SEVEN CANS OF COKE ZERO, THE PEEEP-PYOO-PEEEP BIRD & THE 2024 WHISKEY FIRE LONG HAUL STREET GLIDE

And that is probably the longest heading to anything I’ve ever written. But it needed to be so. And yes, of course I will tell you why because I love you and want you to be happy.

I like being happy too. Who doesn’t? If you said the US Democrats following the Orange Brute relegating them to the bench, you’d be right. Very sad. Oh well.

Anyway, this is about my happiness. And me heading into the NSW mid-west aboard a Street Glide Long Haul in 42-degree heat is the dictionary definition of happiness.

Let me just get this bike stuff out of the way, so you’ll have context. Because context is everything when it comes to happiness.

Harley, bless its heart, has been blinging up its game-changing new touring range and feeding them to me like the wretched bike-junkie I am. In this instance, it’s taken a stock Street Glide (RRP $48,465) and turned it into what it calls a “Long Haul”. You’d be correct in assuming this means its designed for big days in the saddle and an ability to carry lots of stuff.

To this end, it’s fitted a bunch of stuff to the stock bike. The crucial bits, as far as I was concerned, were the super-comfy Sundowner seat, an eight-inch Splitter screen, and the Tour Pack with a backrest pad (which my wife simply adored, so I adored it too). The whole thing is gorgeously painted in what Milwaukee calls “Whiskey Fire” – which is one of those colours nice people ooh and aah over. The fact I have a neck tattoo and the Highway Patrol hates me, ensures I will never be mistaken for one of those people, but it is a killer paintjob.

Once you add in the fitting hardware, the actual fitting, and what to me was unnecessary stuff, like the heel-shifter and some added deflectors, you can add $4916 to the price, which brings it to $53,702.

What you’re getting for your dollars is a proper grand two-up tourer. But since my wife is not remotely interested in hammering out west in 42-degree heat, I was all on my own. Interestingly, this did not at all impact on my happiness. She got her ride the week before. It involved lunch and wine, her ensconced in supreme comfort on the back, and vaguely good behaviour on the King’s highways from me.

Solo trips are different. And since Harley has now built a touring bike you can easily and comfortably ride at 140-170 all day on those big empty roads like the rat-bastard you are, happiness is assured, is it not?

I left early to beat most of the heat, but it was nudging 38 when I hit Mendooran. Even at my preferred touring pace, fuel economy was stupid good, and the larger screen was so efficient, I could leave my visor up. The stock screen can wash some dirty air at you at speed, but naturally, this varies from rider to rider and helmet to helmet. I’d be fitting this lipped Splitter screen in a heartbeat to my Street Glide. It’s so effective, the rain (which I rode in all the way home) just beads on your visor and you have to move your head to the side to sluice it off.

It was 40 when I arrived at Collie Hotel. I love this place. I have lots of history there. Those mad old days are long gone now, but the pub is still hugely welcoming and offers some great food – and I have it on good authority it still chucks up the odd wild night now and again. Isolation is no bad thing in its case.

I was in Warren just as the temperature hit 42. A few times a year, I go and visit Johnny and Red Mick. We go back a-ways. And while I visit them on lots of different bikes, they both ride Harleys, because it doesn’t make much sense to ride anything else up there. There are no corners. And smashing along those big open roads on a thundering hog makes all kinds of sense to people like me. Hot country chicks do not flood their panties if you arrive on a V-Strom.

Fiona, who runs the Macquarie Valley Motel where I normally stay, knows me. She doesn’t get a lot of Mihailovics up that way. She is a most forgiving lady. She forgave me and my late brother Gary the night we pounded on one of her motel doors trying to wake up William Watson so he could drink more with us. We loudly threatened to deflower him, maybe put some chair-legs inside him, and do things to his man-boobs he might not have liked in the cruel light of day unless he opened his door immediately.

The door duly opened, but it was not William who greeted us. It was a small and very frightened Japanese man wrapped in a towel who thought the Yakuza had come for him. Of course we apologised, for we were not beasts, and we offered him compensation-beer. We also offered Fiona compensation-beer when she came out and told us to go to bed. Neither accepted, and we did then go to bed.

There was no room in the motel on this occasion. There was a big funeral in town, and it was all booked out, so Fiona gave me a beaut cabin – spotless and well-appointed – in the caravan park behind the motel. She’d even turned the air-conditioner on so that I walked directly into a fridge. And it was wonderful.

Johnny had been concreting all morning and when I rolled up to his place an hour or so later, he’d put up his tools and was also sitting inside with his air conditioner.

I could not believe how well the bastard looked.

“I stopped drinking five months ago,” he grinned.

“Good for you,” I said. And I meant it.

Lots of blokes I know (and have known) are monstrous pissheads. Drinking piss is their life, and it’s very much the cultural norm in Australia. We perversely pride ourselves on it. I drank a lot myself once. Smashing bulk piss was what everyone did, and if you weren’t smashing bulk piss, there was something wrong with you. Well, there was nothing wrong with me, Goddamnit. So I smashed bulk piss with the best of them.

I stopped doing that a long time ago. Please understand I do not presume to lecture anyone, or sit in judgement on what anyone does. You do you. I’m not your mother or your keeper. And I have done more heinous shit than I can admit to since the statute of limitations does not run out on many of my sins. And all of it has been done as a result of necking piss. I do not think I have ever belted anyone sober. But I have flogged tonnes of idiots drunk. They were drunk too. That’s why we were belting each other.

I guess I just got over it. I was sick of the hangovers. I was tired of the problems I was causing myself, both to my health and to my family and friends. Yes, there is truth in alcohol. “In vino veritas”, as the Romans observed. But it’s invariably an ugly and wretched truth, and the root cause of the vast majority of social harm in this country. That’s just undeniable.

I still have the odd beer or wine or whatever. But my days of smashing piss because it’s what everyone else is doing and I want to fit in, are long gone.

And so are Johnny’s, as it seems.

Which kind of chucked up a few new interesting conundrums.

Here’s an immutable fact: There is only so much Coke Zero a man can drink in a pub.

Here’s another one: People who are not drunk do not enjoy the company of people who are drunk.

And the last fact: People who are not drunk fight heaps better than people who are – but will usually not choose to do so, simply because they ain’t drunk.

Of course, there is a reason I’m telling you all this. Yes, it’s context. I told you. Context is important.

Anyway, Johnny had organised Red Mick to meet us and we were going to ride to Nevertire because the food there is simply awesome. Nevertire is 19 very fast kilometres from Warren, and it’s famous for being were the legendary Oxley Highway starts. Other than that, its just a bunch of wheat silos, a railway siding, and an excellent pub.

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Motoring

4

THE RIDE MODE GIMMICK

13 August 20224

We hammered out there like we meant business and the rain clouds were starting to look serious. It’s Big Sky country here. And you can see the storms coming for miles.

I’d already had a two Coke Zeros in Warren, so I opted for a Lemon, Lime and Bitters with my steak. But then I had another Coke Zero before leaving. It was just on 830pm, so it was almost dark, the wind had picked up, rain was coming, and spidery wee tumbleweeds were rolling everywhere. We rode even faster on the way back to Warren, and Johnny threw a dead bird at me when it bounced off his rubbish headlight and went over my shoulder.

He told me later his headlight is so bad he was using mine instead – and Harley really does make some good lumen-chuckers on its recent models. I told him I thought he’d forgotten to turn his on at all.

It was dark when we pulled up in front of the Warren Golf Club. There were not a lot of people inside, but there was the glorious Raylene. She was the barmaid at the Club House Hotel when I visited during Covid. And she enforced the sitting down and mask-wearing rules with a hilarious swearing savagery that simply captivated me.

She ruled that pub like a cuss-mouthed warrior queen, and she now rules the Golf Club. She served us up another few Coke Zeros, which was kinda dumb on my part, I was starting to realise. I was now so full of caffeine and Coke Zero chemicals, sleep was not something that looked to be a thing.

Red Mick had a beer instead. But when I am awash in Coke Zero (and seven times 375mm is pretty fucking awash), I’m not capable of drinking beer.

Did the lack of alcohol impact on our enjoyment that night? Not at all. We still laughed, we told stories, we offered to find Raylene a rich Indian husband, and we did not at all turn into loud-mouthed fuckwits like we’d done so many times in the past. Raylene was nonplussed. We were not the usual clientele she ejected into the street at about this time.

Around 10.30 we called it quits and I rolled back to my cabin. I was tired, but I was Coke Zero incarnate. In some ways, this was actually worse than having 27 beers in my belly. With 27 beers, a man is going to pass out and sleep, is he not?

A man with 2.6-litres of Coke Zero in his guts is not. I lay there in the darkness, bathed in silence, with all sorts of issues. The bed was too short. The pillow was made of misery. The donna was taking turns being too hot, too crinkly, or too doonery.

And then there was the damned Peeep-Pyoo-Peep bird. May a comet slaughter it and its kin and render the earth free from its satanic fuckery forever. When you’re jacked up on caffeine and trying to sleep, silence is crucial. And Warren is quiet at night. Like a tomb. Apart from this be-cunted bird, which lives near the caravan park in some wetland swamp, and makes the “peeep-pyoo-peeep” noise over and over. But not even at regular intervals, so you can get used to it like the ticking of a clock. It would make its noise, then it would make it again 30 seconds later. Then you’d lie there waiting for the noise again and the fucker would be silent, and you’d think maybe some rat had eaten it, then it would make the noise again.

At 330am I was still awake and it was still peeping its shit into the night. Of course, my inability to sleep was making everything terrible. The bed was a torture rack. My pillows and doona might as well have been hessian sacks for all the comfort they offered.

I eventually fainted. My body had conquered the Coke Zero. But I woke just before six, because that’s what time I normally get up. I was sandy-eyed and it was raining. The bird was silent. Maybe the rain had killed it. Maybe a crocodile had eaten it. Maybe God had removed it from the Earth. But I do not believe in God, so maybe not.

I set off home, chasing the rain. The weather moves from west to east, and I was heading east. And I was going much quicker than the clouds. So now and again I’d stop, the rain would stop, then I’d catch it again as I made my way. I didn’t mind it. I had good gear on, and it was a pleasant change from the oven I’d ridden in yesterday. The Street Glide made it all kinda effortless. You just sit there, and it wafts along as fast as you please.

I hit a bird somewhere the other side of Gilgandra. There were lots of them around drinking from the standing water on the road. I’d passed a mob of emus a while back, but they were well off the road when I photographed them. Not keen on hitting one of them. But smaller birds just bounce off the front of the Street Glide like feathery blobs of joy. I just lower my head a bit when I realise impact is imminent, then “whonk!”, some feathers, a big smile, and I ride on. It’s most cathartic.

Truth be told, I’d had an excellent time, sleep-deprivation and all. There was no-one to blame but myself. No-one forced that Coke Zero into me.

The Street Glide Long Haul is simply made for this kind of riding and these roads. And we have a lot of these roads in Australia, which explains why Harley sells so many of these bikes. The convenience of its hard luggage cannot be underplayed. It really is like having a boot on a car. Sure, I am still happy to strap shit to my bike when I need to, but when you don’t have to, you really appreciate the benefits.

As for Coke Zero, I’m thinking seven in a single seating is not good. To Johnny and Red Mick – you don’t need to return shouts of soft drink, OK? And now all three of us have learned something.