Zebra to Sturgis Part II

TENNESSEE

I rolled Tennessee on the second or third day. I’d lost track ofthe days, the weeks, even the year. Everything was a seamless flow connected by anetwork of glistening August asphalt and flashing dotted lines. The way itshould be.

I swept through the Tennessee mountains, climbing, climbing. Theview was stupendous from the Great Northern Steamer. I sat almost 3 full inches abovethe fleeting asphalt and could see for miles as I climbed into theSmokies.

If you’ve never ridden through the Tennessee hills, you’re missingout on a serious ride. The hills are relatively unsettled, wild, open, as God threwthe clay so long ago with very little visible disruption from meddlinghuman hands. The air is clean and the scent of moonshine mash and virgin hillpussy rides thick on the cool mountain breezes.

I leaned and twisted, swept and swooped through the hills,climbing, descending.

I stopped around noon at a restaurant that overlooked a vastvista of pine and lakes. At least I think it was noon. My watch had been giving metrouble lately. I’d thrown it off a bridge.

The waitress brought a flagon of ice tea and a half a hedge hog,which was smothered in glazed apples and bourbon.

“Do you want anything else?” the blonde asked, a knowing grin onher face.

“Ketchup,” I said.

Her expression fell and she pulled a bottle of ketchup out of hercleavage in an automated fashion.

“From around here?” I asked her.

“No,” she said, her expression brightening.

“Where you from?” I asked.

“Other side of the hill.”

“Thought you said you weren’t from around here.”

“I’m not. I just told you, I’m from the other side of the hill,”she remarked as if I was entirely dumb.

“Oh,” I said, sensing that my own free roaming point of relativitywasn’t shared in this part of the country.

“Ever been out of the country?” I asked.

“Went to Nashville once. Didn’t like it,” she responded, wiping anearby table.

“Ever been out of America is what I meant, actually,” I said,trying to clarify the error in interpretation.

Her rag stopped in mid circle.

“What?” she snapped.

“What?” I asked, a slab of wild hog hanging from my teeth.

“Are you saying I’m fat?” she asked defensively.

“No! How did you get that out of my asking if you’d ever been outof the country?”

“Oh I get it. So I’m not only fat, I’m stupid, too. Is that it?”she asked, stuffing her rag into her apron.

“I didn’t say you were dumb,” I defended.

“You didn’t have to. You said it in your tone.”

“I did?”

“Oh don’t play dumb with me!” she shouted.

“Nobody said you were dumb!” I retorted.

“Oh, so now I’m not only fat and dumb, I’m a liar, too? Just whoin the hell do you think you are, coming in here, calling me a fat, dumb liar?”

The patrons in the restaurant were beginning to stare.

“Well, you know what?” the enraged madwoman screamed at the top ofher vocal ability. “You can just go to hell! You, with your arrogantholier-than-thou attitude! You, with your dirty, stinking leather, judgingeveryone around you! Do you think you are the only man in this world? Doyou think I can’t find someone who will treat me with respect? Who willlove me for who I am, not whether or not I have a perfect ass?”

She flung her dishtowel in my face and stormed off. I sat there,dishtowel hanging from my nose, looking around at the local faces staring back in disgust.

I hadn’t had much luck with the ladies lately. Maybe it was mycologne.

As I fired up the Great Northern Steamer, a crumpled $20 bill hit mein the eye.

“You call that a tip, you cheap bastard? Keep it!” the waitressyelled from the doorway of the restaurant.

I hit the gas and got the hell out of there before they could getthe rope over the tree limb and take the kinks out of my back the old-fashioned way.

As I strummed along, I realized it was time to surpass the 65 mph break-in andopened the RevTech up to 75. But when I gave her thethrottle, the engine fell flat on its face.

“Strange,” I said aloud as I tried it again. Again, the bike fellon its face at exactly 74 mph. “Shit. What the hell?” I checked the fuelpetcock, but nothing would coax the big engine over 74 mph. Thiswas very distressing. Bandit would beat me for sure if I couldn’t climbover 74 mph.

As I rolled along, I noticed it was time to do another break-in oilswitch. The boys told me to dump the blood at 50, 500 and then 1,000. I found a localH-D dealer off the interstate. They rolled the Great Northern Steameronto a lift and started to siphon the oil out. Bandit had not installed adrain hose from the oil bag, no doubt in an effort to retard my progress inour race to the Badlands.

“Why the rev limiter?” the mechanic asked as he siphoned the oilout with a marine sump pump.

“Rev limiter?” I asked.

“Yeah, you got a rev limiter here under the seat.”

“I do?”

“Yeah,” the mechanic said, pointing to a tiny rev limiter cleverlyhidden under the seat near the battery.

“Why that worthless… Take it off,” I instructed.

“Can’t,” the mechanic informed me. “Don’t have anything to replaceit with.”

“But I don’t want to replace it. I don’t want a rev limiter atall.”

“Yeah, but the way it’s wired, you have to have something and wedon’t have anything for a RevTech. I mean, we have oil filters, those are prettyinterchangeable, but the way this thing is wired up, you need something to replacethe rev limiter in order to close the circuit.”

“Why you evil bastard,” I said, cursing Bandit. He’d really nailedme to the ground with this one. “Can you at least advance it?” I asked.

“Maybe, it looks adjustable. It also looks about half homemade.Don’t think I’ve ever seen one like it.”

“Oh that dank wretch.” I could see him and Snake and Ink Dink andDigital Gangster roaring with laughter as they plotted against me at the Bikernet garage inL.A., where the majority of the construction on the bike had taken place.

“I’ll try,” the mechanic said.

The mechanics fiddled with Bandit’s homemade rev limiter for aboutan hour and announced that they’d been able to advance it.

“You should be able to pull a steady 100. No more. When you getto the Badlands, find the Custom Chrome boys and they can get you something toreplace it with.”

When I get to the Badlands. Of course. How convenient. By thenBandit would be the victor. He had gone to great lengths to insure his victory.

Just a few hours before, I’d noticed my feet kept slipping off the custom foot pegs.Then I noticed they’d been put on upside down, in order tocause my feet to constantly work themselves off the ends. It had only taken meabout 10 minutes to break down the tools and switch them, but each littlebooby trap Bandit had engineered into the Great Northern Steamer cost meprecious time, time he was using to streak farther and farther down the roadtoward victory.

I cursed his name as I roared out of the Tennessee Harley-Davidsonshop and onto the superheated interstate asphalt. The mechanic’s words rang in my ears,”Be careful and don’t speed through Kentucky. The place is crawlingwith troopers. It’s their main source of revenue in the area.”

KENTUCKY

They don’t need a sign announcing Kentucky. As soon as you crossthe border and hit their dog shit amalgamation of potholes, you know you’ve hita state with a piss-poor economy like Kentucky. Shame too, it’s pretty, butone of the most polluted. Nice folks, with one of the worst levels ofeducation. All reflected in the roads.

As I thundered through Kentucky at 100, I wondered where Bandit was. Were he and MadMyron already lounging in Sturgis, sipping mint juleps — Bandit’s favorite drink?Were they neck-deep in local women, being fed grapes and having their motorcycles polished?Fuck the troopers, I thought. Let themtry to take me alive. I knew if I so much as got stopped, the run was over.I was running an unregistered bike with California MSOs out of Floridathrough Kentucky. Shit, they’d just chop me into hamburger and feed me tothe hogs — after 20 years of slave labor picking tobacco naked under theblazing Kentucky sun while the bullwhip danced off my back. It was win orlose. There were no sidelines in this game. I cranked the throttle harderand rolled the bike to 101, where it began to flutter. I let it coast backto 100.

There’s something about riding exceptionally long distances, thecountryside ever unfurling before you, always just passing through. You begin to feel a bitinvulnerable. Local gossip and pangs do not threaten you. You glide past headaches and feelnothing. Relativity changes. The weight you give one thing can suddenly shift into anentirely different area in your life, leaving something that you thought was critical feelingmeaningless, and another part of your life, which you thought was of little meaning at all,feeling quite crucial or interesting.

I sorted through the last six months as I rolled on. Awatched odometer is not unlike a watched pot, it never boils. As I rolled androlled and rolled, I watched the odometer slowly flip past tenths of amile, then a mile. Then it started over, flipping off life in tenths. A tenthof confusion with the German Feminine. A tenth of aggravation with the moveto Miami. A tenth of re-writes on the film script “1%er”. A tenth of mybills. A tenth of uncertainty. A tenth of self-discovery. A tenth of the smell of asweating woman on a hot Miami night. A tenth of the laughs at Bandit’s place. A tenth ofbrotherhood. A tenth of the thunder of a fresh engine, stripping the black off bustedKentucky highway. A mile. And over again.

Throughout history there have always been men who adventured, menwho traveled great distances. But in reality, we are all pioneers into our ownselves. We all journey forward, ripe and robust, fresh from the womb, toslowly degrade, to fail and to triumph, to love and to lose, to dance, as uncle Henry Millersaid, “on the edge of the volcano, through the fingernail clippings and the gutter bile,giving a great, triumphant shout.” What strange thoughts I had as the sun lay down itsburning head on the soft wheat grass on the horizon. Strange thoughts in a strange time.

The miles rolling along on the odometer, silently recording their ownpassage, were not those of the motorcycle. They were mine. For when thismotorcycle is rusted and gone, I thought, these miles will be credited notto the memory of the machine, but to myself. In the end, the miles wetravel are our own. Though we might traverse different portions of ourlives with certain people, even certain partners, in the end, the journeyis our’s alone. And when the individual at last can no longer be rebuilt andand we are retired and put to rest, the miles belong to us and our memories.None of us is more than an unremarkable pile of dirt with a temporaryheartbeat. It is within this simplicity, this utter lack of permanentvalue, that our beauty lies. It is because our odometers, in the end, arefinite, that there is some sort of rush, a sense of charge to the fact thatwith each flip of the meter, with each lap, we are closer to the endchapter in our own dirty, sexy, scandalous, glory-filled, fast-run non-fictionstory.

I double-bumped over a hunk of unidentifiable road kill as twilighthit. Time to switch from the day goggles to the night glasses. Knock off thehorseshit road philosophy and get down to the business of riding at topspeed.

Gas stations and abbreviated conversations, minute relationshipswith fossil fuel customers and other adventure seekers. Phony interest,curiosity regarding motorcycles. Why do you ride? Did you build it? Whereare you headed and where did you come from? Oh, how nice. My goodness,that far? I bet you get tired. Have you ever killed a man? Where do yousleep? Why Zebra? What is Sturgis?

Sturgis, who said anything about Sturgis? I don’t know any Zebra. My name is Jones,Jones from Arkansas. Bought the bike at a flea market. Been riding ever since. Gun, nothat’s not a gun under there, that’s my colostomy bag. Lost my asshole in WWII.German landmine blew it off. Dastardly business, war. And colostomy bags, too. Messy ondates, makes gymnastics impossible. What cologne am I wearing…?

A long, sloping hill. A near-miss with a sleeping truck operator.Clever ideas that will be lost to the waving ditch weeds and fence posts that tick past attop speed, as I ride, unable to write, trying desperately to catchthe fleeting Bandit 3,000 miles to the west.

Night is a strange time on a motorcycle. The universe collapses,everything becomes condensed. Space and time become subservient to the headlight and itslimited expanse. One’s thoughts and rambling philosophies adjust accordingly, becoming moreerrant, distrusting, abbreviated, less focusedin reality and more ready to believe that which you would not havebelieved in, in the light. The night is a fast-paced game of hiding. It is aflying pocket of light in which you incubate as grand lands and greatdistances magically pass without your knowledge, your understanding of yourjourney suddenly limited to that which your searching eyes can pry from thesuffocating darkness. I say suffocating, but in reality, it is reallyquite liberating. For what you can’t see is suddenly no longer yourresponsibility. You are free to ignore the ephemeral giganticness thatsprints past you on all sides, hidden from your probing gaze, anon-liability that you will experience yet never be able to see, describeor recall due to its invisibility. But, like the grand reason, whichescapes us all, it’s out there and we can sense its magnitude, its heat,its sheer mammoth electromagnetic effect, though we cannot grasp its chaoticentirety.

I had been scheduled to stop at the house of a bro named Randy from Tennessee, who’dcontacted me via the Internet and offered acot and a hot. But when I got close, I was unable to figure out the directionsto the interstate grocery store, which is where we were supposed to meet. I stopped at arestaurant to get dinner and called The Shepard, Mike Osborne, inCalifornia on my satellite phone.

“Where are you now?” he asked.

“I don’t know, somewhere in Tennessee or Kentucky. Maybe Paris.”

“Getting weird out there, is it, Zebra?”

“Weirder the better,” I said.

“Well, let’s see.”

I could hear a flurry of keystrokes. The Shepard was accessing mye-mail account to retrieve the directions Randy had e-mailed me prior to lift off.

“Okay, got the e-mail. Let’s see, you should be close. Let mecheck Yahoo Maps.”

The Shepard accessed Yahoo Maps and plotted a course. He wasgiving me directions when my cell phone call waiting clicked. It was Randy.

“Zebra, whatever you do, don’t come to that grocery store! Thetroopers are all over the place. They’re running a license plate sting on bikes! They’llnail you for sure.”

“Sweet mother of whiskey!” I exclaimed. Troopers running licenseplate stings was the last thing I needed.

“Sorry, man. We just found out. Been trying to get in touch with you all day. They’venailed half a dozen bros already. Hauled ’em off. Hit thehighway and get out of the area, fast.”

I thanked Randy and relayed the bad news to The Shepard.

“What time is it there?” he asked.

“Around midnight,” I replied, gulping coffee. “And it’s startingto rain. Heard from Bandit?”

“He checked in earlier,” The Shepard said, as he plotted analternate course for me on the Internet maps. “Said he’s somewhere in Utah. Gas tank brokea mount. Fell off, blew up or something. Killed a whole bunch of people. He was pretty nutswhen he called. He and Mad Myron were in theJack and spewing nonsense about blowing up the plumbing in a local hotelwith gasoline fumes and a hotel shop vacuum. Couldn’t make sense of it.Then there was gunfire and a lot of screaming and I lost contact withthem.”

Bright news. Breakdowns for Bandit meant I still had a fightingchance.

“Get me to the next city,” I told The Shepard. “I’ll catch thatvillain yet. He put a rev limiter on me, but we got it dialed up wide open and I figure ifI can put down 900 miles today on this hard-mount buzzingbastard, I can get back in the game.”

The Shepard gave me a new route and it was a good one. Sure, I hadmaps and I knew the better end of the roads in the region, having lived in NewOrleans for four years. But with the digital maps, you could get currentreports on traffic, road construction, weather, you name it. That wassomething you couldn’t get from a paper map.

“You’re good with moderate showers to looks like Louisville.They’ve got some weather there, some heavy traffic on the south side, but it doesn’t look likeanything you can’t ride through.”

I thanked The Shepard and got the hell out of there. The rain wasincreasing steadily and I didn’t need to deal with troopers.

Outside the restaurant, I strapped on the rain gear and lit the fuseto the RevTech. Riding fast, I cut through the rain on my new Avons, which held surprisinglywell at speed in the heavy torrents.

Coming around the city, I went on reserve in heavy traffic and pounding rain. I had yet tofigure the range on the new tank, so I took it 15 milesfarther each fill up to try and locate the exact range. It was the firsttime I’d gone on reserve on that particular petcock and it took me justlong enough to find the reserve that a heavy truck nearly wasted me when thebike lost speed on the rain heavy highway. I looked back and could see the massive Peterbiltlogo. The rattle of the truck’s pipes told me the driver was using everything he had to slowhis rig down to keep from hitting a biker that no doubt appeared out of nowhere in the driving rain. I caught some fresh gas and dumped the big RevTech 88 into the Baker 6-Speed and got hell bound.

Taking the first off ramp I could get to, I rolled into a crapghetto area of town and found a fuel station. As I screwed off the gas cap and flipped up myfogging goggles, I noticed a fat white car person filling his Jap car while eyeing me withdisdain. He ogled the long K-Bar blade that hung frommy right hip, then the large L-lump that the H&K made. His wife locked hercar door and frowned. No doubt they expected me to sodomize the both ofthem.

A couple black gangbangers strolled up. They surrounded theyuppie and started putting the screws to him, their eyes on the car, the luggage on top andthe cat’s old lady. These were real hitters, guys with jailhouse tats and born-to-die brains.

“Yo, yo, yo, let me pump dat gas, Pennsylvania,” one hood said,referring to the yup’s out-of-state license plate as he tried to take the gas nozzle away.

“No, I got it,” the freaked yuppie squeaked.

“You got a lotta shit stack on dat car,” another hood said, tuggingon one of the securing ropes.

“Hey, don’t pull on that,” the yup pleaded.

The cat’s wife was terrified, knowing she’d soon be a widow and thenprobably a hump doll.

I topped off the tank on the Great Northern Steamer and hung up thepump. The five or six gangbangers were getting ugly and more aggressive as theyup lost his nerve. The black attendant who watched from behind 3-inch-thick bullet resistantglass was making no move to call the local heat.

“You get rained on coming from the north?” I asked the yup.

Everyone turned.

“Because I did,” I said, unholstering my H&K and flinging the rainoff it. “Soaked me clear to my fuckin’ bullets,” I added, holding the big German GSG9 specialby my side, looking into the eyes of the gangbangers.

I didn’t care if we had to gunfight. In fact, at the moment, agunfight sounded like just the thing. Clear the senses, loosen up the joints, the smell offresh cordite was always invigorating. You know you’re alive whenyou hear that first, compressed pop. Or dead, whichever the case may be.I was soaked, full of demons and wasn’t all that worried about consequences.Or losing.

“Uh, yeah,” the yup stammered. “We got rained on.” Maybe I shouldrob him and the gangbangers, I thought, chuckling to myself. Take ’em all foreverything they’ve got, nab the guy’s old lady, make her ride on the fenderclear to the Badlands, a meat tenderizer of sorts. Then get married by theChief himself and give her a stout corn husking. Yes…what a marvelousplan… But the fender was covered with gear, so piss on it.

“I was hoping it wasn’t raining north of here,” I said, walkingtoward the gangbangers, watching closely to see who might be stupid enough to go for a weapon.

The gangbangers began to drift backward and then slowly walked away,mumbling. I’d spoiled their fun, but only momentarily I figured. I handedthe yup $10.

“Go pay for your gas and pay for mine with this. I’ll stay hereand keep an eye on your car and your old lady.”

The yup took the money and stared at me like a frightened rat.

“I wouldn’t take too long, if I were you,” I said. “Chances arepretty high those old boys are gonna feel the sting of what just happened and come back aroundthe corner of that fuckin’ gas station shootin’. And the onlything we got for cover here is gas pumps. Move your ass.”

The yuppie scurried to the bulletproof glass and slid the cashunder the window. I kept a keen eye out for incoming fire.

“Boy, I’ve never been glad to see a biker before,” the yup admittedwhen he gave me my change and got into his car. “What’s Bikernet?”

“It’s nothing,” I told him. “Now go on and next time you see abiker on the side of the road having trouble, stop and ask if you can help.”

“I sure as hell will,” the yup assured me as he lit out of thestation and gassed it for the interstate.