by Ted Simon
I must have been a strange sight. The desert sun had burned me very dark and printed a goggle pattern on my face. My shirt was threadbare, and my jeans were shredded across the knees and awkwardly patched. My hair was unfashionably short and dishevelled and I was a bit crazy at the thought of having actually arrived. I imagined myself to look quite romantic. After all, it was the real thing, but their nice orderly eyes gradually convinced me that I was a bit of a mess, and the best thing I could do was go and clean up.
The credibility gap widened into a yawning chasm and never closed. They were unfailingly nice to me, and materially generous. They took the bike into their workshop and promised to give it all the care that could be lavished on it. They gave me another bike, the same model, to use in the meanwhile. They took me to a hotel about ten miles away and booked me in at their expense, and left me there until the next day.
My hotel room was at ground level and had thick glass sliding doors instead of windows, with two sets of curtains. I had a square double bed with freshly laundered sheets every day. At the foot of the bed was a big colour television set. There was a writing desk, itself quite a decent piece of furniture, and in the drawer was a stack of stationery and leaflets describing all the hotel's services and telling romantic tales about its supposed history. I read them all avidly.
The bathroom had apparently been delivered by the manufacturer that morning. Everything in it was still wrapped or sealed by a paper band guaranteeing one hundred per cent sterility. Not even the boys from Homicide could have found a fingerprint in there.
In the bedroom everything was impeccable too. It was air conditioned, of course. Not a breath ruffled my countenance. When my arm itched and I raised my hand automatically to smash at a mosquito, there was never a mosquito. There was only me.
I switched on the television, and it responded immediately with a picture of surgeons and nurses in green conclave round an operating table. The camera closed in on a human knee, and a scalpel opened it up before my very eyes. Horrified, I switched channels to an advertisement for a film called The Bug. A male voice promised that unless I saw this picture I would not know what horror meant. A woman screamed at me, horrified, and showed her tonsils. The Bug eats human flesh,' said the voice, and the woman screamed again.
With flesh-eating bugs I was already familiar. I switched off. There was still only me. I had everything I had been dreaming of for months. Starched linen. Room service. Steak, lobster, mutton, cold white wine, coffee, unlimited hot water, not a cockroach to be seen.
Sitting there alone I found it all quite meaningless. I went for a walk round the extensive premises, through lobby and patio, past pool and fountain, bakery and bookshop and saw that same nice smile everywhere I went, and written in the eyes just as plainly the words: 'Otherwise engaged'.
I looked in my address books. There were a few names and telephone numbers. The friends of friends were all far too high-powered to be called on the spur of the moment like that. There was one man, though, whom I had met in England, a businessman I had found refreshingly interesting and intelligent. He lived in Malibu and even answered the phone to me. I explained how I had arrived in Los Angeles, and he asked me penetrating questions as though I were his psychiatric patient. He promised to call me back, but never did.
The hotel was on the inland edge of Los Angeles and I thought maybe I was among particularly stuffy and provincial people, so I set out on the bike to find the real Los Angeles. I never found it. I rode for ever on an astounding web of freeways, four or eight lanes wide, laid out like a never-ending concrete waffle over thousands of square miles, looking for somewhere to go, but found nothing.
These first days had a profound effect. I felt completely lost, as though I had been whisked away from the earth in my sleep one night and deposited among humanoids in a simulated earth city. Alice was never so flummoxed through her Looking Glass, not even on that vast chessboard. In all his travels, Gulliver was never more shocked, not even when confronted by the giant Brobdingnagian nipple.
I arrived there still with the smell of sweat and stale urine, of unruly growth and open decay, in my nostrils. I was used to faces that showed the imprint of emotion, the stamp of excess. I was accustomed to things being old, warn down, chipped, scratched, scuffed and patched, but real. Where I had been, people and things were forced to show the real stuff they were made of, because the superficial could not survive the battering it got. I was used to the sound of life; roars of laughter, shouts of anger, whistles, cat calls, bargaining, argument and domestic squabble; to the sight and smell of animals; to old people sunning themselves.
Where I had been, children came running.
I looked into the cars that rode alongside me on the freeway. I saw men and women staring blandly ahead with faint smiles on their carefully carefree faces. No visible signs of life there. I looked around me for a genuine house. They were all simulated. Some looked like ice cream. Some were simulated Spanish. Some pretended to be factories, or monasteries, or farm house cottages. All fake. Nothing original.
I saw a tiny girl, poised astonishingly at the edge of a highway, about to wander out into the traffic. There was no adult in sight. She was toddling aimlessly out into my land, and there was no time for me to dismount and help her, so I manoeuvred the bike to bar her way, hoping to change her mind. A car screeched to a halt in front of me and a woman leaped out and snatched the infant away. The woman looked up at me with a venomous expression and snarled: 'Oh no you don't!'
After dark, police helicopters hovered above me on the freeway flashing their epileptic blue lamps and scouring the ground with hungry beams of light.
For several days I remained a total alien, and out of this alienation grew a feeling of tremendous outrage against the senseless extravagance of it all. It was entirely a matter of perspective. To a Southern Californian, his life-style and standard no doubt seemed like the least he could get by on. To me it seemed preposterous and sick. I wandered through supermarkets and along 'Shopping Malls' disgusted and obsessed by the naked drive to sell and consume frivolities.
When I eventually came to visit Disneyland, I realized that the ultimate aim, the logical conclusion for Los Angeles, was that it should all become another Disney creation, a completely simulated and totally controlled 'fun environment' in which life was just one long, uninterrupted ride.
From the point of view of a Bolivian Indian chewing Coca on the altiplano, I could see that it would already be pretty difficult to distinguish between the two.
The effect wore off as my tan subsided, my insect bites healed and the goggle imprint faded. Finally I was an outcast no longer, because someone invited me to his home. He was a motorcycle mechanic making a machine to beat the world's speed record. He was a gentle fellow with a slow, warm smile, and he had come from Indiana with his girl friend who was a gorgeous nurse. They lived in a small place in Paramount and I went to stay there after a while. I discovered that life did after all still go on in Los Angeles, in a clandestine way, lurking in the corners of the waffle.
When I judged myself to be sufficiently civilized, I risked launching myself on my friends of friends who were very big in Hollywood, and so finally I got right up against the Giant Nipple itself. My friend was Herbert Ross, director of a series of immaculate comedies, and he had the idea as we sat munching chicken sandwiches in his office at MGM of having me ride up on my motorcycle to a party in Beverly Hills where he was going that evening.
His touch was as sure as ever. I rode up through Chandler country to a house full of genuine movie superstars, who not only thought my arrival a pleasant surprise but actually grasped, far better than anyone at Triumph seemed to, what my journey was all about.
There were other invitations, and after a while I stopped protesting about Los Angeles and began to enjoy it, until it became difficult to recall just why I had been making all that fuss.
There was a lot of work to be done on my bike. The forks were twisted, had been since Argen
tina. The cylinder head turned out to be fractured. The oil scavenge pipe had been knocked sideways in South Africa, so they had to get inside the crankcase, and while they were there, they replaced the crankshaft, because the head had come off one of the flywheel retaining bolts. The transmission had never given any trouble, but there were other minor irritations that needed sorting out.
One man worked on it for a week. He seemed efficient but heartless, and I could never find a way to talk about it with him. There were many questions I wanted to ask, thinking that the bike really could have been much more trouble-free than it was. In most of the poorer countries British bikes had a tremendous reputation for reliability. In the sophisticated countries like the USA it was just the reverse. The story was that Triumphs were eccentric and troublesome, and you had to buy German or Japanese if you wanted reliability.
It seemed to me that this was mostly the result of superior marketing and propaganda from Japan in the richer markets. It had led to a situation in which dealers and mechanics were involved most of the time with Japanese machines. British bikes could only be a nuisance to them, with their archaic engineering, requiring different tools and a different approach. It suited them that British bikes had a bad reputation, because
it excused the consequences of their own sloppy work. I thought that if I had any obligation towards Triumph for the support they were giving me, it was to demonstrate that their bike really could run clean and trouble-free.
The attitude in Los Angeles was quite the opposite. They seemed ready to swallow the unreliability story whole. Their remedy was simply to replace everything and send me on my way.
'You'll never get more than ten thousand miles out of a set of pistons anyway,' they said. I found it disheartening, but plainly things had gone too far for it to be worth while objecting. The truth was that in spite of all the brisk confidence in the front office, everybody was waiting for the place to crash about their ears. And if my mechanic seemed to have lost heart, it was not surprising, for he had already got himself a new job with Yamaha.
So I took what was offered and said thank you. They pretended to believe in me, and I pretended to believe in them. I thought they were nice people, and I think they liked me, but it was too late to do any good. Nobody wanted to know any more.
I left Los Angeles eventually with a bike set up to carry much more stuff. Ken Craven had written to me offering me new boxes and Dick Pierce in LA fitted me out with a rack and much bigger top box than I had had before. I had abandoned the old rack in Johannesburg, and I had slung the side boxes directly on the frame. I told Dick how the old rack had fractured on the way to Nairobi and that the side struts had been too feeble, and he said they would reinforce the system support for me and put on much stronger struts. It was a very fine rig in the end, offering a lot more capacity. I kept the single saddle, with the leather cover I had made myself in Argentina, and the hole burned in the back of it by my petrol stove when I had been cooking rice at Ipiales with Bruno.
The sun of California is like white wine and pine sap. It may be a temperate sun, but it has an ardent nature. It lifted my heart with a heady buoyancy and spiced the air with a resinous tang. It shone down on me loyally up the coast road from Los Angeles, beating at me from the concrete freeways, beckoning me from Pacific breakers, winking from wind-stirred leaves and grasses. It followed me through San Francisco, bouncing off window panes and shining on long golden hair. It warmed the terra cotta ironwork of the Golden Gate Bridge, flashed off the teeth of a toll collector, hurried me over the rain grooves and up the highway until, a hundred miles further on, it came into its own among the forests and hills of Northern California.
Where the hot cement gives way to cooler asphalt and the highway begins to rise and fall and curve against the hillsides, the bike transformed itself from a running animal into a bird and leaned over to swoop and curl with the contours of Mendocino County. Somewhere there, beyond Ukiah and Willetts, where the highway meets the Eel River, I wound off to the right and flew in among the mountains, looping high up towards the sun and down again into a bowl of fertile land and golden sunshine.
The air was heavily scented. I smelled blackberry and hay and resin. Waves of vivid aroma reinforced my joy at being back on the land again, and I had to recognize the craving I had created in myself for landscape and space. For a while, absorbed in the mind-boggling materialism of Los Angeles, I had forgotten those thirty thousand miles of plains, mountains, rivers, forests, deserts, skies and stars, but they would never be erased from my subconscious. As with music, they could be ignored for a while in pursuit of some short-term enthusiasm, but the hunger would build up silently inside me until something as slight as a scent of pine or a snatch of piano would warn me that I was perilously close to starvation.
I rode round a slithering curve on to a straight section. The land rose to a high ridge on my left and fell away to the right in a more gentle slope that would bring it eventually to the Eel winding among the rocks far below.
I crossed a cattle grid, and then the county line between Mendocino and Trinity. The land here was sparsely wooded with oak, young fir, madrone and manzanita. I saw open grassland above me where the big timber had once stood. Near the road lay heaps of rusting machinery, the leavings of a saw mill abandoned when the land had been logged and sold. I knew about it from Bob and Annie. It was one of the signs that told me I had arrived.
A yellow mailbox was planted on a post by the roadside announcing the name of the ranch and I followed the track down the hill and alongside a big sunburned meadow. The track took me past one wooden house and a newly erected barn to another bigger house. It was early afternoon. I could see a horse in the meadow but no people. The noise of the bike seemed inappropriate and I was glad to put it to rest and let the sound fade into the silence. There were ducks on a small pond. A goat stood facing away from me, obstinately refusing to recognize the interruption.
I climbed some wooden steps to the veranda of the house and went inside. A big man with unruly fair hair sat sprawled in a chair smoking a home-rolled cigarette and staring straight at me with wide, lively eyes. I thought it odd that he hadn't got up to see who was making all the noise. He wasn't busy.
'I'm a friend of Annie's,' I said. Those were the words I was told to say, my credentials.
'Hi,' he said. He continued to look at me with engaging curiosity, as though I might turn into a rabbit. 'I'm looking for Carol,' I added.
'Oh,' he said, still gazing at me quizzically. The silence gathered again. I waited. There was no hurry. A wasp buzzed against the window pane. It was very peaceful. I knew what he was doing and I was enjoying it, two strangers alone together in a room, appraising each other, savouring each other like animals. People talk too much at first, just making publicity. It was hardly more than a significant pause. Then he got up, and walked to the window.
'They're down by the river, I guess,' he said pointing out over the meadow. Then he smiled beatifically.
'Heard about you,' he said, and grabbed me in a bear hug and kissed me solidly on the cheek. That did surprise me.
He told me how to get to the river, over the meadow, past a volleyball net and then left by Suicide Rock. I walked over the meadow bubbling with joy. It's that damned sun, I thought, the same sun that was shining on Cape Town in the autumn and on Rio in the spring. It gets inside me and bubbles like a leaky champagne bottle. Pretty soon I shall be engulfed in ecstasy. I can feel it coming.
At the other end of the meadow a girl was walking towards me, bare-breasted and trailing her shirt through the long grass from her fingers. She saw me and put on the shirt, holding it closed with her hand. When we met in the middle of the meadow, I said I was a friend of Annie's and looking for Carol.
'Oh. Hi,' she said, and released the shirt. T didn't know. We get some pretty creepy people come sometimes. Annie's down at the Swimming Hole with Bob, and yeah, Carol's there too, with Josie, Christine and Frog.'
I found the way easily, an
d met Carol walking up from the river as I came down. She was with two young girls, and my first impression was that she resented me slightly. I had never met her before, but guessed who she was. Perhaps I was feeling too pleased with myself. Perhaps I looked as though I thought I was God's gift to women. Whatever it was, I felt a distance between us, but it did not matter to me at the time. I felt no special attraction to her. She had straight, dark hair tied with an elastic band, a narrow oval face and a funnily shaped up tilted nose reddened by sun. I thought she was too thin. Even so, two things about her were striking. Her colouring was dramatic, russet as the ripest apple, and her eyes were big and grey. I noticed them without paying too much attention.
Bob and Annie, it seemed, had gone up ahead to the Camp Site, whatever that might be, and so I walked up with Carol and the two girls, who were Christine and Josie.
'And Frog?' I asked. 'Who or what is Frog?' 'You'll see’ she said. That's a treat you have in store.' I noticed her dazzling smile then, but it still didn't mean anything special.
We walked up slowly, talking. We talked about Ecuador and Venezuela, and gardens and marriages and rattlesnakes, and trees and Ohio where she was from. She had a warm voice, pitched a bit low, and a powerful Middle West accent that said 'Bahks' for box, and made me want to laugh, but Josie got in first with 'Are you a Limey man?', and so we all laughed at my outrageous British accent instead.
I learned that the ranch was a commune although they never called it that, and that they had six hundred and seventy acres of the most beautiful land in the world, bought cheap after it had been logged. I learned that people who cut down trees indiscriminately for profit were despicable, and that Carol worked the vegetable garden where, with a little help from her friends, she produced enough to feed twenty people. Also that someone we both knew in San Francisco was a nerble.
'What,' I asked, 'is a nerble?'
'A nerble,' she said, 'is one thing and a nonie is another. Ask Frog about nerbles and nonies. Frog is in charge of naming.' 'Who's in charge of Frog?'
