Punk Rocker

Highway One

A Fictional Billy Idol Tale

Mark Barry

© 2016

Mark Barry is an English writer and music fan who has written several novels, including the award-winning The Night Porter. The short stories, King Rocker and One Night In Richmond Park, are featured in the L.A. Punk Rocker anthology. Mark currently resides in Nottingham, England.

The Pacific Ocean is unimaginably vast and today, it acts as a mirror to the sky – a daunting expanse of unsullied aquamarine-tinted silvered glass.

When Billy was at school all those years ago, a balding, stinky-jacketed geography teacher whose name he forgot the minute he left the school gates for good, informed them that the Pacific constituted over half the surface area of the globe. Looking at it now, from a clifftop just north of Bodega Bay on a late summer’s day, he can see exactly what he meant.

It is endless.

It’s more than half the world, he thinks. Way more than half.

Nothing obscured Billy’s view. No piers or ramshackles, no wrecks, canoes, schooners, liners or pleasure boats. No blotches of black seaweed. Hard to believe how ancient mariners would dare to set sail with this enormous expanse of sapphire and waves before them. In those days where the horizon was the feared tipping point, dragons and krakens sank the wary, the stray and the lost and those that survived then fell off the precipice into the void. Those sailors had guts: Drake was the first European to set foot on this coast, and he was the bravest – and most insane – of them all, Billy considers, as a light breeze blows a stray leaf past his buckled boot.

A half-starved gull squawks. He’s been standing there for ten minutes sipping Evian from his supplies bag. Ready, he stretches his legs and throws his arms wide to loosen the pecs and make supple the elbows and shoulders.

Behind him, the Harley. It calls him now.

Long old way to go, matey, he sighs, and turns away from the ocean, a gesture, which strikes him as simultaneously impolite and essential.

It’s a hot, hot day on the coast of California. In his mind’s ear, he hears Lou Reed. His mental radio has been tuned into him all day. At that precise point in time, at that nexus in existence, Billy reflects that he wouldn’t be anywhere else. Running his fingers through his still-platinum spikes, he puts on his full-face helmet with a ghostly black visor that snaps into place perfectly, connecting with a satisfying click of totality. The screen obscures his face. He is temporarily depersonalised by it, freed. He could be anyone.

Freedom.

Just him, the iconic punk rock star Billy Idol, his beloved Harley, all chrome and tube with Ghost Rider wheels ready to blaze.

And Highway One, all 630 miles of it.

He is biking as far north as he can go. Billy loves his motorcycle and the road, this metaphysical, divine combination. He’s on the third day of an odyssey, with, like Chuck Berry, no particular place to go. In another week, the Idol colossus goes on tour and this sense of peace and freedom will be replaced by a frenzy of chaos and crashing power chords. It’s a massive nationwide tour. A sell-out. Not a ticket to be had on the web. Record multiples on eBay and the parasite portals: Meet and Greet packages in Vegas changing hands for the price of a family motor. They’re coming over from Britain and Australia in their hundreds, like Cabot and Drake and Raleigh and Frobisher; something that fills him with pride whenever he ponders on it.

His legions.

Billy King Rocker Idol at sixty.

Like the Shooting Star, he has been doing this for forty years plus – if you count the days he followed the Pistols round the Shires of England in the early days of the punk revolution. He knows that he will have to store away the Harley (and the Triumph at home). His soul empties whenever the reality of being without his bike enters his head. He wishes he could ride to each gig, but the maw of America would swallow him whole. He knows it.

As he ambles back to the bike, he notices someone near the Harley. The shape is sitting on the wall facing the road. Closer, he sees the shape is a girl. Long dark hair, a black leather biker jacket (a bit like his). A small light blue rucksack hanging from her shoulder. She’s looking north as if waiting for someone to arrive. Billy didn’t notice her when he pulled into to the picnic area. He imagines she must have been dropped off by a car or a truck, but why here? This place is miles away from the next town. He gets on his bike, embraces the wraithlike, trembling rumble between his thighs, like a chrome-and-ebon racehorse in the stalls, and creeps towards her. Parallel, he lifts up his visor.

Okay, love? Billy asks.

I need a ride, she replies, matter of fact.

Billy is inclined to say no, but he is first and foremost an Englishman and this woman; early twenties, with her First Nation colouring and impossibly deep brown eyes, all encased in a faceful of attitude, is in need of assistance. In the end, there is nothing he can do. It’s in the programming.

That’s cool. Where are you going?

She answers a question with a question.

Are you English?

Yeh. Live here though. LA. Have done for years.

Awesome, she responds enigmatically. Heading up to Oregon, but I’ll take whatever miles you have to offer.

How does Crescent City sound? Seeing friends up there tomorrow. It’s about three hundred miles. Six or seven hours if we take time to enjoy the view, yeh. Happy with that?

Totally, she says. Appreciate it.

I’ve got a spare helmet. Hang on. Can you ride?

Been riding horses since I was a kid. Bikes are no problem, she says, the merest hint of a smile on her face (but only a hint).

Climb aboard, love, Billy says.

English, she whispers to herself. Looks at the helmet she has been given with unfathomable inscrutability.

William, he offers, along with his hand. If she recognises him, she says nothing. He’s not going to enlighten her. Let’s see what she does, he thinks, which is a conceit, but an altogether understandable one.

Francesca. Call me Fran, she says, climbing aboard.

Though his helmet muffles the senses, he can smell cigarettes, perfume, cinnamon, wood smoke and something he can’t place, something unusual. He has an immediate flashback to London, in the nineties. Someone he met at a gig, or maybe in LA, someone he met in rehab – his memory is not what it was. He waits for her to put on her helmet. She tucks into him, but holds the pillion bar on the back, so her connection to the bike is made with her jeans clamping his hips in that strange pseudo-intimacy only bikers can truly appreciate.

Rock n’ roll, Billy thinks and sweeps majestically on to the road to Crescent City.

Highway One.

Billy loves biking here. Saturday, Sundays especially, and when he can, long trips like this one, staying in cheap motels, filling up in Mom and Pop diners. Relaxation – not of the body, but of the mind and the spirit. It isn’t desert (a place you can genuinely find yourself), but at the right time, and staying out of the city itself, he finds the peace and solitude he needs to rewind the batteries. He loves the sea, and the cliffsides and the greenery and the trees and the cloudless, rolling sky. They started building this, he knows, in 1922, and they kept on building it and building it bit-by-bit until it was said that the highway would never stop until it reached the stars. They built it with picks and shovels and bloody hands and the road builders died in their hundreds in a world where life was cheap. Where mountains stood in the way of the roadbuilders they blasted their way through with TNT and gelignite and old gunpowder salvaged from unused grenades from WW1. They built bridges like the Bixby Bridge in Big Sur to span canyons and ravines with no conceivable nadir except the Hell at the climax of their existence.

Billy loves this history, even if a tiny part of him reflects that his ticket to ride was paid for by the blood, sweat and tears of desperate men. Later, the roadbuilders mechanised (which eradicated the need to use prisoners on twenty cents a day), and that speeded the process and saved lives; the diggers and the cranes, the giant mixers and the black top spreaders, the pneumatic drills and the machine stampers.

They reached Canada faster – but not by much.

Billy and Francesca ride at a steady sixty, the blacktop road is smooth and all around is a sea of emerald grass (though, Billy knows that nothing can ever be as green as the grass back home). Fran says nothing. It is almost as if she isn’t there and the hitching sequence at the picnic site was just a dream, a fevered, trippy hallucination. Billy senses she is looking around her, as he is. Curious and open. Billy likes that in a woman. He is partial to intelligent, educated women and something about Fran suggests she is exactly that, adding a hint of the wild. Her nebulous, feminine presence and the tender pressure of her jeaned thighs either side of his hips is the only reminder that he is not alone. They travel together in silence, save for fragments of the sounds of Highway One. The purr of his engine, with potential energy in harness, capable of an explosion at any time, like a lion in the veldt ready to strike. The sound of passing cars, their inhabitants trapped inside mobile metal jails. Roosting birds chirping and calling in the leafy late summer trees, gulls flying inland (a storm in the deep?), and, on one memorable occasion, a giant crimson truck playing Motorhead as Billy overtook the driver’s blue check-denimed arm waving him