The Mouse That Roared

The mouse that roared

LEANINGS

Peter Egan

“I'VE DECIDED TO GET A MOTORCYCLE again,” my old buddy Jim Wargula told me over the phone one Saturday morning last month. “I was wondering if I could come over and take a ride on your Ducati 900SS. It’s one of the bikes I’m considering, but I’ve never ridden one.”

“Sure,” I said, “come on over. It’s a nice day for a ride.”

I hung up the phone and smiled reflectively (or so I imagined, having no mirror handy).

So Jim was getting another bike. At last.

Jim and I go way back. We met in college when we both showed up for Freshman Orientation Week in 1966, lugging electric guitar cases and Fender amplifiers down the hallway and into our respective dorm rooms. Immediately thereafter, we plastered our walls with motorcycle pictures. Instant friends.

We later bought Honda 350s the same year (a CB and SL) and bought new Norton Commandos the same week, doing a lot of riding together.

Jim got out of motorcycling, though, about 20 years ago during the Soccer Dad Years and has not ridden since, except to bum an occasional ride on one of my bikes.

Still, he never stopped looking at motorcycles. Riding was on the back burner, but always at a slow boil. All he had to do was turn the heat up a notch. Which he had apparently decided to do.

So Jim showed up at my house that Saturday morning with his old helmet and leather jacket. I fired up my 1995 900SSSP for him, rolled out the old BMW R100RS for myself, and we mounted up and headed into the hill country of southwestern Wisconsin for a two-hour ride.

When we got back, Jim slowly turned off the ignition, sat on the bike for a few minutes and then took off his helmet.

“Well, what do you think?” 1 asked.

He turned and looked at me quizzically. “If you owned one of these,” he asked, almost accusingly, “why would you want any other motorcycle?”

“I don’t know,” I admitted, glancing self-consciously at my other five bikes.

“Gotta get one,” he said. “A full-fairing SP, just like this. Your assignment, Egan,” he said with mock Mission Impossible gravity, “is to help me find one.”

So that afternoon I called my pal Mike Mosiman in Fort Collins, Colorado. Mike is a motorcycle addict who spends more time on the Internet searching for motorcycle bargains than most people spend breathing. “We need an SP,” I told him.

Mike called back 15 minutes later and said, “Okay, I got on the ’net and found you a nice one in Cleveland. A ’96 SP with only 4000 miles; rejetted, sprocket, high Ferracci pipes. Owner sounds like a nice guy, says it’s immaculate and wants around $6000 for it.”

I passed along this information to Jim, and the next day he called me back. “Want to go to Cleveland with me this weekend and pick up a red Ducati?” he asked. “Sure,” I said, “sounds like fun.”

“Oh, by the way, can we use your van?” “Sure, “ I said. “Do you need anything else? Shoes or anything?”

“No, just your van, and some help loading the bike. 1 have shoes.”

So we drove to Cleveland, picked up the bike (immaculate, as represented) and stayed overnight near Toledo on the way home. Jim bought me dinner at a Mexican restaurant and we toasted his rebirth as a motorcyclist with a couple of margaritas.

Right after we got home, winter arrived, so Jim now has the SP enshrined in his basement workshop until spring. In the meantime, he’s been reading Ducati books, collecting old 900SS road tests, logging on to Ducati websites, visiting Ducati shops and looking at carbon-fiber accessories that cost more, per ounce, than good caviar.

Jim is a computer engineer for a power utility company, so I gave him one of those “I have a Ducati on my mind” posters that depict a computer desk with a bright red photo of a 900SS taped up on the wall of an office cubicle.

When I call Jim up at his office these days and say, “What are you doing?” he always replies, “I’m working on a computer program and looking at my Ducati poster.”

He’s got it bad.

Which I am happy to see.

Ten years ago, I wrote a column called “All My Rowdy Friends,” in which I lamented that many of my old riding buddies-including Jim-had given up riding, playing guitars or just plain going out of doors, for the tightly focused pleasures of the computer screen.

When I would call Jim at home on a weekend to talk about bikes or guitars, I could always hear his keyboard clacking in the background, even as ' he talked. His conversation seemed distracted by whatever was on the screen.

I work on a word processor all day myself, but trading a Sunday-morning ride in the country for a few more hours on the computer in a dark office seemed like a bad deal to me. Almost creepy, in fact, like a science-fiction plot from Invasion of the Body Snatchers, or some story in which our brains are slowly taken over by a race of passionless aliens. It seemed to me that all forms of real physical activity-riding, hiking, flying, running, bicycling, sailing, etc.-were being supplanted by small, furtive movements of the aptly named mouse on its little foam pad.

Now, happily, this relationship seems to have been reversed, with computer technology put in its proper role as servant rather than master.

Through the dual miracles of the ’net and e-mail, our friend Mike was able to find Jim a bike in 15 minutes and Jim was able to negotiate a deal that night. This little exchange in cyberspace set in motion the wheels of a half-ton Ford van, two days of road travel, a Mexican dinner, the whirring of a margarita blender, the acquisition of a beautiful red Ducati and the promise of a coming summer filled with sound and motion.

When I’d call Jim 10 years ago, he was talking about motorcycles but thinking about computers. Now he is still on the computer, but thinking about his motorcycle. Which sits, even now, poised for spring in his workshop. I believe this is called technological progress. U