Never bullshit a bullshitter, was what my erstwhile boss told me as he gave me my cards. No great problem, thought I, the States was a big place and just six months of toil had inflated the Malone bank account to never before attained heights.
The Pink Elephant was not in such great shape. My first encounters with the Harley had been tentative but I had quickly grasped the fact that you had to ride it like a dirt tracker; with total disdain for the lack of brakes and suspension and the excess of mass. Ridden flat out for a couple of months the venerable vee twin developed rumbling mains.
I could have done the decent thing. Hired some space, acquired some tools and performed the necessary mechanical surgery. God knows, I'd had enough practice on my Norton Commando. But that was four, five years ago, another age as far as I was concerned and not one I was in any hurry to repeat.
Besides, I was already bored with the Harley's lack of top end and if it was a righteous ride it was one someone else could goddamn well endure. I flogged it off for $1500, a loss of 500 notes but I could live with that.
The next thing I knew I was boarding an aircraft heading for LA. Overdosed on plastic food and vinegar wine, I staggered into the light and heat of California, your scribe rice white amid bronzed heroes and heroines with dazzling smiles as fake as my Bangkok bought Rolex. I tried my acquired Yank accent on a taxi driver, hoping he'd avoid the tourist route, directed him to a down and out motel not far from Venice beach.
Several hundred dollars poorer I was soon installed in a coackroach infested room with paper thin walls that would've done a Hong Kong landlord proud, save that the room had a modicum of natural light and you could swing a very small cat in it.
The air had a very different quality to it and I could not wait to leap on some hotshot motorcycle, it had to be better than freezing my balls off in the Big Bad Apple. After a short sleep, somewhat disturbed by the antics of my neighbours and the odd gun shot, I took a hike to the nearest bike shop, passing through a mixture of the bad, the good and the ugly, everyone too tired from an evening of excess to make much of a problem in the early morning haze of pollution and sea air.
As soon as I saw the bike I knew I had to have it. It was just so excessive in every aspect that there was no way I could resist. The machine was a practically new Yamaha Vee Max. A 100hp watercooled, 1200cc vee four set up specifically to make every other machine, be it four or two wheeled, dead meat in the traffic light GP.
The most over the top feature of this machine was a huge chromed air intake for the bank of carbs nestled between the vee of the engine, that looked like it might suck up any stray canines that got it the way. In an acid flash I saw myself in my new job, riding around the city hunting down stray animals, the mighty Vee Max engine sucking in the canines and spitting their ashes out of the tail pipes without a murmur of discontent.
Without even taking a test ride I handed over the dosh and was left to push six hundred pounds of monster bike, backwards up a slight incline on to the street. It was then, covered in sweat, muscles straining, that I had a moment to reflect, that perhaps it was not such a great idea for a man of my mature age to be playing around with these toys and, just maybe, I would have been better advised to have a look at that sensible 1500cc vee six Honda Goldwing which at least had a reverse gear. At least I would be able to tell the editor the Yamaha was obviously a practical machine, for it had twin rear shocks!
There was this deep growling rumble that made me glance over my shoulder fearing that some lumbering artic was about to descend on myself and shiny new mount. Nothing there, then I realised that it was the Vee Max motor spitting into life. And that was just tickover.
Revving the beast a little makes windows rattle, babies cry and Vietnam vets dive for cover. It hit first gear without so much as the slightest crunch, making me suspect there was some precision components deep in the rumbling beast, and in need of some distraction from my aching muscles, I let rip with the throttle and dropped the clutch. Jesus Christ!
I whacked it up into second automatically, my mind and body too full of the wonderful warp speed acceleration, back wheel slipping and sliding, fantastic engine growl and other vehicles which appeared to be moving backwards. I had time to think that this is going to be fun, before needing to whack on all three discs to lavoid collision with a baker's van. I felt sure that the bike would have just run straight through the aluminium panelled vehicle, but it's always worth checking the brakes out before you're too far into a ride.
Despite an all up weight of around 750lbs, the front discs rammed the front forks down on the stops, the wheel screeching evilly as it tried to let loose. I haven't got the time nor energy to piss around trying to find out what the stopping distances are in yards or metres, but they are most impressive. Impressive enough, anyway, to avoid the front wheel damaging the van.
The next set of lights some shark in a hopped out Chevvy was revving the balls off his massive engine. I wound on eight thousand revs, dropped the clutch as the lights changed and was rewarded with the biggest wheelie of my life. The Vee Max runs on one of fatest back wheels I've seen on a bike, short of some of the weirder chops; just as well as it needs all the stability it can get with one wheel off the ground.
It wasn't just that I was suddenly aboard a mono-wheel vehicle, it was that I was aboard a mono-wheel vehicle hurtling across the landscape at warp speed plus, with the number plate threatening to become past news and my forward vision obscured by the front of the bike. Yes, it was fun, sort of, and, yes, I did burn the car off. But it took an awful lot of muscle to get the front wheel back on the ground without backing off the throttle too far.
Having frightened myself silly with the front wheel aviation possibilities and I decided to see what kind of wheelspin was possible. I could get the Pink Elephant to burn a little rubber when I was in the right mood, it was even easier with the Vee Max. I could've ruined a tyre in five minutes if I'd had a mind to, but settled instead for 100 yards of fishtailing, rubber scorching back end take offs.
Unfortunately, the steel trellis that Yamaha use for the purpose of holding the wheels in line ain't too clever at stopping the back of the bike from getting out of line once this kind of foolhardiness is indulged in. A few very frightening lurches when the bike hit some bumpy bits of road soon convinced me that all was not well.
I have ridden worse handling bikes, but not very many. Away from the straight line drag strip, the bike performs very like an early Honda or Kawasaki four, only the Yam has much more grunt and you screw up at higher speeds. The technique for successful high speed riding in fast bends is very much brake, point, squirt, brake.....I found this out the hard way in the company of some plastic missiles (CBR1000s, ZZRs, etc) where the Vee Max would make them eat dust down the straights only to have to brake hastily at the approach of the next corner, squirting the beast over to the wrong side of the road to straighten out the bend as much as possible.
This kind of riding didn't seem to impress my companions, who like many Yanks insist in dressing up in full race leather drag just to pop down to the shops; my leather jacket suitably tarred to mitigate the Pink Elephant's hue was as out of place as my gung-ho riding style. I think they were probably a bit peeved by the fact that at the end of the day's riding I had honed my technique to the point where I could beat them through the bends, and damn the fact that the lurching beast dissuaded many people from getting too close to overtake.
I soon found it much more fun to ride the Beast in an intoxicated and drugged state. It was just too much of a surreal brute to take sober, and once my head was freed up a bit most of the intimidation floated away. My favourite trick was to roar down inner city streets in first gear at maximum revs, the reverberations off the building were my own rock concert and the poor old bastards in the cop cars couldn't catch me up to book me for disturbing the 5.00am peace.
If they got close I turned the lights out and headed through pedestrian precincts, and once, in a spine rupturing manoeuvre, down a flight of concrete steps. I couldn't get out of bed the next day, but never mind, they have 24 hour porno movies on the TV.
I don't know how much it costs to run, but I usually had to fill the tank up a couple of times a day. I assumed that modern technology and water cooling meant the motor didn't need any maintenance, so it didn't get any.
In two months I did near on 10,000 miles, mostly bumming around California, trying to get a passable sun tan (for some reason riding a bike is a very quick way to pick up a tan) and generally burning rubber. It all ended when some blind idiot tailgated me with his Caddy.
Never quite had a sensation like it, a big shove up the back of the spine, a bike spinning one way and myself out of harms way on to the hard shoulder. The poor old Yam was flattened by at least three vehicles driving over it. I walked, or at least hobbled, away from it - not my first and probably not my last crash.
Johnny Malone