Xavier wanted to rent a Harley Davidson motorcycle. He did. He took a train to Queens to the only place in the New York city region where this sort of dream is easily realized and found the motorcycle of his dreams, got lost on his way home, picked me up and expertly drove many hours over a holiday weekend, but then also got lost on the way back to the motorcycle store (and I felt as if I were riding on a bucking bronco all the way down the Brooklyn Queens Expressway - which is a particularly potholed road - and was mad to the point of not speaking once we reached the motorcycle store - a bad sport, some might say), but the dream came true. Seriously though, I can only speak from the back seat of the motorcycle, but I can say unhesitatingly that Xavier drove like a pro (who knew he could pilot a 500-pound beast so deftly?), got the Harley because he wanted me to feel like a princess on a throne (the seat was like that) and once I let go of the overwhelming impression that I was going to die (you know when you tergiversate the chimera of New York into the martian land of Newark, NJ - sounds dramatic, but in fact, it is so...well, all that spring-up action is terrifying on a Harley Davidson), all I wanted to do was outstretch my arms and let the wind carry them behind me with so much, oh so much, wind in my face - all the way down the Garden State Parkway - to the very end, the terminus, the finale of that road: Cape May, New Jersey. In Cape May, New Jersey, we found lovely and rather remote beaches, a lighthouse and, bizarrely, horse-drawn buggies.
Highlight: toll booth. Plump toll booth worker - one ear phone in - Whitney Houston " I will always love you" blaring out of her mouth, right at the moment of the chorus for the first time. I hand her the dollar bills. Xavier belts out in synch with her crooning, "And I-ye-I will always love you-ooh ooh" in a duet, featuring vibrato (and in one case, falsetto) of the finest order. She cracked up and carried on singing.
