In the fall of 1979 I went on a motorcycle trip with Car and Driver boss David E. Davis Jr. David E. invited Bill Baker, chief of public relations for Fiat of America, and former motorcycle racer Trant Jarman, who’d become a crash test engineering consultant and spent his days happily dropping cars from crane hoists, nose first, onto concrete garage floors. (This is the kind of thing that men used to do for a living before computers began simulating all the enjoyment in life.)
We obtained three clunky, awkward, and mechanically primitive Harley-Davidson motorcycles and, by way of comparison, one Suzuki GS1100—probably the fastest and most sophisticated retail bike of the time. We spent a weekend riding seven-hundred miles through Michigan and Indiana for the purpose of …
During the heyday of the glossy magazines the purpose of everything was fun—to provide the readers with some fun. And you can’t give what you haven’t got. The fun began Friday after work, at Brew’s on Thirty-fourth Street in Manhattan around the corner from the Car and Driver offices. The fun adjourned to the bar at LaGuardia airport from which it was transported (with the aid of those libation-pouring stewardesses of yore) to David and Jeannie Davis’s house in Ann Arbor, Michigan. And the fun, when last seen at about three A.M. Saturday morning, was drinking toasts out of the salad bowl and singing:
There once was a Spanish nobilio,
Who lived in an ancient castillio.
He was proud of his tra-la-la-lillio
And the works of his tweedle-dum dee.
I thought, in a college town like Ann Arbor, illegal drugs were supposed to be readily available, to go with the Bloody Mary, the brandy-laced coffee, and the aspirin and gin on the rocks that I needed to face the day. Also, it was raining, and I’d lost the face shield for my old Buco helmet, and I hadn’t been on a motorcycle in almost ten years. (It’s difficult to practice for motorcycle riding if you don’t have a motorcycle around. You can try operating the throttle and the brake with your hand while shifting gears with your foot, but it’s hard to do this in your pickup truck and see where you’re going.)
The others looked as bad as I felt. Even Mrs. Davis and photographer Humphrey Sutton were queasy at the prospect of this journey, and they were getting to ride in a proper automobile. It had all seemed like such a good idea just hours before. Jarman and Baker were experienced riders but rusty. David E. and I were trying to remember which way you face on a motorcycle. None of us had a valid motorcycle license. The bikes themselves presented a daunting spectacle, dripping wet and tippy-looking in the Davis driveway.
The Harley-Davidson FLT-C-80 Tour Glide Classic was supplied with windshield, fairing, running boards, saddlebags, dual headlights, a complete instrument panel, and a lockable trunk with more luggage space than a vacation condominium bedroom closet. We nicknamed it the “Two-Wheel Time Share.” If its kickstand ever gave way we’d have to call the National Guard to get it upright again.
The Harley XLS-1000 Roadster was a slightly smaller, slightly less accessorized version of the full-dress garbage can FLT-C-80.
And (with H-D’s perennially confusing model nomenclature) the FXE-80 Super Glide, stripped to its frame and a seat, was the honest-to-Nazi-helmet, nude-tattooed, sleeveless jean jacket Harley of a Harley-Davidson—the Hog. It set movies running in your head: Easy Rider, Hell’s Angels on Wheels, The Wild One (never mind that Brando rode a Triumph).
And then there was the Suzuki GS1100, with its docile looks and dulcet exhaust note. Yet it had a top speed of 140 mph and did the quarter mile in eleven seconds. Any twist of the throttle put you in danger of being left there with empty bowlegs, like a Roy Rogers figurine after the dog ate the plastic Trigger.
Off we splashed into the Irish Hills. We were Heck’s Republicans (leaving the pillage and rapine to our money managers). The sun emerged about the same time that we emerged—from a bowling alley in Coldwater, Michigan, where we’d been having breakfast beers. In a scene that was not straight out of an early Jack Nicholson biker flick, we’d been terrorized by a Saturday morning Cub Scout tenpin league. Their squeaks of childish glee and the thump of their gutter balls had made our heads pound.
We chose a secondary road, Route 1, that ran due south. We rolled through the cornfields and then other cornfields for a hundred miles, trading bikes as we went.
I started out on the XLS-1000 Roadster, which was more civilized than the Harley-Davidsons of my youth. For one thing, I was surrounded by a nagging, matronly clutter of government-mandated mirrors, reflectors, and turn signals. Then there was the Department of Transportation–required noise pollution equipment—the half-quiet exhaust system and the valve clatter of V-twin combustion chambers silenced by a big plastic air cleaner in place of the old Harley chrome candy dish. It used to be you couldn’t hear yourself think on a Harley. This was a good thing. When you came home with a used one and your mother screamed at you, “What were you thinking?” you could honestly say you didn’t know. Also, all our Harleys had electric starters so that in the course of the weekend not one of us did a Nadia Comaneci over the handlebars as the result of a midkick backfire. The Roadster was still powerful, however, with the torque of a locomotive and approximately the same weight.
Which weight was as a Vespa compared to the Tour Glide Classic. This was a motorcycle that hollered, “Get a car!” In fact, it drove like nothing so much as a Honda Civic with handlebars. The fairing was so complete and enveloping that I was too warm in there even on this chilly fall day. The fairing also produced a kind of aerodynamic undertow that made my hair blow forward toward the windshield. I discovered that by spreading my knees I could create an updraft that would then cause my hair to stand on end. I would pass the slow-moving family Chevys on Route 1, wiggle my legs, and my hair would act like an animated fright wig. Humphrey took some photographs of this in case, later in life, I was tempted to run for public office.
The Suzuki seemed to come from another motorcyclical planet. It was a large bike but tidy and compact in its largeness and positively dainty in its precision of control. The gearshift was a little metal nipple operated by the merest flick of a toe. The brakes were telepathic. There was no tremor or mechanical palsy at any point in getting up to (a blindingly fast) speed or coming down to (a shockingly abrupt) halt. Response to every maneuver was quick to the point of déjà vu—you were already laying over, deep into the corner that you thought you were getting ready to turn. I hadn’t known it was possible to build a motorcycle that was, all at once, so powerful, fast, smooth, and sweet.
No doubt about it, only one of our motorcycles would really stir your blood. Only one cried out to be begged, borrowed, or stolen, then ridden like a proton in a particle accelerator down all the roads in the land until bugs covered every tooth in your grin. That motorcycle, however, was not the Suzuki.
We would pull into a gas station, a fast-food joint, a 7-Eleven, and there we were with the GS1100, one of the most glorious pieces of speed demon engineering in the world: sixteen valves, dual overhead cams, six gears, and a ten-grand redline. And every bystander would rush to see the stripped-down Super Glide FXE. That Harley had the smell. It exuded the aroma of which all the great old bikes—the Indians, the Vincents, the BSAs—reeked, the wiff of danger. And on this particular FXE the dual straight pipes and original air filter had been restored so that the Harley exhaust rumble said what a Harley rumble is supposed to say: “Lock up your daughters and wives.”
Unlike the GS1100 the FXE was not a modern motorcycle with crisp, quiet lines that reminded you of an appliance, a microwave on tires, the safety of your kitchen at home. Motorcycles are dangerous. You should be scared of them and of the people who ride on them. Well, not of David E. Davis, Trant Jarman, Bill Baker, and me in particular. But in general people who ride motorcycles are doing something that’s so scary in the first place that they are statistically unlikely to be scared of you. That is, unless you are as much above the statistical average of scariness as David E., Trant, Bill, and me in particular are below it.
This notion reoccurred to me years later when first the book and then the movie Schindler’s List came out. I thought there was a great missing of the point by author Thomas Keneally and director Steven Spielberg. Oskar Schindler had been a successful motorcycle racer. There’s no mystery about why he did what he did at his factory. He felt like it. And there’s no mystery about why he wasn’t afraid of the Gestapo. He wasn’t afraid of anything. Pencil-necked punks in fake leather raincoats—Gestapo, geslopo. To put it in two of the historically most-used words in the biker lexicon, “Fuck you.”
Or, to put it motion, there was Trant Jarman on the GS1100 flying down Route 1 at three times the legal speed limit.
Let’s face it, the appeal of the motorcycle is not rational. And let’s not mince words about the Freudian nature of the psychological message—big, throbbing, steel-hard thing between your legs. Not exactly hard to decode, symbolically speaking. And “Harley-Davidson” sounds more like it means business than D. H. Lawrence’s “John Thomas” or Elvis Presley’s “Little Elvis” or, for that matter, “Suzuki.” Women gaze upon a Harley with a look combining mild trepidation with … “He was proud of his tra-la-la-lillio / and the works of his tweedle-dum dee.”
The farm girls and the small town teen angels standing in the parking lots of the Laundromats and feed stores as we rode south through Yoder and Ossian and Bluffton and Reiffsburg, Pennville, Redkey, Modoc—standing there on the verge of a lifetime of expanding hips and contracting dress budgets—their eyes said, “Take me!”
In Connersville we dismounted at a mean-looking bar. I was having flashbacks to Humphrey’s and my Buick trip across the panhandle of Florida. I said to Humphrey, “Don’t you dare tell the people in here that they’re quaint and charming in their primitive way.”
Indeed, we had no more than ordered our drinks when a red-faced drunk wove toward our table. His intentions were unfriendly, as were his pals at the other end of the bar. We were just wondering if we should slip a sawbuck under the ashtray and skedaddle when the formidable granny of a barmaid intervened.
“Don’t you let ole Leroy here”—she gestured toward the drunk—“or none of the rest of them”—she gestured toward Leroy’s friends—“bother you none. They don’t mean no trouble.” Leroy meekly returned to his bar stool. And we, with some amazement, realized that the barmaid hadn’t been protecting us from her clientele; she’d been protecting her clientele from us. The Harley-riding terror and its posse had descended on Connersville—the editor of the National Lampoon, the editor of Car and Driver and his wife, an English photographer, a PR executive, and an engineer. (Actually, Trant, although a little guy, might have—being an ex-motorcycle racer like Oskar Schindler—wreaked some havoc if annoyed. But the rest of us would have skedaddled and left him there.)
Thirty years on the vignettes above must seem—to use Humphrey’s word—quaint. The real swastika-wearing one percenters in the never-washed jeans are on Medicare now, their beard braids grizzled, the hair under their Wehrmacht headgear mostly gone. Today, the rice-burning crotch rockets have Power Ranger styling to go with their power. And the kids aboard them are more likely to stomp themselves against phone poles than to stomp rival gang members or innocent citizens or Leroy. Harley-Davidson has gone from being a mechanized dinosaur that somehow survived the Wisconsin ice age to being the last solvent motor vehicle company in America.
Yet in these scenes from long ago you can detect the first germs of what would become a raging infection of senior management flabby guys trying to ride out their midlife crises on Harleys. They want to recapture the bar fear and farm girl yearning. They’ve forgotten that they never provoked that fear or yearning because they were pasty geeks who drove Pintos and were studying like mad to get into business school. Sorry, you chubby renters of Wild Hogs, the bars in rural Indiana now have bare brick walls, hanging fern planters, and wine lists. The farm girls sold the farms and are managing successful ethanol operations. The small town teen angels are worried real estate agents and mothers of three who are still upset by Sarah Palin’s defeat and don’t even listen to John Cougar Mellencamp CDs anymore.
I hope that this ancient article in Car and Driver was not in any way responsible for the embarrassment that modern motorcycling has become. I’m willing to take the blame for popularizing NASCAR, but not for this. And memo to the “Wheezy Riders” and the “Mild Ones”: If your old lady is wider than the gap between your mortgage debt and your house value, please do not seat her pillion and make us look at this on the highway.
From Connersville we went west on Route 44. Despite the heartland’s reputation for bland scenery, this is as pretty a road as you will find from Smokies to Rockies. Route 44 has hills and curves and sudden right-angle county line jogs, dips, dells, one-lane wooden bridges, and occasional sprinkles of sand and gravel to get your attention in the tight bends. We went down this stretch hellbent-for-Naugahyde, leaving the chase car to trail behind in a wake of tire squeals and brake-light panic blinks. Bill Baker was out front on the Suzuki. It may not have had the below-the-belt appeal of the Milwaukee pig iron, but it was a beautiful thing to see as Bill tipped it over in the acute spots and popped it up in the straights. Trant, on the XLS-1000 tricked-out Roadster, and David E., on the FXE-80 pure Harley, were making somewhat more ponderous charges at the curves. I lagged, my hands full with the FLT-C-80 Tour Glide Classic the size of an Elks hall. Taking this at sixty miles per hour through the bendies and over the culvert humps was like flying Howard Hughes’s Spruce Goose in the Reno Air Races. Yet the behemoth would do everything I could summon the nerve to ask it to do. Coming into a sharp turn, I’d press the opposite bar, point my head at the apex, and the son-of-a-gun would keel over like an America’s Cup yacht and hang there at a forty-five-degree angle, close hauled. All it needed was someone blonde in a bikini bottom and Top-Siders hiked out over the lifelines shouting at me to reef the main sail. Or something like that. I know even less about sailing than I know about motorcycle riding. What I mean to say is that the Tour Glide handled better than you’d think a barge like this would. It was not, however, a motorcycle for the indecisive or the changeable-minded. Once you had committed yourself to a particular line of attack, you were—if I may indulge in the umpteenth change of metaphor in this paragraph alone—permanently out of radio contact with central command.
It was fun. I recalled then, after a decade spent driving—as bikers would say—“in a cage,” how fun riding a motorcycle is. And I’m recalling now, three decades later, how fun fun is. And how important. Fun saves us from political dictatorship. Perhaps the midlife crisis Harley riders should be forgiven or even exalted. Motorcycles strike at the very foundation of authoritarian politics, because they are so much fun. (And let us ignore, as the act of ignoramuses, the Iron Crosses worn by biker gangs.) How can you oppress and collectivize a people who are having fun? You have to catch them first, while they’re rollicking around with bottles in hand, sexing each other in the shrubbery, making heaps of money and blowing it on whatever they like. How can you bureaucratize such a people or organize them into armies to fight other people they’ve never heard of? How can you even get them to be quiet for a moment and listen to a public service announcement about wearing seat belts? (Seat belts on motorcycles?) You can’t. That’s what makes America a mess—a wonderful, glorious, hilarious, fun-filled mess.
We’re an ungovernable bunch of fun-loving hooligans looking for kicks. And what do you do for kicks in America? You get on a machine—a truck, a tractor, a snowmobile, a Jet Ski, a riding mower, an RV, a car, even a bus, and especially a motorcycle. Machines have given us common folk the ways and means to run around all over the place doing whatever we want. Before machines, thirty miles was a day’s journey if you had a horse, and you didn’t. We were in thrall to shank’s mare, to the vagaries of weather and of our betters who owned the railroads. Without personal, private machines there was no freedom. And what’s freedom for? Freedom is for fun.
Any mom knows this. Not that moms are necessarily in favor of fun. As we roared toward Bloomington and the home of that very fun institution (and alma mater of my dear future wife) Indiana University, we passed a mom and dad snailing along in their Dodge Bluegill with a six- or seven-year-old son in the back. The kid got a look at our motorcycles and began to bounce around like Tigger. And then his mother—a Democrat, I’m sure—did a remarkable thing. She reached around and put a hand over the boy’s eyes.
In Bloomington we had a dinner planned with Bob Tyrrell and Ron Burr, the editor and publisher, respectively, of the American Spectator. In those days the American Spectator was the (loud) voice of unrepentant conservatism. It had just published a cover showing a proposed presidential portrait of Jimmy Carter, a frame with nothing in it. The Spectator’s original publisher, John von Kannon, had been diagnosed with leukemia. (He recovered and is now the vice president and treasurer of the Heritage Foundation, the [quiet] voice of unrepentant conservatism). When John got out of the hospital and returned to the Spectator’s office near the IU campus, he was bald, carrying about ninety-eight pounds on his six-foot-plus frame, and walking with two canes. He had a T-shirt made for himself—size XXL—printed with six-inch letters: “I Am a Vegetarian.”
David E., Trant, Bill, and I got out of our leathers and into our dinner clothes while Jeannie Davis mixed cocktails and Humphrey sampled them extensively for purposes of quality control. We arrived at a restaurant called the Cork and Cleaver. And I believe that to this day, if you’re in Bloomington and go to the Cork and Cleaver, it would be unwise to mention Car and Driver. There’s something about 350 middle-aged miles of motorcycle riding that doesn’t burnish the finer points of politesse. I noticed it at the Cork and Cleaver bar when the normally mild-mannered Baker growled an order for “a pig trough full of bourbon.”
The hostess said there’d be a short wait and asked, “Can I have a name?”
“Christ,” said Trant, “didn’t your parents give you one when you were born?”
Our waitress wore a Kappa Kappa Gamma pin but she was not responsive to our inquiries about the secret lesbian initiation rites at her sorority. I think it was David E. who asked if he could use one of the Cork and Cleaver’s bedpost–sized pepper mills to go out back and kill a cow so our steaks would be extra fresh. And I’m not going to say who it was that suggested to the waitress a possible alternative use for the pepper grinder.
We went through three dinner waitresses in fifteen minutes. David E. decided that the second one, a handsome olive-skinned brunette in pigtails, was particularly healthy looking and that I had been single (as I then was) too long. He offered to arrange a marriage to be performed on the table after the soup course and consummated under the table during dessert. “How many rifles and blankets does your father want for you?” asked Jarman.
Bob Tyrrell and Ron Burr—loud voices of unrepentant conservatism though they may have been—were starting to get a “For gosh sakes, we have to live here” look on their faces. The American Spectator was and remains committed to fun, but maybe not quite as committed as we motorcyclists.
We motorcyclists who should have been committed to a twelve-step program. Rereading these various tales of transportation misadventure I notice that, as certain pompous English professors used to say, “a subtle pattern begins to emerge.” We were drunk all the time. Our generation drank a lot more than the current generation does. And we still would if we could, but our prostates are shot and one beer means going to the john every five minutes for the rest of the journey. In fairness to ourselves we didn’t have Prozac and hadn’t discovered Valium. Plus, the generation before us was even worse. We, at least, didn’t indulge ourselves with martinis during the day. We stuck to vodkas on the rocks.
The man for whom I worked at my day job, Julian Weber, president of National Lampoon Inc., was a member of that generation before us. A lawyer by trade, Julian said that he always knew it was time to stop talking business at lunch with his Irish colleagues when they started putting their cigarettes out in the butter. Is there such a thing as retroactive AA meetings?
The next morning suicide seemed like an attractive alternative. So we had breakfast at Denny’s. When that didn’t work we rode back to Ann Arbor. Being too hungover to safely ride motorcycles, we thought the answer might be to have someone who didn’t know how to ride a motorcycle ride a motorcycle so that we would look competent by comparison. Jeannie Davis acquitted herself well behind the handlebars of the XLS-1000 Harley Roadster. Humphrey wanted to ride a motorcycle as well, but he wanted to take photographs of us and himself while he was riding. Which didn’t sound very safe, and it wasn’t. Trant had to be kept informed of the score in the ongoing Lions game. This was accomplished by the chase car’s driver making a variety of hand signals that Trant kept misinterpreting to mean that we should stop for gas. I actually dozed off for a moment in the wombish fairing of the FLT-C-80 Tour Glide. That was scary. We all pegged the speedometer on each of the bikes. That wasn’t so scary because, in that era of the Carter administration double-nickel speed limit, speedometers were calibrated only to eighty mph. However, using a highway measured mile, I tested how fast the GS1100 really would go. It really would go faster than I would. I ran out of nerve at what Jeannie Davis clocked as 130 miles per hour, well before the Suzuki’s sixth gear ran out of revolutions per minute. The odd thing was there was no odd thing. Other than keeping from wetting myself, nothing about riding the GS1100 at 130 was difficult. It was the same as riding the bike at 70 or at 50 or at 30.
Near Muncie, or a place like Muncie, the oil pressure in the XLS-1000 disappeared. And the XLS disappeared too. No amount of shouting for oil pressure would get the oil pressure to return and no amount of Trant’s tinkering with the engine would either. So the XLS had to be left behind. As my Car and Driver story went to press, a Harley-Davidson employee was still questioning David E., trying to get David to remember where near Muncie—or a place like Muncie—the motorcycle had wound up.
Only one thought occurred to me the whole day, and, considering my headache, even that was overdoing it. But I did wonder what the political and cultural response would be, in those dark days at the end of the 1970s, if motorcycles had never been thought of and someone just invented them. “You see, it’s sort of like a car, but you sit on the engine, with the gas tank between your knees, and it has only two wheels.”
The powers that be would have had a fit, from the head of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (at that time an evil witch named Joan Claybrook) on down through the insurance companies, the state police, the local police, the school crossing guards, and the Mothers Against Everything. You can still hear their hypothetical shrieks echoing in the halls of suppositional history: “Sitting on an engine! Gas tank between your knees! Only two wheels! You’ll fall over! You’ll explode! You’ll burn! You’ll die!”
It was sad to think that America, a nation founded on danger (not to mention biker-type pillage and rapine), had come to such a pass. And, sadly, this particular form of 1970s darkness never did lift. There was no morning in America for our idea of fun. The nation remains obscenely intrigued with safety in all its forms (including, now, investment risk). My children cannot so much as pedal their bicycles around the paved apron in front of our garage door without being suited up and padded out like NFL linebackers. I await with dread the “Dear Parents” note from school announcing that students will not be allowed to go outside at recess, walk in the halls, eat lunch, or sit in classrooms without safety helmets. (Particularly annoying to my family—you can’t hurt O’Rourkes by hitting them on the head.)
However, I was wrong to believe in 1979 that no newly invented two-wheeled vehicle could be accepted by post-perilous American society. A number of years after our (somewhat) wild ride, the Segway would be conceived, with all the inconvenience and impracticality of the motorcycle and none of the motorcycle’s cool and injury-prone appeal. I can imagine what the farm girls and small town teen angels who looked so longingly at the Harley-Davidson FXE-80 Super Glide would have thought if I’d been riding a Segway: “Dork.”