Some Running Some Not
June 17, 2007
Yesterday, I had to climb the mountain of cardboard boxes in the continuing saga of organizing the Stephen Sprouse archives. The boxes currently stored in a Brooklyn warehouse are being temporarily shipped to Manhattan to be properly inventoried and cataloged. My job is to give everything a preliminary going over, separating items that are relevant for the planned retrospective -- clothing, sketches, paintings, photographs, and so on -- from the personal things.
There's a lot to go through. I put aside about 15 large boxes a couple of weeks ago, and yesterday I got together 21 more, and there's still more to do.
Although Stephen Sprouse's things have been accumulating there for years, the Brooklyn warehouse isn't generally a long-term storage facility. It's run by Vincent, who has an art moving company. The warehouse is primarily used as a way station for paintings and sculptures going to and from galleries and museums; however, since it's such a large space, Vincent rents out available space to select clients.
The warehouse, like so many other buildings and businesses lining the rapidly overdeveloping Williamsburg waterfront, is feeling the squeeze play of progress. "My lease is up next year," said Vincent. "I don't know what's going to happen, but I'm starting to get rid of as much stuff as I can just in case."
Not only is the warehouse filled with his clients' things, but having such a huge space has made it easy for Vincent to accumulate vast quantities of personal shit as well, including a '69 Impala parked smack dab in the middle of the floor. "I just sold it to a guy with a garage right around the corner who restores old cars," he said. "This other guy had been bugging me about buying it, but he wanted me to get it running for him first. 'I just want to hear it run,' he kept saying. He'd call me every day. But then I showed it to this other guy who bought it on the spot. The first guy was pissed. He'd been hounding me for weeks."
When I heard that Vincent was selling off his possessions, I immediately thought of the 1976 Triumph Bonneville that's been gathering a velvety blanket or grey dust behind the Stephen Sprouse boxes for the past ten years. "What about the Triumph?" I said.
"You know, everyone asks about it. It hasn't run in about ten years, and even then, it never ran right, but I'm reluctant to part with it. Memories of my younger, wilder days, I guess."
Although the challenge of getting it to run right would be half the fun, I need another motorcycle like I need trepanation, so I didn't push it.
"There's this guy who comes to the warehouse sometimes," he said. "He's been bugging me to sell it to him for years. Every time he comes here, he cries about it. Pushy. A rich kid. At one point, he said, 'What fun is it just to have that bike stashed away in the back of a warehouse? You never ride it and you can't even look at it, it's buried behind so much shit.' I finally told him, I said, 'Simply owning something that you so desperately want but will never have gives me such endless joy, you have no idea.'"
I asked him what he was going to do when the lease was up, if he was going to find a new space or if he was going to find something else to do.
"I don't know," he said. "I never really liked this business much. It doesn't make me happy."
"How did you get into it to begin with?"
"Whenever anyone asks me that, I always tell them the same thing: You know that Bruce Springsteen song, Hungry Heart?
Like a river that doesn't know where it’s flowing, I took a wrong turn, and I just kept going
Well, that's pretty much exactly what happened to me. I took a wrong turn and just kept going. Sad."
"If you ask me, you should sell everything but the motorcycle," I said. "Get it running and hit the road."
He smiled. Nodded. "You wanna know the truth? After a few years of riding in New York City, I pretty much lost confidence on the bike. I used to get home after being out riding, and I'd realize I was a big ball of tension. It's a fight for your life out there. Which cabbie is going to run you off the road today?"
I knew what he meant. Riding a motorcycle in New York City is a peculiar form of entertainment, to be sure. That's why I was out of the house at 6 a.m. today, to meet Jason for an early morning escape from New York and its over-competitive congestion. We headed north to where the temperatures are 10 degrees cooler and the air is 110 percent cleaner.
I don't know where we went, exactly, other than up the Palisades Parkway and across the Bear Mountain Bridge, a hundred miles through woods around reservoirs and back again. You could say, we took a right turn and just kept going. Jason was the one with the map; I just followed along as we twisted and turned through the twists and turns, crossing paths with packs of Harleys and swarms of squid, all out early and getting lost, checking maps, and getting lost again.
We had to come back, of course, which is always the hard part.
New Jersey has the lowest gasoline prices in the country, and at the last service station before the George Washington Bridge, dozens of cars were lined up at the pumps. We pulled over and gassed up, stretched, peed, and rested, clinging for a few final minutes to the peace of mind that was about to be burned off in the heat of reentry.
Home again, home again, jiggity-jig.
