Chemistry of Fire Read online

  At that time, the only V-Twin sport bikes were the so-called exotics, the ones I had seen lately at Pro Italia in Glendale—Ducati, Moto Guzzi, Bimota—which could cost $30,000 or more. One Super Bowl Sunday at Pro Italia, Rick Nelson, the sales manager, had mused on the Ducati mystery. “The Suzuki has a stronger motor and it’s cheaper,” he said. “But the Ducati is the best. It’s a Ferrari. For me sound is the soul of a bike. If I can’t get off on the sound of it, then it doesn’t matter what the cost is. And sometimes with those Japanese bikes, it gets so technical and refined that you lose what the thing is about. I can bypass technology for soul.”

  Dirk said, “We wanted to capture the riders who had passion. We needed something with soul.”

  Tim explained it this way: “You say, ‘I want a Ducati 916 so bad my gums sweat.’ Why? Because it’s the kind. Then you get out on it, and you find out that it is, it is the kind. But you can’t use it. It wants to be ridden hard, and nine-tenths of the time, you’re going out to Dunkin’ Donuts, and on that slow ride through traffic, a 916′s going to beat you like a redheaded stepchild. You can ride the Superhawk anywhere, anytime, and in the hands of a good rider, it’ll spank the 916.” Honda wasn’t the first to think of this. Suzuki had the same idea a little earlier with the TL1000S. “But it’s ugly as a mud fence,” Tim said. And it’s not connected the way the Superhawk is.

  Shortly before his death, Dirk finally succeeded in getting Honda to put the VTR 1000 Superhawk on the market. The miracle of Honda’s answer to Ducati was that a rider of ordinary skills could go really fast up the Crest (or Decker Canyon or Latigo Canyon) and also could feel confident going to Dunkin’ Donuts. Lyle, a confirmed Ducati guy, wasn’t all that sure he liked it at first. “It’s like a Ducati with power steering,” told me. But then he bought one. It is, after all, an engineering marvel.

  Dirk introduced me to the Superhawk on that first extravagant weekend, that incredibly expensive Honda hoedown at the Rancho Valencia villa in Rancho Santa Fe. This was where Dirk’s wife, Donna, had told me about riders going off the road because of failing to “ride your own ride.” This was the press event to promote motorcycling as a family activity, fun, safe, joyous, and clean. Honda had sent out a semitrailer truck full of motorcycles, all its models on board, including the Superhawk.

  We ate lobster and lamb chops in the huge dining room under a beamed ceiling, attended by liveried servants before a leaping fire. Afterward, over Armagnac and a selection of Cubanos, Dirk’s boss, Gary Christopher, told us of a dream he’d had. Gary was not just a corporate executive but also a man possessed by motorcycling. He was the honest goods, a true believer. In his dream, Gary was doing a wheelie. Only it wasn’t just any wheelie. It was the wheelie to end all wheelies. It went on and on, fifty, sixty, seventy miles an hour, down the road. And he was happy in that dream. Everyone leaned in and listened as he told the story, and I kept waiting for the punch line, but there was none. When Gary was done, we all put our fingers to our chins. Tim nodded solemnly. I nodded, too. Dirk and Candace nodded, and even Donna nodded. Everyone understood. He told us how happy he’d been, and we all got it. It was deep. It was a tale from the Zendo.

  The next day we went riding through avocado and tangerine plantations. We stopped on a quiet road to rest, to trade bikes among ourselves, to get our bearings, and to zero our odometers before entering the mouth of the dragon, fifteen miles of curving, intestinal switchbacks and long, decreasing-radius turns that would suck you in and then spit you out if you weren’t concentrating. We were somewhere in the vicinity of Mount Palomar on roads known to be the best motorcycle routes in the country because of their serene beauty and the jagged technical demands they placed on both rider and bike. Dirk had been riding with Candace on the back of the brand-new Superhawk, which had not even been released for sale, and now he offered the bike to me.

  We stood around looking like fighter pilots in our Aerostich Roadcrafter ballistic nylon suits, and for a few minutes, we compared notes and studied our route, taking cookies and bottled water and apples and juice from the open back of the big white support van in which Beverly and her assistant, Kim, were following us. A few years earlier, Beverly St. Clair had been hired by the Big Four to set up a group called Discover Today’s Motorcycling, which would attempt to correct the problem of sagging sales. Beverly undertook a media blitz that sought to instill in the public mind an image of motorcycling as stylish and responsible. During the first half decade of DTM’s existence, motorcycle sales doubled and doubled again, as did DTM’s budget. Beverly had given us all cell phones so that we could stay in touch. Each time we stopped she mentioned “responsible riding.”

  I mounted the Superhawk and roared into the narrow bituminous channel that had been cut through a shaggy old eucalyptus forest. I found myself behind Dirk and Tim, thinking of Tim’s rules of life. For example: “Never be the first kid to jump off the garage roof.” Tim was tall and looked like a serious athlete. His short hair, which tended to spike on its own, still retained a bit of the red color from the night a tall and beautiful woman named Sally had decided to dye it for him. Tim had been hoping for something more intimate, but it had turned out to be something of a Samson and Delilah night. I had ridden the Crest with Tim and had turned five hundred off-road miles in Baja while eating adult portions of his dust. I had come to trust him. I knew he wouldn’t kill me—not on purpose. So I settled in behind him and Dirk and thought: Whither thou goest, I shall go.

  We entered the shade of the eucalyptus trees, whose branches came together overhead to form a tunnel. The road was black and soft and narrow, barely wide enough for two cars to pass each other. On either side were neatly tended ranchitos with painted fences and flowering bushes and cropped lawns. Tim referred to these as “potpourri plantations.” The smell was intoxicating.

  Soon the road fell away and began plunging and leaping through a series of splits, spikes, and bullwhip curves, returning to itself like a river driven mad by gravity.

  Once again, as always, I found myself alone. But presently I rounded a curve and saw Tim politely waiting for me. Dirk had gone ahead. Tim sat athwart his cycle, ass cocked to one side like a racer, arms and legs dangling with slack-limbed indolence, one finger languid on the throttle. Michelangelo could have sculpted him. But the motorcycle’s tail looked venomous, wasplike, and as Tim’s head swiveled, the face shield glinted like a compound eye, and I remarked how this image of him combined the utterly human with the completely alien and how that was exactly what Dirk had worked so hard to achieve. Odd how the Japanese had failed to comprehend what he was after. Tim could have been an image in a Japanese comic book.

  He raised a hand and urged me on. He was going to show me how to do it. I was to follow him into the Gretel darkness.

  Tim slipped his six-foot-four frame back into riding position. His bike surged forward. I tucked down on the Superhawk and found that the gas tank accepted my abdomen in an almost sexual embrace. So this was the missing piece of the engineering puzzle: me. I grabbed a handful of throttle. The bike was drawn effortlessly in behind Tim’s. We were welded together, brothers in Aerostich armor. Suddenly my life—all life—made sense. I thought: This is a test. It’s about trusting myself, about trusting my friends, about trusting Dirk’s machine. Dirk’s machine could do anything that I had the hair to attempt.

  Commitment is more than a word: once you fly into a turn carrying speed, you can’t decide that it’s a bad idea. Tim had told me, “If you want to wad up your beautiful new VTR 1000 faster than junior-jet stink, just grab a big handful of that floating front disc brake while you’re in a corner.” So to find the path out, he’d said, go deeper in. Look through the turn. Steer your way out. Which sounded like a pretty good set of rules for life.

  Tucking in behind Tim, I asked myself: What’s the worst thing that can happen? The bike isn’t going to fall down by itself. There are two sixty-pound gyroscopes, otherwise known as the wheels, keeping it up. It will run wide only if I
let it. The iron armature of this earth will keep me solid on these curves. Tim was showing me how fast I could safely run the reaches of that river as we searched for Dirk, our Kurtz in that heart of darkness. I saw the formula for unknotting that road in the lines that Tim drew for me.

  As our speed increased, the Superhawk settled into a rhythm, and I settled in with it. I concentrated on being smooth and relaxed. Into the next curve I went, counter-steering. All that was required to make a deep left bank was to shove the left handlebar away from me—a touch would do it. A gentle urging of the throttle would pull me straight through. I understood that motorcycles make noise, but the world was oddly silent, save for a musical tone as the suspension vibrated like a cello string.

  We rounded an especially tight corner that took me by surprise. All at once I knew I was going too fast, and all I could think of was to grab the brakes, to slow down. The centrifugal force was like that sudden sensation when you know you’ve drunk too much and you’re going to throw up. Suddenly I didn’t know whether to push or pull. For a hair-ball moment, a black terror gripped my heart. I had the almost irresistible urge to grab the brakes. Keeping myself from doing so was like trying not to pull my hand away from a hot stove. Then I heard Dirk’s voice in my head. “The throttle is your friend,” he said. Counter to every instinct and on the strength of my faith in him and Tim, I cranked on more gas. The curve magically straightened out. The throttle pulled me through. The engineering Dirk had worked twelve years to perfect actually worked.

  As we rolled into the straight, I saw Tim catch up to Dirk. He slipped into his sideways racer’s slouch. His compound mantis eye seemed to smile back at me through the proton shield, and he jerked his fist into the air triumphantly and gave me a thumbs-up sign with a Kevlar-gloved hand.

  Nights passed at the faux-Italian villa in Rancho Santa Fe, and days passed riding through orange groves and little towns that looked like Mexico, where any individual we passed might earn less each year than one of our bikes had cost. I had come to understand that I would never know what it was like to be Dirk unless I rode like Dirk, a patently absurd possibility. It was Candace who gave me the idea to ride on the back while Dirk took the Superhawk through a canyon. I trusted Dirk’s skill implicitly, yet the paradox of my trust didn’t escape me. For even then I understood in some vague way that he would certainly die while riding a motorcycle. Even at that early stage, I was sad about it, for we were fast becoming friends.

  The sun was going down in the canyon when I mounted up, one arm around him, one hand reaching past his waist to brace myself on the gas tank so that I wouldn’t slide into him when he got on the brakes.

  Late sunlight peeked beneath the front wheel as we entered the shadow-lands. In the first turn, I could feel that Dirk was testing our weight and balance against the Superhawk’s authority. Even so, my gut sensation told me that we were in a long crash, certain but not yet ended. G-forces pulled us toward the cliff of naked rock to our right. We dove deep into the apex of the curve. I could feel Dirk roll on the throttle.

  The next corner was a complete 180, and it was marked with a yellow sign that said, “15 MPH.” Dirk hit it at well above fifty, and when he flicked into the turn, I saw a wooden cross with fresh flowers. I could smell the flowers as we passed. I knew that we were too far over, too close to the edge of the road, that a bit of steel-belted radial the size of a dime could not possibly meet the demands of our speed and our eight hundred pounds. Once on an oil rig I’d been dangled fifteen stories over the Atlantic Ocean on a cable as thin as my old Parker 51 fountain pen. It had taken a supreme act of will then not to weep from fear in front of a group of grown men. But I trusted Dangerous Dirk. We vaulted out of that turn and into the next and the next, and my heart, while it didn’t settle, began to merge into the physics of the situation. Dirk’s feats appeared dangerous to everyone else, because if we tried them, we’d be wearing that Superhawk like a hat. But he was Dirk and we were not.

  We stopped to turn around in the final moments of daylight. Dirk had explained that with a clean, well-engineered road, a rider of ordinary skill could double the speed on the yellow warning signs without undue concern. Candace, who had ridden behind him for much of our trip, reported that he was tripling those speeds routinely. The sign coming up said, “45 MPH.” At the apex of the turn, the right-hand mirror traced its invisible line to within three inches of the steel Armco guardrail. It gave me a chance to watch his precision and smoothness. It was a long sweeping curve, and the distance between mirror and guardrail remained the same, as if we were traveling along the length of a gray galvanized razor blade. There was no wobble, no searching for the line. We were dialed in. We were connected. We seemed to stay in that turn for a very long time. I could see the dimpled pores of the metal as if I were looking through a microscope. Here then was the clarity we seek. If we could not manage it in our lives, then at least we could glimpse it on this razor’s edge.

  As we spun back through the final series of curves, the night advancing through the canyons, I was left with a feeling of joy and trust in Dirk and the bike he’d built and his good-natured accommodations to the impersonal laws that governed its movements.

  One quiet weekday morning, we ascended to six thousand feet on Mount Palomar. Before we started up, Tim told me, “Anything I do, you can do now.” Tim followed Dirk, and I followed Tim, losing them only once or twice. Pinning it in one long and ever-tightening curve, I thought: At last, this is the knot I can’t untie. I felt like Houdini handcuffed at the bottom of the bay. It was an unnatural act, and it took all my faith. I simply flicked the left handlebar away from me—I think I actually punched it—and one part of me fully expected that action to upset the bike. But the Superhawk lay submissively on its side and then greedily ate up the turn as I opened the throttle. It was magic. I know it was magic, because I believed it to be impossible.

  At the top we found ourselves in a cedar forest near Mother’s Restaurant, one of those legendary breakfast spots where bikers gather. Giant oaks had scattered acorns underfoot. Snow, which lay melting by the side of the road, where it had been pushed by plows, persisted in patches in the woods. The only sounds were from birds, the trickle of snowmelt, and our own soft voices as we looked over Dirk’s trip book. The view of the Pauma Valley drew us in. I’d had little time to look while riding, when all my concentration had been taken up with task saturation, the Zen of the beginner’s mind.

  I parked the Superhawk and told Tim, “I think they’re going to erect a statue here. Our Lady of Centrifugal Force or something. Because it was a miracle that I got through those curves alive.”

  “Nah,” he told me succinctly, “you’re all right. You’re in the hunt now.”

  I made my way down from the road and stood in the cool shade of the forest. Bright sunlight filtered through in towering shafts, seeming as solid as columns of yellow stone. I came on a single giant cedar tree with a fairy cavern worn into its trunk by weather and rot and animals—it looked big enough to sleep in. I could hear Dirk talking with Candace and Tim up on the road. They were talking about a series of wheelies he’d done, and I heard him say, “Don’t tell Beverly.”

  Dirk was at home taking care of his children. Beverly and I had hoped to meet him for drinks at the Ritz-Carlton in Dana Point, but his wife, Donna, also an executive at Honda, was working late. Beverly and I had been in the bar for half an hour when Dirk tiptoed in, carrying the younger boy, who was three, and followed by the older one, who was six. Dirk looked like a little boy sneaking out of school himself. “Don’t tell Donna,” he pleaded. “She’d kill me if she knew I’d brought the boys to a bar.” Then he added, “Well, hell, they’ve got to start sometime.”

  Dirk ordered his Maker’s Mark cocktail and leaped up from time to time to chase the younger boy around the vast carpeted bar. Several stories below the windows white breakers creamed and curled against the dark ocean. Dirk’s older son was gentle and protective toward the baby, just as Dirk was gentl
e and protective with them both. I sat admiring Dirk for what he was, true man, journeyman, a rare hybrid of wild and tame, out drinking with the gang with his moveable nursery. I could see Dirk in the older boy, who was already riding a small Honda dirt bike at home. Dirk had only one drink. Then he said he had to get the boys home. He had them in bed before Donna got home.

  Dirk and I exchanged frequent emails. Going over them now, I see that they always involved schemes to go riding. “Beverly said she’s really close to the Campbells,” Dirk wrote, referring to Earl and Linda, who own Pro Italia, “and she will make some inquiries to get Harrison on board.” Earl had built a motorcycle for Harrison Ford, and we were hoping that Harrison might come to Freddie Spencer’s school in Las Vegas with our group to find the limit of his traction. Harrison liked motorcycling because he could be with the guys, and as long as he didn’t take his helmet off, no one knew who he was.

  “Nov. 17 and 18 are reserved with Freddie Spencer for his racing school,” Dirk wrote me a few days later. “Please confirm with Lyle that he can attend and yourself, too. Ray Blank, Gary Christopher, myself, and possibly Pete ter Horst (our new press manger) are all planning to attend, too. Let me know if you and Lyle can make it.” He gave the dates and then added, “Most of this is subject to change without logic!! Sideways is best! —dirk”

  And a few days later: “Will Lyle be able to get to Las Vegas the evening of the 16th? (Sun)?? After school on the 17th I’ll arrange for all of us to drive Legends cars on the small paved oval course next door to the track. Could be too much fun!! Did you get with Harrison Ford’s people?? Should I try on this end??” Dirk had been trying to interest me in race cars, especially small go-karts, which he called shifter cars. From what Gary Christopher told me, they were some sort of suicidal steel cages with huge engines, no seat belts, and a tendency to get inverted without warning. “I always end up covered with bruises when I finish racing,” Dirk told me, adding with glee, “It’s great fun! You have to try it!”