Leanings
LEANINGS
Duck A L'Orange
Peter Egan
THOSE WHO FOUND THEMSELVES trapped in an elevator or a Turkish prison with nothing else to read last year may remember a column I wrote about Ducati Desmos. In that somber tract I was berating myself for being so stupid as to sell my old silver-andblue 900SS three years ago, and I was about to buy another one from my friend, Russ Lyon.
That purchase fell through, of course. Russ came to his senses about five minutes after deciding to sell the bike and re-decided to hold onto it. 1 was proud of him, but his decision left me sans Duck, so to speak. Lve been looking for one ever since, without much success. Every Ducati that’s come up for sale is either so desirable it’s sold by word of mouth before I can get to it, or so ratty and overpriced that it would be cheaper to buy the Cagiva-Ducati factory and make my own bike from scratch, rather than bear the cost of restoration.
My luck finally changed a few weeks ago.
Jon Thompson called me up from the CW offices to say he'd seen a 1977 900SS for sale in the Sunday Los Angeles Times.
“Sunday?” I said. “Hmmm. Today is Wednesday. I'm sure it’s already sold. When I advertised my old Duck in the Times the phone rang off the hook and it was sold the same day.”
“Sorry I didn't tell you sooner,” Jon said. “I just noticed the ad today.”
“Well, it can't hurt to call.”
I dialed the number and discovered, to my amazement and suspicion, that the Ducati was still for sale. It belonged to a young doctor in Brentwood, a little community appended to Los Angeles.
“Lots of people have called about the bike.” the doctor told me, “but no one has come to look at it.”
“Any particular reason?” I inquired, antennae twitching.
“Well,” he said, “when I tell people what color it is, they practically hang up on me. Everybody seems to want original silver-and-blue paint, and I had the bike repainted a nonfactory color.”.
“Oh,” 1 said. “Well, what color is it?”
“Salmon.”
I allowed the word to sink in for a moment. “Salmon?”
“Yeah.”
I didn’t quite know what to say. I'd never heard of a salmon-colored motorcycle before. It conjured up a hue on the color spectrum somewhere between fish-belly white and Pepto Bismol pink, neither of which was exactly my favorite shade for a Ducati. or anything else I could think of other than salmon itself. I shuddered involuntarily and held the phone slightly away from my ear. “Well,” I said bleakly, “I was looking for an original color, too, but I suppose there's no harm in having a look at it.”
So we arranged a meeting, and Sunday morning my wife Barbara and I drove up the coast to Brentwood for a look at this lox-inspired beauty. The doctor lived in a nice apartment building with more security systems than the houses of Medici. the kind of place that erases all doubt as to who’s winning the crime wars. The motorcycle was in an underground garage, protected by a radio-operated, sliding steel door.
We unlocked the Ducati’s security chain, removed the cover and pushed the bike through the gate and out into daylight. I stood back to look at the SS and heaved a small sigh of relief. The Duck was not so much salmon as dark orange, and a rather pleasing shade of dark orange at that, with all the original-style decals and stripes done in silver. The owner told me the actual paint color was Laverda Orange. You could almost imagine it as a slightly lighter shade of the red that appears on the Italian flag. In fact, it looked nice enough that if the Ducati factory had painted all its bikes this color, people wouldn't have them any other way.
Other than having orange paint, a bad battery and half a dozen other electrical malfunctions that I attributed to a bad voltage regulator, the 900 was in beautiful condition. I'd come to see the bike out of morbid curiosity, intrigued by the salmon concept, but I ended up leaving a deposit and running off to visit my friendly credit union officer. Todd, with whom I am now on a first-name basis. And will be for 36 months.
I knew' I was a goner the moment the Duck emerged from the garage into the morning sunlight. Orange, salmon, beige, green, it didn't matter. You couldn't disguise the beauty or the mechanical essence of the bike with a thin layer of the wrong paint any more than you could make Nastassja Kinski look bad by putting her in a different-colored body stocking. The bike will eventually be repainted silver and blue, but I can live with Laverda Orange quite happily for the time being. Besides, to repaint the bike I'd have to take it off the road for a few weeks and I'm not ready to do that just yet.
Last weekend I finally took the Ducati for a first ride in the mountains. I was almost afraid to ride it, worried that the memory might be better than reality. When I rode my first 900SS years ago. it had the best brakes, the finest handling, the most beautiful sound, the most pleasing torque curve, the best high-speed stability and the most precise controls of any motorcycle I’d ever ridden. But that was almost 10 years ago. Sportbikes have improved tremendously over that time, and I half expected that the contrast with modern machinery would diminish the appeal of the old Ducati.
I needn’t have worried. The 900SS is even better than I remembered. Big Ducati V-Twins have a personality and a visceral appeal that exists independent of time. Kept in reasonably good working order and supplied with the occasional tankful of fossil fuel, they will still be pleasurable to ride a hundred years from now. As a design, the 90ÖSS is not only timeless, it's virtually salmon-proof. ED
