Last Time We Rode Death

the last time we rode death

The night began as it sometimes did, with the warm shaking of hands and the masculine back-pounding hugs. That first night, calm enough. We drank at the club and talked about girls and family. Bill was relaxed and, knowing that any little thing turned him dark, I embraced it. We hit some of the bars around Williamsburg. He was always welcomed with big smiles, but each smile was tendered with anxiety. Bill would put his arm around somebody and say "I love this guy," or "When are you going to marry me?" or some other avenue of bonding, depending on their gender, and this would be met with quiet terror, eyes widening like an animal waiting for a predator to pass. Bill is a member of a Latin biker gang called The Lost Riders. While not a established club outside of New York, they still control much of the rapidly gentrifying area of North Brooklyn, a place that I feel is quickly running out of oxygen and that might soon squeeze me either further east or back west. Maybe that's why I hang out with Bill. In his yellow eyes is the story of this city's death, in all its demolished rows where legions of atrophying thugs wander clueless and angry on the sidewalks beneath winesoaked lips chattering away about New Yorker articles and rising mortgage payments. They couldn't care less about Bill's encyclopedic knowledge of the streets they're tearing down and building up, but I care. At least I pretend to care. Bill is only half-Puerto Rican, the other half is Irish. This means he's stuck in two worlds. He'll never be completely anything, always half something, always on the outside of something he knows from the inside out, and that might be part of the reason why I feel close to

him too. When you talk about a place, I don't think it's fair to divide people into The Invaders and The Originals. I am, after all, an invader, just as my Jewish grandfathers and grandmothers who came here with jewels sewn into their pants were invaders, to the point that the newspapers called some of them Moguls, a term rooted in the intrinsic European fear of the rising Jew. They started getting called Moguls when they finally got the money to move onto Fifth Avenue and started polluting the air with their boorish desire to fit in, thus making the old money ever more insecure in their Sovereign Grace. My ancestors carved out their piece with a violent spirit, but instead of fists and pipes and razors I use dollars, I use a new accent and a dissociated stroll. New York has been dividing and conquering itself since it was born, it's been mugging and raping and punching holes into and plastering itself, renaming its streets, cleaning itself up and polishing itself off, collecting dust while declaring immortality. All those hollow new buildings filling up with hollow new people, transients brimming over with dying money. I think it is fair to call some people deaf. We are being inundated by the voluntarily deaf. These people do not listen, but I do. I listen to Bill. At the Lost Rider's club I am seated next to a heavyset Puerto Rican woman. She looks ruefully at me behind tired, stilled eyes. In retrospect, I think it was probably a pill that made that face, but there are so many pills around we can no longer really tell. Everything she says is offset with deep pessimism, but when she smiles at me, it is not completely serpentine, and she warms up to me when I calm Bill down. "I have a pack of unopened diapers. Do you want them?" I ask her. I had missed the drop date for their diaper drive, where all

the bikers in New York ride through Manhattan to support single mothers and poor families with babies. "I'll give them to my brother. I don't know how many kids he got." she replies. "A lot? These are for little three year olds." I say, and I mark the point off the floor with my hand that a three old grows to. "I'm sure he's got some of those." she drawls, rolling her eyes. Later, something makes Bill snap; I never know what sets him off. He's recalling some moment of disrespect. He makes a vague death threat to this person, but after a while, he forgets what he was so angry about in the first place. It involves access to the club; he was blamed for something from another member, and it was disrespectful. Everything in the club has a different key. The liquor has a key, the front door, the door to the garage, the fuse box has a key, and the box that has all the keys has a key. Depending on what keys you have, that's how important you are in the club. Bill tells me something about losing and regaining his patches, which is like being a hedge over the rest, or being made, I don't know and I don't ask, but I get the idea. There is some business that must be done with another member, a stocky man with a furious white beard. They do this in private. I know what they're doing, but I don't get involved. So I sit there and talk about how I know Bill with the large Puerto Rican lady. That is something I am asked a lot. "So... How, uh, how do YOU know Bill?" How does a polite, pasty white boy know Bill? I immediately get the feeling like they think I might be a punk, a little something on the side of the Don't Ask Don't Tell policy that all organized criminals and their cohorts have. I am not an idiot. Prisons and priests make these men who they are, but I don't think that's in the air with Bill. At least I've never really thought about it. He

has offered to let me ride on his bike with him many times. I refuse this offer each time without waver. I am reminded of the image of the squire riding back saddle with his knight and master. No doubt squires throughout the centuries were required to relieve their masters of stress; how about a little polishing of the codpiece for old Sir Lionel? I imagine it is perceived similarly by bikers and I didn't want the association. That night, I presided over Bill as he tormented some local bartenders and their queer clientele. I contained him and kept him from getting in trouble, both easing his rages and laying into him with insults under the radar, exchanging slighted smiles with the girls behind the bar, which made them like me. At the end of the night, a pretty blond that Bill desired walked up to me and more or less invited me home. She laid her hand on my shoulder and stared flirtatiously, without so much as a hello. I felt a little loyalty toward Bill, as much as I wanted to walk her home, so the blond and I agreed to meet in the ephemera of an unknown future close to tonight, at some bar, somewhere, maybe... I hugged her and she walked home. It occurred to me that she wanted to fuck me without even knowing my name, which freaked me out. My cock freaked out too. It responded to her body squeezing against me with clinical apathy. Later, he drove me home. He was pissed off that a girl had asked him to buy drugs for him, but when the bar closed she had asked him to leave. "What a bitch." he said, over and over again. "Fucking bitch. You don't just do that." "It's not a big deal man, let it go." I assuaged. "I know it ain't a big deal but you don't fuckin' do dat!" he said, and I couldn't help but think his rage was a pose to make his baseless rejection and inevitable loneliness redeemable.

"It's cuz I ain't got no teeth left. If I had some teeth she'd be suckin' my dick right now." Bill had been excited because he was about to get a new set of teeth. He had about six left, and he never wore his falsies, so his smile was abysmal. "That's probably true." I said, again taking the role. This made me feel awkward. He didn't seem to notice how I felt during that conversation, which sort of reinforced the feeling that I was a woman. There was a long few seconds of silence as we sat in his GMC and listened to the whir of the motor. "Ok baba, get the fuck out. I love you." "I love you too." We hugged and I rushed into my bathroom, after the usual explosive craps that I have after hanging out with certain kinds of people. It's almost always very beautiful women or people that might have once killed someone. Those that cling to life and those that abandon it. That kind of company gives me the shits. Later that night, I awoke in a rigor of fear. It was back, in the corner, tightening it's palms together. It was coming, or I was inviting it. It stood there, somewhere, in the corner, and I waited for It to leave. A few nights later, I ran into Bill at a local bar. He had been avoiding my calls that night, which is unusual. Sometimes I get more than lonely, only it's not really loneliness, it's a desire for destruction of the self. What is the self? It's anything we embrace as ourselves, and that leads to triumph or defeat, depending. If your self is geared towards triumph, anything destructive is taken as self-defeating, and likewise if you intentionally defeat yourself, any triumph is wrought with questions and anxiety. Attachment to either is what causes all the

suffering in the world. Anyway, Bill is usually happy to hear from his strange friend. I ran out after him. "Hey you fucking prick, don't ignore me!" I yelled at him. He pivoted to me and pretended that he had simply not noticed, but then I saw that he had company. Immediately I knew that he was trying to protect me. They were a couple. The man inspired within me laughter, which I wisely suppressed. He looked like a Jim Henson invention, a muppet. Enormous muscles and a bald head, with two huge, bushy black eyebrows, the only hair on his body, that furrowed over his eyes like longshoreman's caps. His demeanor was entirely neanderthal, as if perhaps he had missed out on a few very valuable genetic transmutations during our evolution. He seemed quite angry, on the verge of throwing a punch at the nearest body. His girlfriend was a short, pale Puerto Rican girl, dressed in white, with a sad and deadened face that made her look something like a beautiful, drifting corpse. I introduced myself to them, and I was met with suspicion. "Don't worry, this kid is good. I love this kid. He's my boy." said Bill. To this they extended their hands. "How do you know Bill?" were the first words. "It's a long story." I said, laughing it off. "Yeah, it's a long story!" Bill said. We had a couple drinks, and the couple continued to look at me warily. The angry man introduced her as, "The toughest bitch I've ever met." Making light of this, and this is always the wrong thing to do, I said, "I don't know about that." I looked at her in a mock threatening fashion. I must admit I am not totally accustomed to

the world of introducing people as the toughest bitches or sons of bitches, so my etiquette is lacking. "What was that? You don't fuckin' know me." she said, and she was genuinely pissed. "Mami, relax, he's a good kid." Bill said. "I'm only kidding, I'm sorry." I consoled her. I have gotten cocky, or maybe self-destructive. At that point it would not have been out of the ordinary if the angry man had suddenly decided to knock my face in. I know people who have had this done to them for far lighter offenses. But I had Bill, and besides, she had forgiven me. "Oh, all right." She said. She smiled slightly at me, which angered the angry man. Bill decided that things were too tense. He decided that we should go to Chula's, a Puerto Rican strip club in Bushwick. "Where's Chula's? I don't want to go to a strip club." I pleaded, trying to maintain an air of toughness and indifference instead of abject terror. "It's in East New York." Bill replied, sadistically. That meant East Flatbush, which was not a place where I could be protected. It meant my death. White skinned people don't have fun in East Flatbush. They haven't since my father lived there in 1955, and even then they didn't have fun, because you don't have fun in East Flatbush. "What, are you afraid of strippers?" the woman prodded. The aura of criminal cruelty was rising, and I was getting nervous. I was thankful to be drunk. "We're going to Chula's." the angry man followed, reveling in my discomfort. Neither of them really wanted to go, but they seemed to like that I didn't want to go.

It was a short drive to Chula's. It looked like a hole in the wall, and it sort of was. The bouncer let me in without a hitch, not even an ID, because Bill said I was ok to go in. The Lost Riders probably own some of Chula's in an unofficial capacity. I don't know, and I don't care, but that's probably it. I was the only white man in the place. The bar had about fifteen stools, all stone faced men. Gangsters and wannabe gangsters, drug dealers and thugs. This was neutral territory though, trouble wasn't started by the locals. It was started by guidos driving by who saw the strippers and wanted to have their drunken bachelor parties there, or go in, handle the dancers, then start a few fights before driving back to Bensonhurst. We went to the end of the bar, where a space was cleared for us. "That's respect." Bill told me, and it was. We got a lot of respect there. Not a single guy stared me down. Nobody noticed that I was an awkward cracker, in fact I was filled with the euphoria that I had a right to be there, for whatever such a right was worth in the scope of the universe. I may as well have been a cloud drifting through the room, transparent, invisible, and untouchable. I enjoyed the sensation. The strippers were, to my surprise, very beautiful. Most of them were Latina, but there were two black women and one white woman. I have only been to a strip club a couple times, and even then I had not really participated in the strippers so much as watching what was going on around me. I tend to look at the faces. The faces of the lizards who stare, some with hate, some sedated out of their skulls, some with a slightly adolescent happiness. Usually though, they have that dreadful antipathy and insensate devotion to the stripper they know cares nothing about them. They are at once present in the stripper's body but also

somewhere else, in some dark place, like a spider, or a newt, or a blackened mushroom. I sought a beer and gave the bartender a twenty. "Give her the money." Bill goaded, and I felt he was making me the cad, the fool who paid, for the purpose of impressing. And so I played the fool, because I like Bill, and I understand Bill. I got my beer and a wad of one dollar bills. "Could I have bigger bills?" I asked, to much mockery. "Are you a fuckin' idiot?" Bill said. He put his arm around me and took a one. "Like this." He said, and in a blink a woman was there with her tits out, smiling. I blushed, again because I look at the face when disaster approaches, the face is where everything is hidden. He shoved the bill into her boobs, getting a healthy grab, growling and barking and otherwise making a show of the experience. At the moment I was amazed that a one-dollar-bill could buy you breast contact. It sort of made me sad. Then I saw a dancer counting her stack, which was about two bricks thick full of bills, and I immediately understood the system. I looked at the faces of the strippers. That's what I remember most, except for this black girl, who's breasts I remember more than her face. They were like perfect rounds of ice cream, with two shiny nipples on top. They seemed to have been waxed or treated someway, which made them look like they were from the future, or synthetic, but in a beautiful way. Bill made me shove a bill into her futuristic boobs. All eyes were on me, so I sort of had to. I pushed the bill in, and she squeezed her breasts together over my fingers. I enjoyed the feeling of leaving my body and watching someone else's hand go in between someone else's nice breasts. She laughed and smiled and told me I was cute. "Thank you. You did a very good job." This came out in the

most dry, managerial fashion, and she skipped away to another client. I looked over at Bill, who was staring at me like I was a complete moron. Which is what I am most of the time. "You're shy." the woman said. "He's shy." the angry man agreed. The angry man had been sitting angrily with his arms crossed, and Bill had to continue to tell him to relax and not start things here because it was Rider turf. The angry man didn't see why everyone was always telling him to relax, and this pissed him off. "I'm not shy." I asserted. "I'm not shy!" "You're really shy." said the lady. "No, I'm just, I'm the only white dude here, I don't know man. Did I just pay for two beers with a twenty?" I said. "Stop worrying. Nobody will fuck with you here. Nobody, or else they answer to me." Bill said. He had countered my lie with a lie. If anybody had fucked with me there, Bill probably would have ran away, but that hardly matters, because it didn't happen. Bill is old and skinny. So maybe the Riders would come next week and ask around, but it wouldn't matter because I'd still eating blended hotdogs with a spoon. "Let's go to the club." Bill ordered. We would go to the club, but not before Bill had spent time with his favorite stripper. A curvy Dominican lady with enormous pendulous breasts and very offsetting dental work. I kept looking at the white dancer, who I assumed was Russian. She looked Russian at least. Her face was that of a mannequin, and she hardly moved. She was beautiful, but something very, very terrible had happened to her in her past. This is why I hate strip clubs, because this is always what I take out of them. At the Lone Rider's garage, things got heavy, just like last time. I

discovered that the lady was not the angry man's girlfriend, but her mistress of a year or so. Most men have mistresses, I think. Given the complex circumstances of many marriages, I don't think it's necessarily a bad thing, but most of these guys are also unfaithful even to their mistresses, and that's something I don't respect at all. I find it very sad, pathetic actually, and it makes me wonder how many men have never really known a woman for more than the role she plays in their lives, whether it be whore, mother, confidante, sister or makeshift daughter, or any combination of the above depending on what the philanderer needs at that time. To my knowledge, my father never cheated on my mom. My mom admits that maybe he could have, or should have, when she was not there for him. I think with true love, all illusions of possession fade to recognizing the need for love in the other, and sometimes people cannot give it all, sometimes people are not there to be the husband and the wife. "I have been with this girl for eight years. Eight years!" That's a long time, we chimed. "Damn right it's a long time. And I been married to my wife for thirty. Thirty fuckin' years. Do you even know what that's like? So you can't judge me, cuz you don't know. I love my wife more than anything. She understands. But you know, she put up with so much, and I haven't been there much for her sometimes. It wasn't always this way, don't get me wrong, I ain't no cabrone, but if my wife ever wanted to have someone on the side, I'd look past it..." "Hey. That's fucked up." the angry man said. Because it is okay to have a woman on the side, but it is not okay for a woman to have a man on the side. This is an unspoken law of assholes across America, and it's one that is rooted in the rutting rituals of our savage prehistory.

The conversation kept turning to the lady and the angry man's affair. This was not awkward, but inappropriate. The angry man was noticeably more enraged. I wanted to say something about love, I can't remember what it was, as they continually interrupted any thought I had that was longer than five words. I wanted to say something about evolution, something about primates, something about the need for humans to love, I had many ideas, but it was not to be. At one point, when I was about to say something, the angry man said, "I know what you're about to say." "Oh, you do? What?" I was surprised. "You are going to say you like her and you want her." he said, his eyes focusing on me to the point that his eyebrows seemed to meet and become falconiformed. "What? No!" I blurted, trying not to laugh, because his feelings were real, but also trying not to offend the exquisite corpse, who I was now noticing had milky white breasts openly cleaved for the world to behold. It was a tricky situation, a critical test of my diplomatic skills. What I said then I couldn't remember, but it was something encouraging the conversation into a more life affirming direction, which, coming from me, was truly a wondrous coup de grace. It got Bill talking. He stood up behind the bar and began to ceremoniously preach about the sins of his life, pacing the line of the bar in his own private pulpit, reigning over his three transfixed followers in the Church of the Unholy Garage. The couple confessed to be suicidal, the frankness of which was off-putting, but Bill worked with it and talked about his years under the needle, the nature of love, of truly grasping onto life just to throw it away. It was tragic, but it came from his heart, and the couple almost seemed to embrace it. But like I said, those that embrace defeat see triumph as too good to be true, and the conversation

quickly degenerated into a lover's spat. Somehow the angry man had hurt her, I didn't see it, and she was about to cry. She looked at me, now with a softness, like a young girl, and didn't appear at all corpuscular or embittered. "How old are you again?" "Thirty." I murmured, sensing the rise of general wrath in the room. "He just elbowed me in the face. He elbowed my nose." She was shaking a little, and she sought an ally in my eyes, which I gave her gladly. "I'm getting the fuck out of here. Fuck this." the angry man said. They left together, and so did Bill and I, trying to avoid them on the street all the while. By accident, their car happened to be where we were heading. To my amazement, Bill hid behind a tree. "Hide you idiot!" he yelled at me. "What? Are you kidding?" "Hide! We don't want them coming over here!" Seeing nowhere to hide, I got on my hands and knees and pretended to be an anonymous drunkard, vomiting onto a garbage bag. I had to hold in the laughter. "What the fuck are you doing you lunatic?" Bill asked. "I'm pretending to throw up so that they will be disgusted and walk by." My ingenious ploy worked, and they sauntered past us. "They're gone, let's get a drink." We had a couple beers and he drove me home again. We were silent this time. "Sorry about those guys, that guy is crazy. Usually a good guy, but that lady was driving him nuts." I yawned, we said our goodbyes.

"Some people." "Yeah." In the morning, there was a red light that shone through my window. The heat was sweltering and I felt like a basted pig. I fell in and out of sleep. I awoke again, and it was there, somewhere in the closet, it flew out, then stopped, and sharpened it's claws, which were not claws, but words. I told it to leave, and it did.