Life was good for those of us who'd been just too young to get caught in the draft but were old enough by '46 for a fifty-dollar war surplus Harley from the depot at Fort Dix. We got black gloss Sherwin-Williams enamel and painted over the olive drab Harleys, and then we got red and orange and yellow enamel and painted flames on the tanks, and dragons on the front fenders. Then we rode around all day and drank beer all night and didn't take no shit from nobody.
Beowulf, though, didn't have a beat-up war surplus bike like the rest of us. His old man was a Marine that got blown up so bad on some island in the Pacific that all they could find to send back were a few bits that might've been part of the three other guys he got blown up with. His ma went crazy when she got the news, and when the insurance money came through, Wulf bought a bright blue brand-by-God-new 1946 Harley-Davidson 73 motor-sicle -- one of the first civilian bikes they made after the war.
Then he hired a real artist in New York to paint a dragon on it and got tatoos of the same dragon on both of his shoulders with the tails curled around his arms all the way down to his wrists. Finally, over on Chambers Street, he found a black leather Wehrmacht motorcycle corps jacket with lots of zippers and swastikas on the lapels, and an SS officer's cap.
The rest of us had war surplus aviator's jackets and either flyers' helmets or any kind of wierd hat we could find. Nobody minded that Wulf looked a lot better than the rest of us. We were angels on roaring dragons of fire wreaking a jazz apocalypse on a square land. And Beowulf, bearing the Word of Bird and Diz Gillespie in a portable Motorola bolted to his handlebars, was our archangel.