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Winding from Chicago

First things first. If I was going to travel the length of Route 66, I needed the right kind of transportation. A sleek saloon car would have been too dull; a 4×4 too plush. In many people’s eyes Route 66 requires either a convertible or a fat Harley-Davidson. But neither seemed right for me.

I did my time on bikes in my youth, but I felt that like most other things of joy, the motorbike had become lifestyled and corporatised, a packaged form of rebellion of which I wanted no part. So, with the Chicago skyline looming in the distance, in a dirty backstreet squeezed between semi-derelict buildings and empty spaces strewn with boulders and rubbish, I met my steed. One hundred horsepower of mean, throbbing heavenliness: a Boom Lowrider LR8 Muscle. Officially, it was a trike, but for some reason I’d never been able to say that word. I’d always said ‘bike’. Whatever I called it, though, it was a thing of absolute beauty.

Water-cooled and fuel-injected, it had a 1.6-litre, four-cylinder Ford Zetec engine and it rode like a dream. Most of it was fairly standard, but I’d removed the leg guards and some tan-coloured panels along the side of the black seats, added a pair of extra headlights and adjustable suspension, and replaced some parts with chrome or polished stainless-steel equivalents. It looked the business.

Now the thing about trikes – especially a modern, low-slung one like the LR8 – is that my arse is only about eighteen inches off the tarmac. I reckon it’s partly for this reason that they have such a profound effect on people in their nice, safe, grey cars. I’d watch them as they drew alongside me, gawping, mouthing, ‘Shit, look at that!’ and wishing they were me. It happened countless times every day. Sometimes they lowered their side windows and leant out. Then the questions start.

‘Oh, man, where did you get that thing?’

‘What kind of engine does it have?’

‘Jeez-sus! What’s that thing you’re riding?’

I just make shit up. When they ask, ‘How many cylinders?’, I say, ‘Eight,’ then smile when they shout, ‘Wow! No way, man!’ (It only has four.) But the trike is so outlandish to most people that I could make almost anyone believe almost anything. Compared with anything else on the road, it looks like a three-wheel Batmobile. It’s a joy, it’s funky and it’s designed for showing off. A total poser’s machine. Some people mightn’t like that, but I don’t give a shit what they say, because I love it.

My trike was like a cross between a hot-rod car and a chopper bike, but in fact it had all the disadvantages of a motorbike and none of the advantages of a car. I couldn’t squit through a static line of traffic like a motorcycle – I was stuck in the queue with the cars. But while I was sitting there, waiting, I couldn’t listen to Radio 4. There was no heater, so I’d freeze my bum off; and if it rained, my crotch would get soaking wet. But that was also the great delight of a trike – I’d be at one with nature, out in the fresh air, smelling and feeling and hearing my surroundings, immersed in the landscape. A motorbike offered the same sensation, but on a trike I could enjoy all that and lean back and relax. Maybe that’s why bikers hate them so much, particularly those Harley-riding weekend bikers (which, incidentally, is another reason why trikes appeal to me).

One final thing I had to make clear from the very beginning of the trip was that a bike was like a horse. It’s my bike. The production company might have bought it at enormous expense, and the film crew might be filming me on it, but it wasn’t our bike. And it certainly wasn’t their bike. It was my fucking bike. So, if anyone fancied sitting on it, they had to ask me fucking nice. And if they dared to swing their leg over my bike without asking permission, they would get a very old-fashioned look from me. At one point in the trip one of the girls in the crew climbed aboard to turn off the lights and my immediate thought was: Fuck! She never asked me!

But you should see the looks I got from people when I parked it. They