Kingdom of Fear (24 page)

The Ducati 900
is
a finely engineered machine. My neighbors called it beautiful and admired its racing lines. The nasty little bugger looked like it was going 90 miles an hour when it was standing still in my garage.

Taking it on the road, though, was a genuinely terrifying experience. I had no sense of speed until I was going 90 and coming up fast on a bunch of pickup trucks going into a wet curve along the river. I went for both brakes, but only the front one worked, and I almost went end over end. I was out of control staring at the tailpipe of a U.S. Mail truck, still stabbing frantically at my rear brake pedal, which I just couldn’t find. . . . I am too tall for these new-age roadracers; they are not built for any rider taller than five-nine, and the rearset brake pedal was not where I thought it would be. Midsize Italian pimps who like to race from one café to another on the boulevards of Rome in a flat-line prone position might like this, but I do not.

I was hunched over the tank like a person diving into a pool that got emptied yesterday. Whacko! Bashed on the concrete bottom, flesh ripped off, a Sausage Creature with no teeth, fucked up for the rest of its life.

We all love Torque, and some of us have taken it straight over the high side from time to time—and there is always pain in that. . . . But there is also Fun, the deadly element, and Fun is what you get when you screw this monster on. BOOM! Instant take-off, no screeching or squawking around like a fool with your teeth clamping down on your tongue and your mind completely empty of everything but fear.

No. This bugger digs right in and shoots you straight down the pipe, for good or ill.

On my first take-off, I hit second gear and went through the speed limit on a two-lane blacktop highway full of ranch traffic. By the time I went up to third, I was going 75 and the tach was barely above 4,000 rpm. . . .

And that’s when it got its second wind. From 4,000 to 6,000 in third will take you from 75 mph to 95 in two seconds—and after that, Bubba, you still have fourth, fifth, and sixth. Ho, ho.

I never got to sixth gear, and I didn’t get deep into fifth. This is a shameful admission for a full-bore Café Racer, but let me tell you something, old sport: This motorcycle is simply too goddamn fast to ride at speed in any kind of normal road traffic unless you’re ready to go straight down the centerline with your nuts on fire and a silent scream in your throat.

When aimed in the right direction at high speed, though, it has unnatural capabilities. This I unwittingly discovered as I made my approach to a sharp turn across some railroad tracks, and saw that I was going way too fast and that my only chance was to veer right and screw it on totally, in a desperate attempt to leapfrog the curve by going airborne.

It was a bold and reckless move, but it was necessary. And it worked: I felt like Evel Knievel as I soared across the tracks with the rain in my eyes and my jaws clamped together in fear. I tried to spit down on the tracks as I passed them, but my mouth was too dry. . . . I landed hard on the edge of the road and lost my grip for a moment as the Ducati began fishtailing crazily into oncoming traffic. For two or three seconds I came face to face with the Sausage Creature. . . .

But somehow the brute straightened out. I passed a schoolbus on the right and then got the bike under control long enough to gear down and pull off into an abandoned gravel driveway, where I stopped and turned off the engine. My hands had seized up like claws and the rest of my body was numb. I went into a trance for 30 or 40 seconds until I was finally able to light a cigarette and calm down enough to ride home. I was too hysterical to shift gears, so I went the whole way in first at 40 miles an hour.

Whoops! What am I saying? Tall stories, ho, ho. . . . We are motorcycle people; we walk tall and we laugh at whatever’s funny. We shit on the chests of the Weird. . . .

But when we ride very fast motorcycles, we ride with immaculate sanity. We might abuse a substance here and there, but only when it’s right. The final measure of any rider’s skill is the inverse ratio of his preferred Traveling Speed to the number of bad scars on his body. It is that simple: If you ride fast and crash, you are a bad rider. If you go slow and crash, you are a bad rider. And if you are a bad rider, you should not ride motorcycles.

The emergence of the superbike has heightened this equation drastically. Motorcycle technology has made such a great leap forward. Take the Ducati. You want optimum cruising speed on this bugger? Try 90 mph in fifth at 5,500 rpm—and just then, you see a bull moose in the middle of the road. WHACKO. Meet the Sausage Creature.

Or maybe not: The Ducati 900 is so finely engineered and balanced and torqued that you
can
do 90 mph in fifth through a 35-mph zone and get away with it. The bike is not just fast—it is
extremely
quick and responsive, and it
will
do amazing things. . . . It is a little like riding the original Vincent Black Shadow, which would outrun an F-86 jet fighter on the take-off runway, but at the end, the F-86 would go airborne and the Vincent would not, and there was no point in trying to turn it. WHAMMO! The Sausage Creature strikes again.

There is a fundamental difference, however, between the old Vincents and the new breed of superbikes. If you rode the Black Shadow at top speed for any length of time, you would almost certainly die. That is why there are not many life members of the Vincent Black Shadow Society. The Vincent was like a bullet that went straight; the Ducati is like the magic bullet in Dallas that went sideways and hit JFK and the Governor of Texas at the same time.

It was impossible. But so was my terrifying sideways leap across railroad tracks on the 900SP. The bike did it easily with the grace of a fleeing tomcat. The landing was so easy I remember thinking, Goddamnit, if I had screwed it on a little more I could have gone a lot farther.

Maybe this is the new Café Racer macho. My bike is so much faster than yours that I dare you to ride it, you lame little turd. Do you have the balls to ride this BOTTOMLESS PIT OF TORQUE?

That is the attitude of the new-age superbike freak, and I am one of them. On some days they are about the most fun you can have with your clothes on. The Vincent just killed you a lot faster than a superbike will. A fool couldn’t ride the Vincent Black Shadow more than once, but a fool can ride a Ducati 900 many times, and it will always be a bloodcurdling kind of fun. That is the Curse of Speed which has plagued me all my life. I am a slave to it. On my tombstone they will carve,
IT NEVER GOT FAST ENOUGH FOR ME.

Fear? I know not fear. There are only moments of confusion. Some of them are deeply stamped on my memory and a few will haunt me forever.

One of my ugliest and most confused moments, I think, was when I was driving a junk Cadillac down the Coast Highway to Big Sur and a large mountain lion jumped into the moving car.

I had stopped for a moment beside the road to put out a newspaper fire in the backseat when this huge cat either jumped or fell off a cliff and landed on its back in the gravel right beside me. I was leaning over the side and pouring beer on the fire when it happened.

It was late in the day, and I was alone. When the beast hit the ground I had a moment of total confusion. And so did the lion. Then I jumped back in the car and took off down the hill in low gear, thinking to escape certain death or at least mutilation.

The beast had tried to pounce on me from above, but missed. . . . And now, as I shifted the junker into second, I heard a terrible snarling and realized that the cat was running right behind me and gaining . . . (I was, in fact, Terrified at that moment.) . . . And I think I must have gone temporarily insane when the goddamn thing came up beside me
and jumped right into the car through the passenger-side window like a bomb.

It bounced against the dashboard and somehow turned the radio volume all the way up. Then it clawed me badly on my arm and one leg. That is why I shudder every time I hear a Chuck Berry tune.

I can still smell the beast. I heard myself screaming as I tried to steer. There was blood all over the seat. The music was deafening and the cat was still snarling and clawing at me. Then it scrambled over the seat and into the back, right into the pile of still-burning newspapers. I heard a screech of pain and saw the cat trying to hurl itself through the back window.

We were still rolling along at about thirty miles per hour when I noticed my ball-peen hammer sticking out of the mangled glove compartment.

I grabbed the hammer with my right hand, steering with my left, and swung it wildly over my shoulder at the mountain lion.

Whack!
I felt it hit something that felt vaguely like a carton of eggs, and then there was silence. No resistance in the backseat. Nothing.

I hit the brakes and pulled over. My hand was still on the hammer when I looked back and saw that I had somehow hit the animal squarely on top of its head and driven the iron ball right through its skull and into its brain. It was dead. Hunched on its back and filling the whole rear of the car, which was filling up with blood.

I was no longer confused.

Backstage at the O’Farrell (Michael Nichols / Magnum Photos)

Avenida Copacabana is always crowded at night, in the style of Miami Beach, which it physically resembles, and spiritually dwarfs. . . . Copacabana is the
beach city
for Rio de Janeiro, capital city of Brazil, where I happened to be living at the time of the horrible “Cuban Missile Crisis” in 1962, when expatriate Americans all over the world glanced around them in places like Warsaw and Kowloon or Tripoli and realized that life was going to be very different from now on: All countries north of the Equator were going to be destroyed forever by nuclear bombs before Sunday. WHACKO! The long-dreaded “nuclear trigger” was going to be pulled somewhere west of Bermuda when two enemy naval fleets collided on the sea lane to Cuba, around two in the afternoon—and that collision would signal the end of the world as we knew it. This was not a drill.

Please accept my apologies if this little foreign adventure story seems overwrought or maudlin—at the time that I told it, maybe it was, and so what? Those were extremely violent times, as I recall; I had spent a long year on a very savage road, mainly along the spine of the South American
cordillera,
working undercover in utterly foreign countries in the grip of bloody revolutions and counterrevolutions that made up the news of the day from the Panama Canal all the way down to the lonely frozen pampas of Argentina. . . . South America in the early 1960s was the most routinely murderous place in the world to find yourself doomed to be living when the World was destroyed by bombs.

And for me, that one fateful place in the world was Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, where I was living extremely well, under the circumstances. All things considered, Rio was pretty close to the best place in the world to be lost and stranded forever when the World finally shut down.

. . .

Geerlings was a Dutchman about thirty-three years old, built like some monster on Muscle Beach but without steroids—beyond an athlete, a dangerous brute with the temper of a wolverine, a handsome guy. His cheap shirts were always bulging, like his brain. He was the inventor of a radical coloring process for glass walls the size of swimming pools.
He fled Holland on a murder warrant—he’d killed Nazis with a Colt .45 that he stole from a dead American; he had grown up in Holland during the Second World War, and his hatred for the Germans was immense. He would go out at night looking for Krauts to beat up.

One night in Rio, we saw some stylish teenagers torturing a dog. They were both holding the dog, pulling its legs, and it was screeching. We came out of the nightclub across the street in a dull, bored mood, and here were these creeps strangling a dog in a well-lit public place; they were about 200 yards from Avenida Copacabana, a big busy street, and we smashed into them at a dead run, full speed and flailing. I remember saying, “Let’s get those evil fuckers.” He was like Oscar—Geerlings had that killer mentality, like a professional assassin.

It was the South Beach part of town, with wide granite sidewalks. They dropped the dog when we hit them, then they bounced along the sidewalk like rubber dolls. I was screaming, “You want to torture a dog, you fucks! We’ll torture you!” No doubt it was excessive behavior—under the circumstances—and as usual in moments of public violence, people went all to pieces. Perhaps we were Feverish. Rio can do that to people, especially on Copacabana Beach: drastic dehumanizing hallucinations, personality inversions at high speed, spontaneous out-of-body experiences that come with no warning at awkward moments.

. . .

They twisted away and ran desperately toward Avenida Copacabana, like, “If I can just get to Fifth Avenue there will be lights there, and people will see what’s happening.” And instead of letting them go—they fought briefly, a little bit of a swing—we pounded them as they took off, two young Brazilians about twenty-five or thirty, healthy boys, arrogant fucking punks.