Wolfgang, Luckies and the Gibson Stalker

Wolfgang, Luckies and the Gibson Stalker

The Helter Skelter, the Twister, the Tower of Death. Most folk thought this last one a thrilling name but when the rivets holding the tower together failed it was more accurate than anyone would have imagined. It was the autumn of ‘29 and the depression hadn’t bitten the farming folk of Orange County just yet; they were still up for some fun.

Great Uncle Joe was atop a sixty foot tower that came down in a stiff breeze and eighteen children got mangled. He was the only one they pulled out alive and even with him in a clown suit no-one saw the funny side. When he was recalling the tale to me and the cousins he would delight in telling us just how close he came to a lynching at the hands of all them bawling parents that night. That is until he found breath enough to explain he was just a hired hand and their business was with the owner of the whole show. That’s how Joe found himself suddenly out of the carnival business and with the limp in his left leg.

You know what kids are like, we sat waiting for the full gory climax but Joe drew short of telling us exactly how the infamous carnival boss Jimmy Joplin met his end that night at the hands of that crowd. I always liked to think it involved some half starved lion tasting sweet revenge.

I always loved the way Joe would take us through the thick of it, him bumming around the state of California during the bleakest of times, but always coming up clean. He was at pains to stress he was never a bum as he never rode the box cars, he had his motorbike. He was never a carnie as he used to ride some miles behind the convoy lest folk think he was born into it and not just filling time. And he was never a gambler as he had seen early how cruel the turn of a card could be. He never shook off the notion that at some time he could have been called a drunk.

As a child you never question the manner in which you learn things or how you become familiar with the world. It never seemed strange to me that on my visits to see him and Aunt Agnetha out in their cabin in the pine forests of Norway that I should expect to find myself in Californian desert of the 1930’s.

His breath would smell of tobacco and his words sometimes whistled through the two missing teeth. Great Aunt Angetha was a warm soul too. Much warmer than I remember mum ever being, which is probably what led to the unspoken rumours about her and dad.

Warm though she was I must admit it wasn’t the flight over the snowy pines that I looked forward to most. Nor was it the cosy cabin or the fine country cooking. Or even that soft smell of clay that came off Aunt Agnetha after she had tried to show us how to throw a pot on her wheel.

It was that fleeting hour at Joe’s feet with my four cousins hearing about his old life. The short while in the early evening before he fell over or had to be put to bed. I don’t know what age I was when I latterly learned about the existence of whiskey but I always knew Joe wasn’t put to bed for want of sleeping.

A good decade had passed before my last visit there. In that time dad had quickly passed and gone to join mum but Joe and Agnetha still held out. It was for the first time ever I made the journey alone to that cabin in the forest just outside Friedrichaven for the reunion. After some hours from the airport driving through lanes carved out of the snow and trees Agnetha welcomed me at the door. She did look every one of her eighty three years but with all the faculties and spark of a stubborn Scandinavian woman little ready to slow down any.

It was after greeting all those who could make it and the new spouses of the old familiar faces that I was shocked to see what looked like the shadow of Joe sitting in that high backed chair he had fashioned from the tress outside the cabin. I could see my sadness shared the faces of the cousins when Joe didn’t have the strength to lift his own cup to drink.

It must have been out of some sense of duty that he managed one last yarn for us all gathered there. He broke the mould and finally imparted how he had found and lost his beloved motorbike and why he had left that depressed and crumbling American frontier for a life in Norway.

The tale started with his finding of the much detailed Gibson Stalker six piston motorbike. It turned out that it was in Shamrock, Texas that the wind had blown him to the scene of a road accident. Joe had ambled up the highway toward some smoke to find an overturned poultry truck with both passengers dead in the cab. It was some morbid serendipity that had led him arrive so soon after the fact that laid on its side in the scrub by the road was the bike with its engine ticking over and owner laid out next to it.

It was 233 miles from Roswell, 285 miles from Santa Fe and 78 miles from the state line that Joe had found himself. A man of no fixed abode, in the middle of a desert gripped in the jaws of the Great Depression and the proud new owner of a Gibson Stalker six piston, the fastest production bike that money could buy.

Agnetha could see Joe weakening from the recollections and tried to draw a close on our little session. She threw a chunkily knit blanket round Joe’s shoulders which he shrugged of with the toothless smile of a defiant little boy. It was clear all who where gathered were a little disappointed and also that Joe would give her little peace if he was not allowed his denouement. Agnetha shuffled back to the kitchen neither condoning nor condemning the old man in his chair.

On the ride back from Texas to California Joe had taken on a young German lad called Wolfgang. He had found him in a drifters camp nestled away from the dusty wind behind a billboard by the road side. A hundred or so men had bedded down ready to rot for lack of work, food or charity but Joe had decided the boy had some more living to do and offered him pillion until the next opportunity to work.

Two hundred miles later they came on a beef farm that needed some casuals. Wolfgang talked our great Uncle into taking a post with him in the abattoir as it paid better and he wanted to return Joes favour by paying for the repairs that the Gibson was screaming out for. Two days in the stinking hangar that turned cows into beef was all it took to make Joe lose his senses.

It was just for a second that Joe broke the thread and leaned in to tell us all that he wasn’t some animal loving hippy like our great aunt, and that when people asked him how he liked his steak he used to say ‘Bloody as Hell’ but it was the knowing that got him. He swore the animals sensed their impending doom and would look to him to make some apology. It was on the third night on that killing line that Joe left the pen gate open and let a hundred head walk out into the desert night. He had laid down his tools and removed his apron before fleeing on his bike for fear of ending up on a meat hook himself.

Just at that point Joe choked on a word and sat silent thinking about what they would have done to Wolfgang on finding five thousand dollars worth of beef gone the next day. He was rattled by a recollection he had probably not allowed himself for a great many years.

When he reached the coast the journey behind him was so marred that he sold the bike and with the money paid for passage on a supply ship returning to Europe. To Norway to be exact and to a new life with our aunt Agnetha.

It was with the guilt of running out on a friend that we left him in that chair as we ate and then gathered our things to journey the many miles home. After some small amount of fuss and kisses that others has caught their rides and set off for the countries they had travelled from. I kissed aunt Agnetha for what I thought would be the last time and took my coat from the pegs. As I opened the cabin door Joe appeared behind me. He looked steely eyed and left a long pause just balancing there on his good leg. ‘Do you have any cigarettes on you boy’ he whispered. ‘sorry uncle’ I lied ‘not this time’. ‘Well, be sure to bring a pack of Luckies with you next time’. ‘I will’ I said as I walked out to my hire car. I almost lost my footing on some black ice out there in the drive, but caught myself. I turned to Joe and promised I would be back as quickly as I could, but with money being tight not as quickly as I would like.

Joe laughed and as he closed the door he shouted back ‘I once saw a man boil and eat his own leather belt to keep from starving! – you’ll survive’.