JOE BLOW
Story by Bruce Berman
Vincent Black Shadow (http://bit.ly/1Kd0nf1).
Just the name is mysterious and dark and cool.
When I was a kid on the south side of Chicago there was one. One. You could hear it coming from a half mile away, always in the evening or night, not so much the sound of a roar but more like a smooth rumble. The sound was like no other bike anyone had ever heard. The rider, the solitary lone rider wore all black and because of goggles and helmet no one could figure out who this guy was. On the the south side you couldn’t know everybody, each neighborhood had a distinct personality, a different crew, different leaders, different habits, but we all sort of knew of each other.
But no one knew who the Black Shadow rider was.
Who was that guy?
I dreamed of getting one of these. It was impossible. They were expensive and rare, their production was limited, hand built, British through and through. But I wanted one bad. More to the point, I wanted to be that guy with the black clothes, hidden behind his mask, announcing his coming with a rumble and a rap, passing through, going to who knows where, rolling, into the evening, a phantom, a ghost, a shadow.
I never got the Black Shadow. Who had that kind of money. Recently I remembered it and that sound looked for one. I found a restored one. Only $95,000 U.S.
Still can’t afford it.
But I’d pay a lot to hear one again.
Incidentally, years later, in my late teens, I went back to the south side. I saw a motorcycle shop on 76th Street and Jeffrey Avenue. I wandered in there. I told ther story of Vincent to the owner of the little shop. He told me that he had bough the shop and knew all the bikers in that neighborhood (my neighborhood was another few miles to the south).
“Did you know who the biker was who had the Black Shadow,” I asked.
“Yeah I did” he replied, “it was the prior owner of that shop.”
Wow! A discovery.
“Who was he,” I asked, dying to know. Bursting. A childhood mystery about to be revealed.
He laughed. He seemed really amused. He reached and put his hand over my forearm as if he was about to tell me an important revelation.
“Well,” he said, his name was Teresa, and she wasn’t a boy.”
The shop’s former name was, “Teresa’s Motorcycle Shop.”
“Teresa was from Manchester, England and, she was,” he said, “a Manly Woman.”
I never got my Black Shadow and not only did I never get to be that “guy” and get to be cool, I never could have.
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