Read Jupiters Travels: Four Years Around the World on a Triumph Online
Authors: Ted Simon
And everyone speaks my language. I don't have to think about making myself understood. 'What's the best way to LA? Is it through Tucson?' 'That's right.' So easy!
Then there's so much fat around. Everyone is prosperous, though they might not know it, with a house and a refrigerator. There isn't anyone ·who couldn't afford to help me if they wanted to, and they would want to, I know it, because their minds can grasp what I am. Also I am not black or crippled or ugly, and I have this cute English accent.
In Mexico the grass was brown, but in Arizona it's green because it is watered. It must be. Surely God would not be so discriminating. The air is clean. Would you believe it? Not a wisp of exhaust do I see from any car, truck or bus. That is a miracle in itself. And here, just where I want it, is a camp site. Rio Rica; a broad grassy paddock under a clear dry sky. Clean lavatories, showers, washing machines, a shop. Cold beer. 'Five dollars.'
'That's too much, I'm afraid.'
'Oh. Okay. Sure. We'll only charge you two dollars.'
I never doubted it. I sling my hammock between two trees. Some kids come over, easy, cool, with beer. They talk to me; I don't have to make it happen. We all go off to spend the evening at a girl's house in town, eating sandwiches, listening to rock, talking. One of the kids was in Vietnam. I hear the whole story in three sentences, and he isn't even talking about the war. In fact the words don't say much, but the meaning comes through like a meeting in space. I'm so tuned in to body language and inflections that I hardly need words, but having the words too is so relaxing.
It goes on like that, through Tucson and Phoenix next day. Even the bike has relaxed and runs better instead of worse. I see on my Esso map that there's a long stretch of road from Phoenix to Blythe with no town marked on it, but I am so laid back that I don't think to wonder why. Before I know it I'm in the middle of another desert, totally unexpected, hotter even than Mexico, with a cross wind blowing sand up my nose.
Well, that makes for a better movie, but it doesn't prick the bubble of credibility because I'm still on a four-lane highway with plenty of gas in my tank and, sure enough, happily placed in the middle of the desert, is the big, green Colorado River, and the KOA camp site with all the usual facilities and proud mobile home owners are lining up the cold cans of Coors beer just for adventurous chaps like me.
Next day I battle my way against an even heavier head wind. The valve trouble is so bad now that I'm down at times to twenty miles an hour, and in real trouble with the big container trucks when they come past. The wind sandblasts my arms and nose and makes me really quite tired, but as an ordeal it is still completely fictional because, whatever happens inside the borders of this country, you're never more than a half-hour helicopter flip from the ultimate in medical technology.
The thing could not have been scripted better. Only two hundred miles away are Hollywood and the Triumph offices. Without any simulation or trickery whatsoever, I shall be able to arrive in the world's most elaborate city as though I had just come out of the Atbara Desert.
I have given some thought to what I would like to happen next. I see marching bands, majorettes, a great arena of people rising spontaneously, irresistibly to their feet, tears streaming down their cheeks; Governor Brown, arm outstretched, apologizing for the President's absence; my own succinct keynote speech reminding the US of her responsibilities to
her poorer neighbours followed by rapturous applause and an intimate dinner with the Secretary of State.
This is beyond the resources of the Triumph company to arrange on the spur of the moment. I turn up at their rather plush offices on the edge of Los Angeles like a bashful Battle of Britain pilot missing presumed dead.
'Holy cow,' they say. 'It's Ted Simon,' and they all shake my hand and bring me a beer.
I looked around Triumph's prosperous offices with an optimistic eye, anticipating some sort of unspecified 'good time'. Sure I wanted a beer, and shower and a chance to change my clothes and even to rest for a bit, but what I really wanted was company, nice, enthusiastic, appreciative company. As a Hero I naturally assumed that people would be tumbling over themselves to accompany me. All the keen athletic executives in the front office were extremely cordial. All the pretty girls at their stylish mahogany veneer desks smiled very nicely at me, but as the minutes passed my bright eye glazed over. I wasn't making contact. In spite of all the niceness I knew they couldn't really grasp who or what I was, and maybe, even, they were too preoccupied with other matters to care.
I must have been a strange sight. The desert sun had burned me very dark and printed a goggle pattern on my face. My shirt was threadbare, and my jeans were shredded across the knees and awkwardly patched. My hair was unfashionably short and dishevelled and I was a bit crazy at the thought of having actually arrived. I imagined myself to look quite romantic. After all, it was the real thing, but their nice orderly eyes gradually convinced me that I was a bit of a mess, and the best thing I could do was go and clean up.
The credibility gap widened into a yawning chasm and never closed. They were unfailingly nice to me, and materially generous. They took the bike into their workshop and promised to give it all the care that could be lavished on it. They gave me another bike, the same model, to use in the meanwhile. They took me to a hotel about ten miles away and booked me in at their expense, and left me there until the next day.
My hotel room was at ground level and had thick glass sliding doors instead of windows, with two sets of curtains. I had a square double bed with freshly laundered sheets every day. At the foot of the bed was a big colour television set. There was a writing desk, itself quite a decent piece of furniture, and in the drawer was a stack of stationery and leaflets describing all the hotel's services and telling romantic tales about its supposed history. I read them all avidly.
The bathroom had apparently been delivered by the manufacturer that morning. Everything in it was still wrapped or sealed by a paper band guaranteeing one hundred per cent sterility. Not even the boys from Homicide could have found a fingerprint in there.
In the bedroom everything was impeccable too. It was air conditioned, of course. Not a breath ruffled my countenance. When my arm itched and I raised my hand automatically to smash at a mosquito, there was never a mosquito. There was only me.
I switched on the television, and it responded immediately with a picture of surgeons and nurses in green conclave round an operating table. The camera closed in on a human knee, and a scalpel opened it up before my very eyes. Horrified, I switched channels to an advertisement for a film called
The Bug. A
male voice promised that unless I saw this picture I would not know what horror meant. A woman screamed at me, horrified, and showed her tonsils. The Bug eats human flesh,' said the voice, and the woman screamed again.
With flesh-eating bugs I was already familiar. I switched off. There was still only me. I had everything I had been dreaming of for months. Starched linen. Room service. Steak, lobster, mutton, cold white wine, coffee, unlimited hot water, not a cockroach to be seen.
Sitting there alone I found it all quite meaningless. I went for a walk round the extensive premises, through lobby and patio, past pool and fountain, bakery and bookshop and saw that same nice smile everywhere I went, and written in the eyes just as plainly the words: 'Otherwise engaged'.
I looked in my address books. There were a few names and telephone numbers. The friends of friends were all far too high-powered to be called on the spur of the moment like that. There was one man, though, whom I had met in England, a businessman I had found refreshingly interesting and intelligent. He lived in Malibu and even answered the phone to me. I explained how I had arrived in Los Angeles, and he asked me penetrating questions as though I were his psychiatric patient. He promised to call me back, but never did.
The hotel was on the inland edge of Los Angeles and I thought maybe I was among particularly stuffy and provincial people, so I set out on the bike to find the real Los Angeles. I never found it. I rode for ever on an astounding web of freeways, four or eight lanes wide, laid out like a never-ending concrete waffle over thousands of square miles, looking for somewhere to go, but found nothing.
These first days had a profound effect. I felt completely lost, as though I had been whisked away from the earth in my sleep one night and deposited among humanoids in a simulated earth city. Alice was never so flummoxed through her Looking Glass, not even on that vast chessboard. In all his travels, Gulliver was never more shocked, not even when confronted by the giant Brobdingnagian nipple.
I arrived there still with the smell of sweat and stale urine, of unruly growth and open decay, in my nostrils. I was used to faces that showed the imprint of emotion, the stamp of excess. I was accustomed to things being old, warn down, chipped, scratched, scuffed and patched, but real. Where I had been, people and things were forced to show the real stuff they were made of, because the superficial could not survive the battering it got. I was used to the sound of life; roars of laughter, shouts of anger, whistles, cat calls, bargaining, argument and domestic squabble; to the sight and smell of animals; to old people sunning themselves.
Where I had been, children came running.
I looked into the cars that rode alongside me on the freeway. I saw men and women staring blandly ahead with faint smiles on their carefully carefree faces. No visible signs of life there. I looked around me for a genuine house. They were all simulated. Some looked like ice cream. Some were simulated Spanish. Some pretended to be factories, or monasteries, or farm house cottages. All fake. Nothing original.
I saw a tiny girl, poised astonishingly at the edge of a highway, about to wander out into the traffic. There was no adult in sight. She was toddling aimlessly out into my land, and there was no time for me to dismount and help her, so I manoeuvred the bike to bar her way, hoping to change her mind. A car screeched to a halt in front of me and a woman leaped out and snatched the infant away. The woman looked up at me with a venomous expression and snarled: 'Oh no you don't!'
After dark, police helicopters hovered above me on the freeway flashing their epileptic blue lamps and scouring the ground with hungry beams of light.
For several days I remained a total alien, and out of this alienation grew a feeling of tremendous outrage against the senseless extravagance of it all. It was entirely a matter of perspective. To a Southern Californian, his life-style and standard no doubt seemed like the least he could get by on. To me it seemed preposterous and sick. I wandered through supermarkets and along 'Shopping Malls' disgusted and obsessed by the naked drive to sell and consume frivolities.
When I eventually came to visit Disneyland, I realized that the ultimate aim, the logical conclusion for Los Angeles, was that it should all become another Disney creation, a completely simulated and totally controlled 'fun environment' in which life was just one long, uninterrupted ride.
From the point of view of a Bolivian Indian chewing Coca on the altiplano, I could see that it would already be pretty difficult to distinguish between the two.
The effect wore off as my tan subsided, my insect bites healed and the goggle imprint faded. Finally I was an outcast no longer, because someone invited me to his home. He was a motorcycle mechanic making a machine to beat the world's speed record. He was a gentle fellow with a slow, warm smile, and he had come from Indiana with his girl friend who was a gorgeous nurse. They lived in a small place in Paramount and I went to stay there after a while. I discovered that life did after all still go on in Los Angeles, in a clandestine way, lurking in the corners of the waffle.
When I judged myself to be sufficiently civilized, I risked launching myself on my friends of friends who were very big in Hollywood, and so finally I got right up against the Giant Nipple itself. My friend was Herbert Ross, director of a series of immaculate comedies, and he had the idea as we sat munching chicken sandwiches in his office at MGM of having me ride up on my motorcycle to a party in Beverly Hills where he was going that evening.
His touch was as sure as ever. I rode up through Chandler country to a house full of genuine movie superstars, who not only thought my arrival a pleasant surprise but actually grasped, far better than anyone at Triumph seemed to, what my journey was all about.
There were other invitations, and after a while I stopped protesting about Los Angeles and began to enjoy it, until it became difficult to recall just why I had been making all that fuss.
There was a lot of work to be done on my bike. The forks were twisted, had been since Argentina. The cylinder head turned out to be fractured. The oil scavenge pipe had been knocked sideways in South Africa, so they had to get inside the crankcase, and while they were there, they replaced the crankshaft, because the head had come off one of the flywheel retaining bolts. The transmission had never given any trouble, but there were other minor irritations that needed sorting out.
One man worked on it for a week. He seemed efficient but heartless, and I could never find a way to talk about it with him. There were many questions I wanted to ask, thinking that the bike really could have been much more trouble-free than it was. In most of the poorer countries British bikes had a tremendous reputation for reliability. In the sophisticated countries like the USA it was just the reverse. The story was that Triumphs were eccentric and troublesome, and you had to buy German or Japanese if you wanted reliability.
It seemed to me that this was mostly the result of superior marketing and propaganda from Japan in the richer markets. It had led to a situation in which dealers and mechanics were involved most of the time with Japanese machines. British bikes could only be a nuisance to them, with their archaic engineering, requiring different tools and a different approach. It suited them that British bikes had a bad reputation, because
it excused the consequences of their own sloppy work. I thought that if I had any obligation towards Triumph for the support they were giving me, it was to demonstrate that their bike really could run clean and trouble-free.
The attitude in Los Angeles was quite the opposite. They seemed ready to swallow the unreliability story whole. Their remedy was simply to replace everything and send me on my way.
'You'll never get more than ten thousand miles out of a set of pistons anyway,' they said. I found it disheartening, but plainly things had gone too far for it to be worth while objecting. The truth was that in spite of all the brisk confidence in the front office, everybody was waiting for the place to crash about their ears. And if my mechanic seemed to have lost heart, it was not surprising, for he had already got himself a new job with Yamaha.
So I took what was offered and said thank you. They pretended to believe in me, and I pretended to believe in them. I thought they were nice people, and I think they liked me, but it was too late to do any good. Nobody wanted to know any more.
I left Los Angeles eventually with a bike set up to carry much more stuff. Ken Craven had written to me offering me new boxes and Dick Pierce in LA fitted me out with a rack and much bigger top box than I had had before. I had abandoned the old rack in Johannesburg, and I had slung the side boxes directly on the frame. I told Dick how the old rack had fractured on the way to Nairobi and that the side struts had been too feeble, and he said they would reinforce the system support for me and put on much stronger struts. It was a very fine rig in the end, offering a lot more capacity. I kept the single saddle, with the leather cover I had made myself in Argentina, and the hole burned in the back of it by my petrol stove when I had been cooking rice at Ipiales with Bruno.