THE ECSTASY OF SPEED

This is an entirely fictitious story. It never happened. I made it all up. So help me God. Oh, and the opinions expressed in this fictional piece do not remotely reflect the author’s personal views. It’s fiction, OK? It’s just my imagination.

I’m a filthy degenerate. No two ways about it. I speed every chance I get. I always have. I always will. My licence has been shredded more times than a Liberal senator’s meeting notes.

You’d think I’d have learned my lesson by now. But some dogs can’t be trained. They remember when they were wolves. And now and again, that old primeval switch gets flicked in their brains, and they howl at the moon no matter how often you’ve tried to beat compliance into them.

So when a filthy degenerate like this, like me, is given a Hayabusa – presumably because the giver understands some old wolves remain in a world of boot-licking lap-dogs – there’s going to be some howling.

The day was bright and clean. There was a spring zest in the air. The crushing summer heat was still some weeks away, but pretty girls are putting on their bright summer dresses, and filthy degenerates are checking their tyre pressures.

My plan was simple. The best plans always are. Belt the Hayabusa down Mother Putty in the morning. It’s week-day empty and a man can apply himself. He can pretend he’s faster than he is. That said, on a Hayabusa, he’s faster than he thinks.

This new Hayabusa was greeted with bizarre opprobrium when it appeared earlier this year. Lovers of the model – mainly fat, twice-a-year-riding fossils – started mewling about how they’d been betrayed by Suzuki because the new and long-awaited Hayabusa did not have 250 horsepower and a supercharger. “Suzuki is dead to me!” they declared on social media.

Yeah, OK. None of them had actually ridden the new Hayabusa. So it is quite right to turn a firehose on them and laugh as they tumble, writhe, and choke on their own dumbness.

What they should have been doing is putting Suzuki’s penis in their mouths out of sheer gratitude. Yes, I know Suzuki doesn’t have a penis. But if it did, and it produced a better, more agile, far more modern, and slightly faster Hayabusa, then the Hayabusa Faithful need to get on their knees, open wide, and neck the big blue Hamamatsu knob with tears of gratitude streaming from their eyes.

What do you think is going on here, bitches? This is 2021. The world is brave and new and even Aldous Huxley is appalled. He’s dead, but he’s still appalled at what has happened.

There is no place for bikes like Hayabusas anymore. They no longer compute. They are like sabre-toothed tigers. They terrify Royal Enfield-riding idiot-children, and make the Highway Patrol masturbate like chimps. They make no sense in a world that has sold its soul to Safety and eschewed the sacred Ecstasy of Speed.

A bike that looks and goes like the Hayabusa, that has been built for no reason other than to go fast, and exists only because there are wolves at Suzuki who know there are other wolves still out there, is a bike to be celebrated.

Giving one to a filthy degenerate like me is both a blessing and a curse. Which is what life is and what life does. It blesses you and curses you, often at the same time. Deal with it.

Anyway, that’s enough horseshit philosophising. I need to get on with my fiction story…

So after riding the Mother in the morning, I intended to attend to various business things in Sydney, and then slab it home on the freeway. I didn’t feel like dodging the deranged menagerie of native fauna ruining every racing line on the Putty Road. I’ve hit a kangaroo at 180km/h. I emerged unscathed. It is just not possible that will ever happen again if I hit another kangaroo. That little reservoir of luck is empty.

The Mother is strange like that. I have ridden it at night many times. There have been nights when not a single animal appeared. There were nights when it looked like a petting zoo.

So freeway. The sun was going down and traffic was surprisingly light. Now there are times when the freeway, any freeway, is awful. Weekends, pretty much. That is when people who only drive on weekends, make their way to various freeways and proceed to ruin everyone’s shit.

You know what I’m talking about. Hogging the right-hand-lane, overtaking vehicles doing the speed limit two km/h faster than the speed limit, tailgating, swerving wildly, and so on.

And because I am a wretched and vile degenerate, I know I could shoot all of them in the face with a high-powered handgun and still sleep the sleep of the righteous. So I tend to stay off freeways on weekends lest I give in to my disgusting and shameful urges.

But on weekdays, if the planets are aligned, and everyone’s testicles are sitting comfortably in their pants, freeways can be a bit of a lark.

I chose a Christian velocity, some 10-kays over the limit, as I surveyed the terrain. And the terrain must always be surveyed prior to slipping the chain. You gotta get a feel for where the Highway Patrol might be. You gotta suss out whether it’s a blanket-coverage kinda day, a sit-and-masturbate-in-the-BMW kinda day, or a fuck it, let them do what they want kinda day.

The Hayabusa is happy to commute, happy to scratch, and happy to tool along at 120km/h. It’s ticking over at that speed. Its sassy Cadillac clocks aren’t doing anything much except looking back at you with dark promises each time you glance at them.

And I glance at them a lot on the freeway. My eyes are constantly roaming. Road ahead, road behind, blind spots, clocks, road ahead, road behind, blind spots, clocks…

I stopped at Brooklyn Bridge to make a call. A Highway Patrol car came out of the parking lot, and gassed it hard past me, heading north. My way. I’m sure there were ropes of cop-spaff hanging from the windscreen.

Cops hate Hayabusas. Everyone knows that. And they hate the filthy degenerates riding them. They are taught at Cop School that these bikes make their Highway Patrol cars look like lumbering bison. Few things throw you at the horizon faster than a Hayabusa. A Five-series BMW diesel is not one of those things. And neither is a V8 Commodore.

I bask in that hatred. It makes my dick hard. If it was a liquid, I would drink it. The cops have hated me and my ilk for decades. I’m OK with that. There would be something wrong with the world if they didn’t hate me. I just hate them back. Nothing else is possible or appropriate.

I have been pulled over on a Hayabusa. It was on the Snowy Mountains Highway. I got booked for 20km/h over the limit. Which, I was thinking at the time, a better result than getting done for 120 over the limit. Which, I was also thinking at the time, is what would have been the deal if his timing was better than mine.

And we all know it’s about the timing, don’t we? Pick a time, pick a place, roll the dice. Same as it ever was. Sure, the stakes and penalties are much higher and more awful now, and that’s kept the bitches out of the playground. Fine by me. Someone has to ride Royal Enfields, right?

The Highway Patrol car that shot off ahead of me at Brooklyn Bridge had pulled some tradie champion over ten kays further on. His fully-pimped Ford Ranger looked very tough, bathed as it was in police lights. I hope he took lots of pictures.

I motored on and ahead of me I saw a Ducati Multistrada. I glanced at my speedo. It said 125. I made it say 140. This happens very fast on a Hayabusa, and it may have caught the Multistrada fellow by surprise when his mirrors were full of Hamamatsu degeneracy.

He dialled it up to 160. That happens quickly on Multistradas, and there we were descending into Ourimbah at 160-170 – with only the tiniest pause for the speed camera at the start of the descent.

I felt some shaming was in order. I twisted that thing on the right and shot past the Multistrada. Hayabusas accelerate very, very, very hard from 170. So do Multistradas. But the rider is a windsock. I am not. The Hayabusa is designed to be aerodynamic. Look at it. What do you think the cops are thinking when they see it? What does anyone think when they see it? Even people who know nothing about bikes look at it and go: “Holy Jesus! Why is that even legal!?”

The Multistrada pursued. His heart was pure. The clocks said 190 as we sliced through the sparse traffic. At that speed, you need to be paying a lot of attention. I was. We were now far enough past the first Highway car to consider there might be another one up ahead.

I buttoned off to 120 again. The Multistrada went past me, raised a hand in salute and turned off towards Doyalson.

Sure enough, there was another Highway car ruining some poor bastard’s day just past that turn-off. I grinned to myself. The omens seemed to be good. And you have to believe in omens, because sometimes that’s all you have.

The traffic usually gets sparser once you’re past the Central Coast commuters, but I kept it humming at 120 and watched my mirrors with interest. There had been a car following the Multistrada and me when we had briefly rolled the dice.

See also

Esoterica

1

VALENTINA MIHAILOVIC 1928-2020

1 March 20214

It was not a cop car. It was an Audi. One of them hairy-balled station wagons the Germans make as some kind of Teutonic joke. “Ja, ja! Dis ist very funny, ja? Un family vagon mit turbo-spitten und scheissen! Ha ha ha!”

And this is what went past me at shit-knows what speed, but I was doing 120 and it flashed past me in the waning light like a missile.

Oh, that is simply peachy, I thought, wriggling in my seat like a girl seeing her first German porn film.

You all know what a wood-duck is, right? It’s a decoy duck hunters put in a duck-pond that attracts other ducks. Then death comes upon them.

This Audi was my wood-duck. Any police cars ahead would clock him before they clocked me. The only problem was when I passed him – and as sure as filthy degenerates are filthy and degenerated, I would pass him at some stage because…well, because Hayabusa.

But that was a bridge yet to be crossed. And as the sun glowed gold as it descended over the Freemans Reach hills on my left, we headed towards that bridge. Fast.

I was maybe 100-metres behind him as the speedo needle went back and forth between 160 and 200. I stayed in sixth because I didn’t want the Audi driver to panic if I downshifted to fourth and came up on him too fast. Because shit happens quickly at those speeds. And it’s always terrible, terrible shit.

So I paced him. I’d close up, then drop back, close up, then ride beside him at 200, then drop back again. The freeway was mostly empty, and we were both rolling the dice like steel-eyed dirtbags in an alleyway full of broken bottles and piss-stained mattresses.

I’ve already told you I’m a filthy degenerate. So you know. But now it was time for the Audi driver to understand what it was he was dealing with. It was time for him to taste the pure, red-blooded tang of filthy degeneracy.

At 200, I downshifted two gears and cracked the throttle to the stop. I didn’t have time to consider what happened next. Like, I’d had an idea. I’d done this before. But unless you do this kind of stuff lots of times, your brain tends to shove the memories into a place it doesn’t like you going to that often.

So what happened next? The Hayabusa did what it had been designed to do and filthed my degeneracy to the next level. It’s hard to appreciate just how fast this thing accelerates until you actually make an effort. It’s no effort for the Hayabusa. This is what it does. It throws the horizon at your face. It’s what you asked it do, after all.

I don’t think I even breathed for those few scalding, howling seconds as I went past that 200km/h-going Audi. And I went past him like he was not going very fast at all. My head was down, my eyes were wide, my mouth was dry, and my arse was clenched like a UFC champion’s fist.

I do not know what speed I was doing. I didn’t look. It didn’t matter. All that mattered was the Audi driver understood what speed and acceleration were really all about. And that he grasped that he was dealing with a filthy degenerate. And that his fine German station wagon was as dust compared to the Hayabusa.

Did he understand all of that? Of course he did. When I slowed down to 120 so that I could make the Singleton turn-off, he went past me and saluted me with his hazard lights. We’d rolled the dice. No snake-eyes. Both of us won, even though he’d lost.

There are other fast bikes. I have ridden them all. Any of them could have done that to the Audi. Some of them steer faster in corners than the Hayabusa. Most of them range in comfort from acceptable and tolerable to OMFG I’m crippled and on fire.

But none of them do this kind of comfy, high-speed, wind-roaring, blood-curdling evil quite like the Hayabusa does. None of them are quite as rounded a motorcycle as the Hayabusa now is. Sure, there’s the supercharged H2 from Kawasaki, but I reckon the Hayabusa handles tighter stuff better – and maybe it’s a bit of the Ford versus Holden thing going on for me here.

But this not a bike comparo. It’s not even a bike review.

It is a work of fiction. It never happened. How could it have? Who even dares to do this kinda shit anymore? Not me. And I’m a filthy degenerate.