Single Unarmed Dangerous Middle Aged Male

 

Like Kerouac he was determined to write spontaneous prose and fuck the consequences and fuck the swearing. If you didn't swear there was something wrong with you. You were part and parcel of the Seventh Day Repressionists, those in black coats that he had been trying to get away from all his life. The country, Wales, the mental health condition, schizophrenia, not for Harley but for the country. He was 21 and he had decided and written down in his notebook that Wales, the country, was schizophrenic. It had a fault line. It was divided by language and would never be united so like his long lost Dad, the biker, he had to leave. He had to go on the road. He had realized long before his friends that if he stayed that he would be suffocated. He knew that like his old man he would keep coming back to top up his oil. Was it the magnetism in the mountains? Was it the radium or plutonium hidden underground? The nuclear waste that the locals had been told was being taken away by Arriva train from Wylfa B and dumped over the border. Was it hell?

He had done his reading. He wasn't like all the others, into singing, dancing and the arts. He scribbled a bit of poetry now and again but Harley was tactile, he wanted to work with his hands. 'Apprenticeships' screamed the signs but Harley having been taught the ways of old Labour by his father, a Bethesda born, union man, before becoming a biker, that apprenticeship meant indentured servitude and prison. A prison of the mind. So as he crossed the porous border of Offa's Dyke, the engine fair thrumming to his ears he knew that he would not return. Farewell to all this! Adieu my schizophrenic lovely!

29 years later, Harley was sat drinking out of a can, his paunch pressed firm up against his biker belly. He was still a biker of sorts, 21 speed, 25 year old Raleigh with Shimano gear structure. He was in the front room of a two up, two down, terraced house in Grangetown, Cardiff. The Capital City of Wales. He had fled North Wales at 21 and now was back at the other end of the country but he was back at where it was at. The action capital of Europe except on a Sunday which was still rather a dour and dry affair, hence the cans. The motorbike had long gone, it had been stolen from outside a Biker's cafe in Birstall. He had got to Cromer in Norfolk on it. Not quite Route 66 but he was still young. After a few months potching about as a handyman on a caravan park he too got the pull that his old man had had. The mountains were calling, he only got as far as Stoke on Trent before the bike went AWOL so he had to walk back to Beddgelert and by that stage he was ready to emulate the famous dog and lay down and die but fate or was it the famous myths and legends played a part in where Harley found himself now. A Hip Hop rapping ensemble had got lost on their way back from a gig at Bangor University and even though Harley looked and to all intents and purposes was a greaser, Flat Pac and his posse needed a roadie and the rest as they say is history or what will actually unfold in the following spontaneous prose. Very much like the author, Harley had not formulated a plan or storyline. He hoped that his life would just unfurl like an anarchist's banner on a hot July day but the old adage is " If you fail to make your own plans, then you will end up in someone else's" and Flat Pac and his No 2 Biggy Smells from Splott Cardiff, knew that. They knew a naive Gog when they saw one, plenty of them had moved down in the early 1970's to the teacher training colleges and to work for the small media outlets like HTV and the BBC. It was their offspring now who were running the joint, they had been groomed at Glantaf and they had their contacts. These were earning good money on the radio and Flat Pac and Biggy Smells wanted to get on the Radio. They had heard of the greats like Edward H Dafis and they wanted groupies that looked like the ones they had. They wanted to get on RadioCymru and Harley was going to help them. They were listening to the groovy funky hipsters like Lisa Stephens and Huw Gwilym presenting on the way down the A470. By the time they stopped for a piss in Rhayader some Gog geezer called Shar-man was singing reggae music about white rastafarians. This was dope to the ears of Flat Pac who had decided after a storming night in Bangor that he was never going back to driving a fork-lift at Ikea. So that day Flat Pac and Biggy Smells decided to adopt Harley as a kind of modern day slave. They would turn the books round. They would be the slave masters and he would be their naive, white gog, slave. They would keep him in a cellar in their house on the Splott Road and would allow him out once a week for a stroll around the park. So this is a spontaneous tale of how a dream can die if you have your motorbike stolen or fall into the wrong company. Harley did eventually escape from the cellar on the Splott Road but only got as far as Grangetown because by this stage he had become institutionalized and co-dependent. As he took another slug out of the can and allowed the shopping channel to flicker its sick he comforted himself with the thought that he was a single, unarmed, middle aged but on occasion still dangerous male.