The Gold Star

         I was always real partial to Gold Stars, the special 500 cc single cylinder motorcycles made by BSA of England and once owned 3 of them at one time. The best of them was the black 1963 Clubman I bought from a friend in 1965. It would do an honest 120 miles per hour and I got it up there several times while drunk out of my mind in the middle of the night. Always a solitary drinker, I took to leaving the bars in the New York City suburbs of Westchester County an hour before they closed at 3 AM and riding the Gold Star down to Greenwich Village where the bars didn’t close until 4 AM. My record was 42 minutes for the 45 mile trip from Foley’s Bar and Grille in Chappaqua to the no name tavern at the corner of Hudson and Jane streets in the West Village. I set a personal record on one of these trips by going 105 miles an hour past the UN garage on the East Side drive. Almost fifteen years later and sober for some years I tried to duplicate this feat with my last motorcycle, a highly tuned Suzuki that had been a drag racer and vaguely set up for the street. The most I dared push the ungodly fast Suzuki to on the potholed and dark tunneled road past the UN was about 85. I had become a woos in my later years. A chicken shit.

I loved the no name because they served Ballantine Ale on tap and I was a Ballantine Ale man for all of my formative drinking years. It was the best. I especially liked those big green glass quart bottles. There was a nickel deposit on these bottles and once a week or so when I would clean them out of the back of my old Chevy I would have enough deposit money for a couple more quarts which would be the start of my next toot. I knew no one at the no name and simply reveled in the ale and the excitement of the ride down and the adventures of the night.

         Closing up the no name I would head down to the tip of Manhattan and ride the Staten Island ferry for 5 cents across lower New York harbor and back and then go get something to eat at Katz’s Delicatessen on Houston St., or a small terrible diner on the west side that Jay Gould reputedly frequented, or go over into Chinatown and have some Wor-Shu Op, duck, or some such. Then I would head down to Wall Street, deserted on Saturday and Sunday mornings at 6 or 7, and run up and down the streets listening to the crescendo of the full racing exhaust of the Gold Star bouncing off the buildings. I still have fond memories of stopping in the middle of Wall Street astride the Gold Star opposite the courthouse steps where George Washington was inaugurated.

Prospero Ends the Revels

Our revels now are ended, these our actors,

As I foretold you, were all spirits

And are melted into air, thin air:

And like the baseless fabric of this vision,

The cloud capp’d towers, the gorgeous palaces,

The solemn temples, the great globe itself,

Yea, all which it inherit shall dissolve

And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,

Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff

as dreams are made on, and our little life

Is rounded with a sleep.

Shakespeare

         And so, at last, around 7 or 8, exhausted, shall we say, from a night of carousing that had begun some 12 hours before, I would head the Gold Star homeward up the West Side highway, back across 10 cent bridge, through the Bronx, and then up the Saw Mill River Parkway to upper middle class suburbia. And the next night I might cool it a little, closing the bars around home at 3 then heading to one of the local diners to eat.

         I had the Gold Star up at Dartmouth for a while and made one fantastic trip on it from Hanover, New Hampshire down to the Central Bar and Grille, about 250 miles, in 3 and ½ hours. I cruised upper Route 22 in New York State for mile after mile at well over 100 mph on a memorable bright sunny June afternoon slowing slightly going through the little towns and reaching back and covering the full open racing exhaust megaphone with my right foot to quiet it a little. The English call it riding at over a ton.