“Well, Tom. The parallelism of truly linked souls.” Hasenpfeffer hadn’t changed much. The same blue eyes, blond hair, and straight features. Only now he had a full beard, his hair brushed his shoulders, and he no longer belonged on a poster advertising the Hitler Youth Movement. Instead, he was ready to compete in a Jesus Christ Look-Alike contest.
He was wearing this yellow scholar’s robe with a garish collar.
“Huh?” My first comment to him in four years, barring a few letters.
“Your motorcycle. I saw you pull up. I have one just like it, but without the Ranger faring.” He stood up and twirled to show off the gaudy cadmium yellow circus tent he was wearing. It had two broad strips of bright blue velvet running up the front, over the shoulders, and then meeting at the back of this oversized hood. Not that he could have put up the hood, since he wore this black tam-o’-shanter with a gold tassel.
“What do you think?”
“They make you wear that all the time, or just when you’re on duty?”
“None of the above. I’m getting my doctorate in Behavioral Psychology tomorrow. That is why you came, isn’t it?”
“Well, no. Just passing through. But I’ll stick around if you want.”
“You are out of the Air Force?”
“Yeah.”
“Any plans?”
“Uh, none, really.” I didn’t think that he’d understand about officers.
“Excellent! Then we can leave in two days.”
“Leave? Where are we going?”
“No place in particular. I have a Department of Defense grant to study social interactions within motorcycle gangs. That’s how I bought the BMW. Forming our own gang will be much pleasanter and safer than trying to join the Hell’s Angels.”
Great. Me they stuff under a mountain. For him, they buy a motorcycle.
“Hell, why not?”
“Excellent! Ian will be with us, at least at first.”
“Ian McTavish? What’s he doing with himself?”
“He got his bachelor’s in Mechanical Engineering two years after you left, and a second one in World History at the same time. He has been working for General Motors ever since. He has three weeks vacation due him, and we’re to pick him up in Michigan this coming Friday.”
“Great. Who else?”
“No one. Just the three of us.”
“So three people constitute a motorcycle gang? I mean, if you’ve got this paper to write . . .”
“I can pad it out a bit. No one reads these DOD things anyway.”
Hasenpfeffer lent me a tie and made me wear it to the graduation ceremony. I thought it looked funny with a T-shirt and a leather jacket, but it was his show. It was about six hours of boring people proving how boring they could be, and after all that, they didn’t even give him his diploma, just a blank roll of paper. The real one was to be sent later. Much later, as it turned out.
The party afterwards was worse than the ceremony itself, with all the grads and their families standing around while the professors came in, “made an appearance,” and left as soon as possible.
I’m patient enough to put up with things like that for old friends. Once in a while. At least I didn’t have to stand in formation.
In the course of the day, about a dozen slender young women came up to say goodbye to Hasenpfeffer. They each got a smile, a hug, and some vague promises about seeing each other again. He politely introduced each of them to me, but it seemed that I wasn’t somebody that they wanted to meet. They each left as soon as possible.
That night and the next morning, we got all his stuff packed and a moving company hauled most of it away for storage. A half dozen more girls came by for their goodbye kisses, and one of them spent the night with him. He actually invited the last two of them to spend the night, but with me, since he was already occupied, but they developed pressing engagements elsewhere. They both left at a dead run, although one of them stopped to see if I was following, and to pick up a rock.
The two of us were on the road Friday morning at ten with a clear blue sky above us.
We took the short cut through Canada, and 401 is a good place for road bikes. I was glad that Hasenpfeffer had bought a BMW because people who own them don’t much like rolling with those who ride all the lesser breeds.
It’s not that we’re uppity, so much, though pride has a certain amount to do with it. It’s just that a BMW is about the only machine that can go on forever without breaking down. I had to stop running with a buddy in the service because his Honda had an average of three mechanical problems a day, and that sure ruins a trip.
But with good machinery between our legs, we knew that there wouldn’t be any holdups, so we could afford the time to make about four beer stops and load up on that fine Canadian brew. I never could figure out how one people could make such great beer and such lousy cigarettes.
CHAPTER THREE
The Other Friend
We got to Ian’s condo that evening. It was quite a place, with carefully tended gardens and an impressive entranceway. It looked as though GM was doing well by our boy. The living room was spacious and nicely furnished with Danish Modern stuff. Indeed, it looked a lot bigger than it actually was. I found out the reason when I sat down. The furniture was tiny! It turned out that he had furnished his “pad” with the three-quarter sized stuff they make to put in model homes, so they can fool people into thinking they’re buying more than they’re actually going to get.
It all fit Ian just fine, though, and it was his place after all. It got me to wondering if anybody made furniture to fit proper-sized people like me. Not that I could afford any furniture, much less a place to put it in.
But what wasn’t undersized was Ian’s motorcycle.
“Hey, you bought a Harley?” I said.
“What’s wrong with buying American, Tom?” Ian said.
Ian was using my name, and Hasenpfeffer’s as well, a whole lot more than he used to. Obviously, while I was gone, he’d taken a Dale Carnegie course. “How to Win Friends, Influence People, and Be A Complete Phony in Ten Easy Lessons.”
“Well, nothing, when you’re buying cigarettes or cars,” I said. “But the engineering in that thing is forty years out of date.”
“It’s tried and true engineering, Tom.”
“Tell you what, little buddy. I’ll lend you a hand the first two times a day it breaks down. After that, you can find me at the next bar up the road.”
“Have you ever considered the advantages of autocopulation, Tom?”
Back in college, I’d ragged Ian a lot about swearing as much as he did while at the same time being such a regular churchgoer. This last statement obviously represented his attempt to cut down. It didn’t last.
The next morning, we were on I-75 heading north. The plan was to go to Washington State by way of Minnesota, head south through California, and then get Ian home in three weeks by way of Louisiana.
By noon, we were off the expressways. We didn’t plan to use the Interstate system all that much. The best way to travel while on vacation is get a map, figure out where you are, and where you want to be that night. Then you draw a straight line on the map between those two points. After that, you try to stay as close to that line as possible while staying on paved roads. This gets you into the country, where things can get interesting. The expressways are efficient, but they’re also boring.
Ian’s Duo-Glide held up better than I had feared, with only a half hour lost for repairs that day. We went over Big Mac (the bridge, not the junk food) that afternoon, but an hour later it started sprinkling, so we pulled up to the only building in Pine Stump, Michigan.
It was a combination gas station (one pump), general store (one small shelf of canned goods) and tavern (four stools at a linoleum topped bar and two chairs at a small table).
The town’s mayor and sole inhabitant was the little old lady who ran the place, tended the bar, and lived in the building’s other room, in back. She looked to be eighty years old. She was skinny, and about as frail as a crowbar.
The surrounding area really did have pine stumps. Thousands of them! They were huge for White Pine, probably world record setters when they’d been cut maybe eighty years before, when the area had been logged over. Nothing growing there now was even close.