“Mama always told me not to look into the eyes of the sun,
But mama, that’s where the fun is…”
Bruce Springsteen
Just the other day I was belting along the Wisemans Ferry Road, and I was suddenly gripped by a fierce nostalgia. Locals will know this is the road that runs from up near Peats Ridge, then down through Spencer along the Hawkesbury River and spits you out at the Wisemans Ferry ferry crossing, or if you carry on past the ferry onto Settlers Road, you’ll end up at St Albans.
I don’t ride that road much anymore, but I once rode it a lot. Especially back in the day when I was in my early-20s, and blazed with outlaw glory like an antisocial supernova full of drugs, bourbon, and bad manners.
Things, quite obviously, were different then. And what we could and did do back then, would today trigger the End Of All Safety, a complete social collapse, and thus usher in the Zombie Rapture. Or so I’m now constantly told.
But I know what I did back then, just as all the mean-eyed old bastards who might be reading this know what they did back in those halcyon days. And it was great.
So, on this particular Saturday, I was very pleased to be taking my new girlfriend, Lynette, out for a ride. She’s now my wife, and I have promised her I would treat this tale with dignity and respect, but some tales need to be told in the way they happened, and you need to appreciate some people change over time, just as the times and mores themselves change. So, we’ll see how we go, shall we? I’m sure she’ll let me know if I have failed.
It was summer, it was hot, and I was fucking glorious. My reflection in shop windows affirmed this each time I looked – and I looked a lot, for there was much to see. I had a candy-red stroked Shovelhead with vast apehangers, a bouncy little solo seat and a cruel bitch pad with matching stitching, shotgun pipes that staccato-spat aural hate at the world, and there was a Bowie knife on my belt to reaffirm my “Oh please fuck with me” attitude that upset my sainted mother so much.
By contrast, my new girlfriend was just out of her teens, and not at all upset by any of this. Lynette was somewhat of a firecracker herself, and she had driven me completely mad with lust by constantly exploding in my vicinity. The whole skin-tight jeans, high-heeled boots, and barely-there tops were the fuse. And that fuse was always lit. Plus we were in that amazing time in our relationship when everything was new, everything was possible, and all of our cups were runnething right the fuck over.
We were also spectacularly broke. We’re not at all well-off right now, either, and have never been financially secure, but at least I can put petrol in my vehicle and food in the fridge. Back then, not so much. We were both working, but we were also both spending every cent we had being firecrackers. My money was entirely dedicated to keeping the Shovelhead working, and her paypacket was committed to simply surviving. The two credit cards we had between us were always maxed out – and I remember she used to try and make me see I was wrong in my view that if the bank was stupid enough to give me a credit card, then it deserved everything it got.
On that day, I had maybe ten dollars in cash – all of which was needed for petrol, which I fully planned to buy at some stage, but was far too involved with the way she hung onto me, and sometimes bit me playfully on the neck as a I levered that wretched, hateful, but utterly magnificent Shovelhead through Sydney on our way to Wisemans.
I kept telling her to stop it, because it’s not easy speeding though Sydney on a stroked Shovelhead with 24-inch apes. You’ve got to concentrate. And that’s hard to do when a 20-year-old nuclear-hot blonde who smells like sin and strawberries is hanging off your back and gnawing on your neck. I didn’t really want her to stop, and she didn’t because she was evil, so I did the best I could not to kill us both.
“Can we stop at a bottle-shop?” she said into my neck as we sat at a set of lights.
“You want me to rob it?” I asked. “I told you I have ten bucks and we need that for petrol.”
“I think there’s enough on my credit card to get us some bourbon,” she giggled.
And she was right. Back then, all credit card transactions were mechanical. The vendor would put your card in a small machine, place a two-page credit card slip over it, then drag the top of the machine from side to side, imprinting the card details onto the two-page slip, which is when he’d then ask you to sign the slip. If you kept your purchases under $50 there was no need for him to call the bank to see if you had the available funds or were a piece of impoverished scamming shit. Much of Australia’s working-class economy operated exactly like this, and on this day, there was enough on Lynette’s credit card to secure a bottle of Jim Beam, and thus our mutual happiness.
I unscrewed the bottle on the footpath in front of the bottle-o, watched as she had a belt, then had one myself, even though she’d smeared the business-end of the bottle with her crazy strawberry-flavoured lipstick. Just so you know, in case it comes up, Jim Beam actually tastes kinda OK when filtered through your girlfriend’s lipstick. Then I kicked the Shovel in the guts, and roared off up the road.
Now, you also have to know that terrifying Shovelhead with terrifyingly hot pillion or not, I never “cruised”. Cruising was something those HOG idiots invented when Harley presented them with the Evolution engine, and enabled these twonks to ride a marque that made relatively few mechanical demands on the owners. Us outlaw Shovelhead owners were different. We went everywhere as fast as we dared because we knew at any second something might fall off, explode, or cease functioning, and it was best to be as close to your intended destination as possible.
Of course, as we made our way up to Peats Ridge, I would slow down from time to time, pull the bottle of Beam out of my vest, pass it back to Lynette so she could open it, take a drink and pass it back to me. Then she’d cap it, I’d shove it back in my vest and twist the throttle again.
The cops were of no concern. There just weren’t many of them around. Random Breath-Testing had not yet become much of a thing, and truth be told, I did not give much of a fuck about much of anything other than having a great time, on a bike, with my mates, and an array of hot bitches, as often as possible. It’s hard today to even conceive I lived like that once, but I did. A lot of us did.
Anyway, about half-a-bottle into our journey, a demonic and mutual lust seized us. I had been percolating with my usual desire for my new girlfriend all morning, but the bourbon, the ride, the way she held me, and her neck-gnawing had ratcheted my desire into the red zone. I was now squirming in my seat and trying to adjust my aroused he-vegetables into some semblance of comfort.
And you cannot hide that kinda shit from your pillion. She knows when you’re groping yourself. And she was squirming a little too. This was a dead giveaway she was on some kind of redline as well, because Lynette was a superb pillion, ie. She sat there and did not interfere with what I needed to be doing. Now she was hugely interfering with what I was doing. And on that shitty winding and bumpy bastard of a road, things just got more exciting.
I pulled over. There was a lovely big rock right on the river bank. There was not much room for cars to avoid hitting my bike, but I was not thinking clearly.
We plonked ourselves down on that rock, and for the next half-hour or so, amused ourselves greatly, only pausing to wet our mouths from the dwindling bourbon supply. So, we were both drunk, which is something to keep in mind.
Things were heating up, but both us understood that consummation, as it were, could not occur here on the rock. There were a few reasons. One, it was brutally uncomfortable – and while I could have performed even as my knees were ground to meat-paste, I didn’t want her bruised up. Two, we may well have fallen into the river as the passion consumed us – which had almost just happened and we both still had our pants on. And three, cars were whizzing past less than two metres away and could see everything. Lynette actually had to talk me down after I’d jumped up and made ready to pursue the last pervert who’d beeped at us.
“Let’s go somewhere else,” she said.
I was then and am now, a slave to everything she asks. And I was so gonna take her “somewhere else”. We got up, adjusted ourselves, which was harder for me because of the way our respective plumbing was arranged, and I hared off up the road to “somewhere else”.
This, friends and relatives, proved to be no easy thing to find. Next time you’re riding up that road, consider where you, at the age of 24, would take your smoking hot girlfriend to make the beast with two backs. See how you go.
Anyway, there I was, alternately hammering and slowing down, my head swiveling like one of them sideshow ping-pong clowns, searching for a place I could take my quivering girl and make her quiver some more.
Nothing presented itself. Each time I thought I’d found a likely spot, Lynette would disapprove of my choice, it was not private enough, or some hippy freak was nailing his hairy-legged woman inside a rocking VW kombi, and we wanted a little privacy.
Twice I rode to the ferry crossing and back the way we’d come. We had both forgotten about the bourbon in our urgency to find “someplace”, but there was still a third of a bottle tucked inside my vest next to my Deep Purple-drumline heartbeat. It was hot, she was hot, I was hot, the Shovelhead was indicating it too was hot by missing and backfiring every now and again, but I was determined and not about to give in to its threatening mechanical bullshit.
Then, after approaching a small valley for the second time, I decided the grass in that bastard was tall enough, swerved off the road and rode straight into the shrubbery. We bounced and weaved for maybe two hundred metres and the grass was at about handlebar height, so I stopped. A part of me that could still think straight was hoping none of the yellow shit would catch fire when I parked the Shovel, which was approaching Chernobyl-meltdown heat. And I could smell it cooking the grass that was bunched up under its guts.
So, yes, it was thick, it was soft, and we could not be seen from the road – apart from maybe the very top of the apehangers (because 24-inches is 24-inches), but you had to be looking.
We immediately went at it like frill-necked lizards. And we sure did flatten some grass. Loose change fell out of my pockets, and joined Lynette’s hair-ties and sunnies in the thick grass. We never did find her sunnies. But it was OK, because she’d borrowed them off a bloke she was seeing at the time because they were expensive and they made her look really hot. He was a merchant banker and his name was, I thought appropriately, “Kneel”, though I may have got the spelling wrong. Lynette stressed a bit about the lost sunnies, so I’d generously offered to go see Kneel and explain the situation to him. She felt that would not result in any positive outcomes, but when I did go and see Kneel a few weeks later, the sunnies briefly came up in what turned out to be a mostly one-sided conversation about how he was to stop calling her, because the only answer he was gonna get was me, in person.
Anyway, an hour or so later, we tidied ourselves up as best we could, and Lynette was always much better at that shit than me. There was not much that could be tidied in my case, and all I really did was put my pants back on, and check to see if my wallet, keys, and knife were present. She, by contrast, combed out her hair (and made me find a hair-tie), re-applied her ridiculous lipstick, and looked just as stupidly hot as she had before I took her into the long grass.
“Any bourbon left?” she asked.
“Yeah, a bit,” I said, holding up the bottle.
“I got some Coke back at my place,” she smiled.
“We should probably go there then,” I grinned back. “It’s rough straight from the bottle.”
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