NEEDLE THREADING

While I was very pleased our rulers made lane-splitting/-filtering legal the other year, its previous illegality was never in my mind as I did it. It is always far better to be tried by 12 than carried by 6, and I will break every law on earth if I feel obeying it endangers me. Interestingly, in more than four decades on the road, I have never been booked for lane-splitting. And I’ve been booked a lot.

But riding through and in traffic on a bike has benefits apart from not actually contributing to traffic.

As a social exercise, it is without equal.

I have made some wonderful mates doing it. I don’t even know their names, and probably never will, but they are wonderful just the same.

These are the mates I meet in Freak Hour traffic, as we strive valiantly not to die while still riding with verve and elan, demonstrating to all and sundry why motorcycling is the One True and Pure Faith.

Each day, I thread the needle. The needle is the river of blind, stupid, SMS-ing dribblers idling along in their hermetically sealed cars, oblivious to the world. They do not see me. And I do not care. For they will never see me until they are made to see me, either by me crashing through their windscreen, or me dragging them out through their shattered driver’s-side window and gouging their still-beating hearts out through their throats. Que sera, sera.

But I do see and have thus formed strange, fragmented relationships with my fellow needle-threaders over the years. These relationships are brief. Some last a few scattered days, some several disparate weeks and some very few may limp along for a couple of months.

Now please understand that not everyone on a bike in Freak Hour is a needle-threader. As outlandish as it may sound, some people clearly buy motorcycles to idle along in traffic with the cars. Yes, I don’t get it either, but there ya go.

But for every hundred hood ornaments, there is a glorious needle-threader, who fearlessly pits his skill against the mindless drones and drinks deep from the rich goblet of motorcycling at every opportunity. And it is with these people that peculiar connections are made, and even more peculiar and unique conversations are had as bro-love is established and re-enforced over a series of traffic lights, and even taken up unbroken the following time you meet.

I conducted one such affair with a Fireblade rider of consummate skill. Three out of five days I would catch him leaving the city and blasting down Victoria Road, and the two of us would engage in a follow-the-leader speed frenzy, which sometimes I won, and sometimes I lost.

His first words to me were: “Jaseethatkarnbackthere?”

I assumed he was talking about the car that had veered aimlessly across our path, clearly feeling it was just fine to turn left from the outside lane. Then he rocketed off because the light went green.

“Healmoshadjya!” I yelled at the next set of lights.

Over the next few weeks, I discovered that my new mate had only recently bought the ’Blade after a few months of licence-free angst and was planning on turning it into a trackday weapon. Given his obvious skill, I felt he would do very well and I told him so over the space of a few commutes.

Then I never saw him again, so he had either died, got a new job somewhere else, or had once again been sidelined by the Fun Police.

I was thus friendless for some months until I formed a needle-threading bond with a fellow on a well-used black Hayabusa with an extended swing-arm and evil metal spikes on its bar-ends.

I was barging about on Honda’s vast F6B the day we met, and I had managed, more through luck than skill, to gap him between the Gladesville Bridge and Top Ryde, whereupon he came growling up to me at the lights.
“Gozealrightthat!” he yelled.

“Stopridinlikeawoman!” I yelled back, whereupon we both howled off the lights and proceeded to weave and dodge and cheat death like a thousand bastards until we got to Parramatta, and he told me that he thought Rossi was due for a comeback.

I didn’t see him again for about a week, and now, astride the Moto Guzzi Griso, I felt I would give a better account of myself than the dire nonsense I had subjected the F6B to.

“Whathafarkizthat?” he asked.
“Agriso!” I yelled.

We hammered off to the next lights.

“Howmanybikesyagot?” he demanded, as the lights went green and he demonstrated how Hayabusas out-accelerate Moto Guzzis, which then afforded me the chance to show him that ’Busas will just not fit into the gaps that Guzzis will.

“Idoabitforayemseen,” I explained to him at the next lights.
“Wassat?” he asked.

“Samagazeen,” I informed his back as he once again laid the power on, only to be stymied by the spread of his mirrors as I bitched him once more.

And so it went on for the next few weeks – the two of us blithely and often elegantly dodging the Reaper by scant inches, having weird truncated conversations, and bonding in a way that is unique and bizarre in equal amounts. We discussed many things: Bastards in cars, scooter-riding mongs with L-plates, the MotoGP, the new Hayabusa, the electronics package on the ZX14, helmets, rain, trucks, mobile phones, cops, my job, his job, his boss, life, the universe and most of the things in it.

He struck me as a kindred spirit in a world of nervous hobby-riders.

I haven’t seen him for about a fortnight now.

I do hope he’s alright.

 

By Boris Mihailovic

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