it was only a matter of time before I met people, was part of something.

My apartment was about as blank and empty as my new life, with its layers upon layers of white paint, like a plaster death mask of the two rooms, giving them an ancient urban feeling, and I didn't want to mute that effect with furniture and clutter. The floor was an interlocking map of various unmatched linoleum pieces in faded floral reds, resembling a cracked and soiled Matisse. It was almost bare, except for a trunk that held my clothes, a few books, the stolen or borrowed Bolex, a Nikon F (my own) and a men's brown felt hat, owner unknown. I had no cups, no table, nothing of that sort. The mattress I slept on had been there when I rented. I had one faded pink towel, on its edge machine embroidered PICKWICK. It was from a hotel in San Francisco. I knew a girl who had cleaned rooms there and I somehow ended up with the towel, which seemed fancier than a regular towel because it had a provenance, like shoes from Spain or perfume from France. A towel from the Pickwick. The hat was a Borsalino I'd found in the bathroom of a bar. I wrapped my jacket around it, rather than giving it to the bartender. It decorated the empty apartment. Each morning I went to a coffee shop near my apartment, the Trust E on Lafayette, and sat at the counter. The same waitress was always there. The men who came into that coffee shop tried to pick her up. She was pretty and, perhaps more importantly, had large b.r.e.a.s.t.s framed in a low-cut waitressing smock.

"Hey, what's your name?" a man in a yellow hard hat said to her one morning as he stared at her b.r.e.a.s.t.s and dug in the pocket of his work overalls to pay his check.

She glanced at the radio behind the counter. "My name is . . . Zenith," she said, smiling at him with her slightly crooked teeth.

That was the precise moment I wanted to be friends with Giddle-her actual name, or at least the one I knew her by.

There are no palm trees on Fourteenth Street, but I remember them there, black palm fronds against indigo dusk, the night I met the people with the gun.

That was how I thought of them, before I knew who any of them were. The people with the gun.

I had been in New York two weeks, and the city to me seemed strange and wondrous and lonely. The summer air was damp and hot. It was late afternoon. The overcrowded sidewalk, with young girls standing along Union Square in shorts and halters the size of popped balloons, electronics stores with salsa blaring, the Papaya King and its mangoes and bananas piled up in the window, all made Fourteenth Street feel like the main thoroughfare of a tropical city, someplace in the Caribbean or South America, though I had never been to the Caribbean or South America, and I'm not sure where I saw palm fronds. Once it became familiar, Fourteenth Street never looked that way to me again.

I remember a rainbow spectrum of men's wing tips parked in rows, triple-A narrow, the leather dyed snake green, lemon yellow, and unstable shades of vermilion and Ditto-ink blue. All of humanity dresses in uniforms of one sort or another, and these shoes were for pimps. I was on the west end of Fourteenth. My feet, swollen from the heat, were starting to hurt. I heard music from the doorway of a bar, soft piano notes, and then a singer who flung her voice over a horn section. What difference does it make, what I choose? Either way I lose. A voice so low it sounded like a female voice artificially slowed. It was Nina Simone's. A piano note and a man's baritone voice percussed together, and then higher piano notes came tumbling down to meet the low ones. I went in.

The music was loud and distorted by the echoing room, where a man and woman sat close together at the far end of a bar, the sole customers. The woman had the kind of beauty I a.s.sociated with the pedigreed rich. A pale complexion, cuticle thin, stretched over high cheekbones, and thick, wavy hair that was the warm, reddish blond of cherrywood. The man conducted the song with the tiny straw from his drink, jerking his arm in the air to the saxophone and the cartwheeling piano notes, which fell down over us as if from the perforations in the bar's paneled ceiling. The horns and strings and piano and the woman's voice all rode along together and then came to an abrupt halt. The room fell into drafty silence.

The woman sniffled, her head down, hair flopped over her face, curtains drawn for a moment of private sorrow, although I sensed she was faking.

"Why don't you sit down," the man called to me in a nasal and Southern voice, "you're making us nervous." He wore a suit and tie but there was something derelict about him, not detectable in his fine clothes.

The woman looked up at me, a glisten of wet on her cheeks.

"She's not making anybody nervous," she said, and wiped under her eyes with the pads of her fingers, careful not to scratch herself with long nails painted glossy red. I realized I'd been wrong. She was not the pedigreed rich. He was and she was not. Sometimes all the information is there in the first five minutes, laid out for inspection. Then it goes away, gets suppressed as a matter of pragmatism. It's too much to know a lot about strangers. But some don't end up strangers. They end up closer, and you had your five minutes to see what they were really like and you missed it.

"Come on, honey," she said to me in a voice like a soft bell, "sit down and s.h.i.+thead will buy you a drink."

I'd thought this was how artists moved to New York, alone, that the city was a mecca of individual points, longings, all merging into one great light-pulsing mesh, and you simply found your pulse, your place. The art in the galleries had nothing to do with what I'd studied as fine art. My concentration had been film, but the only films the galleries seemed to be showing were films scratched beyond recognition, and in one case, a ten-minute-long film of a clock as it moved from ten o'clock to ten minutes after ten, and then the film ended. Dance was very popular, as was most performance, especially the kind that was of a nature so subtle-a person walking through a gallery, and then turning and walking out of the gallery-that one was left unsure if the thing observed was performance or plain life. There was a man in my neighborhood who carried a long pole over his shoulder, painted with barber stripes. I would see him at dusk as I sat in the little park on the corner of Mulberry and Spring. He, too, liked to sit in the little park in the evening, in his bell-bottoms and a striped sailor's s.h.i.+rt. We both watched the neighborhood boys in their gold chains and football jerseys as they taunted the Puerto Rican kids who pa.s.sed by. They were practicing for the future war. The Italians were going to exterminate the Puerto Ricans with the sheer force of their hatred. Or maybe they would just remove all the Italian ice pushcarts and the pizza parlors and the Puerto Ricans would starve. The man sat there with his striped pole jutting over his shoulder like an outrigger, one leg crossed over the other, his sun-browned toes exposed in battered leather sandals. He smiled foolishly when the Italian kids asked what his pole was for. When he didn't answer, they flicked cigarette b.u.t.ts at him. He kept smiling at them. Once, he walked past the Trust E Coffee Shop, holding the pole over his shoulder as if carrying construction materials to a work site. "There goes Henri-Jean," Giddle said.

"You know him?"

"Yeah. He lives in the neighborhood. It's his thing, that pole. No sellable works, just disruption. Goes to gallery openings, bonks people on the head by accident."

The children who taunted him in the playground all had fathers in the Mafia. Every Sunday, the fathers exited their social club on Mulberry, next door to my building, and got into black limousines. There were so many limousines they took up the entire block, lined up like bars of obsidian-black soap, double-parked along Mulberry so that no traffic could pa.s.s. The chauffeurs stood next to the open pa.s.senger-side doors all afternoon. It was summer, and sweat rolled down their faces as they waited for the men to emerge from the social club.

Every morning I sat at the counter of the Trust E on Lafayette, hoping Giddle and I might talk, and if business was slow, we did. I paid my rent to a Mr. Pong, who said I should contact him only if I was moving out or if the city showed up to inspect. I spent each day looking at the want ads and walking around. As I came and went from my apartment, I would say h.e.l.lo to the two teenage girls who cut and styled each other's hair in the hallway. Sometimes they were in the courtyard between the two buildings-one building was behind the other, and I lived in the front-working out dance routines under the wet flags of hung laundry. Each night I went to a pizza place on Prince. The kind of young people I hoped to know, women and men in ripped, self-styled clothes, smoking and pa.s.sionately discussing art and music and ideas, were all there. I didn't interact with them except for once, when one of the men called me cutie, he said, Hey, cutie, and a woman near him became upset, telling him that the street was not his pickup joint, and the other women laughed, and none of them asked if I needed friends. Which was something people never would ask. I ate my pizza and went to lie in bed with all the windows wide open. The trucks rumbling down Kenmare, the honking, an occasional breaking of gla.s.s, made me feel that I was not separate and alone in my solitude, because the city was flowing through my apartment and its sounds were a kind of companions.h.i.+p.

I had met Giddle, but she was of little real help. The stream of New York, at least the one I imagined, moved around her as it did around me. She seemed as isolated as I was, which was troubling, because she'd been in New York, as far as I could tell, for many, many years. She would tell me about herself but it often contradicted something she'd said on a different day. Once she said she was raised in a Midwestern Catholic orphanage. We wore green skirts, she told me, white blouses, white bobby socks, saddle shoes, green jackets. We watched the nuns shower. But on another quiet morning at the diner, she told me her father sold appliances. They'd lived in Montreal. Her mother stayed home, was always there when Giddle returned from school. She had three brothers. Got an F in French. And I looked at her and nodded and realized she had forgotten she'd told me about the nuns a few days earlier.

Something would happen, I was sure. A job, which I needed, but that could isolate a person even further. No. Some kind of event. "Tonight is the night," I later believed I'd told myself on that particular night when I heard the music and Nina Simone's voice, walked into the bar on Fourteenth Street, and met the people with the gun. But in truth I had not told myself anything. I had simply left my apartment to stroll, as I did every night. What occurred did so because I was open to it, and not because fate and I met at a certain angle. I had plenty of time to think about this later. I thought about it so much that the events of that evening sometimes ran along under my mood like a secret river, in the way that all buried truths rushed along quietly in some hidden place.

"This is my wife," the nasal man in elegant clothes said as I sat down next to them at the bar. "Nadine."

He said it again. "Nay-deeen," and looked searchingly at her.

She ignored him, as if she were used to this audible pondering of her Nadine-ness in bars, for the benefit of strangers.

"We were at a wedding," Nadine said, turning to me. "They asked us to leave. They asked Thurman to leave, I mean. But I don't like weddings anyway? They make my face hurt?"

That was how she spoke.

"Why did they want you to leave?" I asked, but I could sense why. Something about their presence in an empty bar many levels below what the man's clothes might suggest.

"Because Thurman lay down in the gra.s.s?" Nadine said. "He started taking pictures of the sky. Just blue sky, instead of the bride and groom. He'd had a few too-"

"I did not have a few too. I was looking for something decent to photograph. Something worth keeping. For posterity."

"Oh, posterity," Nadine said. "Sure. Great. If you can afford it. You could have just told Lester you didn't want to be the picture taker."

There was a camera sitting in front of him on the bar, an expensive-looking Leica.

"You're a photographer?" I asked him.

"Nope." He smiled, revealing a tar stain between his two front teeth.

"But the camera-" I couldn't think of how to say it. You have a camera but you aren't a photographer. I sensed he would only keep meandering away, like something you are trying to catch that continually evades your grasp.

"Better to say yes," Thurman said, "and then disappoint people. I mean really let them down."

"Lord knows you're good at that," Nadine said in a quiet voice.

"I'm talking about building a reputation."

"So am I," she said.

"All I want," Thurman said, "is for people to stop asking me to come to their weddings. And funerals."

"I don't mind funerals?" Nadine said. "Except when they buried my daddy in a purple casket. That was awful." She turned to me. "Thurman knew my daddy? Daddy was a mentor to him? A teacher?"

"A mentor," I repeated, hoping this might lead somewhere, to some explanation of who she and Thurman were. Because they were someone or something, I was sure of it.

"Well, my daddy was a, I guess you could say pimp. Pimp is acceptable-I mean now that he's dead. And you know what? People don't say procurer anymore."

I thought of the narrow wing tips in tropical bird colors. Who knew what was true.

"And my mother was a wh.o.r.e, so they got along perfect."

Probably nothing was true, but I liked the challenge of trying to talk to them. I had spoken to so few people since arriving that it felt logical to interact in this manner. It was direct and also evasive, each in a way that made sense to me.

"May he rest in peace," Thurman said. "A gentleman. I wanted to ask him for your hand in marriage. You were fourteen and G.o.dd.a.m.n. I wanted to just marry the pants off you." He grinned and showed the ugly stain on his teeth. "But then there was no point. It wasn't marrying to get in your pants, since you were allowing it. Not with me. That motherf.u.c.ker you did marry, later on."

Nadine frowned. "Do you want a purple casket, Thurman? Because Blossom might have one all picked out for you. With a copper millennial vault, to preserve your-"

He got up, walked to the end of the bar, and aimed his camera at a sign above the register. SORRY, NO CREDIT.

Three or four drinks in, still they hadn't asked me anything. But what interesting thing did I have to tell? I was content to listen to their stream of half reports on people I'd never heard of, stories I could not follow, one about a baby named Kotch. "This lady was nursing him," Nadine said, "and then another lady and you begin to think, wait a minute, whose baby is Kotch? I don't know who was his mother and who was a wet nurse-"

"I'll make you a wet nurse," Thurman said as he grabbed Nadine and put his hand between her legs. She twisted away and then she was prattling about a McDonald's she once went to in Mexico. I had been in a McDonald's commercial when I was in high school, and I thought, as Nadine spoke, that it might be a story I could share with them.

"McDonald's is supposed to be the same everywhere, right? Well, not in Mexico. They Mexicanize it. Hamburguesa con chile. No fries-fri-jol-es. I was with my ex. We were starving and I was ready to eat beans. We're at the counter and find out we have no money. He had lost his wallet."

She went on about this ex, the revolution he had been fomenting that never took place and had led to their harsh and vagrant life in the mountains of northern Mexico, the hole in his pocket that his wallet wriggled through, leading to his inability to provide for her the most fundamental thing-a McDonald's hamburger. That was how she put it, that he couldn't provide even a hamburger. After which she left him and went to Hollywood, where the nightmare really began, a series of episodes and hard luck that involved rape, prost.i.tution, and an addiction to Freon, the gas from the cooling element in refrigerators.

"What you get," Thurman said when she was finally finished, "for marrying a motherf.u.c.ker."

"I don't want to talk about him. And stop calling him that, would you?"

"You brought him up."

"Only to tell her about the Mexican McDonald's."

"I was in a McDonald's commercial," I said.

"Oh, you're an actress!"

"No, I just did the one thing, I was sixteen and it was just something, an ad our coach answered and-"

"Thurman, she's an actress."

"Well, I . . . we did act, I guess. But that's not . . . they needed a girl who could ski, and so I-"

"You're an actress and a skier! I never meet anyone who skis."

"Do you ski?" I asked, only vaguely hopeful.

"Do I ski. No, honey."

The commercial's director and crew had come to Mount Rose, where we trained. They talked to our coach and ended up choosing me and a racer named Lisa, a quiet girl no one really knew. There was a long day of takes and retakes. They wanted two girls with hair flying, snow bunnies on a brisk, sunny afternoon. A week later they flew us both to Los Angeles, to a strange McDonald's in the City of Industry where they only filmed commercials. It looked like a regular McDonald's, with cas.h.i.+ers in paper hats, a menu board, the plastic bench tables where Lisa and I sat across from each other and smiled as if we were friends although we weren't, each of us holding a hamburger in our fingers with hot lights on us, in this fake restaurant that looked real except they didn't serve customers. I tried to explain this to Nadine, but she kept interrupting me.

When we finished shooting the ad, I flew home to Reno. Lisa was supposed to be on the flight but she wasn't. She was eighteen, an adult, and I didn't wonder. She had apparently gone to a bar near the fake McDonald's in the City of Industry. No one ever heard from her again.

"Freaky," Nadine said. "There's no telling. Once I met the serial killer Ted Bundy. Can you believe it? He was real handsome. Real smooth. I was on a beach and here comes this hunky college guy. I was this close to ending up like the gal in that commercial with you."