From the Library

[Biggles]

"Giz a go!" I screeched unthinkingly, convinced I'd never get one, but I was a little maddened by the smell of burning oil and exhaust fumes.
"Can you ride?" he asked. A fair question, given Gronk didn't know me very well.
"Yeah!" I lied, fully aware that a detailed rundown of how I crashed a two-stroke Rockhopper into a tree six years before was clearly not what Gronk would want to hear at this pivotal moment.
He shrugged and got off. I had a quick look around to see if there were any teachers nearby, and got on. My toes could barely touch the ground and the bike felt vast. It was hot too, and seriously heavier than I had imagined.
Suddenly I was a little scared. My mates all stood around me, honking and giggling and keeping a look out for teachers, so there was no question of a change of heart In the eyes of my peers, a backdown would be tantamount to admitting you preferred kissing boys. It was a ride-or-die moment.
I revved it. Nothing happened.
"Put it in first!" Gronk instructed.
Easy for him to say. I had a vague notion he was talking about gears, but none at all about where they might be found.
"Hold the clutch in!" he demanded, tapping helpfully on the lever.
I duly pulled it in and held it. He kicked the bike into first for me, via a small lever near the left foot peg, and I felt the Honda lurch a bit.
"Now give it some revs and let the clutch out slowly."
And that was pretty much that, as far as my riding lesson went.
It also pretty much sealed the deal on the sale of my soul to the infernal two-wheeler. I was doomed before I'd even pogoed madly out of the car park and onto the street, helmetless and in school uniform - an instant and irredeemable motorcycle tragic, world without end, amen.
I couldn't sleep that night. I had never got the bike out of first gear, stalled it 100 times and ripped open my leg kick-starting it 101 times. But something profound had occurred inside my head in the hour I'd spent 'riding' Gronk's bike in the streets behind my high school - and it was playing on a constant loop as I lay awake in my bed. The sheer atavistic rush of speed that only a motorcycle can provide is so addictive it makes crack cocaine look like a bitch.
My Mother Warned Me About Blokes Like Me  Boris Mihailovik  p8-9

[Biggles]

Right then I was about as thrilled as a fifteen-year-old boy could be without bursting spontaneously into flames. All of this excitement stemmed directly from the fact that I was at the controls of a proper motorcycle for the second time in my life and I hadn't the vaguest idea what I was doing.
I understood that a horrible outcome awaited me if I crashed. I wasn't precisely sure what it would be, but I was sure it would be horrible on a scale yet unimagined by me. Interestingly, I did not even consider the physical implications of hitting the road at 80kms per hour dressed in a school uniform. I was more concerned about how I would explain riding and crashing bikes to my father, who was delusional enough to imagine his only son was at school being taught to read and write and hate quadratic equations.
My Mother Warned Me About Blokes Like Me  Boris Mihailovik  p12

[Biggles]

I nodded, kicked the bike into life and roared off. It took me thirty seconds before I successfully slotted the Honda into second gear.
My heart sang and I must have been grinning and gurning like a fat chick eating biscuits. I subsequently found third and fourth and ultimately fifth, whereupon the bike stalled violently and slammed my balls hard into the petrol tank as I slowed to make a U-turn.
Obviously, there was more to this gear-selection caper than my spray-painted mate had revealed. It took me the best part of the next hour to work out that one must be judicious in one's gear selection by picking the gear most suitable for the speed at which one is travelling. The price for failure was pulped testicles. I was also quickly discovering that motorcycling is a cruel, Darwinian mistress.
But as I worked the gears and felt the bike responding with even greater speed as I careened up and down Cardigan Lane, motorcycling held me ever tighter in its grip and bound me ever closer to its bosom.
My Mother Warned Me About Blokes Like Me  Boris Mihailovik  p14

[Biggles]

I discovered true fear by riding the track at night, the wrong way around, which meant going up Conrod Straight in the other direction - back when it was a real straight and not the effete chicane-shamed atrocity it is today. I can still taste the acerbic tang of pure dread as I hammered up that long, long straight at almost 190 km per hour behind one of the Laverdas, then leaned my bike into the sharp, totally blind uphill right of Forrest's Elbow, followed by the even blinder and steeper uphill horror of the Dipper. This feat was made all the more memorable because people were actually riding the other way at the time.
Oh, and we were drunk. So that helped.
My Mother Warned Me About Blokes Like Me  Boris Mihailovik  p35-6

[Biggles]

"What's that stinkin smell?" Terry groaned as we stood beside a heater inside the Holbrook truck-stop at some obscene and frigid hour of the night.
"It's piss," I hissed.
"What piss?" Terry asked, his nostrils twitching and his head swivelling from side to side due to his recently acquired blindness.
"My piss," I said through clenched teeth. "I thought we were dead when you ran off the road. I didn't see any point holding it in."
That was a lie. I could no more have held in that wee than I could have turned the tide. When Terry's bike left the road and started tankslapping along the verge, my bladder unilaterally emptied, clearly of the opinion I should arrive at the Throne of Jesus with a freshly flushed urethra.
"Why's the back of my pants wet?" Terry gasped in horror as his hands patted the arse of his jeans, which were steaming as they dried in front of the heater.
"Please don't make me tell you," I grated.
"AARRGGHH," Terry moaned, wincing in revulsion as my fright-wee dried on his body and made his skin prickle.
It was too cold to go outside and wash our clothes in the toilet, and in any case our more immediate concern was Terry's blindness and how that would impact on the fact that we had to be in Albury to get my bike off the train in three hours.
"How blind are you?" I asked him.
"What?" he keened, his head radaring from side to side as it locked onto my voice.
My Mother Warned Me About Blokes Like Me  Boris Mihailovik  p43-4

[Biggles]

Radiant dealerships full of embossed leather duds, piratical bandannas and faux Nazi helmets were still some way off as I began doing time with My Shovelhead.
And what a time it was! We were nothing if not busy, that's for sure. I spent more time with that bike than with any other bike I have had before or since. And a lot of that time was spent on the side of the road in places as diverse as inner-city Melbourne and the table drain on the Hay Plain eighty-five kilometres from Balranald. I've sheltered beside it in pouring rain outside of Murray Bridge and cursed it from the shade of a solitary tree near Coonamble. I would have put in, and observed the departure of, at least 10,000 litres of 20W-50 Pennzoil, smeared a billion metres of Silastic around its ever-leaking primary and wondered how, by all that is holy, anyone could build a bike using self-tapping wood screws to hold the headlight in its nacelle. A nacelle, I might add, I had obsessively rubbed some sixty kilograms of Autosol alloy polish into over the time I owned the bike.
My Shovelhead never stopped leaking oil - though it did vary the amounts from a few drops to 'How the hell am I gonna get home now?' And it never failed to excite me when it barked its unmuffled hatred at the world. Except that one time when I ran into the back of a stationary car while admiring my tattooed he-glory in a shop window. Then it kinda pissed me off.
My Mother Warned Me About Blokes Like Me  Boris Mihailovik  p96

[Biggles]

As we headed further up the coast the next morning, I found myself riding behind Jabba. It was both oily and hilarious. Sitting just behind him coming into Taree, I noticed that every few kays his bike's exhaust note would change. Apparently, one of its leads kept falling off. Not wishing to annoy us any further by stopping to fix it, Jabba would simply reach down and plug it back in. This would send massive spasms of pain shooting through his already road-battered body, as 35,000 volts coursed through him, causing him to swerve wildly across the road as he fought to regain control of the Triumph and his twitching limbs. I was laughing, but I also wondered just how much more of this abuse he could take.
We stopped in Taree tor breakfast, which gave Jabba a chance to forage through some nearby rubbish bins for more cardboard. He also asked each of us in turn if we had any spare foam handlebar grips. When I giggled at him, he held up two very dirty and badly swollen hands. The bike's inherent vibration, amplified by the fact the motor was missing two head steadies, was causing the solidly mounted handlebars to buzz with crippling intensity. The swelling of his hands got worse the further up the coast we got. By Port Macquarie, Jabba was no longer gripping the handlebars. He was operating the throttle by pushing the heel of his right hand against it and moaning. His left hand would only go to the bars when he was forced to reach down and reconnect the plug lead with his right.
My Mother Warned Me About Blokes Like Me  Boris Mihailovik  p143-4

[Biggles]

We were to meet at Wisemans Ferry West Crossing at 6 am on the day of departure. This was the ferry one caught to cross the Hawkesbury River in order to ride to the old St Albans pub - a popular Sunday beer-and-lunch spot for lots of Sydney's motorcyclists. But we weren't going to St Albans. We were turning left immediately after the ferry crossing and heading up to the Putty Road, then down a dirt road to cross the Colo River on some old wooden bridge that had been built by convicts a hundred years before Sydney got electricity. From there, we'd head up into the Great Dividing Range, to Bilpin and Mount Wilson via the Bells Line of Road and onto the Bowens Creek track - which, according to the knot of contour lines, was nothing but a narrow path cut into the arse of a great sandstone cliff with a surface designed to murder the stupid novice dirt-rider with immense malice.
My Mother Warned Me About Blokes Like Me  Boris Mihailovik  p191

[Biggles]

Day Two was to begin with fuelling up, then following the bitumen through Canberra and out onto the Cotter Road to the Cotter Dam. But before plunging into the waters of the dam, we intended to turn right onto the Brindabella Road - which I saw came with its own handwritten aside for me to absorb. The aside said: 'You will die on this road if you do not pay attention and take it easy. It is steep, twisty and if you make an error, you'll plummet off a cliff and into one of the most beautiful valleys in Australia.'
Should I somehow make it to the bottom on two wheels, I would notice that Brindabella Road met Crace Road on a bridge over the Goodradigbee River. Ten kilometres further up, we would turn onto Boundary Road, then Forest Drive, Broken Cart Track and the Long Plain - which had been marked on the map as twelve kilometres of 'super-fast open plains dirt' - and a place I could crash the bike at velocities I had never even dreamed of.
My Mother Warned Me About Blokes Like Me  Boris Mihailovik  p192

[Biggles]

I showered quickly as tiredness started to set in with a vengeance. I then fell into a bed that was more akin to a hammock, only to find Mick bellowing it me the instant I'd closed my eyes.
"Come on!" he yelled. "It's four AM, we have to go!"
Damn good thing I'd tucked the almost empty bottle of Turkey in Al's snoring arms before I put myself to bed, or he'd be shaking me even harder, I thought I struggled to my feet and started to dress myself. I knew no one had shat in my mouth because I'd been hung-over before and I was on familiar ground, but my head was sore and murky as I squirmed into my boots.
"Good job," Ian grinned as he watched me curse and mutter and search for my wallet and phone which had somehow found their way under my mattress. "I always get pissed on good whiskey before riding 400 kays of really difficult dirt," he observed.
"Yeah me too," I growled back and swallowed some gooey spit that tasted rather more like some liquefied internal organ than I would have liked. Then I went downstairs, got on my bike in the frosty darkness and headed for Canberra along the Federal Highway.
My Mother Warned Me About Blokes Like Me  Boris Mihailovik  p204

[Biggles]

It was all I could really do, because I could certainly no longer ride a motorcycle properly. All my bastard shit hurt. My helmet ground into my thudding skull and the rest of my body throbbed with a strained ache I'd only ever experienced the morning after a big fight with angry bouncers. As I sourly burped my way past the Mount Stromlo turn-off and the bitumen got twistier, my riding skills deserted me altogether. I must have been about a kilometre behind as I saw the rest of the crew turn off onto the dirt and head up into the Brindabella Ranges.
The DR, its knobby tyres and I just could not get it together.
"Shit," I chanted over and over as I lurched and yawed up the winding track that had the traction of greasy kitchen lino. The dirt was hard-packed, but heavily peppered with shiny buried rocks that caused the bike to skitter alarmingly from side to side. I couldn't stand up on the pegs because I was too busy hanging on for grim death and it was getting colder the higher I climbed. Yesterday afternoon, I had been planning on entering the Dakar. Today I was planning on throwing up in my helmet.
My Mother Warned Me About Blokes Like Me  Boris Mihailovik  p205

[Biggles]

"You good?" he asked, helping me wrench my bike upright.
I nodded. I was okay physically - again a breathing, sweaty testament to the sanctity and glory of body armour.
"I'll ride it up to the level bit for you," Miles offered kindly.
"I'll have your flamin' babies for you if you do," I muttered, but I don't think he heard me. I then watched agog at the ease with which he did just that, with Ian right behind him. I took a deep breath and commenced to clump up the cliff face after them. In ten metres perspiration was cascading off me and I was puffing like a blown horse. In twenty metres black spots were exploding in my vision and there was not enough air on earth to satisfy my needs. I stopped, hands on knees and retched emptily into my helmet. It smelled like old lollies. Miles, Ian and Mick watched my glacial progress from above.
"When were you giving up the smokes, Borie?" I heard Miles ask from on high.
Since my remaining time on earth was measured in minutes, I didn't waste it replying. I resumed clumping up the hill, got on my bike and went at it again.
But the scenario I just described was to repeat itself several more times. Sometimes Ian helped me, sometimes Miles helped me. Once, Mick almost ran over me, which would probably have helped by putting an end to my misery.
My Mother Warned Me About Blokes Like Me  Boris Mihailovik  p222-3

[Biggles]

I have always known there are demons in the night. Fanged, red-skinned horrors, playing at the edges of your vision and capering through your mind as you ride.
Hemingway, in 'A Farewell to Arms', understood the night to be a time and place of great 'otherness' and wrote: 'I know the night is not the same as the day: that all things are different, that the things of the night cannot be explained in the day, because they do not then exist...'
A mate sent me the above wisdom just before I set off at 11 pm one muggy Friday night on a run unlike any I'd ever done - and the words rang with a fierce truth. I am no stranger to night riding. I actually quite like it. I am also no stranger to banging out big miles, and I don't mind that, either. But doing 1000 kilometres in a twelve-hour period and riding 250 kilometres past my destination and then 250 kilometres back was something I'd never done before.
How this came to pass is not as important as the ride itself, though you probably need to know why I wedged myself upon a tiny, screaming 600cc Yamaha R6 and howled northward from Sydney through the murk. A man called Dave had invited me along on what he called a 'FarRide'. A FarRide is a type of ride undertaken by a group of blokes known as FarRiders. They are a unique breed of motorcyclist, for whom the ride is purity incarnate - the be-all and end-all. Some of them have accomplished distance-riding feats that beggar belief and which prompt the question, 'Why?'
My Mother Warned Me About Blokes Like Me  Boris Mihailovik  p244-5