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I've always been an HST fan, and was recently reminded of one of my favorite articles of his when someone asked about the framed "Hunter on a Ducati" print I have on my wall. Figured I'd share for those who may have never read it.
Song of the Sausage Creature
On my tombstone they will carve,
“IT NEVER GOT FAST ENOUGH FOR ME.”
by Hunter S. Thompson
There are some things nobody needs in this world, and a bright red, hunchback, warp-speed 900cc cafe
racer is one of them -- but I want one anyway, and on some days I actually believe I need one. That is
why they are dangerous.
Everybody has fast motorcycles these days. Some people go 150 miles an hour on two-lane blacktop
roads, but not often. There are too many oncoming trucks and too many radar cops and too many stupid
animals in the way. You have to be a little crazy to ride these super-torque high- speed crotch rockets
anywhere except a racetrack -- and even there, they will scare the whimpering shit out of you.... There is,
after all, not a pig's eye worth of difference between going head-on into a Peterbilt or sideways into the
bleachers. On some days you get what you want, and on other, you get what you need.
When Cycle World called me to ask if I would road-test the new Harley Road King, I got uppity and said
I'd rather have a Ducati superbike. It seemed like a chic decision at the time, and my friends on the
superbike circuit got very excited. "Hot damn," they said, "We will take it to the track and blow the
bastards away."
"Balls," I said. "Never mind the track. The track is for punks. We are Road People. We are Cafe Racers."
The Cafe Racer is a different breed, and we have our own situations. Pure speed in sixth gear on a 5,000-
foot straightaway is one thing, but pure speed in third gear on a gravel-strewn downhill ess turn is quite
another.
But we like it. A thoroughbred Cafe Racer will ride all night through a fog storm in freeway traffic to put
himself into what somebody told him was the ugliest and tightest decreasing-radius turn since Genghis
Khan invented the corkscrew.
Cafe Racing is mainly a matter of taste. It is an atavistic mentality, a peculiar mix of low style, high
speed, pure dumbness, and overweening commitment to the Cafe Life and all its dangerous pleasures.... I
am a Cafe Racer myself, on some days -- and many nights for that matter -- and it is one of my finest
addictions....
I am not without scars on my brain and my body, but I can live with them. I still feel a shudder in my
spine every time I see a Vincent Black Shadow, or when I walk into a public restroom and hear crippled
men whispering about the terrifying Kawasaki Triple.... I have visions of compound femur-fractures and
large black men in white hospital suits holding me down on a gurney while a nurse called "Bess" sews the
flaps of my scalp together with a stitching drill.
Ho, ho. Thank God for these flashbacks. The brain is such a wonderful instrument (until God sinks his
teeth into it). Some people hear Tiny Tim singing when they go under, and others hear the song of the
Sausage Creature.
When the Ducati turned up in my driveway, nobody knew what to do with it. I was in New York,
covering a polo tournament, and people had threatened my life. My lawyer said I should give myself up
and enroll in the Federal Witness Protection Program. Other people said it had something to do with the
polo crowd.
The motorcycle business was the last straw. It had to be the work of my enemies, or people who wanted
to hurt me. It was the vilest kind of bait, and they knew I would go for it. Of course. You want to cripple the
bastard? Send him a 130-mph cafe racer. And include some license plates, so he'll think it's a streetbike. He's
queer for anything fast. Which is true. I have been a connoisseur of fast motorcycles all my life. I bought a
brand-new 650 BSA Lightning when it was billed as "the fastest motorcycle ever tested by Hot Rod magazine."
I have ridden a 500-pound Vincent through traffic on the Ventura Freeway with burning oil on my legs and
run the Kawa 750 triple through Beverly Hills at night with a head full of acid.... I have ridden with
Sonny Barger and smoked weed in biker bars with Jack Nicholson, Grace Slick, Ron Zigler, and my
infamous old friend, Ken Kesey, a legendary Cafe Racer.
Some people will tell you that slow is good -- and it may be, on some days -- but I am here to tell you that
fast is better. I've always believed this, in spite of the trouble it's caused me. Being shot out of a cannon
will always be better than being squeezed out of a tube. That is why God made fast motorcycles, Bubba....
So when I got back from New York and found a fiery red rocket-style bike in my garage, I realized I was
back in the road-testing business.
The brand-new Ducati 900 Campione del Mundo Desmodue Supersport double- barreled magnum Cafe
Racer filled me with feelings of lust every time I looked at it. Others felt the same way. My garage
quickly became a magnet for drooling superbike groupies. They quarreled and bitched at each other about
who would be first to help me evaluate my new toy.... And I did, of course, need a certain spectrum of
opinions, besides my own, to properly judge this motorcycle. The Woody Creek Perverse Environmental
Testing Facility is a long way from Daytona or even top- fuel challenge sprints on the Pacific Coast
Highway, where teams of big- bore Kawasakis and Yamahas are said to race head-on against each other
in death-defying games of "chicken" at 100 miles an hour....
No. Not everybody who buys a high-dollar torque-brute yearns to go out in a ball of fire on a public street
in L.A. Some of us are decent people who want to stay out of the emergency room, but still blast through
neo-gridlock traffic in residential districts whenever we feel like it.... For that we need fine Machinery.
Which we had -- no doubt about that. The Ducati people in New Jersey had opted, for reasons of their
own, to send me the 900SP for testing -- rather than their 916 crazy-fast, state-of-the-art superbike track
racer. It was far too fast, they said -- and prohibitively expensive -- to farm out for testing to a gang of
half-mad Colorado cowboys who think they're world-class Cafe Racers.
The Ducati 900 is a finely engineered machine. My neighbors called it beautiful and admired its racing
lines. The nasty little bugger looked like it was going 90 miles an hour when it was standing still in my
garage.
Taking it on the road, though, was a genuinely terrifying experience. I had no sense of speed until I was
going 90 and coming up fast on a bunch of pickup trucks going into a wet curve along the river. I went for
both brakes, but only the front one worked, and I almost went end over end. I was out of control staring at
the tailpipe of a U.S. Mail truck, still stabbing frantically at my rear brake pedal, which I just couldn't
find.... I am too tall for these New Age roadracers; they are not built for any rider taller than five-nine, and
the rearset brake pedal was not where I thought it would be. Midsize Italian pimps who like to race from
one cafe to another on the boulevards of Rome in a flat-line prone position might like this, but I do not.
I was hunched over the tank like a person diving into a pool that got emptied yesterday. Whacko! Bashed
into the concrete bottom, flesh ripped off, a Sausage Creature with no teeth, f-cked-up for the rest of its
life.
We all love Torque, and some of us have taken it straight over the high side from time to time -- and there
is always Pain in that.... But there is also Fun, in the deadly element, and Fun is what you get when you
screw this monster on. BOOM! Instant takeoff, no screeching or squawking around like a fool with your
teeth clamping down on your tongue and your mind completely empty of everything but fear.
No. This bugger digs right in and shoots you straight down the pipe, for good or ill.
On my first takeoff, I hit second gear and went through the speed limit on a two-lane blacktop highway
full of ranch traffic. By the time I went up to third, I was going 75 and the tach was barely above 4,000
rpm....
And that's when it got its second wind. From 4,000 to 6,000 in third will take you from 75 to 95 in two
seconds -- and after that, Bubba, you still have fourth, fifth, and sixth. Ho, ho.
I never got into sixth, and I didn't get deep into fifth. This is a shameful admission for a full-bore Cafe
Racer, but let me tell you something, old sport: This motorcycle is simply too goddamn fast to ride at
speed in any kind of normal road traffic unless you're ready to go straight down the centerline with your
nuts on fire and a silent scream in your throat.
When aimed in the right direction at high speed, though, it has unnatural capabilities. This I unwittingly
discovered as I made my approach to a sharp turn across some railroad tracks, saw that I was going way
too fast and that my only chance was to veer right and screw it on totally, in a desperate attempt to
leapfrog the curve by going airborne.
It was a bold and reckless move, but it was necessary. And it worked: I felt like Evil Knievel as I soared
across the tracks with the rain in my eyes and my jaws clamped together in fear. I tried to spit down on
the tracks as I passed them, but my mouth was too dry.... I landed hard on the edge of the road and lost
my grip for a moment as the Ducati began fishtailing crazily into oncoming traffic. For two or three
seconds I came face to face with the Sausage Creature....
But somehow the brute straightened out. I passed a school bus on the right and then got the bike under
control long enough to gear down and pull off into an abandoned gravel driveway where I stopped and
turned off the engine. My hands had seized up like claws and the rest of my body was numb. I felt
nauseous and I cried for my mama, but nobody heard, then I went into a trance for 30 or 40 seconds until I
was finally able to light a cigarette and calm down enough to ride home. I was too hysterical to shift
gears, so I went the whole way in first at 40 miles an hour.
Whoops! What am I saying? Tall stories, ho, ho.... We are motorcycle people; we walk tall and we laugh
at whatever's funny. We shit on the chests of the Weird....
But when we ride very fast motorcycles, we ride with immaculate sanity. We might abuse a substance
here and there, but only when it's right. The final measure of any rider's skill is the inverse ratio of his
preferred Traveling Speed to the number of bad scars on his body. It is that simple: If you ride fast and
crash, you are a bad rider. If you go slow and crash, you are a bad rider. And if you are a bad rider, you
should not ride motorcycles.
The emergence of the superbike has heightened this equation drastically. Motorcycle technology has
made such a great leap forward. Take the Ducati. You want optimum cruising speed on this bugger? Try
90 mph in fifth at 5,500 rpm -- and just then, you see a bull moose in the middle of the road. WHACKO.
Meet the Sausage Creature.
Or maybe not: The Ducati 900 is so finely engineered and balanced and torqued that you can do 90 mph
in fifth through a 35-mph zone and get away with it. The bike is not just fast -- it is extremely quick and
responsive, and it will do amazing things.... It is a little like riding the original Vincent Black Shadow,
which would outrun an F-86 jet fighter on the takeoff runway, but at the end, the F-86 would go airborne
and the Vincent would not, and there was no point in trying to turn it. WHAMO! The Sausage Creature
strikes again.
There is a fundamental difference, however, between the old Vincents and the new bred of superbikes. If
you rode the Black Shadow at top speed for any length of time, you would almost certainly die. That is
why there are not many life members of the Vincent Black Shadow Society. The Vincent was like a bullet
that went straight; the Ducati is like the magic bullet that went sideways and hit JFK and the Governor of
Texas at the same time. It was impossible. But so was my terrifying sideways leap across railroad tracks
on the 900SP. The bike did it easily with the grace of a fleeing tomcat. The landing was so easy I
remember thinking, goddamnit, if I had screwed it on a little more I could have gone a lot further.
Maybe this is the new Cafe Racer macho. My bike is so much faster than yours that I dare you to ride it,
you lame little turd. Do you have the balls to ride this BOTTOMLESS PIT OF TORQUE?
That is the attitude of the New Age superbike freak, and I am one of them. On some days they are about
the most fun you can have with your clothes on. The Vincent just killed you a lot faster than a superbike
will. A fool couldn't ride the Vincent Black Shadow more than once, but a fool can ride a Ducati 900
many times, and it will always be bloodcurdling kind of fun. That is the Curse of Speed which has
plagued me all my life. I am a slave to it. On my tombstone they will carve, "IT NEVER GOT FAST
ENOUGH FOR ME."
[Originally published in CycleWorld Magazine, 1995]
Photograph: Hunter S. Thompson, with “the” Ducati
Graphic: Ralph Steadman
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