C.J. Potter<\/p>\n
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In Bali the motorcycles outnumber cars two, maybe three, to one.\u00a0 Dirt bikes, street bikes, crotch rockets, Harley’s and rice burners, Indians, Triumphs, and Vincents.\u00a0 The scooters are teeming and ubiquitous: I saw a Vespa all tricked-out with ape hangers, fat tires, and chopper forks\u2014the Indonesian Easy Rider weaving beach traffic.<\/p>\n
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It was hard not to see kismet in all two-wheelers:\u00a0 My traveling buddy and I grew up riding motorcycles.\u00a0 Always his motorcycles.\u00a0 In tenth grade he had a CR-250R and a TRX-250X.\u00a0 We’d gas up Saturday mornings and head for the levee, follow it to the railroad and be in the next county before easing throttles.\u00a0 Jim was always better than me\u2014at lots of stuff, but especially motorcycles.\u00a0 I can ride good.\u00a0 Jim’s a good rider. The way some guys are handy with their iron, the way a mason is with a trowel.<\/p>\n
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From the backseat of our cab in Bali, we couldn’t help but laugh at the river of bikes, a two-wheel current towing our four-wheel barge.\u00a0 Indonesians\u2014the Balinese anyway\u2014can flat-out ride.\u00a0 We weren’t yet to our hotel and saw a 120-pound girl half in the saddle of a Honda Shadow too big for her to put both feet down at a red light.\u00a0 She stood out-rigger right, her left flung over the seat, resting on the surfboard she was hauling in a DYI side rack.\u00a0 On green, her tan elbow dropped and she took off like a trick rider on a galloping horse.\u00a0 It was a nice surfboard, too: four-fin short, totally custom, which told me she could get tricky on the waves as well.\u00a0 Her bikini was not un-flattering.<\/p>\n
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We routinely saw two, three, four riders aboard one cycle.\u00a0 And we saw five: Dad up front ahold the handlebars, Mom back on the fender and sandwiching three bobble-headed toddlers in helmets.\u00a0 20 KMH traffic, wheel-to-wheel. \u00a0I just had to wave from behind the window as they passed.\u00a0 The kid in the middle kept hands on his brother’s waist but gave me a nod.\u00a0\u00a0 All week, I had eyes out for six aboard.\u00a0 Seeing how deft pops was with five made me wonder what was possible.\u00a0 I myself never liked a rider.\u00a0 Passengers give a different balance to the bike and me anxiety for their safety.\u00a0 Jim rides two better than I do alone.\u00a0 The women I’ve seen on the back of his Fat Boy all seemed happily captive.\u00a0 Jim owns only one helmet.\u00a0 A woman’s that some different women have worn.\u00a0 They’re always lured by the chrome, but the chrome never keeps them.\u00a0 Jim seems genuinely stumped by it.\u00a0 I told him he might want to clean his house.<\/p>\n
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We were in Bali for a couple of reasons.\u00a0 The first was that we were on vacation. Jim works overseas for a giant multi-national that pays well for the work and for the austere conditions. It’s a strict Islamic country.\u00a0 No beer, bacon, or boobs, Jim says.\u00a0 Every 90 days he gets 14 in leave and a deposit in his travel account equal to the most expensive ticket available.\u00a0 Because we’ve known each other since ’83 and because it’s not always fun to travel alone, sometimes I go along.\u00a0 We’ve been to Costa Rica twice, Germany, Switzerland.\u00a0 We were headed to Spain this year for the running of the bulls, but Jim’s vacation started on the last day of San Fermin, so we pushed that idea to next year and the Bali idea blossomed like a lotus.<\/p>\n
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The other reason we were in Bali was I had read the break in Kuta offers perfect beginner waves much tamer than the famous expert waves that surround the island.\u00a0 I got on a surfboard for the first time eighteen months ago, in Jaco, Costa Rica. If you can do a burpee you can get on a surfboard.\u00a0 The hard part about surfing is knowing when<\/em> to get on the surfboard.\u00a0 The wind, the reef, the tide, every wave being a discreet event\u2014all these things are more-or-less intuited factors in the timing that make surfing, even bad surfing, a difficult and glorious tango with the planet.\u00a0 The more you know, the less you need goes the saying.\u00a0 Good waves break laterally and a good surfer rides the glassy unbroken face of the wave more or less parallel to shore.\u00a0 Bad surfers ride the white, broken water straight at the beach.\u00a0 This foamy perpendicular stuff is what I do, and when I say that I surf I say it without irony or shame.\u00a0 It’s totally aspirational.\u00a0 Surfing is about as much fun as you can have by yourself.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n And I won’t lie, Kuta was also home to a Hard Rock Hotel and a Harley-Davidson dealership. \u00a0It’s thought that Jim could wear a different Harley t-shirt every day for two months and not do laundry.\u00a0 A lot of times he doesn’t (do laundry) which is why his bachelor pad has, this is my theory, repelled potential mates.\u00a0 About the Hard Rock, I can’t really explain except Jim has an equally large collection of Hard Rock shot glasses from global ports of call.\u00a0 None of this is really my cup of tea\u2014billboard tee shirts, shot glasses, collections, capitalism’s bric-a-brac\u2014but putting up with it is cheap airfare.\u00a0 And really, the Hard Rock Hotel was not nearly as awful as I feared.\u00a0 I mean terribly kitschy in the Hard Rock way, but amusingly decadent too (two pools!), and when I left my wallet behind, the manager called me at our next hotel to report it safe in his keeping.\u00a0 This has not been my experience with hotels in the States.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Another redeeming quality: the Hard Rock is about a half click from that famous beginner’s break.\u00a0 We walked to the beach and surfed until we couldn’t lift our arms. It seemed I had gotten better since Jaco\u2014magically so, having practiced exactly zero times in the year and a half between that trip and this one.\u00a0 Really it wasn’t me, it was the conditions: easier waves, all folding similarly (slightly left) in 3 meters of water over a soft sandy reef.\u00a0 I was still missing them early and missing them late, timing them perfectly and falling off anyway like the third-timer I was, but I was also catching ones here and there all by my self, no coach yelling paddle<\/em> or now<\/em>. \u00a0And one time, very, very briefly I rode clean water to the left just ahead of the white lip chasing me.\u00a0 A real-life trailer for the major motion picture that frequents my dreams.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n We took a cab to the Harley dealership.\u00a0 It was about what you’d expect, except we were in Bali so somehow better. Or not as bad.\u00a0 I love a big American motorcycle.\u00a0 I mean, who doesn’t?\u00a0 But Harley-Davidson the brand, the “lifestyle?”\u00a0 I roll my eyes.\u00a0 Motorcycles used to be all Brando and Lee Marvin in The Wild One.\u00a0 Now they’re a hobby of my dentist.\u00a0 About Jim’s Fat Boy: \u00a0It was stolen off my front porch.\u00a0 Chrome mags, chrome swing arm, chrome mid-frame.\u00a0 There was more money in chrome on that bike than the bike cost stock.\u00a0 Brando should’ve been so lucky. \u00a0But it was stolen on my watch. When I called Jim in the Middle East to tell him, he was naturally pissed.\u00a0 I hadn’t locked the forks.\u00a0 I almost never did because you need a RFID key fob to start the thing.\u00a0 The thieves were determined and resourceful.\u00a0 They must’ve had a lift truck or something.\u00a0 How else do you take 1200 pounds that isn’t yours and won’t start? I came to believe the bike was marked for reassignment, locked forks or not.\u00a0 This is the kind of guy Jim is: after a minute he laughed and said, long as we’ve been riding motorcycles, a stolen one was bound to figure in the story at some point.\u00a0 And he’s also like this:\u00a0 He laughed a little sharper and said since we always ride his, that figures too.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n In Uluwatu, just up the coast from the floating temple, is the break at Padang Padang.\u00a0 To get to the beach one descends a hundred odd steps of twisted crevice in black volcanic rock, bending, craning, stopping to let people go the other way.\u00a0 The slot is so tight that short boards are easily bumped and scratched.\u00a0 Longs don’t fit, but that’s okay because it ain’t really long-board water.\u00a0 Padang Padang was just as thrilling to me as the Swiss Alps, or the hot springs in Costa Rica. I had goose flesh just watching those perfect tubes curl closed, spitting humans out their mouths.\u00a0 The surf was so strong, ankle biters were really knee cappers and the rhythm of the Indian Ocean filled my ears. The sun was hot, but delightful zephyrs blew in from the sea.\u00a0 The sky was faultless cobalt and I could smell coconut on all the sunbathers.\u00a0 I started to think maybe the saying should go: the more you learn, the less you want.\u00a0 I made a little pact with myself to try to come back and get in one of those tubes someday.\u00a0 Big picture, this is not likely to happen, I understand.\u00a0 But this too is surfing: I feel it draw me as strongly as the force that makes it possible.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n The way back from Padang Padang took us past something else you never see in the US:\u00a0 a mosque next to a Catholic church next to a Buddhist temple next to a Hindu temple, all four sharing one big parking lot (filled with mostly motorcycles).\u00a0 Our cabbie confessed Hindu and his wife made a daily canang sari for his dashboard.\u00a0 These devotional shrine-trays were everywhere in Bali: in cars, on the ground, next to cash registers, atop vending machines.\u00a0 At the Hindu temple next to the Buddhist temple very old women sat in a circle and made canang sari from bales of palm leaves they tore into ribbons and wove together.\u00a0 Into these movable shrines good Hindus lay offerings to Vishnu, Brahma, and the like.\u00a0 Religion’s another product I don’t have time for, but there was something irresistible about the canang sari: so delicate and intentional. Uniform as snow, distinct as snowflakes.\u00a0 The cabby’s wife put plumeria blossoms in her devoyions\u2014red at the bottom and yellow on the left, simple and lovely.\u00a0 In the many, many other canang sari I examined, I found:\u00a0 incense, U.S. coins, whole cigarettes, lozenges, life-savers, a condom, a joint (I think), seashells, a tollbooth receipt, what seemed to be a tooth, and something I could only guess was an acid tab.\u00a0 The devotions got me thinking about a cemetery near my house where people leave similar offerings on new graves: poems, candles, art, Zippo lighters. And they made me remember Saturday nights in high school, waiting in the car while Jim ducked into a short mass before we went out raising hell.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Speaking of raising hell, a beach town is a beach town the world over.\u00a0 Legian Street, the main drag in Kuta, is not much different from the Boardwalk in Atlantic City or Avenida Pastor Diaz in Jaco.\u00a0 By day, Legian bustles with souvenir trade that goes from quaint to noxious in about 3 minutes. \u00a0At night, Legian is a thoroughfare of nightclubs and bars, dance venues with fog machines, bubble machines, towering DJ stands, and shifts of bikini girls dancing on platforms high above the crowd.\u00a0 The music is so loud, the bass so reverberate that all the songs make one long soundscape that people under 40 drink, smoke, swap saliva, and sometimes even dance to.\u00a0 People over 40 watch and fondly or otherwise remember youth.\u00a0 Late, late at night the storefronts of Legian Street are shuttered and dark.\u00a0 You pass men standing sentry at even darker alleys leading to the block’s sketchy interior. When you pass these men at their adits, they hiss at you:\u00a0 Sexy lady, sexy lady<\/em>.\u00a0 Or ass, ass, ass<\/em>.\u00a0 Or cocaine, cocaine<\/em>.\u00a0 You might not be interested in these things.\u00a0 Doesn’t matter, you’re going to hear the sales pitch anyway.\u00a0 Yes<\/em> presumably begins negotiations.\u00a0 No<\/em> means maybe, and they follow you up the block commencing negotiations.\u00a0 Fuck off<\/em>, gets merely a change in the offering and new negotiations.\u00a0 It’s simply relentless.\u00a0 This is how I found myself discussing the cost of a joint with a pimp or a drug dealer or something in front of the Night Club Super Complex Sky Garden.\u00a0 Sky Garden is just up from the street from Paddy’s Pub, site of the 2002 terrorist bombing.\u00a0 After I did my best to insult the dude’s flesh offering, he said, “You want some weed, then?”<\/p>\n <\/p>\n I had to laugh.\u00a0 “How much for a bone?”<\/p>\n Kid gives me a blank look.\u00a0 “What you want, Boss.\u00a0 I got it.”<\/p>\n “A joint?” I make the smoking motion.<\/p>\n “I got it,” he says, pulling at least an ounce from his pocket.<\/p>\n I laughed even harder.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n We tried to walk toward a cab stand.\u00a0 The kid walked backward without looking, so he could continue talking to us, dropping his price, changing the product, all but pleading.\u00a0 I noted that the cabs had all but vanished.\u00a0 It was so late it was early.\u00a0 I couldn’t wait to get back to the Hard Rock.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Kid goes, “Girls.\u00a0 Sexy girls.\u00a0 You look.\u00a0 You no like, ok.”<\/p>\n “You’re not listening, Champ. It’s not happening.”<\/p>\n “Cocaine.\u00a0 Good stuff.\u00a0\u00a0 You can’t get this stuff.”<\/p>\n “No.”<\/p>\n “Weed.\u00a0 You make a hundred joints.”\u00a0 Kid turns and walks with us.<\/p>\n “What am I gonna do with 100 joints?”<\/p>\n “Good times, Boss.”<\/p>\n “I told you.\u00a0 No.”<\/p>\n Kid stops.\u00a0 We keep moving.\u00a0 Kid says to our backs, “Viagra?”<\/p>\n I give a knee jerk no<\/em>.\u00a0 And then it settles on me.<\/p>\n “HEY.\u00a0 NO!” I say adamantly as I’ve ever said it, Jim cackling with delight.<\/p>\n “C’mon, Boss.\u00a0 Don’t lie.”<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Up the block we get more pitches.\u00a0 The last one goes girls, coke, hash. \u00a0No. No. No.\u00a0 Then: Taxi?\u00a0 There’s not a car in sight.\u00a0 Kid’s riding a KTM 450, the same make that won the 2015 Supercross in Las Vegas this spring.\u00a0 He slaps the seat.\u00a0 I shrug my shoulders at Jim, who’s already throwing a leg over the fender.\u00a0 At the fountain in front of the Hard Rock I pay the driver.<\/p>\n “Tip ‘im,” Jim says.\u00a0 “He rides better than you.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" C.J. Potter In Bali the motorcycles outnumber cars two, maybe three, to one.\u00a0 Dirt bikes, street bikes, crotch rockets, Harley’s and rice burners, Indians, Triumphs, and Vincents.\u00a0 The scooters are teeming and ubiquitous: I saw a Vespa all tricked-out with ape hangers, fat tires, and chopper forks\u2014the Indonesian Easy Rider weaving beach traffic. 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