Rachel Kushner - The Flamethrowers

The drivers collected along the curb near the café, some popping up onto the sidewalk, spoked wheels and hot exhaust pipes in one tangled mass under the orange neon letters CINZANO. The shiny 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 shiny 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 élan 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 shift 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 shifter 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-choreographed 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 massive 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 Nazionale, streaming through the dark in a cavalcade of motorbike headlights, under the glow of argon and neon.

RINASCENTE FARRINI FALCK

BAR TABACCHI CAFFÉ

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.

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 breasts 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 breasts 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.