Peyote Dreams
By
Art Bone
“Poor Mexico; so far from God, so close to the United States.” Porfirio Diaz
I miss Daytona.
The virus has everything locked down and the MotoClasico group is all old guys; getting this plague would be the end of us. It’s been over three months since I’ve been on a bike but I’ve been rummaging through my moto memories for fonder remembrances.
Daytona Bike Week was the first big motorcycle rally I attended. I moved to Atlanta and started working in a motorcycle shop in 1972. Guys started coming in getting ready for Bike Week in January. I don’t mean one or two; I’m talkin’ fifteen or twenty guys wanted their bikes perfect before they made the pilgrimage to the shrine of Motorcycling. Of course, I had heard of Bike Week, but to me, Daytona was the Daytona 500 and Speed Weeks.
A year later I started my own shop and after acquiring a Norton I hired a young guy who owned a Norton and lived nearby, thinking he might know more about this piece of British Motorcycling History than I did, which was zero.
Charlie Brookman turned out to know quite a bit about Nortons but also, he had been to Daytona the year before. He was the guy I had been looking for. The next year, Charlie and I rode our Nortons and my wife Ann and Charlie’s girlfriend Sandy drove our little Honda Civic down to Daytona after we closed the shop on Thursday night. We rode through the night to check into our hotel rooms Friday morning.
Daytona was a revelation to me. I had never been in a motorcycle traffic jam before. I had never seen that many bikes in one place at one time. I also didn’t understand that one of the most important parts of a motorcycle rally was the food. Friday night Charlie informed us we were eating at a big seafood restaurant down south on the beach. When we arrived we found about ten other friends from Atlanta he had invited. We soon had a big table and three or four waiters hustling around bringing drinks and food. It was great.
Same thing, next night.
Same thing, Sunday night, only more riders.
Monday morning as we loaded up for the five hundred mile trek home, I was already planning my next year’s eight day Bike Week trip. No more weekends for me. For the next thirty plus years, on the first week in March, I joined that 1500 mile long motorcycle parade that started in Sault Ste. Marie, Michigan and followed I-75 south, to end up on the beach.
In those days the Daytona 200 was a race every racer wanted to win. All the best guys came from Europe. Honda, Yamaha, Triumph and BSA sent factory teams; it was a BIG deal. It was the start of the era of two-stroke dominance by the Japanese factories and the start of the era of American rider’s dominance on the world stage. Kenny Roberts won the 200 in 1978, lapping the entire field, then went on to the Formula 1 circuit in Europe and won the 500CC championship. That opened the floodgates for US riders and soon all the top riders were American.
There was something about wrestling a big, heavy four-stroke motorcycle around on a dirt surface that made these guys especially adapt at racing the new, light two-strokes on pavement.
For the next thirty something years I witnessed motorcycle history, as the era of US MotoGP riders waxed and waned. In the meantime, Harley Davidson became the best selling motorcycle in the US when every dentist and lawyer discovered his inner outlaw and bought a Hog and a couple thousand dollars worth of leather and headed for Daytona Bike Week.
At the same time, Daytona discovered that guys riding thirty thousand dollar motorcycles while wearing a couple thousand dollars worth of leather, had money to spend. Suddenly, instead of being greeted by sullen cops with billy clubs and ticket books, bikers were greeted with “Bikers Welcome to Daytona Beach” signs up and down A1A. Bikers, unlike the auto racing fans who came in motor homes and bought their food and booze at home, usually either rode their bikes down or towed them behind pickups. They stayed mostly in hotels and ate out most meals and they drank in bars.
Money changes everything.
One thing I’ll always be grateful to Daytona for is oysters. I learned to appreciate these marvelous mollusks there. A couple of friends and I were riding down the beach road past the North Turn Bar, a modest establishment near where the north turn of the old Daytona beach and road course used to be. I looked over and saw Beno Rodi’s truck in the parking lot so we decided to stop and speak. We were having a friendly conversation when Beno’s food order started arriving. The first thing to arrive was a platter of ice with a dozen raw oysters, with a side of cocktail sauce and horseradish.
I had been introduced to raw oysters several years earlier when a friend bought a croker sack full off a boat in Pensacola. We took them home and he opened a couple, using a rusty screwdriver, dashed a little Tabasco sauce on, offered me one. I gagged it down and, truth be told, didn’t see the attraction. I kept thinking about the old question of “how hungry was the first guy who ate an oyster.”
But, as with most things in life, presentation is everything, and looking at Beno’s platter, I was ready to give oysters a second chance and I’m so glad I did. They were delicious. With the proper mix of cocktail sauce and horseradish they were just this side of “taking your head off” hot. There’s something about eating oysters in an old, beach-side bar and looking out on the ocean.
They were like French-kissing the sea.
Beno appreciated my enthusiasm and said, “If you like these, you should come to the Silver Bucket tomorrow night after the races.”
That started a several year pilgrimage. The Silver Bucket was a bar and oyster joint in an old hotel scheduled for demolition in an area being “Revitalized.” “Revitalized” means everything that has any character or interest will be torn down to make way for some corporate atrocity. The hotel, a replica of the Hotel California, (You can check out but you can never leave,) containing the bar had been closed for years. Usually, the toilet in the men’s room was overflowing and running down the stairs in front and out, onto the street.
The Silver Bucket had been there a long time. The bar was one piece of concrete about fifteen feet long and extending down to bedrock, as far as I could ascertain. It was originally level but years of abrasive oyster shells being dragged over it had made gentle curves in front of each station. There was a trench on the back to catch the shells.
Ordering was simple: just tell the shucker what you wanted to drink. He would provide you with your drink, a sleeve of Saltine crackers, and containers of cocktail sauce and horseradish. Then, he would grab a bucket (the infamous “Silver Bucket”) and fill it with oysters, fresh from wherever they got oysters that day. Next he would open the big autoclave behind the bar and put the bucket inside. This device had eight turnbuckles to hold the door closed. When the door was clamped down the shucker turned an industrial size gate valve, letting steam into the autoclave. After a few minutes of this he opened the door, releasing a cloud of steam, and plopped your bucket in front of your station, shucking several and moving on to the next person down the bar. When you finished the first few, the shucker came back and raked the shells into the trough behind the bar and shucked a few more.
One night we were in there, waiting for our turn at the bar, and got to watching two young guys at the little outside bar. They were drinking shots of tequila in the collegiate style, slamming the shots down, followed by salt and lime on their wrists. It looked like a lot of fun.
Thirty minutes later I was at the bar and anticipating my first oyster, when I became aware of a person just off my right elbow. One of the happy contestants in the earlier drinking contest was standing beside me in distress.
“Crackers,” he managed to say, before he grabbed my sleeve of Saltines and shoved several in his mouth, spraying cracker crumbs around. I slid off my stool and got as far away from him as I could, expecting him to spew at any moment. He helped himself to more of my crackers, then, sensing disaster I suppose, he bolted for the door, never to be seen again.
Another Daytona tradition was the Cabbage Patch. It was and is Sopotnick’s Cabbage Patch bar at a crossroads in the countryside outside of Daytona. It was called the Cabbage Patch because they had a patch of land where they grew cabbages and sold them in the bar.
You may well ask, “Why would bikers be interested in a little beer bar that sold cabbages, out in the middle of nowhere?”
As with many things, it was location, location, location. The Patch was located at a crossroads and there was nothing, no driveways, crossroads, or farm roads for at least a mile in any direction. This made it perfect for folks who wished to indulge in, as they say in legal parlance, “Illegal Speed Contests.”
The cops, always undermanned during Bike Week, would park one car down one road and the racers had three other roads to choose from for their clandestine activities.
In the early seventies when I started going to Bike Week, before cell phones with GPS, it was a mythic location. Someone would say, “I was out at the Cabbage Patch and saw a supercharged, fuel burning Kawasaki drag bike race a double-engined Honda and I would always ask, “Where is the Cabbage Patch?”
The answer was always, “Oh, it’s way out in the country. I don’t know how to tell you to get there.”
When I finally followed someone out there and found this fabled place I was enchanted, as you are with places you’ve only dreamed about but never seen. The first few years there was only the bar and a couple of over-worked bartenders but as time went by and MONEY started to flow into Daytona, the Cabbage Patch started to change. First there were booths outside selling burgers and beer, the next year there was dirt drag strip where the Harleys ruled supreme until Eddie Snipes put a knobby on the back of his 850 Norton and kicked some Harley ass.
They hated that!
The year after that was the infamous “Cole Slaw Wrestling.” Don’t know where this genius idea came from - don’t want to know - but imagine a pit filled with chopped up cabbage and oil and two young, nubile women wearing bikinis and you get the general idea.
Yeah, damn this virus. At most of our ages a person who feels healthy is a person who’s neglecting his health, so I’m not going to worry about it too much. What we’re doing right now is the new normal. Riding, racing, food, drink and sharing it all with friends; all the things that make life worth living; we’ll get it figured out in a year or so. Many of us will be at Lumby next year and, by then, 2020 and this pandemic will seem like just another panel in life’s rich tapestry.