By Webster Slate

Hello friends. This next piece is so crazy and untrue, I naturally want to start with a disclaimer. I love my editor and paper so much, when I know it’s coming, I’ll go ahead and ask her to duck. Stop, drop and rock and roll. Everything that follows is a certain kind of makebelieve I enjoy calling science faction.

So there I was, alone, with just my motorcycle and a beautiful day. I had spent the last few, re-tracing Dr. Thompson’s fabled rides through the mountains of Santa Cruz. In print and in person. The bikes, the drugs and booze, the routes, the times of day or night; from his writings. So far, I had done pretty well and survived my rst couple of “research-oriented” jaunts, even though at least one poor soul I encountered during my rst time out, did not. I believe it was halfway up Old Santa Cruz Road where a brave policeman waved me passed the wrecked softtail, and the large dead body of a One Percenter, lying there with an uncertain future. Both souls were yet to leave. The mighty Buell XB12X (Mrs. Slate) instinctively roared passed and picked up speed as we struggled to avoid said ying unhappy vapors that were the psychedelic wraiths of their winged souls.

This was also the rst time I went to the other Alice’s. I had been to Stockbridge. Fire and Rain, and all. And that river was haunting enough in its own way. As it con- tinues to be.

I could hear the good doctor’s voice resonating in my helmet, saying “Welcome to Santa Cruz, Schmuck.” I had focused on (and found!) a stretch he had covered on his BSA Lightning. (Neil has a beauty in the Motorcycle Museum!) I had done so trying to nd his rhythm of the ride. His speed, his nesse, and his lines through the hundreds of corners; again, his rhythm. And I think that for a moment or two, I and the mighty Buell did. Especially through the death and despair part, when we had to. I guess Dr. Thompson had to, all the way through. I guess, so do I?

When I returned from this spirited ride with my soul in question and bike intact, to Salinas, I knew I had better put this endeavor away for a while. So I did.

Needing something to distract me from my own personal John Franklinesque exploration, the next day the mighty Buell and I went to do a stra ng run at the track.

This truck is a hallucination. See next week’s Gray Eminence.

Let me explain. Running all around the perimeter of the track are roads called perimeter roads, with names like South Boundary and Perimeter Road, A, B and my favorite the one up Wolf Hill. While driving on these road most of the track of the track is visible. In a few spots these roads run parallel with the track. Thus one can catch up to a 300K sports car enjoying a track day or generally menace one of 100 MX-5s as you pass them on the “Perimeter Track.” It’s great fun and very rewarding, personally.

You should see the look in their eyes from inside their helmets when Mrs. Slate and I zoom past, through the gates of hell in to Hooligan Heaven. That cracks me up every time. One time in particular I did this to a gentleman in a Mercedes McLaren gull wing,(400k?, 900hp?) that when strafed the driver was seen pounding on his steering wheel with both hands. I continue to laugh even now.

So I was innocently on my way up some little-known back road up to the track. I knew a very steep hill was coming up to I gave Mrs. Slate a real handful of 97 octane. We were gloriously climbing when we came across a big non-descript, appallingly clean, black truck. An 18-wheeler. Enjoying my sheer cunning and great hair I noticed the following: A man standing across the road from the truck. He was crying as he looked at the phone in his hand. He was crying in Italian. This beautiful truck was “high-cen- tered,” meaning the long part of this truck between its axels was suspended by the road. Its eight rear wheels were barley touching the ground at all. As I looked the truck over close up I was taken by the quality of the paint. It was show-winning magni cent. The truck itself (or, tractor) was unlike anything seen here in America. I simply had never seen anything like it, before or since. It looked like an angry space alien bull, it was magni cent too. I asked the man if he was okay. Through the tears owing down his cheeks, which where red like blood somehow. He sadly wept his response, in Italian.

I could’nt understand a word he said and suddenly I was so sad I started to cry as well. Many years of shame and regret surfaced in intensely strong emotion somewhere between severe nerve damage, electrocution and an orgasm. I had lost control completely and cried with such a furious joy that my tears turned to blood and poured down my cheeks in quarts. My new friend stopped crying into his phone in Italian and swiftly moved toward me and embraced me as long lost brother returning from war might. We stood there crying and hugging, both of us now doing so in uent Italian. We both took pause in our grief when from seeming nowhere a small gentle looking round-faced man with a glowing aura of white, green, and red which crowned his head and made his unusually large smile and eyes re ect his ageless, perfect being. My new war-torn brother whispered to me in perfect English, “Webster, this is Lamborghini Moses…”