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.
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