Riding Prejudice
It took just 20 kilometres, heading south from the Sunshine Coast, to realise I had made a big mistake. This motorcycle wasn’t just uncomfortable, it was almost unrideable.
The mirrors showed sky. The seat was all swoops and curves and I couldn’t hold any position on it for more than a few minutes. The forward controls were where no normal person would reach for them. The heel-and-toe gear lever was unusable. The foot brake swung on a pivot above the frame rails so it couldn’t be operated from the floorboards, and the motor was lumpy at highway speeds.
I could ask the vendor for my money back. He was, after all, my brother, and familial ties must account for something. But there was pride involved, or perhaps stubborn stupidity. And the fact was, I was smitten with this bike from the moment I saw it. It was a ’94 Moto Guzzi California that had sat unridden in an open carport on a Sunny Coast beach for half a decade before my brother bought it two years before. He spent money bringing it back up to spec but he was, alas, saddled with that affliction common to motorcyclists of a certain age – too many bikes. So he sold it to me, possibly to recover his costs, or maybe just to stop me drooling every time I was near it.
These were my thoughts, then, heading towards home. Do I look for an exit, motor back, return the keys and seek a way of saving face, as well as the purchase price? Or do I continue onwards, resigned to the fact that while the bike may be difficult to ride any distance, it would still look good parked on my suburb’s café strip. Trouble was, I wasn’t sure whether I would last the distance back to my brother’s garage, let alone the rest of the ride to
Brisbane. And that was when the Harley rider overtook me …
Long hair, shorty helmet, bare hands, Jackie Howe singlet, torn jeans, boots, and not much else. On an older naked model I could not determine, with a motor that bellowed like an out-of-tune B17. He rode with his feet forwards, arched backwards, gripping the ape-hangers, body billowing like a spinnaker. I looked over as he roared past and thought, “What a Muppet.”
But then, as he flew into the distance, a revelation! With a pelvic-floor movement I shifted forward, pushing my nether regions up against the tank, gripped my own set of high and wide bars, and leant back. The seat’s mid-section rise cradled my lower back and held it firm. My legs pushed themselves forwards and – et voila! – my left foot fell comfortably on the gear shifter and the right sat nicely on a half-sized foot peg that projected from the brake lever pivot. If I relaxed a little, the floorboards came into their own, cradling my arches nicely. And the mirrors gave a fine rearward view.
In this position, forty years of riding prejudice was blown away by the wind. The further back I arched, the easier the riding became. I spun the V-twin up to slightly-higher-than-legal speeds and it sang. It was difficult to comprehend, that simply changing one’s riding posture (and attitude) could change the riding experience so completely.
A half-hour passed and a fuel warning light prompted a stop at a service centre. Returning from the cashier, I walked to where I had parked and there was the Harley rider. He looked even more intimidating off his bike, but he was giving the California an appreciative once-over. I told him I had just bought the Guzzi and it was my first cruiser. He turned towards me, as I stood in high-cut boots, two-piece racing suit, holding gloves with carbonfibre knuckle protectors and a full-face helmet with motoGP graphics. His look could not have been more condescending. Turning to walk away, he sneered, “Yeah, mate. I can tell.”
Kieran Lewis