by N. A. Dalbec
I was in business for myself. I rented the car on a nightly basis, six nights a week was the minimum, and Sundays were free. The shifts were long. You had the car from four in the afternoon, to four in the morning. You needed to work a minimum of ten hours a night, six nights a week to make a good buck. Otherwise you were wasting your time.
My first night turned out to be great. Beginner's luck was on my side. After that first fare, I didn't stop all evening. The adrenaline was rushing through my veins, and the money was rolling in. Little did I know that I would do this type of work, on and off for the next eight years.
Meet You at the Eiffel Tower
Not many businesses offered the flexibility that this one did. You could leave on one day's notice, and you could come back on one day's notice. I made it a point to take full advantage of that feature.
It was summertime, and one of my brothers, who was a teacher at the time decided that he would go to Europe for a month or so. I thought that to be a pretty exciting adventure.
My oldest brother and I drove the brother who was taking the trip out to the airport. There was a little bit of time to kill, so we went to the bar. While sipping on a beer, an idea came into my mind. Why not try to join my brother in Europe? So this was the deal. He was flying that day, which was a Friday. I would try to make arrangements to meet him in Paris on the following Friday, at the base of the northern leg of the Eiffel Tower.
All of this was rather whimsical. I had no passport, no ticket reservation, no Eurail pass, no nothing, except the cash and the willingness to go.
My brother would call me from Europe mid-week to see if I had managed to make all of the arrangements to join him in Paris. What a week it turned out to be. I managed to get a temporary passport, and a Eurail pass. I needed to book a flight. I called all the airlines to see what I could get at a decent price. Fortunately, I was considered a student, and was able to get a reduced fare with Air France, flying in to Paris. Once I had the ticket and the passport, I went to the taxi broker that I was working with at the time, and told him that I was going to be gone for a while. Taxi brokers were used to this sort of thing. A lot of the fellows my age would work their butts off all summer and go to exotic places like Sri Lanka in the winter. It was the thing to do in those days.
During the mid-week trans-Atlantic call with my brother, I confirmed that I would be at the Eiffel Tower on Friday morning. It was Thursday afternoon, and my parents were driving me to what was then the country’s largest city so that I could catch my flight. We met up with my eldest brother. We had dinner, and my parents headed back home. With pack sack on my back, my brother gave me a ride to the airport on his motorcycle. It was a beautiful early evening, and the temperature was great for the ride to the airport.
So there we were again, my eldest brother and I, having a beer at the same bar where we'd had a drink the week before. This time, I was leaving for Europe. The flight was on time, and I took advantage of the overnight flight to rest from the week that had just passed.
I arrived the next morning at the all new Charles de Gaulle airport. I had never been to Europe and was looking forward to the trip with my brother. After a slightly confusing information gathering session at the airport, I managed to get on a bus that would take me to a point not too far from the Eiffel Tower. It was interesting to see the differences in architecture on the way in from the airport. The cars were funky, the women were beautiful, the drivers were crazy, and the city trees had all their branches lopped off.
Well I got to the Eiffel Tower. As a matter of fact I got there an hour early. So did my brother. We met at the base of the north leg of the Tower, as we had planned, one week before.
California Here We Come
It was late August, and the Rabbit was brand new. My friend had just sold his Porsche 914 and had remained true to German cars by picking up one of these new-fangled replacements for the defunct, in our markets anyway, Beetle. The Rabbit was, as the name implies, quick.
My friend was at university that year, and I was still continuing my education at the real world school, concentrating on short spurts of work, and longer periods of travel. University wasn't starting for a month or so, and as a result of a rather spontaneous decision, we decided to pack the car with camping gear, some beer, and a few cans of sardines. The destination, California.
Our jaunt would take us across North America, and so it was imperative that we make good time, so that we might take advantage of the late summer sun and sand on the west coast. We decided to do the trip non-stop, at least to get out there. The plan was that we would drive one tank each, and alternate at every fill-up.
Our trip took us first through Detroit, then to Chicago. From there we had decided that we would travel south-westward to arrive sometime later, in San Francisco. The first leg of the trip took us to a Holiday Inn. Once there, we visited the bar. Not such a good idea, seeing we had some three thousand miles left to go.
Our energy level was still pretty high, and we were sticking to our one tank shifts. Driving through Detroit had been quite the experience, and driving through Chicago proved to be an experience also. Whenever we would be driving through one of these major centers, we would wonder why they packed so many people into one place, and why so many people would want to be packed in one place. Thank goodness they had good highways to get through the cities.
After Chicago things started to get pretty flat and the roads were pretty straight. At one point we were tempted to tie the steering wheel to the side-rear-view mirror, and to place a rock on the gas pedal. It was the era of the double nickel, and we noticed cars being pulled over for doing sixty-five miles an hour, so we literally and figuratively had to keep it on the straight and narrow. Nice countryside though. I wasn't really sure that rocks actually balanced on pointy peaks, just like in the cowboy movies. Now I know. One annoying thing about driving in the mid-west is that on those long straight four lane highways, the back of your head can get burned off by the headlights of a car that might be miles away.
We ever-onwarded into Utah, and Salt Lake City. That place must be something like ten thousand feet below sea level. My friend and I both noticed that we seemed to be driving downhill for something like an hour. It felt like we were going into an abyss, and in the pre-dawn night, wondered if we were ever going to get back up to a normal altitude. The Bonneville Flats were everything they said they would be, and Reno was offering inexpensive breakfasts, but we didn't stop.
Our energy was waning. It was harder and harder to do full-tank shifts, which, at the speeds we were going, would keep us at the wheel for four, sometimes five hours. At one point, my friend looked at me, and said that he would need toothpicks to keep his eyes open, and I believed him. His eyes looked like little puffy wrinkled bags that just stayed open enough to let a pair of bloodshot glassy white marbles peer aimlessly outward. I was not in much better shape. So we decided to do two hour shifts, and that got us through.
We made it to Pacifica Beach, just south of San Francisco in fifty-six hours. We were very tired, and the ocean waters felt really, really good on our aching bodies. We took it easy after that. We had made it, and promised each other that we would never, never do that in one shot, again.
Motorcycle Mania
Everybody we knew had them. It was the era of the motorcycle. The Japanese bikes were dominating the market that they had entered in the sixties, and now in the early seventies, had become household names.
I'd had four small motorcycles, and one slightly larger Honda 350 twin that was more of a workhorse than anything else. I wanted something bigger now, and the choices for road bikes were numerous. In smaller road bikes two-strokes were still popular. They didn't sound as good as the four-strokes, but they were tough as nails, and they loved to run in the cold.
I was torn between the Yamaha 400 twin and the Suzuki 380 triple. A good friend of mine introduced me to his 380, with straight bars, and not much else. I was sold, but so was my eldest b
rother, who beat me to the punch, and bought his, one year before I did.
The bike shop I went to was just opening up. The owners were really nice. We swung a deal one winter day, whereby I would give them a certain amount of cash each month until the bike was paid off. They had no problem with that, and in the spring of '76, I picked up my new set of wheels. I was able to join two of my friends who already had picked up their bikes in the fall. One of them had a Suzuki 550 triple, and the other had a Suzuki 500 twin. The first trip for the new bike was on an Easter weekend. Straight out of the shop, and off the bike was on a six hundred mile trip to the oldest city in the country. It was about eighty degrees when we left on Good Friday, and just above freezing when we got to our destination the next morning. We went through the wall of cold where the temperature changed by about thirty degrees inside of a mile. The same thing happened on the way back, except that we drove through a wall of heat.
It was the year of the Olympics, and I did a lot of traveling to the east coast that summer. I'll always remember a trip back home that was riddled with misadventures. It was a two-part trip. Along the way I was stopped for speeding. I explained to the officer that I had been riding slowly for some time and that he happened to catch me at a point when I was cleaning out the carbon, so to speak. The officer didn't buy the story, and gave me a ticket which I could, and did, pay on the spot. Not much later, my gummy rubber boots fell off the bike. I never noticed their absence till I met with some rain. Not too much later I lost a container of injector oil which I was relying on for future use. I was losing a lot of things on the first part of that trip.
On the second day, I must have put on my rain suit a dozen times, until the thing fell apart. I fought sixty-mile-an-hour winds. Just nearing a major centre, I ran out of fuel. The station was one exit back. Time for a walk. Once fueled up, I crossed my fingers and forged ahead. As I prepared for yet another stop, oops, my shift lever had disappeared. The engine vibrations had gradually worked the lever loose. At the gas station, I tried to negotiate with the kid running the place for his vice-grips. The price kept going up instead of down, so I let the kid keep his vice-grips. I pulled a pair of small pliers from my bike’s tool kit, and stored them in my pocket for easy access as I rode along. It was a rather hair-raising experience having to crouch down and shift the bike with a pair of pliers while crossing a city of three million inhabitants, but I made it all the way home that day, some 650 miles.
I stood in the shower until the tank was empty. I had been on my motorcycle for sixteen hours. My butt was about to fall off, and so were my shoulders. After showering, I walked down to the garage to remove the shift lever from my Yamaha scooter. It was gone. It turned out that my brother had used it on his bike, because he had lost his shifter on the same weekend.
I rode that motorcycle a lot that summer, something like seven thousand miles. In the fall, I traded it on a liquid-cooled 750 Suzuki two-stroke. I was so anxious to get that one on the road that I took delivery of it in the middle of winter, and because we had a fairly dry one that year, started riding in February. I must have been crazy. I would have needed a snowmobile suit just to keep warm. I remember my knee caps going white on me.
This was my seventh motorcycle. Up to that point, I hadn't taken any bad spills on bikes. I felt that I'd been pretty lucky, because everyone we knew had taken at least one spill on their bikes, and some had been less fortunate than others. So I decided to sell the bike. The end of the season was approaching and I thought I could still get a sale in at a fair price. This was not to be. One night, coming back from a club, I lost the bike going into a turn. It was one of the most unpleasant feelings I have ever felt. The bike and I were separated, and I felt my body skid along the road like a jet plane touching down more than the requisite once. My hands and feet were in constant contact with the pavement, and my knees and chest kept bobbing up and down like a long plank being carried at both ends. As I was sliding, I kept hoping that the unpleasant experience would end soon. It may have lasted a few seconds, but felt like forever.
I was very fortunate not to be hurt. I picked myself up, picked the bike up, and tried not to cry. I got to a phone, called my oldest brother up, and asked if he'd call a tow truck and come and pick me up. That was my last bike. I've ridden them since, but I've never had a solid urge to pick one up again.
The Pad
At one point in time, most people feel a need for their own space. As you grow up, a natural desire emerges. To sever the invisible umbilical cord is a critical step, more in its timing than in its execution.
I was twenty-two at the time that I decided to make a move. A number of my friends were on their own, and still a good number were still living at home. A furnished basement apartment became available in the neighborhood. It was located in a house that belonged to my good friend's parents. I had clued in another friend to this place sometime before when he and his girlfriend were in search of an apartment. They lived there for quite a stretch, but had now moved on to other things, and other places. I knew the place well, as did our entire circle of friends. The place had seen a lot of parties, art sessions, and a variety of other activities.
For two hundred bucks a month I could have the one bedroom apartment, heat and light included. I took it, and fixed it up to my liking on a very slim budget. It was only a couple of blocks from my parents' place, but it gave me the privacy, and the autonomy that I desired at the time.
One of the best things about living there was that you could play the stereo as loud as you could bear it from morning to about eleven at night. Not that the place was soundproof, but that was the arrangement. One of the worst things was that the apartment was located in yet another basement. The place was well kept, but there was an ongoing fight with earwigs, those disgusting little creatures that get into everything. They liked the apartment because it was cool in the summer. The other thing that used to get to me was that the fridge would freeze everything but alcoholic beverages. In the morning you'd have cereal with milky white ice crystals on top. That was your milk. Apart from those niggles, the place was comfortable.
The apartment served as a drop-in center for many of my friends. I was in to making beer at the time, and so were many others. It was very easy to make, and everyone loved to drink the different varieties that we would make. The very best thing about home made beer, apart from its affordability, was that you could drink a whack of it and usually not get a headache. The biggest problem with home made beer was keeping it. I remember people dropping by on bottling day and drinking the entire batch before it even got bottled. Bottling was just a formality. It allowed the beer to become effervescent. Flat beer never stopped any of my friends from drinking. Actually, flat beer tastes a little like a red semi-sweet wine. In fact, beer is technically a wine.
Apart from being used as a brewery, the place was often used as a center for the arts. My friend next door, in the other part of the basement, whose parents owned the house, was studying art at school. He introduced a number of us to painting with oils and acrylics. It was not unusual to stay up to all hours of the night endeavoring to create the ultimate masterpiece. It was an activity that relied on artificial stimuli, and we all enjoyed the stimuli as much as the painting.
I ended up staying in that apartment for about ten months. A renewed desire to return to academia overcame me, and I couldn't afford to keep the place. Living in that apartment taught me a few things. It taught me that freedom has a price. It also taught me that I hate living in basements, and if at all humanly possible, I will avoid living in a basement ever again.
Turning Points
There are natural turning points in our lives. We can't avoid them, and in fact we should embrace them, at least the ones that we have control over. Sometimes, we make a decision that will seem very serious to us. Sometimes it is. Often, circumstances change the course and results of a decision that we make. The important thing to remember is that we should make decisions, we should continually ven
ture, and take calculated risks. If the outcome of our decisions is negative, then we should do everything in our power to correct it. If the outcome of our decision is positive, we should enjoy it and expand on it.
It was one of the most powerful moments in my life. Anger, frustration, and fear were foremost in my mind. I was angry with myself, I was frustrated with what I was doing, and I was deathly afraid that if I didn't do something, I would be stuck in a situation that I had created, and did not see a way out of.
I was twenty-three years old. I had been going to the school of reality for some five years. I had seen every kind of person imaginable, from the richest to the poorest, from the brightest to the dullest, from the luckiest to the most deprived. I had been driving a taxi cab, on and off, for five years. I had traveled, and lived with other people my age. I had satisfied the youthful curiosity that had emerged some five years earlier. I came to the realization that if I didn't break out of the life that I was leading, the lesson would be lost, and I would become the lesson for someone else. I had only wanted to taste the school of reality, to give me time to grow up.