Report from the ISDE Qualifier trail.

Unqualified again

My own personal goal left in motorcycle racing is to actually qualify for the 6 day team. I don’t have to ride the 6 day, been there, done that. I know I don’t want to ride another 6 day, Tulsa was enough. It was a wonderful experience to have behind me, but I just could not face trying again. It is not so much the riding as it was the struggle getting ready. God what a chore every conceivable scenario must be worked out. Then there was the ten minute tire changes. I managed one during the week. Enough is enough. The fact is I didn’t actually qualify for the elite USA team, I bought my way into Tulsa, just like many others. That leaves actually “qualifying” as my goal, my grail, my whale, my sail.

I had it better than ever this year, both races I needed to compete in were familiar to me, I’ve ridden there many times. I had a very good bike to ride and some extra parts all from the kind people at ATK. Drew Smith had done the final suspension set up and S&S Racing in Elizabeth Illinois had the proper jetting so the big bike ran as well as it handled. I was not afraid of riding the big bike in a southern Ohio qualifier, as long as it didn’t rain…. Guess what, yep it rained, and rained and rained, Southern Ohio in the mud is enough to make one crazy.

The Qualifier series is the best, you get to see about the same group of people every year and a lot of them go on a big overseas vacation every year to actually attend the Six Day. You get to know one another and there are always stories to share from old trips. The one I hear most often is about the time Franco Acerbis filled me full of this new and wonderful food called Calamari. He was so proud of me he said he had never seen any one eat that much “squiggly eye” before. Then he said he had never seen any one throw up that much “squiggly eye” before! I’m sure other great things have happened at the six day but this is the one I have to deal with.

Also at the Qualifiers a lot of the group camps out at the start area, then you have to impound a day early and the race is two days long, it’s kind of like spending the weekend at the Yogi Bear campground. Unless it rains. When it rains it’s like being stuck in the French prison like Pappion was in.

Vic Ely, Kirk Sessions and the rest of the Appalachian Dirt Riders are the nicest bunch of guy’s you could ever want to meet, unless it rains, then they become some of the most demented sickest motorcycle destroying mad men on earth, and it rained.

I camped out in my van and at 2:15 AM Saturday morning one hell of a thunder storm came through Wellston and it poured and poured. It was sprinkling at the start and the skies were dark and showed no signs of a break. Damn, if there was one thing I did not want to do in this life was to wrestle a 600cc Dual Sport bike in soupy mud for two days. What karmic faux pas have I done to deserve this?

What a mind bender, sitting there on the starting line looking ahead not at two 5 lap motos or even an hour and a half hare scrambles, not at the Qualifiers, rain or shine I was looking at 250 miles of muddy southern Ohio trails. My heart thumped along like an old tractor pushing thick cold blood through my cold wet body, my brain kept asking why? Why again do you have to drag us through this hell? Your mommy loved you so much and you just go out and try to tear it up, you tear up every thing in some kind of self defeating, nothing for tomorrow attitude. The tractor pumps another gush of chunky blood. The brain asks why do you hate your self so much? Why choose a goal that is unattainable, expensive, physically destroying, with no monetary rewards or at your level any peer recognition nor admiration. What’s wrong with two 5 lap motos? Can’t you get beat bad enough to see you are not a champion? Why must you go 250 miles to see how bad you will get beat? Not just beat by other riders but beat physically, financially and mentally? Your old knees only have so much cartilage in them, must you pound out every last bit?

You, that is if you live long enough are destined to become another bionic masterpiece like John Penton who has knee hip and spine replacements. Remember how he toted X-rays of his carbon fiber spine disk things to show off? Is that what you are after? Another squish of Jell-O thick blood and I say out loud: I don’t know why? I just don’t know! This time loud enough that Jeff Fredette started staring at me, he is half afraid of me any how but now I’m battling with imaginary gremlins and have started swinging my fists and crying “I don’t Know!” Hugh Fleming from the AMA walks up and stands in front of me, looking very concerned about my well being. To me his face is encircled with a ships steering wheel spinning around it like on the Gilligan Island introduction.

“Charlie Charlie Charlie, are you all right? Right? Right?”

“Gee Skipper I just don’t know, every molecule in my body says no but I am driven by something so strong I can not fight it. Alcohol was easy, but I can not say no to the bikes. The cursed bikes are my down fall. I look at Fredette, he’s looking at me with the same ships wheel spinning around his face, and he looks real concerned because we are riding on the same minute. I said to Jeff:

Professor, help me understand, it’s the wheel isn’t it? The wheel is the true focus of my attention. The bike just gives me a motor to push the reverent wheel around. Around and around and around for heavens sake. The Smith Sister in laws walk up and stare, all my peripheral vision is consumed with the spinning ship wheel and I ask them, Ginger, Mary Ann, It’s the wheel isn’t it? All round like all your best body parts, all round like the sun and the moon, round like a baby’s head and round like a dying mans eyes. The wheel, pick a point and it will come back to you, dejavu for infinity, even the infinity sign uses two wheels to represent it’s endlessness. Are not the wheels on my motorcycle just like the infinity sign? I have to keep going just because I can’t stop. Stop. Stop.

Three! Two! One! One, one one. The starter slapped me on the back and said “Have a good time”

I suppose my brain is right in the fact that I have nothing to prove. My peers know I’m not worthy, deep down inside I know I don’t deserve to make the prestigious Six Day team, but even with all it’s knowledge, my brain is incapable of stopping me from continuing. If I folded my hand and just quit going then I would not be Charlie Williams, not the true Charlie Williams, I would be just another quitter or has been or never was. You can be a player or you can be an observer. Big difference, at least now, at this point of my life I can still be a player. On the inside looking out. On the stage looking down. In the play not in the audience. And that makes it right? Hell no! Hells here and now.

I have to use hallucinations from cheesy TV shows so we can all relate to them, of course I have more complex hallucinations, but for the average readers sake I will use something we are all familiar with. If I tried to describe what I thought I was really seeing, it just might make you go mad! Thinking about what I think I’m thinking about. Heaven help us as huge waves of theater curtain roll by some where between our eyes and where they hook to the brain. Paisley prints in the most subtle colors and the most intricate design float by on the heavy velvet material. Once the flag drops everything turns to florescent grease heated to boil mixed with wax and mercury. My hearing is unaffected so while I’m seeing what Bill Gates cant even think of, I hear Jeff Fredette complaining to Hugh Flemming about wanting to ride on another row.

3-2-1Vroom another row of riders take off. I can feel my entire body pulse when my heart goes over top dead center and another clot of blood is released through the exhaust valve. This sensation gives me the answer to two cycle pipe tuning and for one brief and fleeting moment I understand back pressure, header length and stinger diameter, but that knowledge is gone as quickly as it came and now I can hardly get the bolt hole to line up.

I raise my goggles and roughly wipe my nose with my gloved hand and yell at Hugh. “You should see what I see!” “Demons and lizards on fire writhing in pain fighting over my soul!” Flashes of horror, dead puppies, hungry children, and cheap after market parts being put in my Volkswagen. Hugh tries to calm me, I know he is right as my hearing is one hundred percent. But my reason, logic and imagination run wild, flat frickin crazy shit pops in and out of my head: Corkscrews boring holes in my head, rats crawling inside my bones, peeking out my joints their shiny little eyes. My own eyes are being melted by a butane torch, the boiling eye liquid runs down my face and I can taste it at the corners of my mouth, it tastes just like chicken. I gasp a deep breath and it feel like 14 coal miners drive their picks between each of my ribs. The air rushes out of me and I cough great balls of blood and spittle on a piece of glass protecting the camera man and director. The diaphragm is one of the strongest muscles in the body and it has the capability of forcing an exhale strong enough to launch an average bite of steak some 27 feet in the air. The spitty blood explodes in a splatter that will make me immortal on celluloid. The film is later sold to a Swedish porn producer and my face was computer enhanced to look more like that of James Bond when he was made up to look Japanese. Just my luck.

Then I relive every time a girl told me NO! Heart break after heart break, when that is over I get to relive every mistake, every failure in my life, not one good aspect is shown only defeat and failure. Visions of every crooked line I ever painted, every bad piece of wall paper, every lie, fib, or made up excuse. I have to read and reread every article I have written, ugh my spine shudders at the hideousness of this thought. All this goes on as I pin ball along through the woods. The trees are the steel hardened ball and my shoulders are the energized bumpers, my eyes whirl like the score board and the bells and whistles are in my head.

After two long days of incompetence, I ride up to a creek and there sat world hero, Drew Smith stuck up to his seat in mud with no hope of extracting it himself. He yelled at me to stop and help him, I said Okay then started crossing the creek myself. As I rode up the other bank Drew yelled something at me no one else had ever said to me. In a desperate strained voice Drew yelled; “Charlie, don’t leave me!” I thought he must be fighting his own brain gremlins. We lifted and strained but could not move the bike, it was suctioned in the mud. Randy Hawkins and another rider stopped and the 4 of us lifted Drews bike out of the quick sand and were all back on our merry way. But his desperate voice carried on with me; “Charlie, don’t leave me!” He must have been really desperate to enlist my help.

Several weeks and many thousands of dollars later I’m laying on the ground at Loretta Lynn’s and Jeff Russell is standing over me smiling, he asked: “Was it tough enough for you? Will you ever draw a picture of me in a coolot again?”

“Oh no sir! I’m sorry really sorry, I thought you would think it was funny.”

“I did think it was funny, but not as funny as you laying in the dirt crying, where’s my pencil, I want to draw a picture of you and we’ll see how funny it is.”

I laid there sobbing and hiccuping.

Hugh Fleming walked up with his clip board and told me I had better get my bike into impound or I’ll lose more points.

I’ve rolled over on my side with my face down in the crook of my elbow and yelled a muffled;

“I don’t care! Besides you should disqualify me for letting some one else work on my bike! Moan & groan.”

“Charlie” Hugh said, I’m not going to disqualify you, we all get more enjoyment out of making you go on instead of making you stop. I want to give you extra credit for getting a pretty girl in a bathing suit change your tire, just how low will you stoop any how?”

“Disfrigginqualify me!” I insisted raising my face up off the ground, sand and gravel stick to my cheek and lips.

“Jeff, do you think we should disqualify him?” Asked Hugh.

“Naw, let him go, besides he don’t count.”

“Oh he’s going all right” Said the girl in her bathing suit as she changed my flat tire. He ain’t staying here if I do all this work. And besides, you guys can let him break a few little rules, who’s going to complain other than the guy he was ahead of and he’s gone to the hospital. Attempted suicide I heard.”

So my supporters or antagonizers loaded me back on my bike and made me leave the pits, I agreed to ride at least to the next grass track. See in my head I had visions of the grass tracks at other ISDE I’ve been to, long sweeping turns on dead level ground, I can do that so I plugged on. But in typical American fashion the grass track looked nothing like any thing I’ve see in Europe. It was up and down steep hills with hair pin turns, one sweeper. When the Europeans finally come around to our way of grass tracking we will rule, but until then we’ll keep practicing the wrong kinds of turns and terrain. Things went from bad to worse during this test because Jerry Bernardo caught and passed me. This really sucked because I had just spent a week at the Mike Healey moto-cross school and all I wanted to practice was long sweeping turns. European style I kept telling my class mates.

Then again in the final moto test I found one good sweeping turn and was really grooving until at the exit of the turn was the face of a 6 foot tall super jump. As I approached I thumbed through my FIM rule book and it said this jump was only 39.37 inches tall, so I kept it pinned, knowing that the rule book did not allow dangerous doubles or table tops. While I had the rule book out I looked up the recommended length of the cross country tests and how technical the trail should be.

I absorbed the steep face of the jump in my knees and in the ATK suspension. I held on tightly with my legs and kept my upper body loose and over the bars. Once in the air I tapped the rear brake to bring the front end down and gave it a little tug to the left for the best line. I casually did a roll off and a little foot jig while scanning two turns ahead. I braced myself for the pin point landing when I remembered I had ignored the jumping class at the moto-school, insisting cornering skills out weighed unnecessary jumping skills. Man I crashed big time, turns out the jump was a huge table top, must have been 5 feet across, I came up short, landed flat, just like Evil, I crushed down on the seat and my face was buried in the bars. Then came the rebound off the top of the jump, my body was stretched and my head thrown back as I jumped off the top of the jump back to ground level. This time I took the bars at the waist and I saw a lot of front fender very up close. My face followed the fork leg down past the spinning tire, the fork seals looked good, spokes, check, computer sensor wire? Gone. Grass and dirt? Here and now then blackness then skies then blackness then sky. Seth ran over and said:

“Dude, what gear were you in?”

“Third.” I croaked.

“Oh man you came up way short, you gotta hit that one in fifth!”

Pretty soon they had me scraped up off the ground and walked me over to the podium where Rodney Smith and Michael Lafferty were waiting. Still dazed and confused they helped direct me to the top level of the podium. Some one slipped a wreath of gilded olive leaves around my neck. Ron Ribolzi made sure I had on my Trelleborg hat, my Spy goggles were turned around backwards on my neck. My arms were raised above my head in celebration and all eyes were on me. Having never been on top of the podium before all these sights were new to me. Faces who usually scorn or ignore me stared up in some hungry for a glance, touch my soul, I need speed, can you tell me your secret, how do you do it? You are the greatest, pick me. The mob moved closer as one writhing mass. It looked like sea weed with faces and cheap T shirts waving at me. Unlike earlier hallucinations, this episode only affected my hearing I could see just fine. Adjusting to my new position as hero I smiled and waved for the cameras, I threw my gloves out into the crowd.

Hugh Fleming walked up with his clip board and the riotous crowd simmered down and he started his speech. Since my hearing is afflicted his words did not mesh with his mouth. His voice carried a heavy Italian accent as he struggled with his English.

“Sank vou viry mush. In behalf oz ze FIM und morocyclist ull over ze wirld, Cha-lee Willy-ams, iz ze shampion.”

I just beamed, and I raised my open palms towards the cheering crowd. But the words Hugh actually spoke were nothing like I had heard. He said something like: Thank you all for coming, bla bla bla. A year ago we had a Qualifier here in February, and Charlie Williams said it was too easy and drew a picture of Big Dave in a dress, and Jeff Russell in a coolot with platform sandals. He thought he was really being funny. But today Charlie couldn’t even finish, he rode half the event and quit. Jerry Bernardo passed him for heavens sake. Squid, squirrel, goof ball, nut case, loose cannon, looser, capital L, LOOSER. Charlie Williams, in his most embarrassing moment. Had he finished the event nothing would have been said, but Charlie choked and he looks just ridiculous in my eyes. A fool, a big mouthed cry baby, non finisher quitter, unqualified scum of the earth, Charlie Williams!”

He swung around and pointed at me and it was my proudest moment, “Shampion” Echoed through my deluded mind. In reality the crowd was not happy to see me, they were the riders who had finished the event and were bleeding and broken and beat up and just plain worn out by two days of long hard trail and any man there wanted a swing at me for drawing that stupid little picture of Jeff Russell in that stupid little coolot. I didn’t think Clipper would run it, don’t blame me, Clipper is the one who printed it!

Now the adoring crowd has started throwing roses to me, tears cloud my vision and my own ego clouds my hearing. What I perceive to be a victory celebration is in reality the simmering of a lynch mob boil over, my ass was on the line. The mob was not tossing red roses, it was a group of grown men throwing rotten tomatoes at me with vengeance. As my thoughts herky jerked about the words of Dr. Johnson rolled through my mind: “When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro.” Let them throw tomatoes, we’ll have spaghetti.