Wednesday, 28 November 2012

Keep Peddling


When he was growing up, we all thought Harlan was crazy.  Oh, hell, he was crazy.  When he was five he rode his tricycle three blocks over to 16th Street so he could ride down Peterson hill like his 12 year old brother regularly did on his full sized bike.  He almost made it to the bottom, too, except that according to Ned Clemson, our mail man and an eye witness, he hit a stray dog and went over the handlebars. “Flew twenty, twenty-five feet through the air,” Ned said. “And then bounced twice.  I thought he was dead.” That was the first time Harlan went over a set of handlebars; it wasn’t the last.
I was 16 and Harlan was 12 when he came up to me and my friend Paul outside of Paul’s house in Clifton Heights and asked us to dare him to take his banana seat, hi-rise 20” Schwinn down the ski jump that Paul and his dad had built in their back yard.  All the houses in that neighborhood were built backing onto a ravine with a creek in the bottom.  Paul’s dad was from Switzerland and had been a ski jumper so had built this steep track down into the ravine and then made a wooden ramp at the bottom that launched Paul about forty feet down the hill.  The problem was that, after landing, he had to turn sharply and stop before he hit the creek which was only another forty feet away.  “You’ll kill yourself,” Paul told Harlan. “Yeah?  So dare me then,” Harlan said.  “There’s no snow to cover up the little tree stumps and rocks in the landing area,” Paul added. “What do you care?” Harlan said.  I had lived three doors down from Harlan and his family for my whole life.  His father was a mechanical engineer and his mother raised their four kids.  I liked the whole family, but felt a little jealous of them. They always had the best toys and bikes and went on fishing trips to Wisconsin. “I’ll dare you,” I said. Harlan sneered at Paul.  “A buck,” he said to me.  “If I do it you have to give me a buck.”  I nodded.
We all headed into the back yard and to the edge of the ravine.  It was an overgrown jumble of trees and bushes so thick that you couldn’t see the creek at the bottom, except for the four foot wide swath cut right down the center which was largely bare dirt with hacked off stubble and stumps.  When covered in six or more inches of snow, the track would be even and smooth, but as it was, there was not even a clear path to the jump some hundred feet below.  The whole thing looked terrifying.  Harlan hopped on his bike and went over the edge without even looking back.
 “Jesus,” Paul said.  “He’s peddling!”
“Don’t pedal!” Paul and I both yelled.
Of course Harlan was already half way to the jump by the time he would have heard our yells.  “Harlan!” I added loudly, for no apparent reason and with no apparent effect.
Some people have unusual skills and abilities that go completely unnoticed in them by everyone around them. I had never realized that until I saw Harlan go down into the ravine. To be honest, it is only in retrospect that I became fully aware of his talent.  At the time, I thought perhaps it was just dumb luck.
Harlan guided the front wheel of his bicycle through the intricate maze of stumps, stubble and rocks with a series of tiny twitches of the handlebars and a heavy dose of body English.  He was still upright when he hit the ramp.  From our standpoint, Harlan appeared to rise fifteen feet off the ground, but that would be a measurement taken parallel to the slope.  In fact, at the point when he was flying over the deepest part of the ravine, he was probably fifty feet in the air. At about that point, he seemed to realize that his landing might be better made without his bicycle under him, and he jettisoned it to his left. When he landed, he was on the far side of the ravine, about eight feet up the slope in a thick tangle of wild raspberry bushes massed between two large cottonwood trees.
Later, Paul said, “I told him not to pedal,” and added, “I thought he was dead.”
When I visited Harlan in the hospital, his left leg and right arm were in traction and his face was bandaged from the cuts he had sustained from the raspberry bushes. As soon as he saw me he said, “Where’s my buck?”
After I graduated from high school, I went away to college and didn’t spend much time at home.  To be honest, I wasn’t that interested in maintaining relationships with my high school friends.  They all wanted to stay where they were; I wanted to see a lot more of the world.  I lost track of Harlan, though I saw his picture in an issue of Cycle World that I had picked up in a barber shop in Boston. The photograph had caught him in the middle of a huge endo while practicing for the Springfield Mile. The caption said that he had broken a leg and was recuperating in a local hospital.  They quoted a corner marshal who had witnessed the crash.  “It was incredible! He almost wrestled the bike upright and back into shape.  When he finally lost it, he somersaulted three times and then hit the wall. I thought he was dead.”
I was almost 40 when I heard about Harlan again. The head office of the bank I was working for had sent me to London.  I was in a coffee shop getting a cappuccino to take to work one morning when I heard my name being called.  I turned to see Harlan’s brother, Cliff, standing in the next line.  We sat down for a few minutes and he told me that Harlan was in a hospital a block away.  He had been racing on the Isle of Man and crashed into a stone wall at 120 miles per hour. The motorcycle had hit the wall first and, according to Cliff, saved Harlan’s life.  “It was miraculous! The bike broke through the wall first; when Harlan hit it, it was already half rubble, not nearly as solid as it had been. He sailed right through it.”  He paused, then added, “Even so, when the ambulance got there, the paramedics all thought he was dead.”
That afternoon, I went up to see Harlan.  He was in a room with four other patients, all of whom had casts and/or bandages covering parts of their bodies.  None had casts like Harlan’s; with one leg in traction, he looked like a mummy trying to walk up to the ceiling. He laughed when he saw me.
“I have to break something, I guess, before you pay me a visit,” he said. “Nice to see you.  Where’s my buck?” He laughed again.
I spent about 20 minutes with him, before the nurse came in to change his diaper.
We talked a little about the old neighbourhood but mostly about racing and motorcycles.  In the years since I had seen him he had raced in almost every kind of competition available: flat track, motocross, road racing, and in every case the people who had sponsored him had loved his potential but had nevertheless eventually always cut him loose.
            “I kept breaking their machines,” he said.  “They kept getting tired of paying the bills.” He paused for a second and looked hard at me.  “I always thought that the bikes had a little more in them than they did, that I could push them a little harder, that this time they would do what I wanted, what I could do... .” His voice trailed off.
            “What are you going to do now?” I asked.
            “This is going to take a couple of months they tell me,” he answered looking down the length of his plaster encased body parts. “They think they put everything back pretty much the way it is supposed to be.  I was thinking speedway might be fun to try.”
            I can’t say I didn’t expect it, but even so, it seemed preposterous to look at a guy, now in his mid thirties, wrapped in plaster, talking about more racing.  I was going to say, ‘You have to be kidding,’ or ‘Are you crazy?’  But I didn’t.  After all, I worked for a bank and wore suits and ties every day and had to put up with constant, relentless bullshit from other guys in suits and ties. And I knew that any thought of craziness had left me a long time ago. 
            “Well, I hope you can,” I said.  “It always looked like fun to me, too.”
  I better go.  I have a meeting in...” I looked at my watch.  I was fifteen minutes late. “...in five minutes.”
            “Thanks for coming, and thanks for not calling me crazy,” he added.
            I looked at him in order to give a good-bye nod, but he caught my eye and held it for a second.
            “It’s the speed,” he said.  “Only speed can do it.  You know?”
I didn’t, though standing there, I suddenly wished that I did, so I nodded.
“If I go fast enough,” Harlan said, “I can get to the point where...” He was looking for words.  “Where only my reflexes, my whole nervous system is fast enough, good enough to keep the bike up, and I know that I am going as fast as it is possible to go.   You know?”
I nodded dumbly again.
“Everything gets calm. It’s like being in an actual place, a self contained kind of...” He laughed self-consciously and stopped trying to explain.  I suppose he could tell from my expression that I didn’t know what he was talking about.
 “Of course, then I always try to go a little faster, and... well....”
A middle-aged nurse bustled in, interrupting him, and I used her arrival as an excuse to leave.  I think I said ‘Take care’ or something like that. It’s hard sometimes to say what you feel.  They say bankers are cold, objective, passionless. Maybe; all I know is I didn’t want Harlan to stop racing. A lot of people might say that wanting him to keep going was uncaring, even cruel, since the odds are that he would eventually kill himself.  I don’t think that’s it.  I just want him to have another chance to go as fast as it is possible to go, to enter that place he had tried to explain. To always keep peddling. Only a relatively few people can do that; none of them are bankers.
           

Friday, 17 February 2012

Pency O'Doule, Enthusiast Extraordinaire

Pency Meets His Match

As Pency and I wheeled into Falkland, Pency turned in his saddle to look back at me, his left hand on his hip.  I got the message.  It was my fault.  When I had set up the meeting with Big Ed, I had forgotten that this was the weekend of the Falkland Stampede, an important event on the calendars of both wannabe rodeo riders and wannabe outlaw bikers.  Everywhere one looked, there were Harleys, all along the main road, filling every front yard, lined up on every side street, Harleys as far as the eye could see. 
“A confluence of crap,” Pency always muttered about such events.  “Anachronistic excrescence.  An effulgence of flatulent Fatboys!”
Pency always made me nervous around Harley owners.  That’s because he wouldn’t keep his opinions about Harleys to himself.  Once he had passed fifty-five years of age, he lost all desire to restrain himself.
“It’s just too hard to keep it all to myself anymore,” he had once told me.  “Besides, I’m old enough now so that they won’t hit me more than once, and I think I can still take one shot to the head.”
It didn’t occur to him that his companions might be drawn into the fray, of course. Still, here we were in lovely Falkland, British Columbia, looking to make a deal with Big Ed on a new rear tire for Pency’s ZX-10.  Falkland’s five hundred permanent residents loved the annual Stampede.  They all made a fortune selling hotdogs, parking spaces, beer and marijuana.  Especially the owner of the hotel loved it.  He owned the only pub in town, and it was always full during the stampede.
We found a place to park around the corner from the hotel: two spots in a long line of Harleys, then walked back to the bar.  Pency never drank when he was on a bike; I never had more than one.
The place was jammed, cowboys and bikers were crammed shoulder to shoulder around about fifteen wooden tables and stood three deep at the bar. I was about to say that we would never get served when a middle-aged barmaid in overly tight blue jeans and  bulging breasts in a black leather vest sidled up to Pency with a tray of draft beer.
“You lads looking for a drink?” she said, in drawl that was half western and half British.  “Nice moustache, by the by?”
For some reason, women have always liked Pency’s moustache, particularly when he turned up the corners like a World War II, English Sergeant-Major.  Even now, drooping slightly and almost completely white, the moustache had obviously piqued the barmaid’s fancy.
“Coffee for me, Luv,” Pency said, almost smiling.
“Bud Light,” I said.  “Just a glass, please.”
“Sorry, dearie, but we only serve mugs at stampede.”
“Okay, a mug.”
Three large men wearing sleeveless black leather jackets bearing “Satans Spawn” patches got up from a table and brushed past us.  Percy immediately took the place of the nearest spawn before a silver bearded biker with a cane could sit down.  I sat in the chair opposite him.  Silver beard was not to be denied.
“Hey, I was going to sit there,” he said to Pency.
“There’s still one empty chair, mate,” Pency replied.  “Be my guest.”
To my surprise the guy sat down.
“Name’s Ziggy,” he said, holding out his hand.
Pency took it.
“Pency O’Doule.  This is Jim.”
I offered my hand.  Ziggy’s was rough and calloused.
“What do you guys ride, anyway?” Ziggy asked.
“A ZX-10 and a GPZ 1100,” Pency said, looking Ziggy in the eye.
“Rice burners?“ he snorted.
“Yes, it’s amazing what modern technology can do.”
“I couldn’t stand the buzzing and whining, myself,” Ziggy said. 
“I know what you mean,” Pency said.  “Though I usually go by so fast, I can’t hear the Harley riders whine. And the acceleration is particularly annoying.  I almost did my neck an injury last week.”
“Acceleration is one thing,” Ziggy said, “but it’s torque that gives a bike that feeling of power.”
“Ah, torque,” Pency responded, “the poor man’s horsepower.  What have they got the 1500 Harley up to now?  Eighty horses?”
“Eighty-four.”
“Well, only 82 more and you’ll match mine.”
“Boomer’s got more horsepower than that under him,” a man standing behind me said.
“Pull up a chair,” Ziggy siad. “This here is Frank. This is Pency and Jim.”
Frank grunted hello and slid a chair in next to mine.  He was about fifty with a greying pony tail and curved sunglasses.  His leather jacket had bug carcasses all over the front.  He reeked of marijuana.
“Really?  More horsepower?” Percy asked.  “What did Boomer do, load the hog onto his pick-up?”
“Very funny!  He put in a Stage Four Screamin’ Eagle engine,” Frank said.
“Put it into what?” 
“A Durango Brothers soft-tail custom frame.”
“And the forks?”
Stanley springers with custom damping.”
“Tank, fenders, wheels?”
“Howard, Clean-line and Decourcey.”
“I thought we were talking about Harleys?”
“We are.  A custom Harley.  Those are just custom parts.”
“What parts aren’t custom?”
“Hey, it looks like a Harley and sounds like a Harley; that’s what counts.”
“Yes, indeed; my sentiments exactly. Well, good luck to Boomer then; I’m sure he’s happy.”
“He loves that bike,” Ziggy said, grinning. “He’s got over sixty thousand invested.”
“Chrome plating and custom paint was twenty alone,” Frank commented in a hushed whisper.
“My, god,” Pency blurted. “He could have bought a Ducati race replica for that!”
“That’s one of those Eye-talian crotch rockets, isn’t it?” Ziggy said.
“Boomer wouldn’t like them,” Frank added.
“You boys talkin’ about me?” a deep voice said from behind Pency.  A very large bearded man in a black, sleeveless tee shirt with a picture on the front of a large cobra wrapped around a naked woman hove into view.  He looked like Bluto, gone to seed.
The bikers at the table seemed glad to see him.
“Hey, Boomer!” Frank said. “We were just telling these boys about your bike.”
Boomer grinned.  “Yeah, well, it’s not quite finished.”
“What’s left to add?” Pency asked.  “Streamers and a raccoon tail?”
Boomer’s smile disappeared.
“Who’s your little friend, Frank?”
“Just met him, Boomer; I wouldn’t call him a friend,” Frank said in what sounded like a verbal retreat.
“Pency here doesn’t think your bike is very fast,” Ziggy said.  I detected a little goading taking place.
“Oh, yeah?” Boomer responded, not very enthusiastically.
“Maybe you should drag race him,” Frank suggested.
“Think so?” Boomer asked.  He sipped a little more from the beer in his right hand.
“Actually,” Pency said, “I never really thought much of straight line racing.  I prefer something with a few turns.”
I expected Boomer to make a disparaging excuse and change the subject.  He didn’t.
“Really?  Turns you say.  Hmmm.  I could fancy that.”
For the first time I noticed a slight Scottish burr in Boomers speech.
Pency smiled.  “You want to race me around corners on your your Harley chopper?” he asked with a grin on his face.
“Maybe.  Do I get to choose the course?”
“My friend, you can plot any course you wish as long as it has...let’s say...more than four corners in it.”
“How much?”
“You really want to lose money over this?” Pency asked.  “Well, I don’t wish to take advantage of you, but if you insist...twenty dollars?”
“Well, I’m not greedy,” Boomer answered, “but let’s say fifty.”
“Deal,” Pency said.  He looked at me and smiled, shaking his head slightly.
“Frank, what time is it?” Boomer asked.
“Ten thirty, Boomer.”
“Perfect.  Let’s fire ‘em up.”
We all got up and headed for the door.  Frank and Ziggy spoke to a few men on their way out and before I knew it, there were thirty or forty people walking out the door.  Pency and I started to turn toward the side street where we had parked but stopped when Boomer stepped into the street and picked up a helmet off the seat of a motorcycle. 
His bike was a custom Harley all right, but not a typical chopper.  It looked like a modern interpretation of an old 1920’s board track racer: sleek, spare, with low bars, clean lines and a lot of chrome.  Pency was impressed too.
“Well, that’s a surprise,” he said.  “It’s actually quite attractive.  Oh, well.” Then he added loudly, “My bike’s over here, Boomer.  Which way are we going?”
Boomer pointed north out of town.
Pency and I put on our helmets, climbed aboard, started the bikes and headed in the direction Boomer had pointed.  I was expecting a trip away down the highway to a section that wouldn’t have much traffic where an illegal race could take place in relative safety, but we had only gone a block when we came up to Boomer, stopped at the edge of the road.  He pointed toward the rodeo arena off to the left and drove off.  Pency glanced at me but followed.  Up ahead, Boomer had stopped just past some bleachers and was waiting, his Harley engine thumping slowly and loudly.  Frank was hurriedly opening up a gate that led into the arena.  Pency pulled up beside Boomer and motioned to him to turn off his motor.  They both took off their helmets.
“What’s this?” Pency asked, a little annoyed.
“The race course, my little English friend.  Two laps around the arena: four corners.”
Pency looked into Boomer’s face for a few seconds.
“You’ve put on a little weight,” he said.
“Aye, about six stone.”
Pency unzipped his leather jacket, reached inside and pulled out his wallet.  He removed some bills and handed them to Boomer.
“I saw you in ’76 in London.  You won every heat you were in.”
“Aye, good times.  Thanks.”
Pency put his helmet back on. He had to paddle backwards a bike length in order to turn around.  The men who had gathered to watch were laughing and applauding, not very politely.  I followed Pency to the outskirts of town and a little garage that had a few motorcycles in the drive and an old Dunlop sign on the wall beneath the words: Big Ed’s Garage and Motorcycle Spa.
When we had parked and taken off our helmets Pency pre-empted my question.
“Boomer McGhie was the best speedway racer in Britain in the Seventies,” he said.
“Well, he tricked you though, Pency.  He couldn’t expect you to race your Ten on dirt.”
Before he turned enter the garage he looked at me.  “He could have.”