Chemistry of Fire Page 9

  Goldstein’s crash: Like fighter pilots, motorcycle riders have their own language. No one speaks of a crash. They say, “I stepped off.” They call it “an unanticipated dismount.” Or they say, “I took a soil sample.” So Goldstein stepped off at about a hundred miles an hour and broke every bone in his body, give or take a few. He got a helicopter ride, as they say. Meaning: to the hospital.

  Goldstein didn’t ride for two years. Now he stood in Pro Italia hungrily eyeing the Ducatis, which seemed to melt and move in the liquid light. It was hard to tell that Goldstein had been injured so badly. He walked a bit stiffly. He couldn’t quite decide if he was ready to buy a new bike. He still belonged to the Clubhouse with Bobby and Lyle Lovett and the others. He went to the meetings. He even drove up the Crest (in a car) to have breakfast with them.

  The Clubhouse is a loose affiliation of riders who meet just down the street from Pro Italia at eight o’clock on Sunday mornings at a steel shed where they keep their motorcycles. From the outside the shed is nondescript. Inside it looks like a church. There is a sort of chancel-and-narthex feeling to the room, and at the front, where the altar would be, Lyle’s Ducati holds a place of honor. Ranked in two rows on either side of the long room are the other motorcycles, mostly Ducatis, along with some Moto Guzzis. The lighting is subdued. Chairs are set in neat rows. The floor is carpeted, and a lectern stands at the head, though I’ve never seen anyone speak at it. The leather suits hang on a rack at the entrance like brightly colored vestments. A lot of lime-green lightning bolts on expensive cowhide adorn the legs and arms.

  The first time I rode with the Clubhouse, I hadn’t been on a motorcycle in twenty-five years. The last motorcycle I’d owned had had a kick starter. When Earl Campbell, who owns Pro Italia, offered me a new Triumph, I stared at it with the dumb realization that I had no idea how to use buttons that were placed on the handlebars and around the instrument cluster. As the others were warming up their engines, I wondered if I’d even get out of the parking lot. Rick Nelson, Pro Italia’s sales manager, came over to me and said, “Ride your own ride. Don’t get sucked in.” And walked away. It was like hearing a Zen koan.

  Suddenly, everyone roared out of the parking lot, and reflexes I hadn’t known since I was a teenager returned to my hands and feet. We passed through a desolate region of poisonous restaurants and stucco malls and began the climb out of Glendale on Highway 2. The leaders pulled away into the national forest. The last I saw of them, they were leaning hard into the curves at angles that defied what I knew of physics. Small in the distance, they looked like cartoon motorcycles hinged to a toy track by invisible springs that would make them lie comically flat, then pop them up again, then make them lie flat again, as fake mountain scenery revolved on a drum past the stationary bikes.

  I thought to follow them, then immediately recalled what Rick had said: “Ride your own ride. Don’t get sucked in.” My bike had no hinge, no spring. If it leaned over that far, it would stay down. I saw them recede through several more curves, and then I was alone. When I say “alone,” I mean that I was the only person on a motorcycle. I was, in fact, surrounded by great zeppelin-like sport-utility vehicles full of children.

  With no more effort than it takes to pull the trigger of a pistol, I could have passed all the cars, but I was afraid. I loafed along behind a titanic white land yacht, riding beneath the weeping gloom of rock walls, which vaulted hundreds of feet straight up. At length, I reached Newcomb’s Ranch and found the group finishing breakfast. The restaurant was one huge dining room of makeshift tables with plastic tablecloths. The floorboards were bare, the walls unfinished, and a woodburning stove, which appeared to be made out of the cast-off boiler of a ship, dominated the center of the room. A bar faced the road and parking lot. Helmets lined a high shelf. The guys sat with their leather suits peeled down to the waist, exposing T-shirts. One T-shirt said, “Ride Fast. Take Chances.” Another was printed on the back with the legend “If You Can Read This, The Bitch Fell Off.”

  No one said, “Where have you been?” No one made fun of me. They were gracious and self-deprecating and said things like “Riding good isn’t riding fast” and “I’m not fast at all.” They said it because they had seen people killed and it had really gotten to them. There was a coffee can on the bar for donations and a crudely lettered sign that said, “WHEN YOU CRASH, the first people to reach you will be volunteer paramedics . . .” It went on to ask for donations for emergency medical equipment. The Crest was a notoriously dangerous stretch. Several motorcyclists died there every year. Nobody wanted to tempt someone to go faster and then have to watch him die on the side of the road. Even so, this didn’t slow them down. When we left, they all zoomed away before I could remember how to get my motorcycle started.

  When you fall down, they are even more solicitous. On another day I was following a professional rider. We had been on a freeway on our way to the pretty roads. I followed the rider off the exit ramp, which curved onto an access road. As I leaned into the turn, I found myself under the motorcycle in deep gray mud. My left leg and foot were pinned, and it wasn’t at all comfortable.

  Within seconds I was surrounded by riders. Though they were part of my group, I couldn’t recognize anyone behind the tinted face shields of their helmets. I couldn’t help thinking: Alien abduction.

  Someone was saying, “Don’t try to do anything. Your adrenaline is going to be really high. We’ll take care of it.” But my adrenaline wasn’t high. I wasn’t even hurt (thanks to an Aerostich suit reinforced with lots of padding and Kevlar). I just felt stupid. I’d scratched up a really nice motorcycle.

  They lifted the bike off of me. They all came over and touched me, asking, “Are you all right?” It seemed like a ritual, this touching. The pro I’d been following gave me his motorcycle to ride and fixed the one I’d dropped. We rode on to a café, where we stopped for coffee. There were perhaps two dozen of us, and as we stood around in the parking lot, they came to me one by one and touched me and said, “Are you all right?” Some told stories. “If it’ll make you feel any better, I stepped off last year . . .” They all seemed to be saying: There but for the grace of God go I.

  Riding a motorcycle is about the most dangerous thing most people can figure out how to do. Emergency-room physicians invented the term “donorcycle.” A man I know who runs a heart-transplant program for a major hospital told me that victims of motorcycle accidents were the best source for fresh hearts, because “where else can you find a perfectly healthy young person whose only difficulty is that he’s brain dead?”

  There is a sliding scale of danger in riding a motorcycle. As the speed increases, the danger increases. And as the path of the motorcycle turns, the danger increases exponentially. The reason is simple physics. An object in motion tends to stay in motion in a straight line. The faster a motorcycle goes around a curve, the less there is holding it to the road. The safest way to ride is slowly in a straight line. But the whole point is to get as close to the limit of traction as possible.

  Many of the riders I rode with, in fact, had attended Freddie Spencer’s school in Las Vegas (sponsored by Honda) to learn how to drive to that limit and recognize it. “There comes a point in leaning over,” said one student, “where if you touch the throttle, you’re going to go down. That’s the point where you want to be riding. That’s what Freddie’s school is about.” The reason to ride there is that it makes the world disappear, leaving only the beating of your pulse, the beating of the engine, and a heavy g load crushing your body into the suspension of the machine. Not everyone likes that feeling. But when it’s over, the world returns in saturated colors. You feel more fully alive. Everyone around you is smiling about that shared secret. I had known the feeling in other sports—diving, gymnastics, snowboarding, and flying stunt planes. It took me months to achieve that state on a motorcycle. And I was able to do it in part because I met Dirk Vandenberg, who was the chief motorcycle test pilot for Honda of America.

  Tim Carrit
hers, a writer for Motorcyclist magazine and a former racer, attended a motorcycle safety course with me. “Is it dangerous?” he said. “Hell, yes. You see this fifty-pound suit I’m wearing? Well, I don’t wear it to garden in.” He was referring to the Aerostich ballistic nylon suit most of us wore, which has viscoelastic padding in strategic places, Kevlar in others. Tim said he wouldn’t ride around the block without it. “If you can’t accept the risks, don’t ride. Japan has never understood that nobody needed a motorcycle. Motorcycles are not for everyone, no matter what Honda would like to think. So you have to make people want them, and you can’t make them want them with purely logical reasons.” He used the Triumph Motorcycle company’s new engine technology as an example. It had three cylinders. Why wasn’t it a tried-and-true four or else a sporty V-Twin? “Because,” Tim said, “Speed Triple sounds bitchin’.”

  I met Dirk Vandenberg at the Motorcycle Safety Foundation course. At the time, I had no idea how funny it was that Dirk was taking the course. Later I understood that it was a bit like Max Planck taking remedial math. Dirk wasn’t the sort of guy who drew attention. He stood less than six feet tall, smiled innocently, and never bragged or even mentioned what he did for a living. He wore black plastic glasses with cracked frames and a throwback moustache. His black hair had been cropped short (at a discount, it seemed). He wore square clothes, and when he drank, he drank Black Russians made with Maker’s Mark instead of vodka. He smoked cigars, which he carried in a leather case in his shirt pocket, along with pens and pencils. He looked like a cross between Clark Gable and Ernie Kovacs, only cleaned up so that he might be mistaken for a high school algebra teacher. I knew vaguely that he did something under the sprawling umbrella of Honda’s marketing department. The truth was, as Ray Blank finally admitted to me, Dirk was Honda’s secret weapon.

  Ray Blank was head of marketing for Honda of America, which supplies the world with cars, trucks, vans, motorcycles, all-terrain vehicles, electrical generators, and other types of machines that are powered by internal-combustion engines, even lawn mowers and Weed eaters. “Honda,” Tim Carrithers said, “is the eight-hundred-pound gorilla.”

  To understand what Blank meant about Dirk, it’s necessary to understand a bit about the design of motorcycles. Motorcycles are designed for different purposes. The Clubhouse riders, whose wish is to go very fast through canyons, ride sport bikes. Sport bikes are several steps away from Superbikes, which are the fastest racing motorcycles on earth. Sport bikes are designed to lean way over so that riders’ knees touch the pavement and to have a head-shocking range of power such that opening the throttle makes riders feel as if they are going to be ripped off the seat and left on the road while the bike shoots ahead on its own. This has been known to happen.

  Cruiser is a term applied to bikes that look like a Harley-Davidson, the company that has dominated that part of the market. When the Japanese manufacturers got into the cruiser market a few years ago, Harley-Davidson sued, but the courts decided that, as Carrithers put it, “you can’t patent soul.” Cruisers are heavy, loud. They do not lean well (the bike I fell off of was a cruiser), and they vibrate dramatically. Cruisers are often covered with chrome and tassels. “They’re more a fashion statement than a motorcycle,” Carrithers said. But they are more comfortable than sport bikes, especially on long road trips.

  Then there are touring bikes, enormous jukeboxes meant for driving long distances across country, such as Honda’s Gold Wing. They are just a roof short of being automobiles, and most of them have large windshields and fairings to stop the wind. (Motorcycle purists say that having the wind in your face is the whole point.) Touring bikes have stereos and luggage racks. Some have heaters. One of Honda’s models even has a reverse gear.

  Dirk’s job was to design, develop, and test sport bikes for Honda. Only Honda tests sport bikes on American roads, and so there was no one like Dirk in the entire industry, no equivalent at Yamaha or Kawasaki or Suzuki. Dirk kept Honda ahead of those competitors for many years.

  Dirk’s name was never mentioned in the press. Ray Blank—indeed, all of Honda, right up to Soichiro Honda before his death—lived in fear that personal injury lawyers would discover the existence of Dirk-san (as he was called in Japan, where he had traveled more than a hundred times in the course of his twenty-one years at Honda) and find out how much one man had to do with the development of each sport bike that Honda put on the street. Because there were grisly accidents in which people were jammed under the steel Armco barriers on the sides of roads. Plaintiffs’ lawyers would have a field day. They’d have someone to blame. Honda executives awoke in cold sweats sometimes, thinking how it would sound to hear Dirk’s nickname reverberating through a courtroom. His colleagues called him Dangerous Dirk.

  Honda sport bikes represented Dirk’s art form, an expression of his very elegant answers to very knotty problems of physics, fluid mechanics, and engineering. Dirk worked like an artist making lithographs, who creates an image and then takes it to the printer to work out the final product. Honda engineers in Japan would build a prototype from their own concept or from Dirk’s. Dirk would go to Japan to test and help to perfect it. For most motorcycle companies, that’s where the process would end. But Honda went a step further. Japan would send the prototype to America, where Dirk would ride it not only on a test track but also on the street. “They can make them work perfectly on a test track in Japan,” Dirk once told me, “but they won’t be ridden on a test track. They’ll be ridden on roads under a wide range of conditions.”

  When a prototype arrived at Honda in Torrance, California, Dirk would take the bike apart and put old body parts on it, a scuffed and dirty gas tank, ugly tires. “We’d never wash it,” he said. The point of that exercise was to make the motorcycle look like some sort of anonymous beater—like Dirk himself—so that no one would know that he was testing Honda’s latest technology. Then he’d ride the streets of America, a secret man on a secret mission. He looked like a dork on a ratty mongrel motorcycle that might at any moment leave him walking. In reality, he was the lead astronaut of Honda, riding a state-of-the-art instrument from one of the most sophisticated teams of engineers in the world.

  Dirk loved his anonymity. He told me of the thrill—well, the laughs—he’d get pulling up to a stoplight next to a bunch of kids on Kawasaki Ninjas, one of the fastest production sport bikes. Dirk would grin that innocent grin of his and gun his engine provocatively. They could see his black plastic glasses behind his face shield. He’d give them a chance to mock him and his dirty no-name bike. And then he’d leave them in his dust while he wheelied away. Dirk could do a wheelie half a mile long. Longer.

  A wheelie, of course, is that maneuver that results when the back wheel gets so much power that the front wheel comes off the ground. I remember, when I first started riding with Dirk, asking if he had any particular advice. “Cut your toenails,” he said. I was puzzled until he told me about learning to do wheelies. When the bike would rear its head up so far that he’d go over the back of the seat, Dirk would hit the ground standing. Since he was usually going about fifty miles an hour by the time the bike went over, his feet would be jammed into the toes of his boots. “My toenails would all turn black and fall off,” he said. “I learned to wear tight boots and cut my toenails real short.”

  Like motorcycle racers, Dirk enjoyed a relationship to pain quite different from my own. I regard pain as something to be avoided. I think Dirk regarded pain the way I regard the skin on an orange. He didn’t really think about it. It was a flimsy barrier, which he went through easily to get to the good part.

  Dirk, of course, didn’t work alone. The final product represented the work of teams spread across the globe. But in a tangible sense, Dirk led Honda, and Honda led and defined not only the sport-bike industry but also the very culture of motorcycling. Since the early sixties, all the other manufacturers have been in a constant struggle to keep up with Honda, which year after year has taken the awards, won the races, and en
joyed the praise of the industry press. During his two decades at Honda, Dirk not only helped to define that company’s success but did more to define the entire Japanese sport-bike industry than any other individual.

  The odd thing was that Honda had no one to replace him. Many contributed, but Dirk alone actually climbed onto the bikes to ride and said: Here is what it has. Here is what it needs. He had no assistant, no protégé, until late 1997, when he brought a young racer on board and began to teach him the trade. Dirk’s position was unique in all the industry, and Honda let him work in his own way with no real plan in mind other than to capitalize on his gifts and to keep him secret for as long as possible. That was the Honda Way. It was part of the spirit of Soichiro Honda, which had made the company not just successful but dominant in everything it attempted.

  The company has always followed one man, Soichiro Honda, who said, “Before technology, there must be a way of thinking.” Mr. Honda’s Super Cub, a small motorbike that was introduced in the late fifties, still holds the distinction of being the best-selling motorized vehicle in history. Honda has sold more than a hundred million of them. The change in the culture of motorcycling, which enjoyed a defining moment when the Guggenheim Museum displayed The Art of the Motorcycle, can be traced to the work of Soichiro Honda. Through Dirk, it can be traced to the enduring present.