The Remarkable Mr. Desmedt
The remarkable Mr. Desmedt
UP FRONT
David Edwards
IT IS EXACTLY THE KIND OF PLACE YOU'D expect to find raw, stripped-down choppers being built, a nondescript brick-front warehouse within spitting distance of the East River, in a gritty Brooklyn neighborhood whose only nods to urban beautification are tagged walls and razor wire glinting in the sun.
This past September 19, thousands of people filed onto N. 14th Street between Kent and Wythe to pay final respects to one Lawrence Desmedt, the shop's own er, known to millions through his expo sure on various cable-television specials simply as "Indian Larry." More block party than wake, the memorial featured tribute burn-outs, a barbe-`~ que, ice sculptures and a pair of tattoo artists inking Larry's fa mous swirling question-mark logo onto backs, biceps and boobs. His urn was unveiled, a lone Panhead cylinder assembly, vintage 1949, the `~• year of his birth.
Larry died when a riding stunt went horribly wrong at a bike show in North Carolina. In front of a crowd estimated at 8000, he was about to wrap up the ex hibition with his signature "surf" move, standing atop the bike's seat, arms out stretched, a trick he'd done thousands of times over the years. But at little more than walking speed, the front end began to wobble. Larry tried to plop down onto the saddle and grab the handlebars, but somehow missed and fell awk wardly off to the side, his helmetless head thudding the pave ment. Despite being airlifted to a nearby hospital, nothing could be done and he was dis connected from life-support the next morning, his wife and friends at his side. He was 55.
By all accounts, it had been an intense and interesting halfcentury plus five. Larry began chop ping as a bike-crazy schoolboy, strapping a Iawnmower engine and a set of Stingray handlebars onto his unsuspecting little sister's tricycle. There were other inter ests, too-some wholesome, some not. A missing finger was attributed to either a faulty 4th of July skyrocket or a failed bank robbery, take your pick. As a young man, he whipped around banked velodromes on lightweight, brakeless bicycles. He had bit parts in movies and TV dramas, even a Burger King com mercial. He belonged to the Coney Is land Polar Bear Club, whose members plunge into the icy, 30-degree waters of the Atlantic Ocean every Sunday from October to March.
"Emersion shock. It's a rush," said club president Louis Scarella when asked about the attraction. "Yes, Larry was a member-still is as far as we're concerned. We miss him."
Indian Larry was a friend and some times-model of Robert Mapple thorpe, the con troversial homo erotic photographer. He partied with Andy Warhol. He was happi ly married to a lovely woman-stage name "Bambi the Mermaid"-who performed at the Coney Island circus sideshow, sometimes with Larry as the filling in her bed-o'-nails sandwich. One suspects their union was never dull.
"I have a hardcore hetero über alpha male kind of husband," she once proud ly told a reporter.
Per his wishes, Bambi asked that in lieu of flowers, donations in Larry’s name be sent to either the National Council on Alcoholism & Drug Dependence or the New York branch of the Society for Prevention of Cruelty to Animals-which suggests, quite correctly, that Mr. Desmedí had a hard past but a soft heart.
Bulging lifestyle aside, it is through his motorcycles that most of us were introduced to Indian Larry. In the late ’80s when custom shows were being swept by so-called “bodybikes,” sugary contraptions of much bondo but little depth, Larry emerged from the East Village bike scene on a hard-edged throwback of a chopper built around an old Indian Chief motor, hence his nickname.
“Larry did his own thing,” says photographer Michael Lichter. “He built his simple choppers, bikes that were out of era-they looked back, and at the time that was not popular. But the world came back his way.”
And how. As the ’90s morphed into the new millennium and reality television turned bike-builders into rock stars, he stood out as the Bob Dylan of the bunch, always true to his folksy roots. Taking equal parts inspiration from Michelangelo and Ed “Big Daddy” Roth, Larry built memorable machines he described as “a cross between a top-fuel bike and a roadracer, a performance chopper, an improved motorcycle.”
Craig Constantine, a producer for the Discovery Channel’s hit “Biker BuildOff” series, says Larry’s creations had an even higher calling.
“He saw a bike as not just a badass chopper, but as a serious work of art,” Constantine says. “Like a chalice, it was functional, but it could also be a holy object adorned with engraving and jewels.”
Larry as leader of a Machine-Art movement? “Yeah, I’m an artist,” he told Constantine, “but I always try to put things into perspective with a ‘combat focus.’ If we’re in combat, art flies out the window. So what would I be? I would be a grease monkey first and foremost.”
Indian Larry, King of the Grease Monkeys, is gone, but surely he’ll be hard to forget. An entry on his website, written before his death, might even give us a clue as to his current whereabouts: “Larry can be found around beautiful women, tattoos, motorcycles and the Coney Island Polar Bear Club,” it read.
If that’s not heaven, it’ll have to do. □
