Enough of this Twaddle! The Floyd's the Thing!

Right! Onward, dear reader; let us leave old Ambiguo, swaddled in his gut-restricting fat pants and swinging from an impostering Profundo's prow, let us leave these two-bit hams and cut to the very quick of the issue itself.
"Look, you said, or at least I thought you did somewhere in the midst of all that nonsense, that your two old farts managed to actually get their hands on a couple of frames. Did you or did you not? Spit it out, you bathtub admiral!"
Calm yourself, gentle reader, for yes, there is proof in the tapioca. My Italian fat men did indeed come through, and in spades; here are the photos as received by me, sparingly cleaned and ready to be dismantled and shipped for closer and inspection and eventual restoration. This Floyd came courtesy of Poltrone, the hatchet-nosed old bit of doggerel, found in an rubble of an abandoned meatpacking warehouse in the Testaccio district of Rome, alongside the burnt out hulk of an ancient Vespa Sprint 150 and the dessicated remains of what is now vintage beef.


One wonders how such a paragon of geometry in motion could have found its near end in such a disreputable heap. Whats more, Poltrone tells me that the warehouses as they are now are on the verge of being turned into twee modern art museums. Oh, modern man! Do not look abroad for new jewels when those of old lie tarnished below your feet! Floyd Number Two, forwarded along by the scarcely recognizeable and dutifully chastened Ambiguo, makes me want to clasp him to my chest and pinch his swollen cheeks. THIS, my friends, this is a Floyd. Note the frame angles, the intricate lug-work. Perhaps a bit difficult to make out in this dim lighting, but upon arrival, attention shall be lavished upon it. Poetry in motion (to be). His story has still to be told in full, but Ambiguo reminds me at chance intervals of the cunning insight I saw burning in him at our first meeting. He sends this Floyd on from Bologna, meekly traveling south and away from dangerous dumplings, where he caught the Floydian scent from a wizened old reed of a man who laid a finger along his nose while selling a restorative bichiere of plonk in Lo Nagro, at the terminus of Viale Schiavonia. Of course, Floyd found and wine at hand, one cannot count on Sgnr. Ambiguo for wanton tourism.

In Which We Regress, But Only a Teeny Twiddle

In the filmy hours of the morning, the world squashy and without corners as filtered through the cat on one's face, it is easy to find, along the freshly mowed walk of conversation, enticing brambly holes in the hedge through which one's thoughts may wander, straying from the Floyd at hand.
Such, with just such a load-bearing feline tucked in this humble narrator's armpit, was the case when last we did tout in terms elegiac and parables profound, the nature of the Floyd. But be of good cheer! dear reader, for a new light dawns and begs us gather at the foremast, bearing words that finally, like Ahab's final pod of whales, give us cause for Hope.
I have received a Floyd.
I have received Two Floyds!
Two Floyds from the past, caked in the sad patina of nearly 40 years disuse. I received a cable some two weeks ago from Messrs. Poltrone and Ambiguo, opened it with trembling hands, and could scarce believe my eyes at this news, glorious beyond hope!
Apparently Ambiguo thought the search might proceed propitiously in the northern climes, and thus rationalizing a prodigious appetite for dumplings to be cunningly purchased on the project's Euro, he plowed northeast, to Trentino Alto Adige. Oh, but I forgive him, the old wurstle, for in his stomach lies a device more accurate than the truest of pidgeons. Try as he might to block out loyalty to the Floydian cause, a sausage in his mouth and a slice of rye bread in each ear, his heart was too true. Staggering out of the first trattoria he had found, bloated and wheezing, leaking at the seams, he pattered to rest on a bench along the main boulevard, and promptly fell asleep in the sun. He had, by the subsequent written accounts, ceased to be of this world, borne along on waves of shnitzel as hosts of pretzels sang him to his rest, and was as communicative as a lamp post when prodded with the polizia's truncheon. "The gentleman's impressive girth," stated the report filed by Sgnr. Montana, "made his removal and ultimate disposal a rather fiddly (trans. 'intricato') procedure. Profundo was summoned."
Here, dear reader, I almost lost my pants, for as you no doubt know very well by now, a certain Profundo plays not a small part in the very reason we are here in the first place! A relative, perhaps, a fugitive from space and time?
No.
Profundo was simply another very fat policeman of wine cask proportions, who seemed to have the most accumulated knowledge of moving large objects. He arrived with sling shimmed to the front of his Ape and after much huffing and puffing, succeeded in harnessing the mountainous bulk of Ambiguo to his three wheeled chariot. Tottering, spinning at times on two wheels, the cask wove his way to the the Ape car's home, the alley behind the station, and, rather than attend to the discomfitting task of unbuckling the leviathan so ignominiously hoisted to the crafts wobbling bow, proposed lunch.

In Which We Meet Profundo Himself, and Lament the Deplorable State of Floyds' Two

We look in on our hero as dawn slips unnoticed out from within the water barrel, where it has been sulking about for some hours, a doleful moon-faced calf. Shards of cold sun clatter like a spilled alphabet on the barn door, metal ringing out as a sting through fouled off forearms, and inside, the ghost of Profundo curses sotto voce, realizing a night spent on the floor.
An hour passes, slowly, and as the cluster flies shake the torpor from this late September of their numbered days, Profundo warms in a bar of sun, changes from a man cut from thick morning valley mist to a color through a waterfall, to a wafting shade suspended above a teacup, and then disappears completely. The fat late-summer flies flap like grapes at the window, while a hollow sound much like a bicycle leaving its place under the eaves of a shed follows the sigh of the door closing on itself, and the last cicadas' rasp to life, slow fingernails ratcheting across an emery board.

Like the hazy shadow of the long-gone conductor of old number 99, seen filing his nails and setting his pocket watch in the golden suppertime sun of the dark thirty, the teller grows susceptible to the gauzy qualities of these legends not fully passed on. A rear wheel spinning round the corner and out of sight along the olive trees, a rusted jack knife quivering quarter-blade deep in a stump by the trestle; only too well do we know that these men, these objects, did once cast shadows. And if, armed with this historic knowledge of things tangible, we thrill to the feeling of doubting desire and temper our blind logic, do we know surely they do not cast them still?

Facts remain, unpleasant altogether they might be. Peppe Profundo died too soon, and no longer inhabits corporeally the streaking Floyd that Verner fit to his lean frame.

But the pictures remain, as well do the stories, and it is no great effort, upon squinting the eyes, to see once again outlined against the sun, hat turned backward on his head, Profundo's back dipping side to side as he winds up the hill and banks off to the left, off among the goats and the goatherds of the Sardinian countryside.

Floydian Technicalities

Before we go further into the tangled web of actual latter-day Floyd retrieval and subsequent restoration (knock on wood; I have a Telex waiting from Signore Capodanno, my man in the south) perhaps it will be of some service to review, precisely, what is and what is not a Floyd. At left is not an original Floyd, although after Verner's death in 1963 there was an ill-fated attempt to revive the marque. This amounted to nothing more than emblazoning the trademark Spenserian script onto a seemingly meaningless array of products. The Floyd coffee percolator met with some little household success in the nostalgic early 80s', but there is nothing here to suggest that this example bears any relationship to a bicycle. It is likely amateurish homage paid by a island-dwelling race fan of the time.


This Floyd met with an equally dastardly end, and you might make a case that neither is this example an original. By 1930s' the telephone, the wireless telegram, and the automobile, all conspired to make the world too small for the "Sagebrush Robinhood", and he was gunned down in 1934. Equally legendary, unequivocally un-bicycle.




Ahh, this is more like it. While from the angle of the camera in the photo on the left we do not know the exact year and model, this is by all accounts an early Floyd frame built while still on the Bianchi team in the late 1950s'. From the scenery, I would say that this is a shot from Sardinia, before the start of a race. The rider is most likely Busi or Verner, two of Bianchi's pride, judging from the luxurious delivery system to the starting line. Note the rider in the background; not everyone received such kingly treatment. Floydian certitude: highly likely.



At right, a Molteni rider with his drilled and fluted Eddy Merckx bicycle, likely made by Ernesto Colnago, a colleague and equal of Verner's. Shares much of the same drilling common to racers of the time; Busi's proposed Floyd was to be drilled to such an extent as Verner found dangerously excessive and excessively fashionable, neither of which he found reason enough.



Nobody is really sure what this one is; it might be a bicycle.

Sing a Song of Floyd

I have received a windfall missive from one of my men. Scouring the Italian countryside armed with Carte Blanche, combing the dusty courtyards of crumbling Tuscan villas', the great glassed front windows of grand old Northern hotel bars, peering through the tarred knot holes of sea-drunken Sicilian fishing lockers, they are searching for the stuff of cycling legend. Hand built to order, only about 50 Floyd bicycle frames were ever finished before the untimely and unfortunate death of Vittorio Verner in 1962. Details are few and hazy at best, but most of the myth surrounding the builders death revolves around a personal grudge with a member of the Bianchi team, whose company Verner was forced to leave after refusing to build a frame for Bianchi's show horse, Giancarlo Busi. Verner regarded Busi as a showboat and an ass, and wanted no part of his growing legacy to be attached to a racer whose results did not match his popular status, a furor which found no end of sensationalized reception in the manic Italian press. It was a year later, during the final descent of a club friendly in the mountains above Lake Como, that a stick found its way in into the front wheel of Verner's personal Floyd, and in the rain above Bellagio, coupled with the notorious inability of steel rims and leather brake pads of the time, Verner fell, was run over by the pack he was leading, and was killed. It is for these frames, these precious and groundbreaking bicycle frames, that I have come to Italy, and why I have enlisted the help of 6 old men, natives to their region and still mindful of a time when the forgotten Floyd was king of the road, to help me restore the Floyd to its former place of glory.

Lucera is a wonderful wee town on top of a rather sizeable hill --all the better to both contain and defend against marauding Muslims and the odd wandering Turk, in ancient days of continual instability, I suppose. In the heart of Puglia, the stepped heel of Italy, it has all the twisting lack of directional logic of a sun-dried olive, mirroring Siena and other little Tuscan towns, but here not a soul speaks English, which is superb.
I had arrived only the day before the onset of this heavy, velveteen night, wreathed in cigar smoke and declarations of love, and had just made the momentous discovery that there was a smoking pizza production, for there is really no other word to call it, which is open every hour of every day except Christmas and Doomsday. To enter this place after finding first the alley, marked from other alleys by the smell and then the crowd, always, one shimmies crab-ways down a hole in a wall under a bare bulb, to find yourself straddling a thin corner of inhabitable space, practically inside one of the 2 blast-furnace wood ovens that gulp and gasp from the far side of the room, not 6 feet away. The heat is incredible, and a small wizened man covered in flour, preserved against any further aging by years of living in this inferno, proffers two giant pieces of pizza, deep and crispy, along with two glass bottles of water, all for 1 euro 50. Heaven, and I haven’t even entered the gates yet.
I met Marta while living in Rome, a dark haired, full lipped stunner of the first degree. Over the course of a summer, it became clear that while she had a boyfriend of her own, in her own distant paradise of Manchester – how she spoke! A drawling “Munchooster” – I fell in love, at least with our afternoon trips to the beach and the way she put her arm on mine at dinner, if not with her. It came to pass that she invited me to visit her family with her for a week over the summer, a long bus ride into the other, exotic world of poorer Southern Italy, and I felt that, perhaps, destiny was not such a foolish idea. 3 weeks later, I stood in the square of Lucera at dusk, heard the low murmur of the entire town speaking cumulatively its hopes, desires, and of the daily football match, and was keenly aware of my long evening shadow as it stood next to another willowy form breathing next to my own, although that beginning was the last of the romance.
We walked softly through the arbor lined walkway to her house. I smelled grape leaves, caught the accusing eye of an old woman as she turned to her companion, and began slowly to realize that here, in the south of Italy, in the shadow of the Roman Empire and its wealthy progeny, children are by far the most prized possessions that a family can boast, and that in each child, the town as a whole holds a vested interest and claim. Who was I, a privileged American, to walk into their garden and attempt to pick their flowers?
There then were times when I felt a bit the 3rd or 5th wheel, depending on the vehicle. Lucera is a very small town, and
everybody knows everybody, so when walking around with Marta, we couldn’t move two steps to the windward without having somebody schmoozing, gabbing, and giving me the pig eye. Every boy-man in the village, 14 years old and up, was gunning hard for this girl; it turned out that she’s quite the legendary Mae West. My role became to remain near-bye while batted eyes and toothy smiles were fired off with reckless abandon, and I felt defeated without having had a chance. A few days later, however, I met a group of her friends while morosely kicking pinecones in the plaza, and after playing calcetto (small sided football) with them and recognizing each other the following night, a bunch of them took a shine to me, and all went well from there.
The finest was Luca, who when I first met him seemed like a greased up shiny flirt-monkey, but in fact turned out to be rather wonderful, and told me quite sincerely over a beer on the steps of the abbey that he is solely responsible for the Luceran dialect. When pressed, he then he conceded that really, he had only instituted the use of the word "Numero!", meaning "all right!" or "excellent!" or "Number!", if you want to be literal about it. But sure enough, everyone in this town said “Numero!” every five words. I tried an experiment -- we went one night to a jazz concert a few towns over, another teeny hill top town accessible only via a slithering viper of a road, canted over the wrong way on turns. In love with the night and the wine, I Numero'ed my head off at the concert, to no avail. Numero is Lucera, ever the more shall be so, and I am proud to have eaten squid and gotten soused with the Father-Creator of a language.
Speaking of squid, the question then must be posed: where do squid come from? Why, the sea, of course. I wish I could tell you we caught live squid, but that would be completely false. But we did go the ocean many times, twice on the Gargano peninsula, which is a shootlet that sticks out of the ankle of Italy, all a-cover with cliffs, crumbling walls, olive trees, and grottos. The first day, we turned left, and wound up on a natural rock platform that sloped in to the water, what with spongy fuzza-forms in the water and a tunnel into which waves sloshed and a hole atop out of which water shot when the waves sloshed mightily. The next day we turn right, and found a grotto of unsurpassed solemnity -- all the water up to your knees
and warm, out from which one could swim into open water further out, or around a necklace of manatee looking boulders, to a beach of -- lo!-- sand. The sun was unrelenting, and my sunburn correspondingly so, tingling long after the cold shower at home.
Nights there were strolling, and eating, and strolling again. Twice we drove out into the countryside with a bunch of people, clonged over rutted dirt roads, bottoming out the car a few times, and arrived at one farmhouse or another, the people listing to the left, the house to the right, with party going full bore, 5 years olds to the grandmothers, under a portico. There were thousands of kittens, seemingly reproducing through fission, and geese wonked plaintively from the soft dark of across the drive. A hole in the wall, and the local crazy man, equivalent to the man whose solemn duty it is to be the cook – there are always these men, always everywhere -- is busy singing his forearm hairs and sweating all over the pizzas he is throwing in and out of the belching fire. And of course all the girls say, but I want to do it, and they do, to ribald and obscene coaching from the male contingent, and naturally every gets covered in flour. The pizza seems marvelous, but you cant be sure, since in order to get any at all, you have to shoulder to the front, grapple it in, and stuff it blazing hot into your maw, for which the appropriate prescription is cold red wine, just taken out of the freezer.
When I arrived the first night, the entire of Marta's family was waiting to meet me; aunts, uncles, grandmother, grandfather, Pablo the dog. There was a halo of cigar smoke around the outside table, and the ancient grandfather solemnly wished me many good things to come in my life. Marta made a whirling motion at her temple with her right index finger. Then, I was informed that the guest apartment where I was to stay was across town, to which I responded with a giggle. I had visions of grandfather patrolling the hallways with an ancient blunderbuss, hoping to catch a marauding American in the dead of night.
And there were cousins, of all things, and lunches eaten with these cousins with shirts off, and a final day at the beach in the town where the grandparents live, a massive affair, what with the miles and miles of numbered umbrellas -- we were 16 red. After a gigantic lunch, it was back to the beach, and sitting off alone with the three cousins, ages 12 13, and 15, and the slow realization that I am in fact not so very different and not very frightening up close, wisely nodding our heads in agreement over the lacking aspects of the latest Harry Potter, and mud fights, (Really! At your age!) followed by several sound duckings, a light-hearted nose-bleed and then, sadly, I had to go. And I was driven to the bus station, still smelling of beach and sun, and talked to the girl in the seat in front of me all the way home, because I felt so good.
The sweeping wave of bodily wealth that we search for, that lies dormant off in lands unseen, re-emerged in my soul. Marta's aunt runs a English school in Lucera, and wants me to go and teach, and yet, would that be the same? It is a curious question of time vs. place, one that constantly moves me on and that has been the ruin of not just one relationship, but I think that time consistently wins out, or at least I’d like to think so. The notion that, while inscrutably singular and painfully, sweetly personal, this week could have been anywhere in that great unknown, is a comforting one, for surely there are as many sea tinged metamorphoses left in my body as there are places I have yet to see.
Then 2 days ago, I got a post card, a cartolino from Luca, reminding me, if they make me work too hard, to tell them to piss off in Luceran dialect. Numero.

Justly returned from N.Mex, soaring to great spiritual heights in the great horsehair kiva of the Mesa elves. In quick digression, I was walking around an indian edifice, when a native homunculus approached. I, thinking that the people whose town is being used as a Disney-type attraction by the palefaces would not be necessarily friendly and recepive, said nothing. He, who obviously saw in my honest visage and deep pockets an opportunity to bridge the socio-economic divide, said to me upon passing, "Afternoon". I startled like a terrycloth robe and was momentarily taken abaft, but rallied to tender my goodwill affectations to him as well. "How does your garden grow?", I thought to say, or "How does your copernity sagatiate?" But the combined brisk pace of an Indian leaving the kiva at 5:30 in the afternoon and of a pastyfaced young gentleman ambling oppositely from 12km left an airy divide between us, as my sails sagged and I wallowed in his wake. In short, all I got out by way of greeting to the noble savage was "How!" Another young paleface bites the dust.