Driving east from Marseille and, next day, west from Nice, my companions of the road included hundreds of bikers on their way to Saint-Tropez for a Harley-Davidson convention, or out and about on the highways of the Côte d' Azur having already arrived. This is the sort of machine that fires Bill Taylor's soul. Here are his latest reminiscences from the New York of his early adulthood, with passing references to Harleys and more prosaic ways of getting around the city. I'll leave Bill to explain the photo I chose ...
Mild steel is cheaper than road repairs. Hence the 1970s in financially straitened New York were punctuated by the cla-clank of traffic driving over massive metal plates covering potholes that could swallow a car. It seemed from the noise that almost every intersection in Midtown Manhattan had at least one.
The lullaby of Broadway… writ large and loud.
One way to beat it was to join it; to get into a car, turn up the radio, keep a hand hovering over the horn and work your way into the melee. Like most free-for-alls, it turned out to be more sound than fury.
I mostly saw it from the front passenger seat of a Ford LTD station wagon, a vehicle with the bulk and handling characteristics of a garbage scow. The British government offices, where I was working as a messenger, had a fleet of them.
I would’ve liked a job as driver and not simply to beef up my derisory pay-cheque (fiscally, I was in worse shape than the city). But they were jealously guarded; mostly held by ex-pats from north of the border who were known as the Scottish Mafia.
It was after I’d moved to Philadelphia that one of them, with whom I’d driven miles, lost control of his LTD and put it through a drycleaner’s window. I believe that landed him on the front page of the tabloid New York Post (several years before the paper’s most famous/infamous splash: “Headless body in topless bar”).
But he was neither fired nor prosecuted. Diplomatic immunity included the cars, which carried “DPL” number plates. Though they weren’t supposed to park anywhere but legitimate spots, they very often did. If memory serves, one of them was actually towed away once. The towing company was made to bring it back.
The station wagons were used for everything from carrying messengers such as myself about our daily rounds to ferrying Queen’s Messengers and their diplomatic pouches between office and airport.
I’d read about these couriers, and their silver-greyhound insignia, years before in an Eagle Annual I’d had for Christmas. Their job turned out to be not as glamorous as it sounded.
Coincidentally, it was a story in another Christmas Eagle Annual (which I still have) that first turned my thoughts towards journalism. That wasn’t as glamorous as it sounded, either, though it did have its moments.
Being a QM didn’t. The messengers, most of them retired military personnel and police officers, spent most of their lives on airliners and suffered from chronic insomnia, poor digestion and uncertain temperament.
I never did fathom how security clearances worked in the diplomatic world in which I laboured. All I knew was that I’d literally wandered in off the street and, on the strength of a brief interview, been given a job that involved carrying… I know not what, but some of it was pretty sensitive. I can only assumed I’d been vetted somehow by someone.
There was one place messengers were sent occasionally where you waited between two locked doors while you were scrutinised by a camera and a call was made to your office to make sure it really was you. Then when you returned with whatever it was, your boss had to get on the phone again to say that you’d made it back virgo intacta, as it were.
I was also asked when I started whether I had any contact with eastern Europeans. Er… yes, actually. A university chum of my girlfriend was a Czech refugee. After a few days, word came back: The contact could continue.
There were places in the office where only the initiated were allowed. Dare to set foot in the corridor where one man worked and his personal assistant would appear like a Jill-in-the-box with a smile that stopped short of her eyes to ask if she could be “of any assistance”.
The man, said to be a distant cousin of the Queen, was known to everyone as “The Spy”. He was a cheery soul, always with an affable greeting if you ran into him in a non-proscribed hallway.
Pretty heady stuff, if you thought about it. Cloaks and daggers and who knew where there might be an umbrella stashed, its tip glistening with a discreet venom?
We had the run of the United Nations building, too, well away from the Security Council chamber and the parts where tourists were allowed. It was a rabbit warren of corridors and poky offices. But the cafeteria was a good cheap place to eat lunch and our kitchens at home were all equipped with full sets of cutlery stamped UN and smuggled out piecemeal in our consular briefcases.
It wasn’t at all what I’d expected from New York. Thousands of miles from home, I was still surrounded by Brits, some of whom regarded me with suspicion because I had an American girlfriend and knew people who drove hot rods and rode Harley-Davidsons.
But there were magical moments to be had in the shotgun seat of a bread-and-butter Ford. Once on 42nd Street, which in those days really was a sink of iniquity, the mournful harmonica theme from Midnight Cowboy came on the radio. I’d seen the film several times and now, if not living the life, I was at least in the place where the life was being lived. Another kind of New York music to my ears.
And then the driver, the only Hebridean I’ve ever met, vented himself of some Gaelic oath and changed the station.
* Earlier instalments in the Not a Native New Yorker series are stored at http://www.francesalut.com/not-a-native-new-yorker/. All as written, though examples of North American punctuation are generally anglicised.
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