Ride Like Hell and You'll Get There Read online

  The rest was another blur. Again my wife was rushed away and another doctor was stopping me from following. I turned to look over my shoulder in time to see a nurse leave our room with a blue cloth in her hands. ‘Stop!’ I yelled without thinking. I looked back at the doctor, he was frozen, the nurse was static, halfway out of the room, her eyes darting between the doctor and me.

  Maintaining eye contact with the nurse, I walked across the room that was now thick with a palpable awkwardness. My hands black with Clare’s blood, I lifted the blue cloth and there was our baby, in a stainless steel kidney-shaped dish. Tears rolled off my nose onto tiny remains. The floor dropped out from under me, while my heart sank so low in my chest you could hear it breaking.

  I raced over to Lola—somehow still wrapped in my jacket and asleep on the couch in the corner—and swept her up into my arms. ‘You’ll take me to Clare, right now,’ I said to the doctor. The doctor nodded his head and held the door open for me.

  Sometimes, if I have a fever or a nightmare, I see that dish, in technicolour; it wakes me up every time.

  Clare was being prepared for surgery and would not be back in the conscious world for hours. I watched numbly through a glass window for a while, aware only of my wife lying there even though the surgical team worked around her. Then Lola stirred and brought me back to earth and I walked away to the waiting room. I found myself back in the corner on the floor next to the vending machine, Lola now wide awake and bored out of her mind. But we didn’t stay there for long.

  ‘What’s wrong, Daddy?’ She bounced along next to me as my bowel decided it was time for round two.

  Several hurried, sweaty trips to the toilet later I was exhausted, cried out and beaten. Then the vomiting started again. Eventually not bothering to get up and run to the toilet I just put my head into the rubbish bin next to the vending machine while Lola pointed out the fact that there was a distinct yellow hue going on.

  ‘Does it hurt, Daddy?’ I looked up over the bin at her big blue eyes. Slowly, the blurry background came into focus and I could see that the waiting room was now starting to fill with people, who glared at me in horror and disgust over copies of Woman’s Day.The door opposite me flew open, surprising us as it had remained closed for hours.

  ‘Are you okay? Have you been seen to?’ A doctor in green get-up froze as soon as he saw us. I explained as much as I could about the last few hours and he quickly gathered us up and took us into his office. ‘That’s my toilet, you camp in there while I get you some medication,’ he said as he steered me towards a door then sat Lola down with some toys and books. A few minutes later the doctor returned with drugs to bung me up and hydrates to replenish my bone-dry system. But most importantly he told me he would check on Clare’s situation.

  I distracted myself over the next few hours by looking after Lola, cleaning the blood off my shirt, and pacing. I didn’t allow myself to think about what I’d experienced, didn’t let myself remember what I’d seen. All I wanted was my wife back, and fortunately for me it wasn’t too long before we were together again.

  Clare needed to stay in hospital after surgery, but typically she soon announced that she was ready to go home, even though she was still weak, woozy and couldn’t walk. We left the hospital with Clare slumped in a wheelchair, her head buried in her hands, Lola crying because Mummy was upset, and me, pale, sweaty and splattered in bodily fluids—unrecognisable from the happy, healthy family who stepped off the plane yesterday. The sense of loss hanging around us leached in and out of every pore like an oil slick and threatened to squeeze the life out of everything.

  As I pushed Clare out to the car park and our bloodstained hire car, an early model Ford transit van skidded to a stop directly in front of us.The van’s sliding door flew open and five men in medieval chain mail and armour frantically spilled out onto the concrete. Their full metal outfits clattered together as they rushed around, barking orders at each other, then they dragged one knight who appeared to have a broadsword buried in his shoulder to the hospital doors.

  Frozen by a curious blend of wonderment and horror, Clare and I silently watched their maniacal high-speed entrance. The van sat there in front us, its engine still running, several shiny helmets on its floor clinking together as the engine ticked over.

  ‘Fuck,’ said Clare. ‘I thought I was having a bad day.’

  CIRQUE DE

  SUPREME COURT

  AT FIRST I sat there in the Supreme Court waiting to be tortured, while staring at the back of our opponent’s head and imagining it exploding. Exploding while the QCs talk to each other and the judge shuffles his papers and listens to the litigation.

  We had a good business plan, so good you could nail it to Donald and fling it over Trump Tower. But not according to the man whose head was about to explode, the ‘plaintiff ’. I’d just like to point out here that ‘plaintiff ’ comes from the Anglo-French (the language spoken by descendants of the Norman invaders) for ‘one who complains’.

  We had apparently broken the first rule of business: ‘Don’t get sued.’

  And the second rule of business: ‘Don’t go into business with anyone you don’t know 100 per cent.’ By that I mean performing due diligence that borders on stalking, crawling up their butthole with a microscope, getting charged with invasion of privacy and, when you’re completely satisfied, hire a professional to do it all again.

  The first two court sessions were interesting, but after two years I started to get really bored. The court case just turned into a normal part of our business operations, we budgeted for it, the months rolled by, and the bills rolled in. None of us went to court after the first few sessions unless we had to; we just let the legal teams do their thing and then report back afterwards. For a while I was convinced they all just closed the door and played tiddly-winks for an hour, ordered in lunch and drafted up the bills.

  In fact, there were repetitious painstaking hour-long arguments, punctuated by eureka moments. There was passion, rivalry, hate and a healthy sprinkle of sheer blind chance. There were endless affidavits, subpoenas and what can only be described as embarrassing stalling tactics straight from the ‘my dog ate my homework’ school of law.

  The partners stayed strong throughout all this bullshit. They’d been around long enough not to get rattled by the legal games and the psychological warfare that goes on, the attempts at intimidation that only really reflect fear and disappointment around the arena.

  I soon learnt some tricks to deal with it, thanks to our director, Jason Theo, who had been through this kind of thing in business before.There are only a few people that I’ll seriously listen to, whose advice I will take, and Jason is one of them.

  The first trick was that if you can keep your wits about you, if you are lucky enough to lift the veil and see people for who they are, as opposed to the image they try so hard to project, you can become something far more imposing and real than an angry businessman—you have the clarity of mind to step back and breathe.

  ‘After all,’ said Jason, ‘it’s just money; it’s just a pissing contest.’ He was able to predict what was going to happen next in the legal saga, and I found the logic behind his thought processes very interesting: action and reaction based entirely on finances and ego.

  So I found a weird peace in the middle of the maelstrom. For me, it was not personal at all, but to our opponents it was. Angry chests got inflated, stressed heart rates and voices were raised—they were in the bad kind of headspace that disrupts your life and leaves a scar on your soul. It was truly bizarre to watch.

  During one particularly expensive session in court, Jason and I sat there while our opponents glared daggers at us and passed notes between themselves, occasionally leaning over to whisper something important directly into each other’s ears, then look deeply onto their crotches, ponder for a moment, before looking up to glare at us again.

  So Jason and I glared back, then I passed him my large imposing black diary in which I’d been studiously scrib
bling all morning. While he gave his best steely eyes across the room, I leaned over his shoulder and whispered into his ear, ‘I drew a robot.’

  Jason gave a slight nod, glanced down, poker face like solid marble, then his eyes flicked up again and fixed their cold stare on our antagonists while he passed the diary back. ‘Nice robot,’ he whispered.

  Overall I’m actually grateful for the experience of having my back stabbed, balls kicked and being fisted with one big legal bill after another. In more than two years of litigation, reading threatening legal letters and paying attention to wise heads like Jason, I learnt volumes about keeping your business growing, your staff properly trained, happy and motivated, while you’re freaking out, winning tenders, passing audits and certification requirements, and dealing with QCs and lawyers. I also learnt which pants chafe under my lodge apron following a three-course dinner, who I can trust in business and why men over 40 buy sports cars then drop dead.

  Meanwhile, back on the home front, we were learning some lessons, too. Our all-knowing, all-expensive and all-consuming city council chose to relocate two large and entirely unemployed families into two state housing commission properties in our suburb. You can probably guess what happened next.Yep, within the first six weeks of our new neighbours moving in every house on our street had been broken into. Mine included.

  The frightening thing was that the break-ins were happening between two and four in the morning while everyone was at home, asleep and vulnerable. The night we got done I’d crawled out of bed to get some water and was plodding down the hall into the kitchen and there was a man lifting the window off its frame. He looked like a ninja, completely dressed in black, while I looked almost pale blue and translucent, being bald, sun-deprived and completely naked. We shared a wide-eyed silent frozen moment, then he ran and I chased, as we fell into our respective roles like a couple of archetypal cartoon characters. Only more absurd. Pick-axe handle in hand, my man bits wildly flapping about in the night air, I nearly left them on the fence before realising it was all a bit pointless and walked home naked for a cup of tea.

  A week later and 25 grand less in the bank, our home can be locked down like a maximum security prison. Sure, it’s overkill (as Clare likes to point out), but what are you going to do when the law is so ambiguous about these things? I reckon that on confronting an intruder in his house, most red-blooded Aussie men will do whatever is necessary to defend his wife, young ones and all that he has worked so hard for. If I had to beat a man to death, then so be it. But in an effort to not let that scenario unfold, in our home there are now two different alarm systems and locks, impenetrably solid doors, security mesh, roller-shutters and enough motion-activated spotlights that if some muppet jumps over my fence at night again my yard will be visible from space.

  Another side effect of our new neighbours was the redecoration of the bus stops. Every weekend, like clockwork, the bus stop on our street turned into an art gallery with wonderful modern tags and improvised street art bearing innovative titles like ‘FUK U’ or ‘NIGGAS ON DUST’ or the always popular and somewhat timeless ‘CUNT’. Then every Monday morning the council truck would dutifully paint over all of the artwork, returning the bus stop to its original mental-hospital-wall vomit-green. This repetitious waste of paint went on for six months.

  After everyone in the suburb had been thoroughly done over, every house, shed and car, every mailbox kicked, every bus stop vandalised, the council moved the families on to a new area to pick over. It’s only a matter of time before they land in your neighbourhood, so remember, if you’re running around naked with a pick-axe handle chasing intruders, the only winners will be the lawyers.

  After our first year of operations, I went into another business venture. This time it started without breaking the first rule of business and grew at an equal rate without the legal bills. But this began to cut into my time and I was now juggling two businesses. I was doing it happily, though, because I had to make regular trips to talk to clients in Adelaide and this allowed me to spend time with Colin at the University of Adelaide where we would work on the bike.

  She was growing into a monster.

  I joined the Dry Lakes Racers Association (DLRA), the organisation that runs an annual event in Australia called ‘Speed Week’. Speed Week began in 1985 and since its inception it has become a mecca for the rebellious petrolhead. For just one week a year, a few hundred mildly insane DLRA members gather, migrating like bogan salmon to a dry salt lake in the middle of nowhere (actually Lake Gairdner in South Australia). They will climb into or onto their machines—whether that’s driving, riding or simply strapping themselves to a homemade rocket—and shatter the outback silence in a hell-bent effort to set new land-speed records and drink more piss. Some push the 400 kph mark; others get smashed and listen to Barnsey instead. In recent years a new class of competitor has surfaced—the non-fossil-fuel-burning type—so now, as well racers tear-arsing down the salt on machines with electric engines, there are those like myself on environmentally happier diesel.

  But despite all my gibberish about congregating bogans and rockets, the DLRA is in fact a serious organisation. Every facet of Speed Week is very carefully planned and this means that as a member and competitor I need to know the rules. While we were building the bike we had the DLRA rulebook open all the time. The book itself is, however, thick and confusing. What class do I race in? How do I define a motorcycle that has a car engine in it? You know the sort of thing. Luckily, though, the DLRA scrutineers who pre-approve your machine and make sure it’s safe and capable of doing what you want it to do were really helpful and eager to assist. I was immensely impressed with their level of care and skill, not to mention their pure enthusiasm.

  Before too long I received the ‘Operational Plan’ from the DLRA, a detailed event schedule for Speed Week. Excitement reverberated around the university; even the mechanical engineering students who had helped design and build the bike, but who had now graduated and were out in the world, booked themselves in to be there so they could see her run down the track. All in all I was feeling really confident; everything had gone like clockwork over the last two years, the build, the planning, the paperwork, you name it. I even got booked to be the keynote speaker at the Association of Australasian Diesel Specialists (AADS) annual conference in Adelaide the day after we were slated to attempt the record.

  Meanwhile, another plan had been ticking away in the background, as if I could put any more on my plate. Straight after Speed Week I was flying to Tokyo where I would jump on a Ural motorcycle with a sidecar, pick up my passenger and riding buddy Jocko, then ride around all four of Japan’s islands. The fun part being that Jocko is a slightly disturbed adult male chimp with a passion for motorcycles and flower arranging. No, I’m not making this up.

  I had been chipping away at this project for sixteen months; Jocko’s owner, after I’d made several trips over there, agreed to let me explore the Japanese countryside with his pet. I got official permission to do it from the Japanese equivalent of our Roads and Traffic Authority and, as a result of that, also managed to find a fully qualified primate veterinarian who’s into motorcycles willing to come along in case Jocko twisted off one day and tried to eat someone and needed to be tranquillised. I had the bike customised to accommodate Jocko with a cleverly designed harness and he even had his own riding gear including helmet and goggles. Bike builder and close mate Matt Bromley was at the time finalising his build of all the bikes for the upcoming but severely delayed filming of Mad Max Fury Road. Matty gave the bike the once-over for me and finetuned the sidecar for Jocko’s hairy arse. As usual, he did an amazing job.

  I spent many years in my past working in Japan on drilling rigs and made some lifelong friends there. Most of them live between Nagaoka and Niigata on the west coast of Japan’s main island of Honshu. They helped with the importation and registration of the bike, and organised a storage facility to house it and all the spares. Their contacts in oil and gas meant this h
appened very smoothly through the port of Chiba, then the bike was road-freighted up to storage in the port of Sendai, where it sat poised like a coiled spring in a small tin shed near the mouth of the Natori River.

  So all the prep work for that project was also done, and it was ready and waiting for me to arrive, fuel up the bike and go.

  Between business trips to Brisbane and Adelaide, between meetings and the Supreme Court, between Lola’s Saturday morning swimming lessons (with me standing in a languid pool surrounded by ten screaming smelly brats producing a minimum 60 per cent urine content) and mowing the lawn on Sundays, I found myself thinking about the salt lake, the speed and eventually Japan’s clean, safe roads beckoning from across the globe. I pictured Jocko and me enjoying a cold beer at the end of the first day’s riding, parked with the wonderful snow-capped Mt Kurodake in the background while the vet looked on and polished his dart gun.

  Happy days.

  100% GUARANTEED

  TO HURT

  BUT IT WAS not to be.

  Of all the things that could have stopped my bike tour around Japan with a chimpanzee, I would never have thought of a tsunami.

  On 11 March 2011 Japan suffered its worst disaster; the wave that hit Sendai was 40 metres high, it swept inland for 10 kilometres wiping out everything that couldn’t get out of its way. Including Jocko. Meanwhile I stood in my lounge room dumbfounded in front of the evening news with the phone in my hand and no one answering.

  Of course, I hadn’t insured the bike or any of the bike gear. I thought it was safe and secure; if anyone should understand what Mother Nature can do with the ocean, it’s me. My learning curve continues.