Flat Track: About Coming of Age, Love and Above All, Racing

By Loukas Mexis

'On the turns, where you defy physics and velocity beats mass, that’s where winners are made’

Flat track is the essence of motorcycle racing, and the Indy Mile is the place where legends are born and worshipped.

It is the blinding lights that heat up the whole field, turning the atmosphere around the track into a sauna and making skin sweat beneath the leather overalls. It is the thousands of people cheering twenty-five hellishly-fast machines fighting for the number-one plate.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: May 15, 2013
• ISBN: 9781922204431

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Prologue

It had always been about bikes. Motorbikes, that is. Back when Gunner and his friends were still in school, no one really cared so much about when they would lose their virginity as when they would get the chance to ride a two-wheeled fossil-fuelled machine for the first time. For Gunner, that day was a turning point in his life, an effect after a powerful cause, that being the unfortunate and sudden death of his mother. He was only a few days away from his thirteenth birthday when he lost his motorcycle virginity. He was just a kid.

Gunner Adams had never been a mischievous boy. He would always sit quietly in a corner doing his homework or drawing on paper. Studying and sketching, that was what he knew how to do and that was what he did.

But after he moved in with his uncle, he was introduced to a whole new world where suspension systems, four-stroke engines and RPM gauges reigned. This was not surprising, since his uncle owned one of the few custom-bike garages in Santa Rosa, California. At first, it was mere curiosity he felt, which soon turned into adoration and finally, love. Back in his hometown of Evansville, Indiana, Gunner had never had the chance to observe such machines up close. He had never had the chance to twist bolts on an engine cover of a Japanese import bike or a seductive Italian café racer. Far from it, he had only handled his pens and pencils, and the empty hooch bottles his mom used to drain twenty-four-seven. That had been life for young Gunner. But in Jim’s Garage, a new one presented itself and he was drawn to it like a moth to the flame. He was still afraid to really get into the whole mechanical side of it. He felt he would first have to study the subject for the equivalent number of years a brain surgeon would require, before he had the knowledge to actually split an engine in two. So he didn’t. Instead, he just observed Uncle Jim, his every move and breath over the bikes, trying to soak up every drop of knowledge. For a thirteen-year-old boy who had just lost his mother, that was enough. Or so he thought.

Six months had gone by since Gunner set foot in Sonoma County and his uncle was working on a restoration of a beautiful British trials bike, a Triumph Trailblazer 250. A simple bike consisting of just the basics, some pretty metal touches with a sophisticated aura from a much more civilized era, the seventies. Gunner fell in love with that bike from the first moment he laid eyes on her. He could not understand why he felt like that about a machine, but he did, and that was enough to make him start drawing pictures of it. Two months went by and the bike was like new.

As good as it could ever be, his uncle always said to any potential customer. Jim did take pride in that. That night, he made the final check on all the bolts on the peripheral parts, fired up the engine, revved it a few times and then let the British bike rest till the next day which was delivery day. But that night was to be Gunner’s first ride. He waited for his uncle to lock up the garage and walk the mere thirty feet back to the house which stood on the same grounds. He knew his uncle’s routine off pat, and if everything went as usual, for the next twenty minutes Uncle Jim would be taking a long shower trying to get rid of the oily smell from his body. It was more than enough for one quick ride around the block. Yes, that would be enough for him, enough to brag about the next morning in school to his new classmates. It would suffice. He walked quietly around the corner and lifted the garage door just a tad so that he could squeeze under and enter the main hall. He knew that if he lifted it all the way up the noise would eventually reach Jim’s ears. He didn’t want that, obviously.

The Triumph Trailblazer was there, waiting to spring to life again under the guidance of his owner who would be arriving the next morning to take the motorcycle back home. Nope, now the master was Gunner and he had a burning desire to ride this machine; he had to understand what all the fuss was about with these two wheels. How difficult could it be? He understood the basics of gear shifting; he had practiced enough – at least a dozen times – when the bike was idle. Plus, he rode a BMX like a professional. What’s so different about an engine in the middle? Piece of cake, he thought and took a deep breath before setting his grand master plan in motion. He pulled the back door up and pushed the bike out, carefully so as not to make too much noise. The grounds had no perimeter fence, no nothing; the road was just in front of him. Gunner lifted his right leg and mounted the machine. Seconds later, the kick-starter was in place, waiting to give the needed spark to the plug, to fire up this piece of metal. The first attempt was a failure. The second, as well. The third felt like something was going right but Gunner had no idea what that was. He pushed the starter lever slowly to the ground until it could be pushed no further. It needed force, and with as much power as he could muster he did what had to be done. The bike sprang to life. He revved the engine with content, turned on the lights and held the clutch until he could set it into first gear.

The idea was that he would stay on first for a whole ride around the building and return the bike in one piece. That was the plan. He started letting the clutch go when the rear wheel started to push the motorcycle forward. It was slow at first, but unfortunately, this tranquility lasted only for a few seconds. The bike, all too quickly, gathered speed and was cruising on the road, while Gunner was trying to swallow all the adrenaline he felt gathering under his tongue. Too late. As soon as he had to turn left, the rear wheel slipped out from under him and the Trailblazer crashed heavily onto the road. As did Gunner.

His uncle found him moments later trying to lift the heavy bike up again. He noticed that the kid’s nose, which had hit the ground along with the rest of his face immediately after he had lost control, was bleeding like a stuck pig. Uncle Jim held his breath and tried not to explode in Gunner’s face. He knew that the kid had a lot on his mind, he was, after all, parentless and that meant special treatment at such a fragile age. He picked up the bike and pushed it back to the garage. Gunner stood frozen, unaware of the damage he had caused. He followed silently holding his head back, trying to slow the blood gushing from his nose. It was definitely broken but Jim had no time to take him to hospital. He put some bandages around Gunner’s head and told him to lie down. He would have to ground him for months to come and he told Gunner he was getting nowhere near another motorcycle. Jim was going to have to fix the bike as soon as he could because it was due for delivery the next morning and Lord knew how much that was going to cost him. He lost a couple of hundred bucks that night and a good customer. That same night, Gunner acquired his crooked nose from that minute-long joyride, but not only:

He had found a purpose.

Chapter 1

Bourbon-injected cylinders

Lynn Adams gave birth to her only child on the first day of November, back in 1988, in a place people called the River City of Indiana. Others preferred the nickname ‘Pocket City’, but no one really called Evansville by its proper, its given name. It was, after all, a river town lying safely hidden in a horseshoe bend on the Ohio River. Not that big, not that crowded, it was a calm and quiet place for a kid to grow up in and stay away from trouble and the madness which thrived in most major cities throughout the States. That was not why Lynn Adams had decided to remain in Evansville when she got pregnant, not at all; it had nothing to do with the future of the boy. She chose to do so because she thought it would be safer for herself and her fragile little soul, a soul already torn apart into numerous pieces. It wasn’t so much because she had become a mother by the age of twenty-three, or that she had had to survive without parents since her mother died when she was twenty. It was because of Gunner’s dad. Or rather, because of his lack of presence.

Young Gunner grew up in a small apartment that Lynn had rented really close to the center of Evansville, where the market and small industries stood on the riverside. Her parents had never made enough money to buy a house. They were immigrants from Scotland and had come to America wishing to make a fresh start and build a better future for their child. Cancer had other plans and clashed with the fate they had hoped had been written for them in the stars. Lynn’s dad died when she was a teenager, after a six month struggle with a larynx tumor, and her mother followed suit five years later from the silent killer, ovarian cancer.

Everyone in town kept saying that they had been a really unfortunate family. But that was not the only thing people whispered behind Lynn’s back. They knew that she was a wild one, constantly rebelling against authority and the way of life Evansville was promoting. Some occasionally called her the town’s ‘sure thing’, others shamelessly ‘a slut’. Yes, Lynn was a stereotypical free spirit and had always wanted to become an actress and join the Victory Theatre Troupe. Along her path, she met all kinds of people; she wanted to soak up as much as possible from different cultures. Unfortunately, when she turned twenty, she was flung into a different life – that of survival and misery. That was when she met Gunner’s dad, a man Gunner was destined to never meet. Instead, he grew up fatherless in a small apartment unit in downtown Evansville, the river city of Indiana.

He remembers few things from his infant years. Not surprising, since most kids cannot really form memories until the age of five. Those were the most difficult years for Lynn, a single mother trying to make ends meet and maintain a household while working as a waitress at various bars and cafes along the river.

The nineties came and along with them came the matter of young Gunner’s education. Many good schools where situated in Evansville, everyone knew that, and so was the University of Southern Indiana. Lynn always dreamt that her son would one day study there and become someone great and important, someone definitely better than her. Every night, she looked at herself in the mirror and felt pity, pity for her lost hopes, for her naive dream of becoming a renowned actress, of an ideal happy family with a small house by the river somewhere in Vanderburgh County. Snowless winters passed by and humid summers followed, all of which felt the same, all completely expected and tasteless. Gunner was growing up, he was finishing kindergarten and was becoming a boy; he was no longer a baby. When he was old enough to ask, he did.

What about dad? Is he ever coming home? he asked, trying to understand where he was and why he had been absent for as long as he could remember.

He knew that growing up without a dad was unnatural. He could see it by comparing his life to that of his kindergarten friends, but had never really had the strength to turn wonder into question. He was a quiet boy, a really quiet and calm boy. Lynn could boast about that, she was the mother of a truly gentle kid that rarely cried or made a fuss. She could brag about that, but not about his father. Her answer was always the same.

Dad is gone, Gunner, just like grandma and grandpa. He was a dangerous man and lived in dangerous ways, and that eventually cost him his life. You should always keep that in mind, every time you think of living on the edge. Over the edge, lie scary things, and you should always be careful not to fall, was the bedtime story-like answer she told him, without going into too much detail since he was too young to understand the much more complicated reality.

But she was wrong. Gunner was outstandingly smart. At the age of five, he knew things that ordinary people did not, like the way electric appliances worked and how to fix them. Lynn did not like that and repeatedly scolded him. She punished him enough, until, like Pavlov’s dog, her son stopped wanting to mess with them. And then, Gunner was miserable. He stopped talking in class, he started moving slower than molasses on a cold day and always looked displeased. It was around the same time that his mother started losing control over her drinking habit.

The year was 1995 and the brand new Aztar Casino had just opened its doors to the public as the first riverboat casino of Indiana. Lynn managed to get a job as a waitress there, since she was still only thirty years old and looked as pretty as a rare blossom. What came with the job was drinking, a habit she had struggled with in the past, when Gunner’s dad had left. Alcohol can be seductive. That was something Gunner had learned the hard way, every time he laid eyes on his mother and felt sorry for her state, covered in her own puke and trying to move her body into bed after ten hours of serving gamblers and two hours of crying with a bottle of bourbon in her hands.

Not once did Gunner shout at his mother; he felt that would have been uncalled for. He was nearly eight years old but felt sixteen; he had to, because if he did not then their lives would be in utter chaos. He would walk slowly towards her, pick up the empty bottle of bourbon and throw it into the trash can; then he would try to wake her up and move her to the bedroom, unless she was already in a deep state of sleep, where plan b would commence and a warm blanket would cover her up, keeping her warm until the next morning when she would wake up, shower and once again go serve customers in Aztar Casino.

Then came the November that summoned Gunner’s eleventh year of life and a strange thing happened; his teacher at school insisted on having the boy assessed because his near-mute state was starting to become a matter of concern. Some psychologists talked with him and subjected him to various complicated and boring tests with triangles and colors. Then they came up with the answer to a non-existent problem: obsessive-compulsive disorder.

What the hell does that mean? shouted Lynn at the doctors.

It sounded really serious. The experts explained that it was nothing alarming and that most people exhibit symptoms of the disorder to a certain degree. Some keep washing their hands, while others walk only on the left side of the sidewalk, but most everyone with this particular anxiety disorder is characterized by the presence of intrusive thoughts and unhappiness. Or was it the other way around for young Gunner? Did the disorder come first, or was it the sadness of his father’s absence that had led to it? The specialists did not seem to care, nor did Lynn. Some form of psychotherapy was prescribed, but no medication, since it was not that serious at the time. Besides, he was only just a kid.

People with OCD tend to become marvelous people, the doctor kept telling Lynn in order to calm her down, which eventually worked.

She regretted having made him stop tinkering with the electric appliances, but replaced that with a new hobby for him: drawing. He was good at it. The detail of his sketches would have enthralled even the strictest of critics, and he was improving rapidly. He was self-taught; he had never had any guidance from an art teacher or an actual painter. He enjoyed his pencils and was constantly lured by a blank page because he felt in total control. The combination of paper and pencil provided the freedom to create something from scratch, something never before seen by anyone. Gunner did not feel like an artist, he was only a kid, but what he created could be considered a form of art. He drew things, not people nor landscapes; he preferred depicting picture-perfect blueprints of mechanical devices, like TV sets, cars, helicopters, airplanes. Lynn envisaged him becoming an aeronautical engineer – at least she did when she had a clear mind, a state which was starting to diminish.

She was a full-blown alcoholic by then. Gunner was old enough to realize it. He was soon becoming twelve, and his mom was never there. She had severed all connecting links with the real world. Her employers started to have various problems with her coming late, leaving early, drinking while serving, dropping orders, stealing money, trying to hustle the customers. She lost her job and that meant eight more spare hours for drinking, at least until all her savings reached zero. She was an embarrassment to the building and the small community residing there, to her neighborhood, to herself, but above all, to her son. He could no longer talk to her with more than a mumble, and those crazy outbursts she had out of the blue made living with her unbearable. Gunner would be trying to find something to pack for his school lunch while his mom was bellowing or singing at half past seven in the morning, right after a good two-hour cry in the middle of the night. She would sometimes look at herself in the mirror and stay there, silent, just gazing at what she is and what she used to be. Young, she had been considered a whore, and why was that? –