Desert Memories

DESERT MEMORIES

By J. A. IRVING

California desert, approaching the Seventies. The sun had just come up, and they said this would be the hottest day of the year. The shadows still felt cold, but already the sun had weight when it leaned on you.

Ben Bastion walked from the van where he had spent the night in the racers’ parking lot into the Costa Mesa International Raceway garage. His blonde curls seemed extra unruly: a typical case of pre-race nerves had kept him from resting well, even in a down-filled sleeping bag with a foam pad between him and the steel floor.

A shaggy band with electric guitars, organ, and drums was already trying to crank its amps loud enough to dispel the nighttime desert chill in front of near-empty grandstands, as music of a different kind – to some ears – roared out in the cavernous garage. The first race bike fired up to begin prepping for their final practice before the main event that afternoon. Ben’s mechanic brought the pit-starter to spin the back wheel so they could bump the much-modified single-cylinder to life; Ben himself threw a leg across the tiny saddle of his faithful Rudyard TT Replica and gave the throttle grip a twist or two. A smell and faint blue haze of burnt castor oil rose with the cascading noise.

The mechanic shepherded the silver-and black bike, warming up for its first laps of the day, outside into the desert sun. Ben threw off jeans and T-shirt and stretched a leather jumpsuit, blazoned with Rudyard name and sponsor logos, over his wiry body; he pulled on gloves and boots, and squeezed those famous Bastion curls inside one of the still-new full-face coverage helmets. 

A slight figure in red and black leathers of his own swaggered up, wearing an older-style helmet and plastic face-shield, with a mechanic pushing his shrieking Italian four-cylinder bike on toward the pit lane and track. Gino Benedetto slapped Ben on the shoulder. “Now that’s how a real racing motorcycle sounds – not some thumping old English tractor, growl and grumble!”  The two were longtime rivals and in some grudging sense, friends.

“Hey, Gino!” Ben yelled through his helmet and the racket of motors. “Thumping English tractor revs higher than she used to, and she still corners like on rails – we’ll see what the track says about ‘real racers’ this afternoon!”

“Neither of us will catch the 750s and the two-strokes,” Gino admitted ruefully. “But we’ll keep them honest!”

“And racing luck yields surprises, too.”

“Si, si. But I wish we had more than luck to count on!”

Ben and Gino, and the rest of their two-wheeled circus, knew each other from the road-racing tracks of North America. Some of them also raced dirt ovals, but not Ben. A Rudyard-and-Tanaka dealer from the small town of Pine Lake in the mountains of western Canada, he stuck to his TT Replica. Yet even though it had grown a hundred more cubic centimetres and an extra gear since its track debut over a decade before, it could no longer really keep up, despite Ben’s smooth and precise riding style.

Benedetto, a sprout from an old family tree with Italian roots, always raced stylish, complicated Italian machinery even as Asian two-strokes inched toward dominance on the racetrack. Gino also majored in after-race parties – booze, a little dope sometimes, a girl on each arm.

Life played like a movie. Ben and Gino and the others, young, or young-ish, and leather-clad, served as the heroes and villains. A little leather-wrapped man with a scanty moustache sneered at the private entrants as he mounted the latest factory-prepped two-stroke: Gary Quadra. The magazines profiled him in feature stories that hinted at possibilities soon of a world championship run in Europe. He’d posted a qualifying time yesterday that put him on the inside of the front row for the start. Quadra sneered at his factory-sponsored team-mates, too.

Ben stepped outside into brilliance from the shadowy garage. The sun already radiated back from the dusty hills, cactus, and brush, heat rising in waves from the asphalt track surface. Ben sucked at the crooked spout of a water bottle that could reach inside his helmet. Pavement softened and tire grip changed when facing this much heat. Crowds had begun to gather and bake in open bleachers at key spots around the course, some carrying their own sunshades, drinking beer, colas, and lemonade. Suntanned blonde models watched and waited to put on bikinis and hand over the trophies. Some of the riders threw a few jokey lines their way.

Ben had his own beauty at home with the kids, although sometimes Mary travelled to races with him.

By now the track was hot; tires and oil reached working temperatures quickly; this afternoon might overstrain some of the machinery. Like those two-strokes. Ben studied the cornering lines he had worked out yesterday: had a square inch of oil changed the exact spot to start his lean for this curve? Could he still trust the Replica’s vaunted roadholding at these temperatures, there in that series of bends, and flip the bike with abandon from one side to the other, at over 100 mph?

He and his mechanic made a few adjustments to the forks and rear shocks after the track officials flagged the session to a close. The tires and brakes had just enough laps on them to be ready to race.

After a morning of supporting events and music, clocks – still mostly dial-type – reported race time for the feature approaching. Teams pushed all the bikes to their start positions according to qualifying times, each make roaring its own distinctive exhaust note as mechanics and riders coaxed them to start again. Ben was already sweating in his leathers and helmet, and the Rudyard pumped out its own waves of heat and vibration as he positioned himself in the thinly padded saddle. 

A convertible led the field on a pace lap and the green flag waved. Gary Quadra turned his pole position start into an early lead while his team-mates traded second through fifth with a trio of factory-entered 750-cc four-strokes. Ben’s Rudyard single roared along, running just behind the stars and repeating exactly each braking point, turn-in, apex, lap by lap. Then on a fast, downhill series of bends called the Stairway, Gino’s red four-cylinder drifted past him. Ben felt a jolt of adrenalin but stayed on his rhythm, keeping one eye on Benedetto’s line while riding his own.

He dived under the red bike as they banked into a hairpin, rubbing fairings a little at the corner’s apex, and then he growled ahead.

Gino lunged back into the lead of their duel on the outside of a long, fast corner. Ben outbraked the wiry little Italian at another spot, winning back the place.

They kept at each other in the scorching sun, lap by lap, their engines pouring out mechanical heat, at the same time as they crept closer to the overall leaders – who battled elbow-to-elbow among themselves. Their leathers were soaking with sweat. They set personal lap records. Fans leapt to their feet each time Ben and Gino came in sight, duelling red and silver.

Over fifty years later, the two of them remembered together. Gino, attending Ben’s birthday, back in Pine Lake, seemed bent, frail, with wispy white hair. Ben’s curls had long since been shorn to pale stubble, but he kept up an exercise routine a physiotherapist had given him after his last big crash – his only serous road accident, more than twenty years before.

They joined Ben’s neighbours and family with the bratwurst and ciabatta rolls and salads around Ben and Mary’s hand-built log home on the lakeshore at the edge of town. Mary had been failing since a stroke ten years ago, but she still attended.

“And then, last lap, we went too far!” Gino grinned. He snapped his fingers in the air to show how quickly everything could change.

“I made the quickest sector time of the race down the Stairway,” Gino said with satisfaction, “and you hung at my back tire. Amazing! You got by me on the brakes, there, and I pulled beside you as we turned in – the asphalt was getting really soft. We both lost grip at the same instant; we both ate dust!”

“We both wore gravel rash for weeks, but people still talk about that race, and they remember us, not Gary taking the checkered flag and champagne!” Ben had always wondered if one of them actually took the other out. “It was a day to remember, even if we didn’t score trophies. Quadra never forgave us for stealing his show, as long as he lived.”

“Si-si!” The old racer had a light in his eyes, even though he seemed much more aged than Ben. “And now you will beat me again on birthdays, si? I heard about this party down at the care home. But could I have a champagne if you don’t mind? They don’t give me that, at the old folks’ home.”

“That was always why you wanted to win – the bubbly, eh?”

“I wanted to beat you, but the champagne was a nice bonus!” The frail old racer smacked his wrinkled lips.

Ben smiled and shook Benedetto’s hand as he led him to the ice bucket and the last bottles of birthday champagne.

I never cared about the bonus, Ben thought, but I wanted to beat myself, even more than beating the other guys. Guess that’s partly why I stuck to my old Ruddy instead of trying to get some superfast new bike.

Gino’s care aide took him home to the seniors’ facility early, still smiling.

Ben remembered again hat hot afternoon in the desert, riding back to pit lane with Gino in the ambulance, their leathers and bodies scraped raw and dusty. Gary Quadra scowled and stopped spraying champagne as reporters, photographers and fans crowded around them as they arrived.

A couple of years later, Quadra died in a 170-mph crash at a track in Florida that left two other riders facing months of hospital and rehab. But at least they raced again. Hot days, or cold, rainy ones beside northern oceans.

Worth the crashes and pain? Challenge seemed built into human nature. At least they measured themselves against one another and themselves, and the circuits; they tried to leave a record of achievements, not simply tearing up public streets for their own amusement. Ben squinted his blue “racer” eyes into the distance. Too bad Gary Quadra hadn’t found a little more room to “love your enemies.”