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The Beattie files:
You meet the nicest people on a Harley
Young
Beattie
continues on life’s great adventure, meeting a bro in
a brothel, and learning about
use-by dates on bullets…
(Ed's note: These are excerpts from young Beattie's book
on some of the more colourful incidents in an
action-packed life. See the end of the piece for more
info.)
(by Chris Beattie, March 2024)
“Mate,
if it hadn’t
been for old ammunition, the bitch would have killed
me for sure!”
This
was one of
several memorable encounters we had during a
two-wheeled odyssey a few years
back.
We
were on a west
coast swing that began in LA and took in Las Vegas,
before heading north
through Death Valley, west into Yosemite National Park
and then south back to
LA via San Francisco and the legendary Pacific Coast
Highway.
Harley-Davidson
had
kindly offered me and my partner Patricia and I a new
Tour Glide, which was the
ideal companion for the trip we had planned. It was
the start of summer, so
temperatures were already starting to climb as we
headed east for the five-hour
run across the desert to Vegas.
I’ve
found that
riding a motorcycle in unfamiliar country generally
results in meeting people
and finding yourself in situations out of the
ordinary. And this trip would
prove no exception.
Cottontails
brothel
in southern Nevada hadn’t been on our itinerary when
Patricia and I planned the
journey. But one thing it did have going for it was
cold beer in the middle of
a scorching 45-degree day. As heat haze blurred the
surrounding desert, we were
due for a midday lunch stop and a quick call back to
the family in Australia.
Trouble was, we were in the middle of a parched – and
deserted – desert. To our
west lay daunting Death Valley; to our east the giant
Nellis Air Force Base
Gunnery and Bombing Range. Not the most hospitable of
environments.
So
what
looked to be a small roadhouse up ahead raised our
spirits. As we slowed
our big black tourer and pulled into the parking lot,
empty other than for
another luggage-laden Harley already baking in the
sun, the Budweiser neon sign
in the window sealed the deal.
But
as I went to
walk through the door, Patricia gave me a nudge.
“Oi,
I’m not going
in there,” she said. “It’s a brothel!
I’m not going to phone the kids from a brothel!”
In
my haste to
escape the midday heat and seek comfort in a cold
Budweiser I’d completely
missed the five-metre-tall sign in the driveway.
“Cottontails
Brothel
– All Welcome!” it beamed seductively.
I
looked at the
sign and turned to Patricia.
“You
want a cold
drink now, or would you rather go thirsty for the next
50 miles?”
She
shrugged, and a
moment later we were both sitting at the bar, dark
subdued ’80s disco-style
mood lighting replacing the harsh desert sun.
“Howdy
brother,”
said the ageing tattooed biker on the barstool,
reaching out to offer a firm
handshake. It turned out Ziggy, who was the only other
customer in the bar, was
from Texas. He’d just come back from visiting his
brother, who was currently
the guest of the Federal Government in San Quentin
prison, near San Francisco.
As we came to discover, Ziggy and his brother were
both highly placed members
in a particularly notorious one percenter US bike
club.
“I
only get one
week a year to catch up with him,” he explained. Today
was a “rest and
recreation day”, he said, and Cottontails seemed like
as good a place as any to
‘unwind’.
Ziggy
had been
engrossed in a conversation with Shelley, the barmaid,
when we entered. As
Ziggy later confided, he was hoping to get the “daily
special” rate down to a
more affordable $40. I wished him luck.
Meantime,
realising
she had female company, Shelley tried to make Patricia
feel as comfortable as
it’s possible for an Australian woman tourist to feel
in a Nevada brothel.
“What
can I get ya,
honey?” she offered cheerfully.
A
chilled
chardonnay helped melt the ice and before too long
Shelley was entertaining an
enthralled Patricia with bawdy and bizarre tales of
daily life in a Nevada
bordello.
After
a refreshing
drink and some enlightening conversation, we left
Ziggy and Shelley to their
negotiations, mounting up for some more miles under
the unrelenting Nevada sun.
We
dismissed our
Cottontail interlude as just another weird encounter
on a roadtrip that had
more than its fair share of the unexpected and
unusual.
Like
a day earlier
in Las Vegas, when Patricia was propositioned by a
Harley-riding Elvis, who
looked like he’d seen better days.
“Hey
baby, wanna
come cruisin’ with the King?” drawled the elusive
superstar as he sat sprawled
on his bike in the front of the 7-11. A great opening
line, but while the oil-
and food-stained white sequined outfit and impressive
paunch seemed authentic enough,
the unconvincing hairpiece gave the game away.
Then
there was the
World Famous Peggy Sue’s Diner near Baker on the way
to Vegas, a delightful
oasis in the middle of nowhere that had us wondering
if we’d just ridden
through a time-warp and been transported back to the
1950s.
Waitresses
dressed
in bobby socks and knee-length dresses danced between
the tables, while the
whole place hummed to tunes from the likes of Buddy
Holly and the Big Bopper.
Even
Batman put in
an appearance later in our trip as we toured down the
California coast from San
Francisco. Coming into the historic hamlet of
Monterey, I did a double-take as
I noticed the Batmobile – or a very authentic looking
replica – pull up in the
lane next to us.
“Nice
bike dude!”
commented the costumed crusader, who gave us a gloved
thumbs-up as he
presumably went off in search of local evildoers. It
turned out our arrival
coincided with a local car show.
The
day before we’d
met bullet-proof expat Kiwi Mike. We pulled in to his
small, rustic general
store on our way into San Francisco from Yosemite
National Park, drawn by the
NZ flag flying on a pole out the front. Mike had been
living in the country
outpost for about 15 years and was a long-time Harley
rider.
The
jovial and
rotund 55-year-old took an instant fancy to Patricia,
who he said reminded him
a little of his former wife.
“I
just hope, for
your sake Chris that she’s not as mean and ornery,” he
said, going on to
explain that a minor dispute between the pair had
ended with Mike in intensive
care fighting for his life.
“The
bitch pulled
out a gun from behind the bar and shot me!” he said.
“Here, look, this is where
it went in,” he continued, lifting a sweat-stained
singlet to reveal an ugly
crimson scar the size of an orange just above his
navel and another to its side.
As
Patricia tried
to look away, he explained that out-of-date ammunition
was the only thing that
saved him.
“It
didn’t have
enough power to go right through me. At least I ended
up with the bar and
store,” he said. “Bitch went away for five years. She
can rot in hell as far as
I’m concerned.”
As
we left, I made
a mental note to check the date on the ammunition box
if I ever married a
female American gun nut …
The excerpt is from Beattie's wild and woolly book. So far as we know it's had one brief print run and he's threatening to do another. Watch this space.
In the meantime he can be
contacted by email.
More at The
Beattie Files home page
Travels with Guido columns here
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