From the Library

[Biggles]

I am a motorcyclist, and though I recognize I am not the "usual" motorcyclist, I also don't anticipate ever meeting one of those in person. All I know is that over the years I have occasionally sat back and thought how strange it is that motorcycles can completely overtake your being and act as if they own it. Certainly nothing in my life before them- and certainly not my parents, whose own interests run to chamber music, books, gardening, art, and cocktail parties- had prepared me to fall in love with bikes. I had gone through prep school, college, graduate school without knowing they existed. Those years were filled with sequential or concurrent passions: horses, the Civil War, dogs, bicycling, photography, poetry, the dream of true socialism, literary theory, and a couple of dozen boys. I am still interested in all those things to some extent, except for the boyfriends, whose names I have largely forgotten, but the desire I came to feel for bikes eclipsed all of them, even though I still dream of having a horse.
The Perfect Vehicle  Melissa Pierson p22-3

[Biggles]

I don't want to sell my bike, which is another friendly suggestion I receive. I love riding- and although I can't say I love trying to look this damnable fear in the face, I realize the possibilities for self improvement. The bike has merely become the concretisation of the free-floating terror that lives inside me, and if I didn't have a bike, it would attach itself to something else. I would be unable to go to the grocery store, or make phone calls, or show up for work. I don't want my world to shut down any farther; I need it to open up, and a motorcycle does nothing better than propel one outward. A few years ago I started going through the travel and adventure section of the library, looking for books by people who did dangerous things, preferably again and again. I always found what I was looking for. The autobiographies invariably carried a variation of the type of statement made by Sir Edmund Hillary, the first to climb Everest: "Fear is an important component of any challenge. If you feel fear, and then overcome it, you feel a special thrill." I was getting special thrills every time I went out for a spin.
The Perfect Vehicle  Melissa Pierson p54

[Biggles]

ELVIS PRESLEY The King was a devoted motorcyclist, much to the dismay of those with a financial interest in his continued celebrity- and to the delight of the savvy PR organ of Harley-Davidson, the magazine "The Enthusiast", which often pictured him astride the Milwaukee product. In "Roustabout", a supremely forgettable movie, Presley is a baby-faced rebel who hits the road on a shiny red "Japanese sikkle" (which he rides while singing) and joins the carnival. This 1964 flick is wonderfully resurrected in 1986's "Eat the Peach", in which the bike-riding, down-on-their-luck Irish protagonists obsessively watch their favourite movie, "Roustabout", until they hit on a plan intended to change their fortunes: building a Wall of Death in the middle of the depressed Irish countryside.
The Perfect Vehicle  Melissa Pierson p81

[Biggles]

ROBERT HUGHES Long the art critic for Time magazine and an unapologetically opinionated observer of culture at large, he is also an unapologetic lover of riding. In 1971 he published an essay in the newsweekly titled "Myth of the Motorcycle Hog." He tried to define the core of the experience:
Riding across San Francisco's Golden Gate Bridge on his motorcycle, the biker is sensually receptive every yard of the way to the bridge drumming under the tires, to the immense Pacific wind, to the cliff of icy blue space below... There is nothing second-hand or vicarious about the sense of freedom, which means possessing one's own and unique experiences, that a big bike well ridden confers. Anti-social? Indeed, yes. And being so, a means to sanity. The motorcycle is a charm against the Group Man.
The Perfect Vehicle  Melissa Pierson p82-3

[Biggles]

At the outset, with a solid mass of machinery trying to dive into turn one as if it were a single unit, relatively few risks are taken. Control and nerve. A bit more control and nerve than those other twenty-nine are showing. That's what begins the process that leads straight to the finish. Finally, since someone must take the lead, the rest of the field strings out behind, making it more possible to witness the concurrent intensification of the drive to win, to beat both the track and anyone else on it.
On and on they go. Twenty laps, thirty, shrieking by so fast in the front stretch that the spectators who stand at the fence are blown back, can't move their heads fast enough to watch them go by, so they pick one direction to look in and stay stuck to it. For their part, the racers are so precise about the line they choose that if it's raining you can see a five-inch-wide dry path forming, and no matter how many times they go around, a mile and a half later their tires will be exactly on that stripe each time.
The Perfect Vehicle  Melissa Pierson p97-8

[Biggles]

One has to suspect nothing but such compelling cause when so many racers are blurring down the course wearing splints, bandages wrapped tight to keep the swelling out of the way, broken ribs and foot bones, and disregarding doctors' advice and, on occasion, threats. Getting back into the ring is the only thing that matters, and most people would hardly believe the sacrifices made to do so. Grand Prix racer Wayne Rainey fell in practice before the 1992 season, injuring a hand that might have healed but not in time for the first race; instead, he had a finger amputated so he could compete. The next year his colleague Kevin Magee, with a similar injury, made exactly the same choice. Just before participation in the Mille Miglia claimed his life, the Marquis of Portago, a celebrated automobile racer of the fifties, affirmed, "Racing is a vice and, as such, extremely hard to give up."
The Perfect Vehicle  Melissa Pierson p106

[Biggles]

My motorcycle was very happy to be home. Franz would pull her up onto the lift in the back room and instruct me on whatever minor dismantling needed to be done. It was not lost on me that one trouble I had had working on my bikes at home was not having the proper tools; in Philadelphia I first felt the silken weight of a Snap-on tool, a true joy to hold. Once Franz looked over as I was extracting the oil filter from the bottom of the sump during an oil change, saw my right hand under a river of black oil, and said, "You mean to tell me you haven't figured out how to pull a Guzzi's filter and keep your hands completely clean?" Damn, I thought; changing the oil is about the only thing I know how to do well, and now he tells me I don't. A few minutes later I came to my senses. I was such an easy mark. 
"There's no way to do it, you liar." He guffawed through his nose as he ran up front to avoid the dirty shop rag coming his way.
The Perfect Vehicle  Melissa Pierson p110