Simon Gandolfi - Old Man on a Bike

The lady calls on her mobile and obtains Don’s home number. She gives me the number and hands me her mobile. I explain that I am unfamiliar with mobile phones. Added to which, I am old and more than a little deaf.

She calls Don for me and we get an answering machine. I leave a message. Minutes pass while I wonder what to do next and while the lady wonders what she can do next (other than assign tables).

Her telephone rings. Don’s daughter, Elspeth, is on the line. I try not to sound panicky while Elspeth’s response is that of a calm mature woman aged eleven going on thirty. She consoles me. She gives me Don’s mobile number.

The lady calls Don, who is surprised at a woman calling. I am saved. And I am deeply, deeply grateful to the Angel of the Bourbon Street Café. I try to imagine the same scene in England at a popular restaurant on a Saturday evening.

I’d still be there, out on the pavement, lost …

Don leads me to the hotel. We shower, change and head for dinner at the ultimate Texas tourist restaurant. Call for a reservation and the restaurant dispatches a white courtesy car with cattle longhorns bolted to the bonnet. The building is a fake barn with dead deer heads mounted high on the walls. Right by the door there’s a steak on display the size of a pair of bricks. Eat the steak and they feed you free for a year. (Eat the steak and you wouldn’t want to eat for a year.) We are shown to a table beside a dais on which sits a competitor for Cholesterol Man of the Year. He already has a serious weight problem. He is midway through the two-brick steak. He is sweating and wears the defeated look of a foot soldier on the fourth day of the retreat from Moscow (take your choice – German or Napoleonic).

The maître d’ shows us to a table right beside the glutton dais.

Don says, ‘Great, so we have to look at that while we eat.’

We eat mini-steaks the size of quarter-bricks.

Don and I share a hotel room furnished with twin king-size beds. Midnight and a fourth biker joins the party – Eric, a forty-plus photographer who chews tobacco and rides the same model BMW GS as Jack. Eric bought his bike in the past few weeks. Jack bought his bike in the past few weeks. I guess that these two are competitors in some type of interpersonal rivalry as to who can be the hottest forty-year-old teenager on the block.

Eric unrolls a sleeping bag. I warn him to spread it the far end of the room because old men have to get up in the night and I don’t want to fall on him.

The king-size bed is comfortable. We have travelled 600 miles. I have driven a Hummer at ninety miles an hour without fear and am feeling confident as to the morrow.

Sunday is the day of rest. We have miles to cover and are up at seven. First stop is a farm twenty miles out of town. The farm grows Cadillacs. The Cadillacs are planted in a straight line out in the middle of a vast field that may stop at the horizon but probably doesn’t. The field is as flat as a skating rink. The Cadillacs are buried nose down up to their windscreens in the earth. Most visitors bring cans of spray paint. The graffiti is interesting. This is a sculpture both impressive and delightfully weird.

Our next halt is in nowhere. This is the Texas panhandle and Galileo was talking nonsense when he said the world was round. The world is flat, believe me. The road runs straight for thirty miles: not a house in sight, no animals, not even a tree. Telephone and power cables that have nowhere to go weave pointless patterns across this vast expanse of nothing. The boys on the bikes ride in a bunch. Travelling a British country lane the boys and I would be big. We would fill the road. Children and old ladies walking their dogs would find us threatening. In the panhandle we are minute pieces in a board game. The sun sparkling on bike helmets is the controlling ray operated by whoever plays the game. Reach the end of the board and we fall off.

Mid-morning we enter the Palo Duro State Park. Palo Duro is Spanish for ‘tough stick’ and the player of the board game has gouged a stick viciously across the board. The result is ripped red canyon country out of a Hollywood Western.

We stop. I take pictures while Eric and Jack strike attitudes at each other and exchange bike seats. Jack’s is a custom seat three inches lower than the standard model. Jack has long legs that have been cramping over the past day. I have watched from the Hummer as he wriggles from side to side and stands on the footrests or stretches out his legs beyond the engine.

Eric has the standard seat and has shorter legs. He claims to be comfortable with Jack’s seat. I suspect Eric would claim to be comfortable sitting on six-inch nails.

The road we follow from Palo Duro back to Turkey has humps and corners and views forever. Eric and Jack lean into the corners and are gone, chasing each other round the school yard, speedometers registering 120 miles an hour. Don sits on his Harley, solid and sensible as a granite Texas rock. The Harley thunders and competes in vibration with a pneumatic road drill. Only a rock could survive.

Meanwhile, Paul, the lawyer, cruises to the rear cradled in the leather upholstered luxury and law-office silence of his Honda Monster. And I bask in the massive comfort of the Hummer.

Saturday was country and western. Sunday started with Swan Lake turned up high and crystal clear on the satellite radio as I swooped across the void. Now I have Beethoven’s Eroica ramming me through the curves and over the low hills.

My sons would be listening to the Red Hot Chilli Peppers. But a big Hummer? And the Texas panhandle? Believe me, whatever the music, this is serious bliss.

Midday and we have circled back to Turkey and are filling our tanks. This is the third time the Hummer has required gas. The tank takes thirty-five gallons and filling the tank takes a while. We are in a dry county. The help at the gas station reports that we must drive sixty-five miles in one direction or thirty-five in the other to refill the beer cooler.

The Sporting Club is across the street from the gas station. Complete a membership form at the club and you can order a beer. The big square dining room with its high ceiling is delightfully cool. The decor is dead heads on the walls together with framed photographs from the good ol’ days of old-timers crouching over dead meat on the hoof (even here, in west Texas, dead Indians are out of fashion – although a dead Mexican might pass muster).

A buffet is set up in the next room: a dozen different salads; fried chicken, grilled pork, broiled silverside, all the vegetables; custard and apple pie. I have the beef. Delicious. The service is typically Texas friendly, full of smiles and goodwill how-are-yous.

A party of freshly barbered weekend Harley riders occupies the next table. They ride top-money bikes with all the fixings: matching luggage, satellite radio, central heating, shoe polish and gold-tap toilets. They travel in company with a Harley support team hauling a Harley trailer behind a three-quarter-ton Ford truck.

Our route onward is a zigzag in search of corners to excite the kids. Paul, the lawyer, tends to hold back a little on the curves. He has ample power and acceleration to catch the pack. Keeping pace in the Hummer is less easy. Hummers aren’t designed for road racing. Beer is legal at our next gas stop, although drinking on the premises is forbidden. Eric finds a patch of grass to sprawl on the other side of a telephone post that marks the forecourt boundary.

Next stop is a 500-acre play ranch that Paul and Don have bought. The ranch is off a dirt county road. The BMWs gambol in the dirt. The Harley irons the dirt flat. The Honda is a little skittish and Paul is a little anxious. I drive the Hummer with the windows down and blast Texas with opera.