Rooth, Groff and Mr Smith: In and Out of Luck
By the time I’d closed the panniers and strapped the work bag on the back seat, the lightning had rolled over the motel and the rain had stopped. “Beauty,” I thought. Nothing worse than kicking off a ride wet through. That extra cup of coffee bought a small respite.
Problem was it’d been lovely weather when I’d left Brisbane. Hardly a cloud in the sky and warm enough for fingerless gloves. After a month’s worth of tropical storms and humidity to swim through, the chance to go for a quick 400km blat down the coast for a few days’ work on such a lovely day was too good to think about rain gear and faceshields. So l hadn’t…
I can’t count the number of times I’ve left Queensland and forgotten it gets cold over the border. More than once that first tank of fuel has seen the bike parked outside an army disposal store. In the old days it used to be a newspaper stuffed down the jacket or, like that trip through a Melbourne winter as a student, a couple of jumbo rubbish bags threaded for arms and legs. Canberra once saw my knees turn blue for a couple of inches either side of the joints. Guyra in the early morning reduced me to shivering under a hand drier in a garage toilet thawing out fingers and once, in Tasmania, I spent half a day hugging a smouldering log and the other half drinking rum with the firefighters.
Live life on motorcycles and the stories of survival against the elements tend to stack up in your head like chairs in a church hall. Actually, Nicko and I jemmied a window on a church hall one night when the rain was pelting down so hard even Jesus couldn’t have ridden through it. We’d lit an old fuel stove in the kitchen and kept it burning on cardboard, old pamphlets and a broken ping-pong table …
Ah, places of refuge. Phil’s place during the storms last month was just the latest in a string of weird. Huddling under a bridge during a deluge near Katoomba with Seddo, both of us trying to roll soggy cigarettes with wet papers and makings. We must have gone through the best part of a packet of Drum, what with the shivering and shuddering and fumbling and dropping. We were both nicotine heads, but smoking that day was more about getting close to a cigarette lighter than trying to inhale. It was still the best test of a Dri-Rider jacket ever.
As teenagers, my schoolmate Keith and I got dumped on so hard we’d ridden our bikes — an SL350 and a Docker Honda (DOHC 450) — up the back verandah at Kathy’s Tavern south of Tamworth. Kathy, a lovely lady with dark hair in curlers and a ciggy on her lip, had taken pity on us and opened early. It wasn’t hard to persuade us to hang our jeans and combat jackets in front of the fireplace and she’d given us a couple of her old dressing gowns — floral items, mostly pink — to wear while we sipped warm rum and milk. Then some council workers came in for an early smoko and Keith and I got to learn about pride and punching on too. At least it got the blood flowing.
So, with the storm up front dragging back memories by the score, l settled in to smiling and facing a wet ride home. These days I don’t get as many long trips on the bike as l used to — work and kids coming first as they do — so l fooled myself into thinking that any day on the bike’s a good one and this would be too.
You know what? All the way to Grafton the scuds stayed in front. Sometimes by just enough to cop second-hand spray from the truck wheels, but the old Road King — cammed and carbied up to blow away those new-age look-alike laptops with wheels from the same blood factory — was roaring and my spirits were soaring.
The bridge past Maclean was fresh shower wet so I thundered on, watching the black clouds dump their rain to the east along the beaches. You figure your luck’s got to run
out, but as long as the rain kept clear I kept smiling, knowing that every mile north meant another degree or two of warmth.
At Ballina I ducked into the fishermen’s co-op for a late lunch on the best seafood the Pacific Highway’s got to offer. While waiting for scallops and prawns, the sky finally fell through and it bucketed down, while l crunched away on the sort of tucker reserved for single blokes on fat wages, not fat blokes feeding small armies. A rare treat, but then the whole day was. So far.
I got through the newspaper and a coffee as the clouds blew over, and used it to wipe the seat before taking on the truck-crossed roundabouts Ballina council uses like a crab pot to trap custom. The clouds were rolling over the west now, no doubt the drenching keeping the Nimbin hippies in their yurts, but nothing more than puddles showed on the road.
The big flared guards on the Road King kept me dry. Skimpy might be cute in a bikini, but not much beats plenty of tin in the rain.
Not that it was raining, until a few heavy drops at Nerang chased us into a garage for the last fuel of the trip. Then the sky turned black and it dumped down, flooding the forecourt and filling the drains. I spent 15 minutes chatting Jaguars with the mechanic working on an XK in a warm workshop and emerged to find the rain gone.
I did get wet that day. Yep, two kilometres from home it chucked it down. Half a day’s riding, nothing more than a bit of spray to disturb the ride and then a quick drenching, almost in the driveway. Just enough to make Karen all sooky at the return of her soggy hero. Bloody marvellous!
Wow, l guess if a bloke could live long enough, he’d win Lotto too!
By John Rooth, Two Wheels, February 2009
“Garden hose. You put a length of it between the foam and the seat cover, right down the middle. They sit on it and it, you know, does the job…”
The gnomish figure who supplied me with this information spoke with convincing authority. Perhaps it’s true but, if so, it’s in the same category as Rohypnol.
There’s a long-standing myth that the vibrations of a bike get girls hot. Ducati owners perpetuate this and, apparently, pillioning a girl on a Ducati is an iron-clad guarantee. “She was so up for it by the time we got home that we did it in the garage before I could turn the engine off!”
Meanwhile, the sign says Broken Hill is 460km away and I’ve already ridden about that distance. Her email message said she’d been thinking about me and wanted to go for a ride. This is code, right? She’s saying she wants sex. With me. These windows of opportunity don’t last long. A 900km ride may result in nothing.
“Oh, I didn’t think you’d come. I was pissed when I wrote that. Have you met my boyfriend, Brutus?”
“Hello, Brutus. Geez, that’s a strong handshake … “
All this is an unhappy by-product of my being good in bed. In their darkest hours they remember.
Riding and sex aren’t a natural fit. Committed riders are usually dirty, distracted and unreliable. They have no recognisable future and, while girls are often desperate for a hit of freedom, they know it will all be over when they lose their teenage bodies, so they gravitate towards “good providers”.
It probably has more to do with the personality of the rider. For reasons that escape me entirely, some riders are deadset chick-magnets. Okay, they’re usually well-built but mostly thick as two planks. The girls I want find them irresistible. I can offer good manners and intelligent conversation, but this is judged as worthless when compared with a tradie riding a 150kW vibrator.
Reclining on her bed in the moist, autumnal Broken Hill evening (I shouldn’t have written that — most women are repelled by poets), Sussi (What were her parents thinking when they named her?) was probably remembering a gallop we had through the Barossa Valley. There was high speed, wine, a cavalier disregard for authority and intimate hotel rooms. The mix was intoxicating and even now when I think about it I can smell the grapes and the passion in the air.
It was clear, however, I wasn’t “the one”. It’s not in anyone’s short-term interests to admit it but I think the potential in most relationships is obvious right from the beginning. I was dirty, distracted and unreliable — everything she wanted for a moment in her life but nothing she considered important in her future. This might be a truth about marriage — you aspire for something that is inherently unsatisfying.
I often think about sex while I’m riding. The hours I get to spend with myself are sometimes filled with memories and regrets, relationships I should have pursued, those I did pursue that turned out badly, and fantasies of relationships I really wanted but never had.
I’ve had sex on the road with women ranging from Pauline Hanson (must be the red hair) to Scarlett Johansson. I’ve had plenty of sex with the girlfriends and wives of my friends and acquaintances. In my mind they never say no. Sometimes I deliberately think about sex to stay awake but this time it doesn’t seem to be working so I stop at the Coombah Roadhouse and have a drink at the table in the garden area.
There’s a hose attached to a tap on the roadhouse wall. I’m semi-delirious but I use my Swiss Army knife to liberate a four-foot length. I briefly contemplate inserting it into the bike’s seat but am overcome with self-loathing and stuff it into the panniers instead.
Sussi has a surprise for me when I finally arrive. There’s no Brutus but when she said she wanted to go for a ride, she meant on her own bike. She’d taken the plunge and bought a tidy SV650. We rode north on the Silver City Highway and stopped at a waterhole she knew for a swim and a bottle of wine. She told me how much she treasured our friendship and how pleased she was that the sex thing in the past hadn’t ruined it. I lay on my back in the sun while the newly chaste Sussi cleaned up and repacked her bike.
I hadn’t ridden 900km to see a friend. I had other plans. Thinking about it filled me with shame, though. I have so few women friends I should be grateful for her attention. My head needs serious reconfiguring.
We raced each other a bit on the way back and she ran out of fuel about 40km from home. It looked like I’d have to leave her there for an hour or so until I remembered the garden hose. I used it to siphon fuel from my bike into hers, so stealing it in the first place wasn’t a complete waste of time. She thought it somewhat unusual that I should be carrying it in the first place, but I patiently explained that, in the outback, you can’t be too careful.
I left it with her when I headed home. She was grateful and asked if I could think of a way whereby she could carry it on her bike all the time in case she ran out of fuel again.
I gave her a couple of ideas. That, of course, is what friends are for …
By Grant Roff, Two Wheels, May 2011
Peter Smith
There was no doubt about it. The sparks had gone, and along with them any chance of me making it to the next town before nightfall.
Sparks have always been a mystery to me. No wonder they call the stuff electrickery. And night riding has also presented some difficulty. Five years of seven nights and four days a week in the hot seat of Sydney’s ‘do it coz you gotta’ taxis have not been kind to the Smith psyche (or the Smith eyesight) and night blindness on dirt roads at twilight is not the sort of combination I’d wish even on some (but not all) of my enemies.
Luck had run out too … long ago, it seems. When you find yourself bereft of luck the days drag by, one minor mindless calamity after another, until you find yourself wishing it would end, but realising that it bloody won’t until you die.
That’s the really bad thing about luck deserting you. It means that even the simplest acts fail, or are fraught with counterproductivity of astronomical proportions. And even when the worse does come to worst and you summon up the courage to end it all, the gun misfires or the rope breaks or the drugs are so far past their use by date that they’ve decayed into salt or some other simple, harmless compound that merely makes you throw up or gives you a Titanic bloody headache that, unlike the ship, won’t go down.
The Vikings knew all about luck, as tangible a part of a person’s character, they reckoned, as his thirst, his skill at swordplay or the length of his beard. They believed that a person’s luck was born into them, but it could be changed, improved or strengthened by exercising, severed in battle with The Fates, quenched or stolen by circumstance.
Weird, as I have mentioned before, was the god who knew about luck, and he could smile on an unlucky man trapped in the bow of a stricken dragonship in the teeth of a North Sea gale. Equally, he could turn his back on the strongest and noblest of warriors as a cruel traitor crept to the hero’s bedside with a dagger in his hand and grim murder in his heart.
Luck can give and it can take away. In the spectacularly beautiful words of an early Scots gospel, it can “yeve it me” and it can “biraft me o’ it”. It can be felt at times, and what a glorious feeling it is to be ‘on a roll’, to know the wonderful Oz feeling of having ‘all your Christmases come at once’, and to live in the absolute and unshakable certainty that, should you back the rank outsider in a 30-horse race, the donkey will bolt home by 10 lengths, even if the jockey is asleep and the nag has only three legs.
With luck all things are possible, all mountains are climbable, all steeds rideable, all enemies surmountable. There are no obstacles which can prevent you from prevailing. Your heart feels warm and whole, your arms strong and willing, your brain clear and serene. The world is at your feet, and your strength, in the words of the prophet, is as the strength of 10.
But when luck deserts you, you ain’t, in the words of our esteemed Prime Minister, “Shit”.
I sat by the side of the road and took stock of things. The road I was on was not well travelled. If I did manage to get a lift the last 60 km into the next town, I had no way of getting back out to collect the bike. There was, after all, only six dollars left in the Smith pocket and with only 20 minutes or so to go until the bank shut I was certain that there’d be no chance of enriching myself sufficiently to afford a room in a boozer, even if I did manage to make it back to town, let alone make arrangements for the collection and transport of the machine to someone who knows something about the mysteries of motorcycle electronics.
As I pondered these things I felt a familiar sensation upon the Smith pate … the gentle smattering of raindrops. This caused me to reflect on my lack of foresight in not providing myself with either wet weather or camping gear.
It was, after all, winter, and in this part of the country winter nights can be very long and very cold. The more I pondered these sorry facts, the heavier the rain became.
Yes, it was blatantly clear that luck had deserted me again. My heart was leaden within my chest, my stomach was a mass of knots, and with bitterness and vehemence I rose to my full height (not very much, but one must make the most of that which one has) and I began to curse Weird with a string of invective which one would expect from an individual who is both the son of a son of a bullocky and the son of the daughter of a sailor.
When I’d finished I felt much better, until I heard a soft cracking sound.
In dull bemusement, I watched as the bike’s sidestand broke and the machine I love slowly toppled over onto its side, accompanied by the sound of breaking glass and rending metal.
Oh Death, where is thy sting?
By Peter Smith, Two Wheels, July 1992
