Song of the Sausage Creature
By Hunter S. Thompson from CycleWorld Magazine
There are some things nobody needs in this world, and a bright red,
hunchback, warp-speed 900cc Cafe racer is one of them -- but I want
one anyway, and on some days I actually believe I need one. That is
why they are dangerous.
Everybody has fast motorcycles these days. Some people go 150 miles
an hour on two-lane blacktop roads, but not often. There are too many
oncoming trucks and too many radar cops and too many stupid animals
in the way. You have to be a little crazy to ride these super-torque
high-speed crotch rockets anywhere except a racetrack -- and even
there, they will scare the whimpering **** out of you.... There is,
after all, not a pig's eye worth of difference between going head-on
into a Peterbilt or sideways into the bleachers. On some days you get
what you want, and on others, you get what you need.
When Cycle World called me to ask if I would road-test the new Harley
Road King, I got uppity and said I'd rather have a Ducati superbike.
It seemed like a chic decision at the time, and my friends on the
superbike circuit got very excited. "Hot **** ," they said, "We will
take it to the track and blow the bastards away."
"Balls," I said. "Never mind the track. The track is for punks. We
are Road People. We are Cafe Racers."
The Cafe Racer is a different breed, and we have our own situations.
Pure speed in sixth gear on a 5,000-foot straightaway is one thing,
but pure speed in third gear on a gravel-strewn downhill S-turn is
quite another.
But we like it. A thoroughbred Cafe Racer will ride all night through
a fog storm in freeway traffic to put himself into what somebody told
him was the ugliest and tightest decreasing-radius turn since Genghis
Khan invented the corkscrew.
Cafe Racing is mainly a matter of taste. It is an atavistic
mentality, a peculiar mix of low style, high speed, pure dumbness, and
overweening commitment to the Cafe Life and all its dangerous
pleasures.... I am a Cafe Racer myself, on some days -- and many
nights for that matter -- and it is one of my finest addictions....
I am not without scars on my brain and my body, but I can live with
them. I still feel a shudder in my spine every time I see a Vincent
Black Shadow, or when I walk into a public restroom and hear crippled
men whispering about the terrifying Kawasaki Triple.... I have
visions of compound femur fractures and large black men in white hospital
suits holding me down on a gurney while a nurse called "Bess" sews
the flaps of my scalp together with a stitching drill.
Ho, ho. Thank God for these flashbacks. The brain is such a wonderful
instrument (until God sinks his teeth into it). Some people hear Tiny
Tim singing when they go under, and others hear the song of the
Sausage Creature.
When the Ducati turned up in my driveway, nobody knew what to do with
it. I was in New York, covering a polo tournament, and people had
threatened my life. My lawyer said I should give myself up and enroll
in the Federal Witness Protection Program. Other people said it had
something to do with the polo crowd.
The motorcycle business was the last straw. It had to be the work of
my enemies, or people who wanted to hurt me. It was the vilest kind
of bait, and they knew I would go for it.
Of course. You want to cripple the ******* ? Send him a 130-mph Cafe
racer. And include some license plates, so he'll think it's a
streetbike. He's ***** for anything fast.
Which is true. I have been a connoisseur of fast motorcycles all my
life. I bought a brand-new 650 BSA Lightning when it was billed as
"the fastest motorcycle ever tested by Hot Rod magazine." I have
ridden a 500-pound Vincent through traffic on the Ventura Freeway
with burning oil on my legs and run the Kawa 750 triple through Beverly
Hills at night with a head full of acid.... I have ridden with Sonny
Barger and smoked weed in biker bars with Jack Nicholson, Grace
Slick, Ron Zigler, and my infamous old friend, Ken Kesey, a legendary Cafe
Racer.
Some people will tell you that slow is good -- and it may be, on some
days -- but I am here to tell you that fast is better. I've always
believed this, in spite of the trouble it's caused me. Being shot out
of a cannon will always be better than being squeezed out of a tube.
That is why God made fast motorcycles, Bubba....
So when I got back from New York and found a fiery red rocket-style
bike in my garage, I realized I was back in the road-testing
business.
The brand-new Ducati 900 Campione del Mundo Desmodue Supersport
double-barreled magnum Cafe Racer filled me with feelings of lust
every time I looked at it. Others felt the same way. My garage
quickly became a magnet for drooling superbike groupies. They quarreled and
bitched at each other about who would be first to help me evaluate my
new toy.... And I did, of course, need a certain spectrum of
opinions, besides my own, to properly judge this motorcycle. The Woody Creek
Perverse Environmental Testing Facility is a long way from Daytona or
even top-fuel challenge sprints on the Pacific Coast Highway, where
teams of big-bore Kawasakis and Yamahas are said to race head-on
against each other in death-defying games of chicken at 100 miles an
hour....
No. Not everybody who buys a high-dollar torque-brute yearns to go
out in a ball of fire on a public street in L.A. Some of us are decent
people who want to stay out of the emergency room, but still blast
through neo-gridlock traffic in residential districts whenever we
feel like it.... For that we need fine machinery.
Which we had -- no doubt about that. The Ducati people in New Jersey
had opted, for reasons of their own, to send me the 900SP for testing
-- rather than their 916 crazy-fast, state-of-the-art superbike track
racer. It was far too fast, they said -- and prohibitively expensive
-- to farm out for testing to a gang of half-mad Colorado cowboys who
think they're world-class Cafe Racers.
The Ducati 900 is a finely engineered machine. My neighbors called it
beautiful and admired its racing lines. The nasty little bugger
looked like it was going 90 miles an hour when it was standing still in my
garage.
Taking it on the road, though, was a genuinely terrifying experience.
I had no sense of speed until I was going 90 and coming up fast on a
bunch of pickup trucks going into a wet curve along the river. I went
for both brakes, but only the front one worked, and I almost went end
over end. I was out of control staring at the tailpipe of a U.S. Mail
truck, still stabbing frantically at my rear brake pedal, which I
just couldn't find.... I am too tall for these New Age roadracers; they
are not built for any rider taller than five-nine, and the rearset brake
pedal was not where I thought it would be. Midsize Italian pimps who
like to race from one Cafe to another on the boulevards of Rome in a
flat-line prone position might like this, but I do not.
I was hunched over the tank like a person diving into a pool that got
emptied yesterday. Whacko! Bashed into the concrete bottom, flesh
ripped off, a Sausage Creature with no teeth, f-cked-up for the rest
of its life.
We all love Torque, and some of us have taken it straight over the
high side from time to time -- and there is always Pain in that....
But there is also Fun, in the deadly element, and Fun is what you get
when you screw this monster on. BOOM! Instant takeoff, no screeching
or squawking around like a fool with your teeth clamping down on your
tongue and your mind completely empty of everything but fear.
No. This bugger digs right in and shoots you straight down the pipe,
for good or ill.
On my first takeoff, I hit second gear and went through the speed
limit on a two-lane blacktop highway full of ranch traffic. By the
time I went up to third, I was going 75 and the tach was barely above
4,000 rpm....
And that's when it got its second wind. From 4,000 to 6,000 in third
will take you from 75 to 95 in two seconds -- and after that, Bubba,
you still have fourth, fifth, and sixth. Ho, ho.
I never got into sixth, and I didn't get deep into fifth. This is a
shameful admission for a full-bore Cafe Racer, but let me tell you
something, old sport: This motorcycle is simply too ******* fast to
ride at speed in any kind of normal road traffic unless you're ready
to go straight down the centerline with your nuts on fire and a
silent scream in your throat.
When aimed in the right direction at high speed, though, it has
unnatural capabilities. This I unwittingly discovered as I made my
approach to a sharp turn across some railroad tracks, saw that I was
going way too fast and that my only chance was to veer right and
screw it on totally, in a desparate attempt to leapfrog the curve by going
airborne.
It was a bold and reckless move, but it was necessary. And it worked:
I felt like Evil Knievel as I soared across the tracks with the rain
in my eyes and my jaws clamped together in fear. I tried to spit down
on the tracks as I passed them, but my mouth was too dry.... I landed
hard on the edge of the road and lost my grip for a moment as the
Ducati began fishtailing crazily into oncoming traffic. For two or
three seconds I came face to face with the Sausage Creature....
But somehow the brute straightened out. I passed a school bus on the
right and then got the bike under control long enough to gear down
and pull off into an abandoned gravel driveway where I stopped and turned
off the engine. My hands had seized up like claws and the rest of my
body was numb. I felt nauseous and I cried for my mama, but nobody
heard, then I went into a trance for 30 or 40 seconds until I was
finally able to light a cigarette and calm down enough to ride home.
I was too hysterical to shift gears, so I went the whole way in first
at 40 miles an hour.
Whoops! What am I saying? Tall stories, ho, ho.... We are motorcycle
people; we walk tall and we laugh at whatever's funny. We **** on the
chests of the Weird....
But when we ride very fast motorcycles, we ride with immaculate
sanity. We might abuse a substance here and there, but only when it's
right. The final measure of any rider's skill is the inverse ratio of
his preferred Traveling Speed to the number of bad scars on his body.
It is that simple: If you ride fast and crash, you are a bad rider.
If you go slow and crash, you are a bad rider. And if you are a bad
rider, you should not ride motorcycles.
The emergence of the superbike has heightened this equation
drastically. Motorcycle technology has made such a great leap
forward.
Take the Ducati. You want optimum cruising speed on this bugger? Try
90 mph in fifth at 5,500 rpm -- and just then, you see a bull moose
in the middle of the road. WHACKO. Meet the Sausage Creature.
Or maybe not: The Ducati 900 is so finely engineered and balanced and
torqued that you can do 90 mph in fifth through a 35-mph zone and get
away with it. The bike is not just fast -- it is extremely quick and
responsive, and it will do amazing things.... It is a little like
riding the original Vincent Black Shadow, which would outrun an F-86
jet fighter on the takeoff runway, but at the end, the F-86 would go
airborne and the Vincent would not, and there was no point in trying
to turn it. WHAMO! The Sausage Creature strikes again.
There is a fundamental difference, however, between the old Vincents
and the new breed of superbikes. If you rode the Black Shadow at top
speed for any length of time, you would almost certainly die. That is
why there are not many life members of the Vincent Black Shadow
Society. The Vincent was like a bullet that went straight; the Ducati
is like the magic bullet that went sideways and hit JFK and the
Governor of Texas at the same time. It was impossible. But so was my
terrifying sideways leap across railroad tracks on the 900SP. The
bike did it easily with the grace of a fleeing tomcat. The landing was so
easy I remember thinking, *********, if I had screwed it on a little
more I could have gone a lot further.
Maybe this is the new Cafe Racer macho. My bike is so much faster
than yours that I dare you to ride it, you lame little turd. Do you have
the balls to ride this BOTTOMLESS PIT OF TORQUE?
That is the attitude of the New Age superbike freak, and I am one of
them. On some days they are about the most fun you can have with your
clothes on. The Vincent just killed you a lot faster than a superbike
will. A fool couldn't ride the Vincent Black Shadow more than once,
but a fool can ride a Ducati 900 many times, and it will always be
bloodcurdling kind of fun. That is the Curse of Speed which has
plagued me all my life. I am a slave to it. On my tombstone they will
carve, "IT NEVER GOT FAST ENOUGH FOR ME."
