“Do you haf to ride to zees job?” The German Feminine asked.
I noticed something in her eyes which was altogether rare in the world of Germans- emotion.
“Why?” I asked.
“I sink you should haf a stronger helmet. Perhaps a Deutsche(German) helmet.”
“Shiiiit,” I laughed as I headed to the garage to get El Diablo, the big twin ass sled.
“Perhaps you should take the Stinkin’ Lincoln den,” she said, her voice trailing after me, referring to the 1970 Lincoln Continental.
  “What?! Jesus, woman! What are you talking about?! Ride in a car? Like the Car People! Vile serpent, I cast thee out tarnished spirit in the name of 80 spoke rims and apehangers!”
Reaching into my jacket I pulled out the pit bull scrotum which hung around my neck on a leather thong. I dipped my gloved fingers in and flicked holy water at the infected wench, water that had been blessed by the Chinaman. It was a unique ceremony, thousands of years old, according to the Chinaman, which involved his actually drinking the water and then filtering it for evil Car People spirits with his blessed kidneys. Later this rarified nectar was retrieved by casting it into the oil pan of a ‘ 59 Pan in total darkness with nothing but trained bats to direct the spray.
I keyed the padlock on the bull neck of El Diablo, spun the lock around my finger twice and holstered it on a belt loop, snapping it shut in one smooth motion. Two throttle cranks, ignition lights, choke, clutch, starter button, and El Diablo spoke.
“Abandon all hope, he who sits behind my chromed horns, for wide in the road and paved is the highway which leads unto hell and loose women. I shall deliver you to the Mother Asphalt where ye shall be judged according to your speed,” the custom pipes thundered as I performed my ritualistic throttle rolls in the underground cave where I stored the Beast.
   The throttle rolls weren’t really required to fulfill any specific task, but they sure got those lazy neighbors out of bed.
I stomped the Beast into gear, killed the choke, rolled the right grip, let fly the billet clutch handle and rode out of the garage on the fat backed Dunlop, leaning into the bouncing rocket as I smoked up skyline with melting rubber.
The first wheelie of the day is like breakfast. Skip it and you’ll feel like shit all afternoon. I felt the black and yellow tanks slam into my chest as I kept the freight train of rolling aluminum and chrome running harder and faster with each funny car rear wheel rotation, streaking down Via Campesina Avenue to the 4-way near the fountain. Marine Corps Lou snapped off a crisp salute as I flew past, the front end slamming into the pavement, the front tire squeaking as it was brought abruptly up to speed, much like the tires on landing jets at LAX.
The Beast split the quiet morning air, sending the retired Senators and surgically tightened movie producers of Palos Verdes Estates scurrying for cover, fists waving, false teeth clattering and spitting unprintable profanities lodged against my genealogy, my family tree and of course, my gas drinking, fire breathing bro, El Diablo, the Beast. Birds fell dead from the sky from the sheer volume of the engine and clattered to the ground, leaves turned black and fluttered from the limbs by the thousands as we passed. Small dogs died of heart attacks and women clawed at themselves, in lusty vengeance.
 The security of big money is a tough one to give up for the tramps and hussies and the old whitemeat billionaires who cluttered up my mountain roads in PV with their slow Rolls Royces and oversized Bentlys could offer this in spades. But they couldn’t offer an all night dance with the pelvic spreader or a goosed up wind tunnel ride down the 405 at one minute after the witch’s hour on a red piped outlaw bike with no tags, no registration, no numbers and no apologies. I’d had many a dusty vase offered to me by the local tamales, no doubt in hopes I’d knock the cobwebs off their brittle bone catchers, iron out a few spoiled wrinkles, pound out the creases worn deep from lack of use and too few hours spent inverted and barking, but I’d always declined. I prefer strong drink and even stronger women, Latins primarily, because they fuck back and I’ve yet to blow one up running her too hard for too long. The German Feminine was an exception to this rule, just like the occasional knucklehead that cranks out 300 horse and never throws a pushrod in a dozen trips across Bonneville. But other than the tall blonde, it was dark meat and aged porto from Portugal for me.
The old cats had the candy, but I had the horsepower. I was the black knight who shook them out of bed at 4 a.m. and blew the corks out of the bottles of their high dollar French whiskey. I’ve never seen the underside of a Bentley and that tells me they can’t even do a wheelie, or someone would have done it by now.
The old gals were silken hags who wreaked of $100 a drop perfume and ground monkey skull face powder with withered cunts that had pruned and shriveled years ago and to restore one to its proper working condition and then gear it up to really run right would be too much work when there were so many fine daughters of Spain sporting big stroker pussies with powdercoat lips and rigid frames all over L.A. and Miami.
I slid El Diablo sideways to the 4-way stop at Palos Verdes Drive and Chicco and eyed PV’s very finest. She was a local Spanish cop with a flog-me set of asses that kept her gunbelt tipped impossibly far forward, lips that pleaded like a schoolgirl for a kiss and coal black eyes which had to be handled with heat resistant tongs and asbestos gloves. She wore seven-inch heels cut from bucking-bull horns tipped with golden .45bullets, with sterling silver zippers that clenched their precious metal teeth all the way to her intersection in a desperate effort to restrain her five foot legs. A finer set of fat bob tanks never had a badge pinned to them. Her stance challenged any and all to try to overrun her walls and plunder her treasure. Sultry, defiant, dirty, lascivious, fecund and fertile, she mocked everything about her uniform which was supposed to stand for blunt authority and conformity, to stifling rules and idiotic regulations. Straining at the buttons and fasteners, her sweating body transformed her blue law enforcement nylon into a perverse stretch suit that trumpeted resistance to order, a dirty finger diddling of rules, the tonguing of regulations, the flat tracker, hard on sodomy of traffic laws and a salty, stinking, all night orgy that leaves the DMV sheets stained and torn.
Hanging off those hips, a sidearm took on a whole new meaning. Her handcuffs should have been covered in black reindeer antler fuzz and her nightstick doused in boiling caster oil. I would have paid money to have her use that canned hot sauce on my eyes while I rode her on the dyno in my bull spurs with a rodeo glove shoved up her rubbery brown ass.
I watched as she slowly, seductively beckoned the large lines of traffic to move forward, then stop, then charge ahead again, then stop. She teased the steel snake, titillated it, toyed with it, a sick rush hour foreplay and she was the temptress in full control, a highway domanatrix who was in desperate need of Relief. And the nerve she had, wearing white for the color of her gloves.
We’d had an encounter in the wee hours several months ago. I was pulled over on El Diablo, heading back from Bandit’s casa, thebikernet.com intergalactic headquarters, in San Pedro, about ten miles south on the coast. A massive grasshopper had found his final resting place on my red lensed Bolles. When you’re traveling a road like Portuguese Bend, which dangles along the cusp of the Palos Verdes Mountains, 800 feet above the rocks of the pounding Pacific, it’s best to have both eyes operational and a clear line of sight.
As I rubbed the grasshopper legs and wings off my glasses and onto my shirt tail, one of the PVPD SUV’s had rolled up alongside me.
“Do you need help?” came the breathy offer.
I had eyed the fiery Spaniard. Oh, I needed help all right. And she might at last be the person who could give it to me.
“I was just sitting here, cleaning this suicidal hopper off my glasses,” I said.
Her burgundy lips threw the moon’s cool blue light back in its face.
“So everything’s all right? You don’t need any- help?” she asked.
“Not tonight,” I said. I wanted to eat my gas caps. The German Feminine was expecting me and I was already a half an hour late. If I showed up soaked in the hot pepper scent of Latin estrogen and uterus lube, there’d be hell to pay indeed. Few peoples can throw a fit like full blooded Germans. She might well crank up the gas and fire an ATF “non-flammable” pyrotechnic round like the kind they used at Waco through the window from a hilltop and watch the whole thing disintegrate into flames, glass and concrete particles.
The Spaniard turned to me and slowly waved me toward her. I clicked El Diablo in gear and rolled toward the ravishing vixen. Oh how she needed relief. But a good farmer knows that just because a cherry is red, does not mean it’s ripe and the patient grower waits, waits, waits until the outer flesh on the cherry becomes ripe and thin with pressure, until the mere suggestion of a hummingbird’s beak would cause it to burst. No, now was not the time. One must wait until the cherry has grown to double its size in the warm sunshine, until the navel where the stem is attached weeps with sucrose and fructose, sweet tears of anxious sexuality, a liquid petition for relief. Patience is the first sign of a true artist.
As I rolled by I could sense her heat. Had I but merely reached out and touched her, she would have instantly been heavy with child, fallen to her back and pushed a raging Viking infant through the damp fabric of her cop cloth.
Another day, I thought, as I glanced at her in the rearview mirror and saw her continue to search the flowing traffic for relief.
On Pacific Coast Highway I cranked the Beast up into third, rattling the straights and spooking the gray faced accountants who were hurrying to their doom with humorous determination. The German Feminine’s voice echoed in my ear again, “…you should take the Stinkin’ Lincoln,” as I waded into the hated Car People.
These were the enemy and they were especially menacing today. CarPeople were savages who surrounded themselves in rolling coats of armor which they used to smash, crush and demolish goodly bikers. The Car People were a diseased race, entirely unpredictable, cursed by the winged demon of the bottomless pit, frozen in burning ice, forever flapping his wings and sending forth a flame that burned souls and shades alike. Created by forcing city buses and locomotives to inbreed at the point of a poisoned trident, the master of eternal woe made the malformed Car People with their extra wheels and overgrown bumpers and loosed them as a steel pox on the holy world of bikers.
Blown tires, high speed front end wobbles, hail, there is nothing a biker hates worse than Car People. They are the only natural enemy of the biker. So whenever the opportunity presents itself, I make any and all gestures which can render their day a certified disaster. Dented doors, missing mirrors, busted glass, shaved paint jobs, all part of the love I show Car People on a regular basis.
Winding the handcrank hard, a pale, shivering, wisp of a man wearing a brown suit, brown tie, brown shoes, brown slacks and no doubt, brown underwear, tried desperately to roll up his window as I passed. I reached in, snatching off his brown toupee as I hurtled past. It was a “Ralph Lournette, Brown, Size 11, Extra Natural Hairpiece” according to the tag. Swerving madly, swatting at his bald skull, the accountant veered off the road and slammed into a parking lot pay box. I stuffed the hide into my vest. A man never knows when he might run into the next swap meet and a freshly skinned Nutria Rat pelt might go for a pretty penny to biker with the taste and upbringing to recognize a high quality river rat skirt.
The Car People are especially menacing today, I thought, as I braked hard and cut around a city bus that pulled into traffic without so much as a blinker. I could smell violence in the air and I was surrounded by the bastards on all sides. Everywhere I looked a Car Person snarled and grimaced at me. They were hungry and I represented relief to them. It had been a long time since they’d run down a biker and been allowed the orgasmic pleasure of skidding through his heart and guts. The Car People were restless, slightly mad, demented and on the hunt. They swarmed me in packs, trying to separate me from the mass of rolling steel so they could crowd me into a bridge rail or cement embankment and then do burnouts on my intestines.
But I was on to their game and easily out rode the cowardly circus geeks and left them gagging on the lovely smell of fogged Dunlop and tacky asphalt.
I was riding north on Pacific Coast Highway, or PCH as it’s known to the locals. It winds along the very edge of the coast from Washington state to L.A., at which point it becomes a captured eagle, running through the beach cities, reduced to speed limit zones, red lights and six lanes of very heavy traffic.
Three north and three south, no waiting, I thought, as I split lanes and cut between the Car People who were sitting at a red light. It’s legal to split lanes in California, an obscure ordinance which was originally passed with the idea that air cooled motorcycles would burn up sitting in the very regular Los Angeles traffic jams.
But it had opened up a whole new world of danger for the biker. It’s a short ride from life to the other side when you blow the gap known as No Man’s Land. One aggressive move on the part of the CarPeople and you suddenly find yourself being pinched, crushed between the rolling river of flying metal, sailing sports cars, big semis and illiterate illegal aliens driving vehicles that were scrapped by licensed drivers years ago. And as every biker knows, it requires a mere bump, a tap that would amount to nothing more than an exchange of foul words and insurance information among the Car People, to send a biker cartwheeling to the pavement to be run over ten, twenty, sixty times before the flow of Detroit, Jap and Euro iron could be skidded to a halt. By that time, all that’s left of the biker are a few good stories and a series of scattered limbs and organs, all blended into burned tire rubber and blacktop, gleaming red and black streaks under the California sun, with the occasional shred of bloody leather or denim wrapped tightly around a dripping drive shaft.
All it takes is one dumb ass talking on his cell phone, putting on eyeliner and trying to read how his stocks did in the morning paper, to change lanes without looking. When you see one coming it’s from the side, a sudden emergence of Buick tail light and back bumper, moving to intersect you as you pass or perhaps a lateral hit, the left side of an SUV made by the people who brought you Pearl Harbor, headed your way, while a110 pound dingbat in a suit and yuppie noose lays on the horn, trying to pass the guy in front of him, somehow entirely oblivious of the thundering biker beside him.
Whenever they come, they come fast and with the blind intent of killing the man on two wheels. I had cracked many a Car Person in the chops at the next traffic light, who had pinched me so hard that I had to physically reach over and whack their car to put them on notice that they were about to commit vehicular manslaughter. Of course this was often followed by many foul slanders from the Car Person who was entirely offended that the rolling Viking next to him had dared to thump his wonderful status symbol and save him 20 years in the hole. But they never seem to be so saucy, once the light turns red and a hundred cars pin the min on all sides and bring them to a halt. Then the kickstand comes down and the hammer drops with it. It seems everyone is a brawler when they’re flying down the highway and I’ve had to reach through many a rolled up glass to educate a Car Person who thought it fair to holler and spit fire and lightening after running me into the shoulder or the car next to me, who then panicked and realized that the Zebra was coming to call and daddy wasn’t there to save them.
It’s always the same, they have that terrified look of adrenaline mixed with running offal on their face and they rear back in their seatbelt in horror as the first few punches land. Then they shriek and holler as you walk back to your idling bike, calling for help or perhaps just hanging there silently in their shoulder belt, dripping on their Calvin Whatever britches. And it’s interesting how careful all the other Car People in the immediate area are about not crowding you as you blast off that light. Car People are essentially cowardly like their cousin, the hyena, which is why they almost always hunt in packs. One sees a lone Car Person try to take out a biker now and then, but they must be very hungry and often such a lone attack is a result of a bot fly eating into the brain and driving the Car Person utterly insane.
I rolled along past a flower shop in Redondo Beach. A tall Hawaiian woman wearing a short dress and barefoot, was bent over, arranging an array of brilliant sunflowers in an aluminum water bucket outside her shop. Her loose breasts hung wonderfully in the brilliantly colored material and made me think of a cantaloupe tree or perhaps a vineyard with honeydew melons hanging from the vines. I would have to buy some flowers for the German Feminine, I thought as I rumbled past on El Diablo. Perhaps many flowers.
The day was a balmy, breezy Tuesday and I was in no hurry, so I rolled along slightly faster than the enemy. I called my own shots and made my own hours and there was no boss or corporate geek above me who had authoritarian rule over my time. I got to work when I felt like it and stayed as long or as short as I liked. And on the good mornings, when the bike felt tight and smooth, the asphalt was fresh and well laid and the white lines flicked by like good conversation, I didn’t rush the ride.
The traffic pulled up a long hill as we rolled over the city of Redondo Beach, a funky beach town sandwiched between all the other beach towns of L.A. I saw the light turn green and the rightmost lane was open and free. I swung over and handed a business card to a bro on a Ducati as I rolled past. He took it, read the address, bikernet.com, and nodded tome as he stuffed it into his vest pocket.
Steaming up the big incline, I clicked into third and passed the 35 mile an hour mark, letting the two hundred pound flywheels turn El Diablo at a steady 40.
