Good Vibrations (2 page)

Often to be found far from his native North Carolina, Clark has been a regular feature of our visits to the Eastern Seaboard. On this occasion, he was renting a neat wooden house nestling amid idyllic green woodland. White-painted, surrounded by screened porches and set on rising ground, the light summer breeze wafted through the building in a way that rendered air-conditioning redundant. A good thing, Clark later observed, because there wasn't any. We wandered around the back looking for him and discovered him flicking his battered Zippo under an orderly pile of boatyard scraps for a barbecue. I lobbed him the ritual six-pack of cold Beck's. He looked different, but I couldn't work out why.

‘How's it goin', shipmates?' He opened a beer and up-ended its misted length to his lips in the sultry evening.

‘Right enough if you don't mind melting. How about yourself?'

‘Things are slow,' his easy Southern speech was like a homecoming. ‘I'm not building boats commercially any more and it seems years since I earned a buck sailing.'

‘Market not up to much?'

‘Nothing wrong with that. But I'm working on a new project. No long-term point in making boats for rich people – “There you are, sir. She floats. Ain't she pretty? Thank you, Ma'am, here's your bill. We don't take cheques.” – I've set up a scheme for bringing kids from the city, giving them a workshop and something to do where they'll have to rely on one another. After they've built a boat or two, I'll teach them how to sail as well. They'll learn a trade and get some value into their lives.'

‘So why are things not moving?'

‘Everyone says the idea's fine. The town loves it, the government loves it, committees of wealthy people love it, I guess even the kids'd love it if they ever got a chisel in their hands. Trouble is nobody wants to put up any money, so I'm burnin' up my life tryin' to raise cash.'

‘How's that work?'

‘I have meetings with bankers, then well-intentioned guys and folks who want to see their names up in lights for doin' something good organise dinners for rich “maybes” and invite me along. One of them even wants to shove me sideways an' run the show. He sounds impressive to the trust-fund brigade, but he couldn't find a bottle of rum in a distillery. Whole thing's like beatin' against the current.'

As we talked, Mara, a house guest from out West returned. She kissed Clark on his shaven cheek, and I realised what was different about him. He had hacked off the most handsome El Greco beard on the North Atlantic so that businessmen in BMWs would trust him. Somehow, he looked diminished by it, but he was no fool, so clearly he'd done what he had to.

The day faded while we were eating our chicken, corn and potatoes, but its remains stayed jungle-hot. As the fire died, squadrons of whining, biting bugs zoomed in to the attack. The locals whacked and smacked at them professionally for half an hour or so before admitting defeat and fleeing up the steps to safety inside the porch. In the darkness before moonrise, crickets kept up a non-stop buzzing and fireflies danced in the blackness beyond our screened haven as we drilled our way to the bottom of a quart of bourbon. In the deepening night, Mara talked of Flagstaff, Arizona, where she and her two young children were living in a small apartment with Fred, the father of neither of them. She told Roz about Hopi Indian villages high on mesas at the edge of Navajo country, and I fell to dreaming of the road stretching ever westward. It had always sounded a long way off. As the level in the bottle sank like water running through a meanly charged coffee filter, it began to seem even further, but progress on the bike front was promising and I could hardly wait to get cracking.

Shortly before midnight, Clark had soaked up enough whiskey to forget his troubles and blow the dust from his grandfather's copy of Uncle Remus. He perched himself high on a beat-up sideboard in the candlelight and read to the company in the full magnificence of his Southern drawl. Sadly, he lost interest just as Brer Rabbit hit the briar patch and we were on the edge of our seats, but as his eyes glazed over in the warmth of remembered companionship he sang us a sea shanty in a fine, strong tenor ringing from another life. Then he passed out, and reaching to help him I somehow contrived to fall down the stairs to the yard. The women now retired, leaving the men to live or die.

At the time, death seemed a soft option, but as I lay upside down I noticed the moon sailing out through the clouds from the east and remembered why I was there. Everything in the land seemed to be chasing the sunset westwards, and I thought for a moment about whether riding back towards this coast in a couple of months would feel unnatural. From my inverted perspective, the road to California spanned half the planet so, providing our resolve held firm and we kept the bikes upright, it was more than possible that the question would never arise.

In any case, the idea was too complicated to unravel, so I sagged off to sleep rather than try.

2
BUREAUCRACY
BAFFLES BIKERS

The modern port of Baltimore is so immense that it's hard for someone from a small country to get his head around it. Far from the oasis of Clark's house, our search for the shipping agent's office to rescue my bike led us through a melting noontime desert of wharves and warehouses to a group of colossal sheds surrounded by idling trucks and comatose truckers. We peered through a doorway into a hall the size of an aircraft hangar, echoing and empty. A thin, solitary man in a grey overall was sweeping dust into clouds in a far corner. We hiked across.

‘Where's Wallenius Shipping?'

‘Huh?'

‘Wallenius Line.'

‘Ladies' room? Out back and left down the row.'

‘Thanks a lot…'

It was worrying that he didn't understand a word we said. Were our accents really so outrageous? But we followed his pointing finger to a rudimentary toilet facility which, like all sensible travellers, we used while we had the chance.

Hoping to improve on this failure, we tried the map instead. American road systems are generally logical and well signposted, but for some reason Brits of all classes have made an art form of getting lost on them. Still learning to fathom how the tarmac matched the clearly printed sheet, we blundered on down steadily deteriorating tracks until we finally lost our nerve on the edge of a pothole the size of a glacier crevasse. The car rocked gently on its soft suspension as we stared in fascination at a vision of hell deserted.

Stark against the blue sky stood the colossal shell of an abandoned factory, which I fancied could once have been an outlet of the all-powerful Bethlehem steel works. Ridge after silent ridge, the roofs sagged and lurched in the still air. Smoke-blackened chimneys pointed to the vacuum of space like accusing fingers, ranks of blind windows gazed only inwards, while all around lay the general detritus of industrial America moving on.

Oh God of Bethel, by whose hand, thy people still are fed…
The scene of dereliction stood light years apart from the images created by Dodd's 1755 hymn. What had arisen in the mind of the founding father who homesteaded here, to name the land he had wrestled glade by glade from forest Indians after the Judaean town? And what had gone wrong over the intervening three centuries?
Who through this weary pilgrimage, hast all our fathers led.

Fifty yards towards the sheds, a crow pecked apathetically at something unspeakable in the dirt. We paused for a while in respectful introspection as one does in a cathedral, then turned back towards the docks.

More by fortune than planning, a brief drive and a short walk brought us to the agents. We were relieved of $85 in cash – no credit cards accepted – for the dockers' efforts and sent onwards across miles of sun-baked gravel to the customs shed for the next stage of what was starting to feel like springing my bike from prison.

Having dealt with stone-faced immigration officials on waterfronts from Rio to Russia, we felt confident that extracting Black Madonna from the US Customs shed would be pregnant with difficulty. It was not. The horrors slammed in a day later from an offside position. The Customs men were sweetness itself. We told them our plans and showed them our papers. They stamped everything, completed various forms in triplicate, handed me a ‘release' to give to the jailer and wished us well.

Struggling to believe it was this easy, I decided to try the question that I had imagined would not dare to speak its name. The prices on used bikes in the showrooms suggested that Harleys like mine were actually worth more here than back in the UK. In case someone made me an offer I couldn't refuse, I had to know if there would be punishing import duties, or some other barrier to honest trade.

‘Just suppose,' I asked casually, ‘that, say, I felt inclined to sell this bike. What would be the position?'

‘You can hawk it outside the dock gates for all we care,' said the boss. ‘If it was an Eyetalian Ducati or one of them BMWs from Germany, that would be different,' then he continued with an almost straight face, ‘but this is US made, is compliant with all US standards and is a credit to the American way of life. So it's OK.'

‘It ain't no credit from where I'm sitting,' an officer who hitherto had said nothing spoke up as we were walking out the door, ‘if I were you, I'd sell that flash heap of scrap first thing in the morning an' get yourself a Honda.'

I waited with indrawn breath for the avenging chain whirled by the all-American god, Harley, to crash through the ceiling and strike this heretic dead. But the cooling fans went on squeaking and nothing happened at all. In pragmatic Europe, people who ride Harley-Davidsons are sometimes suspected of suffering personality disorders for the logical reason that they could be operating faster, better-handling Japanese machines at half the price. There is far more to a Harley, however, than such naïve considerations. I've known plenty of properly set-up madmen who have been proud proprietors, but there is something about the massively engineered brashness of these rolling icons that agitates unenlightened non-Americans. Particularly if they are bikers themselves. I'd have expected a remark like that back in Blighty, but never in a land where grown men strut around in Harley T-shirts that announce, ‘If you have to ask why, you'll never understand.'

Fortunately for my sanity, one of this misguided commentator's colleagues took up the cudgel for national decency and waded into him on patriotic grounds. Roz and I slipped away, unable to believe our luck. Sadly, that was where it ran out.

To save us a further trip to the docks and a day of rental car charges, we had decided to whizz the bike straight out of its lock-up, and side-step the issue of insurance for the moment. We would buy that the following morning. Organising cover over in the US was necessary because, understandably, no firm back home was interested and also because Roz's bike had been an unknown quantity when we left. Since a minimum of third party liability cover is a legal requirement in Britain for motorcycles just as it is for any other motor vehicle, we assumed without question that the same would hold in the Land of the Free. We therefore decided to travel ‘two-up' back to Annapolis as though there was a bottle of Bud balanced on my fuel tank, and avoid cops. A sound scheme, but it fell at the first hurdle.

Taking the release papers to Wallenius' shed at five minutes to four should have seen us away on the bike, dumping the car and grabbing Betty Boop from Annapolis. Through a dirty window I could discern the ‘Heritage' behind a padlocked door. Apart from warehouse dust, Madonna looked none the worse for her ocean passage. Her wide, ‘fat-boy' handlebars still set off the sleek, jet-black tank with its discreet, purple, coach stripes, the studded leather-work and the stark, black and chrome V-twin engine.

We had the paperwork, we'd paid the money, but the docker with the keys had sloped off work early. I complained at the office window, where a man in a moth-eaten vest and the obligatory baseball hat shrugged his shoulders.

‘Your bike'll still be here tomorrow,' he advised philosophically.

There was nothing to be done, but the situation wasn't a dead loss. At least, we reasoned, we should be able to sort out the insurance in the morning and still be away before the weekend.

On our way out, we lined up the Oldsmobile behind four or five trucks at the dock gates, where the window on the security block was sited so high in order to accommodate the cabs that I couldn't reach the sill, even by stretching up. From somewhere above came the amplified command, ‘Next!' I clambered on to the bonnet of the car to confront a checkout lady who looked like James Bond's ghastly adversary from Smersh, the nightmarish Rosa Klebb. She was looking for trouble, but couldn't find any. I handed her a release form I'd been given for the car and she nodded me through reluctantly. Roz was pulling away when suddenly the barrier slammed down. A heavy-duty cop appeared from nowhere and leaned into her window. His blue shirt was covered in badges like a Boy Scout patrol leader, he had a broken nose and he smelt of yesterday's hot dog.

‘Gimme your release.'

‘I think we just did,' Roz replied.

‘That one on the dashboard.'

‘That's for our motorcycle. The bike's still in the pound. We'll need that form tomorrow.'

‘Gimme the form, lady.'

‘If we do that,' I broke in, ‘I'll have to go back to the customs for another, and I'm not taking the bike out now. There's only me and her and this car.'

At this point the cop, whose face had started out ugly, turned really unpleasant. I couldn't believe it.

‘Don't mess with me,' he rasped, loosening the press stud over his sidearm. ‘If I say I want the form, you give me the form.'

We gave him the form.

He screwed it into his trouser pocket and swaggered off back to his lair in the security block, where I supposed the lovely Rosa had the kettle on for a nice cup of tea. No suggestion of a ‘Thank you', or the hint of human courtesy. I thought about some poor sod having his motorbike spirited out of the docks unmolested by Rosa or her deputies, and hoped to God it wouldn't be mine. There is a world of difference between asking a London Bobby the way to Mornington Crescent and arguing with a policeman weighed down with gun, ammo and night stick, sporting an extrovert pair of handcuffs at his waistband.

The Great Insurance Stress Binge began back at Clark's place the following morning. Four months previously, I had called Harley-Davidson Insurance in the US to see how the land lay. A comprehensive policy for two bikes had been readily promised at reasonable rates.

‘No problem,' the obliging chap had advised, exuding the brotherhood of the road. ‘Just pick up the phone when you're ready.'

So I did, and was answered by a computer. I punched ‘five' for ‘new business' from the various electronic options and Harley propaganda came booming down the line instead of piped music. I enjoy this oddball mix of image mania and marketing gobbledegook. It beats garbled Mozart, and is an even better laugh than the Handel favoured by my accountant, which sounds like a Thai Temple dancer messing about with the cuckoo from a Swiss clock. Far better the roar of ‘four 1200-cc Sportsters flat out round the Daytona race track', or ‘the local chapter ridin' out of town on a Saturday morning', especially when the rumble of the bikes is back-dropped with seriously funky blues music.

The underwriters of Carson City, Arizona, where the H-D office offers round-the-clock service, were obviously having an early hamburger, because the wait went on for a long time. I was grooving to John Lee Hooker and the obscure sound of ‘a 1340-cc Evolution engine cooling off after a fast ride' when the line cut them dead and a young lady called Tracy came on. Idly thinking about John Lee and his wayward baby, I told her I was calling to insure my bikes. That, she reassured me, would be no problem, so I groped for my papers and credit card.

First I gave her details of the machines themselves.

Fine.

Next, she asked me where they would be garaged.

I chewed my pencil. They wouldn't be garaged at all, of course, they would be on the road. But I doubted that this was what she wanted to hear.

Doing the right thing as it turned out, I was mean with the truth. She needed to believe the bikes would be kept locked away, so I gave her Clark's address and advised her that we would be doing some touring. That satisfied the form she was filling in, and we swam along merrily until the final question.

‘What are the numbers of your Maryland driving licences?'

‘We don't have any, but we have international driving permits that are recognised by the Federal Highways Authorities.'

A pause.

Then, ‘Just one moment, sir.'

I stood by to dish out a plastic number that would bill me for the promised $600.

‘Sir, we cannot issue insurance to anyone domiciled in Maryland who does not hold a Maryland driving licence.' Tracy was back on the line and she was not carrying glad tidings.

‘Yes you can,' I contradicted politely, imagining her a simple country girl who needed coaching in international matters. ‘Your firm already quoted me. They knew I was from the UK and nobody said anything about Maryland licences.' Then I reminded her about the international driving permits.

‘What is your quote number, sir?'

With a sick feeling in my stomach, I had to admit I didn't have one. I had been optimistically content with the glib reassurance that H-D would deliver the goods. It had all seemed so simple at the time.

‘I'm sorry, then, you must be mistaken.' Tracy was getting going.

‘No, I'm damn well not. I've shipped my bike here on the strength of your company's promise.'

Tracy didn't want to hear about that. She held her stand and her composure without flinching.

‘I'm sorry, sir, I cannot issue insurance unless you have…'

‘Yes. OK. You've made yourself clear. I'll try buying insurance locally.'

The receiver fell like a guillotine.

What now?

Clark was on the way out to meet a group of well-wishers with no funds. I told him my troubles.

‘Jeez,' he shook his head. ‘Nothing's ever easy, is it? We have our own problems getting insured for out-of-state vehicles. If we're living away, we just register the bike in the state where we have the licence. You aren't supposed to, but it generally does the trick.'

‘But with my licence, it shouldn't make any difference what state the bikes are registered in.'

‘Don't you believe it. Bureaucrats and stupid regulations breed in this country. Getting anything done that doesn't fit the boxes on their forms is so difficult that you sometimes feel like giving up. Try my agents here in town, and the best of luck.'

He handed me their business card, hopped into his huge pick-up and buzzed off through the trees.