I can’t reveal much that has gone down in Mexico of late. With any luck, you’ll read about it in another rag in much greater depth and I want to get out of the country before I put pen to paper. The Mexican government still thinks it's running a police state here and think nothing about ripping open dubious looking packages addressed to the UK. They wouldn’t bother with a trial over the bagful of insults contained within, they would just take me outside and pump a few bullets in me.
The police don’t piss about over here. And neither do the army. In most civilised societies the militia consists of scum who don’t have the intelligence to do anything other than don ridiculous looking uniforms and start harassing innocent speedsters like myself. In Mexico it's about the only profession, other than drugs, that pays at all well. Part of the perks is the ability to exhort large lumps of cash out of foreigners. The trouble I've had trying to get a bit of decent speed out of the Z1300 doesn’t bear thinking about.
Readers will recall, doubtless, that my last encounter with the American Dream was with a bunch of porcine Angels whom I had to flee with a headful of fear and loathing. They barely gave me time to rest my weary body before descending on my apartment building in a great horde. Pigeons fell off their perches with fright, old dears fainted and the young bucks who normally hang about on street corners looking for easy pickings discretely did a runner.
They parked up in front of the building, this great mass of hairy Mongoloids, revving their Harley engines until a man couldn’t think and the window behind which I was trying to hide threatened to fragment into a trillion pieces baring my soul to the carrion crows who wanted blood for all the damage I had done to their machines and the loss of face implied - I could have raped their mothers, shot their offspring (in the unlikely event they could find anyone human with whom to mate) and burnt their homes to the ground; but that carnage would have been nothing compared to the few scratches inflicted on their beloved beasts. Whilst my brain buckled under their threat, I had a vision of making a massive fortune by selling them plastic vaginas that could be located perfectly in the back end of their petrol tanks.
Thoughts of vast national fame, worldwide copyrights and an excess of franchise deals faded when an even more alarming sight was revealed before my doubtful eyes. Before any action could occur, droves of wailing police vehicles descended on the area. Shotguns and sidearms were unfurled on both sides. I don’t know if the police had come to arrest me for other misdemeanours or if they had come in summons to the hysterical complaints of residents which were doubtless burning down the telephone wires. I didn’t intend to hang around to find out either way.
By the time I'd reached the Z1300, which was secreted in a niche at the back of the car park, helicopters were hovering overhead, sporting the names of various TV crews. Losing my chance of becoming a film star, and abandoning the femme to whatever fate she deserved (she was snoring away soundly at my last glance), I pushed the big Z a couple of hundred yards away from the building. Completely knackered by then, drenched in several bucketfuls of sweat, I clambered aboard and found one dead cycle. Panic was abated when I noted that in my urgency I had knocked the kill switch. That rectified, a few rumbles on the starter and it was time to say goodbye to the USA via the back roads the other side of my apartment building.
I travelled through what little was left of the afternoon and night with a panicked head full of road blocks and the minor fact that my passport now sported a fake visa extension (surprising what you can do with a toy printing kit...) I changed the number plates twice just to be on the safe side and kept to the minor roads. I hoped that the border guards would be too busy keeping the Mexicans out to worry about letting me leave the wondrous United States of America.
It seemed obvious to me that I should ride the Z as far as I could down through South America. I had always fancied lounging around in Rio, especially as I had a money belt full of thousand dollars bills, my reward for toiling away in the aerospace industry. For the kind of money I was carrying, hick South Americans would have killed their mothers.
The big Z had settled down to a constant 80mph drawl through the Texas badlands until she ran out of fuel in the middle of nowhere. | knew there was something I should have checked. After an hour or so in the gruelling heat a grizzled farmer came along in an ancient pickup and sold me a few pints out of his spare can.
Enough to get me down to the next town where I almost came to blows with a local yob, who went into a barely comprehensible spiel about how rotten were Japanese motorcycles. I just laughed in his face, rather hysterically it should be admitted. He reacted in the typical childish American way by trying to take my face off with a right hook. I move my head out of the way, naturally, and a few of his mates grabbed hold of him and waltzed him back into the cafe that was attached to the petrol station. I got out of there whilst I was still able to stand on two feet.
The Z1300 responded to the urgency of my right wrist by doing a tyre churning wheelie the whole length of the main street. I had become a dab hand at aviating the six cylinder mammoth’s front wheel, not that it took much effort with so much liquid power on tap. The police car I almost hit didn’t respond to this reptilian attack, the driver was either comatose on autopilot or hurrying to do something really important like inspect the local brothel or coerce dinner out of some poor sap of a restaurant owner.
Encouraged by this reaction I opened her up a bit more, leaving town with the clock flirting with 130mph and the chassis weaving and wobbling like only some ancient Jap on worn out tyres, suspension and bearings can manage. Paranoia about being pulled over before I hit the border soon took a grip, though, and I backed down to a more reasonable 75mph... I was, though, of the general opinion that the faster you went the less likely were you to be pulled over. I mean, they wouldn’t be able to catch a glance at the number plate if you were really pushing it.
Before hitting the border there was a sudden thunderstorm that drenched me in seconds and kept making the Kawasaki run on three cylinders. Visibility all but disappeared, which combined with the way the power flipped on and off all the time, made for some highly amusing antics. By the time the squall ended my head was completely, utterly done in. I must have left a trail of piss every time the wheels threatened to skid away from under me.
| was in a desperate state physically by the time I reached the border. I could see this in my reflection in the mirror shades the customs officer sported. He was so starch white in the heat haze that I felt he was more an apparition than a threat. I hadn’t shaved for days, my leather jacket was in tatters and my toes poked out of the ancient boots I bought in a garage sale (just about, by the way, typical of the sartorial elegance of UMG editorial standards).
He hardly glanced at my passport, stamping my exit and giving me the kind of look that indicated I better not try to get back into his beloved United States. The Mexicans were much more rigorous and only 100 dollars overcame the fact that the Z's number plate did not match that on the registration document. Something else I managed to forget. I could have bluffed it out and perhaps paid a lot less, but by then I was way gone with visions of myself wandering between custom posts in the no-mans land between the two countries. Later events revealed, at least to my boiled brain, that the bastards had radioed ahead to their mates, telling them to look out for this big sucker on a grime coated Kawasaki. The hassle I had in Mexico makes raising the dead seem ridiculously easy.
Johnny Malone