Ride Like Hell and You'll Get There (10 page)
The guys at the uni had the bike ready in the trailer and I had sorted out the accommodation in Corowa. That’s when I decided it would be fun to get my bike shipped over to Adelaide so I could ride to Corowa, then after the land-speed attempt I could ride down to Melbourne and get smashed with Clayton Jacobson. Picture a man who looks like he just ate an entire roast chicken without using his hands; he’s a big man, not in a fat way, but in a big man, big beard, big hair, big sense of humour way. I knew if I stayed over at Clay’s place I would then jump on the ferry the next day with a hangover and spend a week riding around Tasmania sobering up only to do it again on the way home. I didn’t make it to Tassie when I went around Australia on Betty the baby-faced-killer motorcycle two years ago so, hey, why not do it now?
My bike-riding mate Diego is from Argentina, so he’s extremely well mannered, very dark and handsome, always well dressed and groomed, has a ridiculously big, charismatic smile and speaks with a bog-thick South American accent.You know, the sort that makes women glaze over with mental images of being undressed by Antonio Banderas. I see a guy who sounds and dresses like the cat from
Shrek
and is about the same size too.
I was grabbing a quick lunch break with Diego and filling him in on all the latest happenings with the bike run. He was stuffing his wife’s empanadas from a lunchbox into his face. The wonderful aroma brought back memories of the first time I met Diego’s wife, Veronica, and her amazing empanadas.They were coming over to our place and earlier that day Clare had asked me to move Sid to the other end of the table, so I picked him up, high chair and all, twisted, leant and bent over, putting my back out and writhing in pain on the floor while Lola berated me for using all the bad words at once. I crawled to the bathroom on my stomach, grabbed some pills leftover from a bike stack I had a few years before and all was fine. Diego and Veronica arrived with the empanadas. She was gorgeous and gracious, of course, and I attempted to extend every gentlemanly courtesy, but on 40 milligrams of morphine, I actually appeared mentally incompetent or psychopathic or both. I could not stop eating the empanadas; needless to say the evening was fun for me and a disaster for Clare. Anyway, since then I’ve been addicted to Veronica’s empanadas.
So back to Diego who, having demolished half a dozen, was grinning at me like a well-fed hamster. ‘Pol, can I come wid you, my friend?’
‘Well, yeah, course you can, mate, but we’re riding hard all day every day, so no mincing about, no grinning or hanging around like an extra from a pirate movie.’
‘Pol, wat are you talking about?’ He looked genuinely puzzled as he flicked a speck of pastry off his Hugo Boss sleeve then flashed a grin at a random passerby.
Several phone calls the next day had all the guys who were coming with us to Speed Week diverting to Corowa instead. Simon and Howard both decided to ride their bikes down from Brisbane. Simon was on an antique BMW R60 and Howard was riding a Buell he had managed to load up with enough gear to make it look more like a Pakistani mule. Also on the way was Brendan, my photographer mate. At the time he was running about in the outback trying to get a picture of some ultra-elusive native nocturnal bird. Brendan’s not into birdwatching, he’d rather set fire to his underpants than creep about in the bush at night, but as soon as some muppet told him no one’s ever captured it on film he was off like Bear Grylls after a juicy grub.
Then I started the phone calls to get both Diego’s and my bike on freight to Adelaide. This is when I discovered that I had missed my window for road freight out of Perth to Adelaide by one day. So I tried the train, no dice, and alternate routes, no time, so I called some specialty bike transport companies.
‘Where from?’ they asked.
‘Perth.’ I held my breath.
‘Forget it,’ they said.
So then I thought about riding over, but my fuel tank is too small, so I considered hiring a ute, putting the bikes on it and driving them over myself, but that just sounded silly. So I called a friend, Ashley Taylor, who runs Pentagon Freight.
‘You’re a lucky bastard,’ he said. And I was. Ash had a truck leaving Perth for Adelaide the day after tomorrow, and there was just enough room on the back to put two bikes. There was only one hitch: we had to put the bikes in crates.
So I called the companies that make crates to order, but there was either no time, no response to messages or no actual sense of effort. That meant I was going to have to build the crates myself. Erwin called me from a rig somewhere in the South China Sea while I was on my way to the timber yard to ask how it was all panning out. I got as far as explaining the crates when he laughed. ‘Shit, Pauli, you’re a dumb arse,’ said the man who was, to me, like a brother, mentor, friend and Yoda.
‘Well, fuck you, too, champ,’ I barked.
He chuckled, which annoyed me even more. ‘What kind of bike is Diego riding?’
‘A new BMW 650 Tourer,’ I replied curtly.
‘Mate, call up the Harley and BMW dealers in Perth and ask for a shipping crate. I guarantee they’ll have crates out the back purpose-built for both your bikes.’ And this is why the man is a legend.
The next morning Diego and I met at Pentagon Freight, put our bikes into the crates and booked our flights to Adelaide. He was arriving a few hours ahead of me, so he would go to the freight yard and run the bikes over to our motel. I would arrive and meet with the uni team to go over the plan for getting to Corowa. Everything was set.
I drove home from Pentagon feeling like there was a good viable plan in place to counter the loss of everything so far—Speed Week 1, Jocko, my Ural, all of it. The plan covered a lot of distance and was on a ridiculous timeframe with no room for error. Our bikes would arrive in Adelaide the day before Diego and I, we’d get them fuelled up and ready to go, then get the salt-lake bike ready for an early departure from Ed’s workshop. It was a ten-hour ride to Corowa, then at 6 a.m. on Monday we’d set up the bike at the runway, break a world record between 8 and 9 a.m. and by lunchtime Diego and I would be on the freeway headed for Melbourne. We would have to skip getting drunk with Clayton to catch the 4 p.m. ferry to Tassie. Easy.
Friday night my phone rang. It was Mick, one of the blokes from Pentagon Freight. ‘Hi Paul, I’ve got some bad news,’ he said.
I was walking out of my local deli with a carton of milk and a bottle of tomato sauce. I froze mid-stride; I didn’t want to ask but I had to. ‘What sort of bad news?’
‘Yeah, well, you see, somehow your bikes were loaded onto the wrong truck and are on their way to Karratha.’
‘FUUUUUUCCCKKKK!’ I dropped the milk. ‘WHADYA FUCKIN’ MEAN KARRATHA?’
There was a brief silence while Mick regained his hearing. ‘Don’t worry, we’re on top of it,’ he hurriedly explained. ‘We’ve got the Karratha truck pulled over and the Adelaide truck pulled over, we’re mobilising up a long tray ute with a pallet jack to pick up your bikes then we’ll hotshot them over to the Adelaide truck. They’ll get there, but about twelve hours late.’
Which meant the bikes would arrive in Adelaide just a few hours before we did. That would still work. I thanked Mick, asked him to keep in touch, picked up my carton of milk, smiled sweetly at the other customers who avoided eye contact with me, and went home to spend time with my family.
THAT AFTERNOON I
jumped on the flight to Adelaide. Start the clock.
Diego had been on the phone as soon as he landed. The bikes had arrived at exactly the same time he did and he had already ridden his bike over to the motel and was heading back on mine, via Ed’s workshop to take a gander at the BDM-SLS. I told him to leave my bike there as we were all heading off from the workshop in the morning; he could double me on his bike from the hotel.
Ed’s workshop is cool. He lives there with two of his mates, Simon and Tristan, all recently graduated from the University of Adelaide. Casual but not chaotic, in fact rather polished and well-engineered, it’s the ultimate man cave. All three of the guys had been involved with the BDM-SLS from its inception and in many ways their careers have evolved like the bike, now out in the world looking to make a mark.
Diego and I finally met up outside the motel; I had just dumped my gear in my room and he was walking towards me, grinning the way only he can. ‘Heello, my friend,’ he said, beaming just like the cat from
Shrek
.
‘Good work, mate,’ I said, squeezing him in a blokey hug. Our motel was at the busy end of Hindley Street, Adelaide’s epicentre of nightlife. It was 6 p.m. on Saturday, 17 March and the sun was about to depart, leaving the neon and noise to take over, and already the street was awash with pissed idiots in various shades of green clothing and drinking green beer.
‘What ees going on, Pol?’ Diego gesticulated, palms up and confused face, at the green-clad drunks.
‘It’s St Patrick’s Day, mate,’ I replied. Right on cue a particularly hammered guy in green coveralls staggered out of a bar and walked straight into a lamppost and face-planted on the street.
‘Who ees this saint? Why ees everybody drunk?’
I paused. How do I start to explain our lust for any excuse to have a day off work and hit the piss? Diego doesn’t get our sports, our humour or the sometimes blatantly racist things we say without thinking. ‘You hungry?’ I ask him.
‘No,’ he answered, still scanning the street in amazement.
I was in desperate need of a shower so Diego and I arranged to meet back at the motel; he said he’d take half an hour to check out some sunglasses he’d seen in a shop (if I spent more than half a minute choosing sunglasses I might have some style, too).
Showered up and happy, I was back out the front of the motel, just checking out the scene while I waited for Diego—it was party time now and the street was packed with punters. Then I saw him running towards me like someone just stole the family empanada recipe. ‘Pol, Pol . . . I can’t believe eet . . . Eet cannot be possible . . .’ he gasped. He was really agitated, and frantically going through his jacket pockets.
‘What the fuck is it, mate?’
His dark Argentinean eyes fixed on me, his expression bewildered and gutted. ‘I have lost the keys to both our motorcycles.’
‘
Fuuuucccckkkk!
’ was my immediate reaction before I calmed down and fired all the standard questions at him, you know, when did have them last, have you retraced your steps, gone back to the shop and asked the staff, would you like me to kill you slowly or just hurt you badly. But they were gone, properly gone, lost on Hindley Street. And of course Diego had checked everywhere already.
We went to the police station, ironically directly across the street, and gave our details to the cop behind the counter in case someone handed the keys in. He smiled and reached under the counter to produce a bucket full of keys. ‘No worries. If they end up here, we’ll let you know.’
The problem solidified in my head like a cement tumour as I sat down on the kerb next to Diego’s bike. He dropped down next to me like he was bearing the weight of the known universe on his shoulders. ‘Pol, wat are we going to do now?’
It was 7 p.m. on a Saturday night, St Patrick’s Day, we had no keys for our bikes and we were due out of there in eleven hours for our one and only shot at the land-speed record. There were spare keys at both our homes in Perth, but no time to get them to us. ‘I need a drink.’
‘Good idea, Pol.’ Diego sprang to his feet and disappeared into the bar while I sat on the kerb staring at the road, oblivious to the rambling hordes all around me, not really focusing on anything but searching blankly through the options. I could smell the whiskey before I realised it was under my chin; Diego was back on the kerb with two large glasses.
We slammed down our drinks and my brain kicked into gear. Okay, I thought, so Diego’s bike is here right next to me, it’s not alarmed and the steering lock isn’t engaged; my bike’s in Ed’s workshop, it is alarmed but the alarm control is cable-tied to the handlebars so the movement of the transport truck wouldn’t set it off, it also has an un-engaged steering lock . . . so our only problem was replacing the ignition keys. All I had to do was find a locksmith on a Saturday night who wasn’t drunk (that discounted the Irish ones) with the right blank keys to fit a Harley Sportster and a new BMW GS and convince him to stop whatever he was doing and fix our problem. Easy.
Diego searched for locksmiths on his phone and, faking a smile, left me with a list while he went to get more drinks. The first two didn’t answer, the third was already smashed, the fourth and fifth sent me on one of those daisy-chain circles where the phone is answered by a machine that directs you to call another number that directs you to another machine that rings a mobile for you, so you can listen to another machine asking you to leave a message or tell you about their normal office hours, or the best one, getting diverted back to the first machine that kicks off the whole process again. The sixth number just took me to a recorded message by some twat about his pissy-ass weekend fishing trip and he wouldn’t be back to fix fuck all until Monday. One guy nearly gave in: he was obviously out at the pub and close to starting his third or fourth beer, he paused to reflect after I tripled his asking price. ‘Nah, mate, can’t help ya, sorry.’