Fungus Mcgoo, the Plastic Bug Caper And Why Maybe I Retired Too Soon.
Fungus McGoo, The Plastic Bug Caper and Why Maybe I Retired Too Soon.
Capias Dodge
Dirt track racing never appealed to me much, as I like plenty of room when things go wrong. Sure, road racing speeds are higher but you usually get space to go off course without—as happened to Bob McDonald when he went down at Concord—getting the most astonishingly clear tire tread marks across your butt and up your back.
Or there was the case of Fairingnose Hamby. The name? You'd probably have to see him to believe it, but in profile he was a perfect replica of a motorcycle, specifically a Norton Manx with early dolphin-style fairing.
Anyway, he would have been a great road racer but he preferred dirt, short track mostly but half miles or TT when his big bike was running good.
This was in the Sixties so I’ve forgotten the details but nearly as I remember it was at Santé Fe Raceway, near Chicago. He was crossing it up at the end of the backstretch when he hit a pothole. It’s not true he was stuck so tightly to the Castrol sign that he had to be peeled off it like a banana skin, but at 70-per you do hit an immovable object a right smart lick. Actually he did a one cushion bank across the course and durn near got run over by Tommy Morris and Buggsy Mann who were in a hurry to make the corner.
Well, they brought him home in traction and put him in the hospital for further observation and to see if it was necessary to put any silver plates into his bone structure. Of course he got bored there in the ward with all those strangers, none of whom had ever ridden a motorcycle, let alone had any interest about what sort of gearing to run on what track.
I had stayed home to manage the shop while he was making his bid for glory, but even after they hauled him back to the hometown hospital I couldn’t visit right off.
It began with a mechanic I'll call Fungus McGoo, although that isn’t his real name. Fungus had Bad Luck. We used to claim his greatest distinction was in becoming the National Tar and Feather Champion of 1961.
Seems he was tuning a Zundapp. Now, as anybody who’s ever tuned an old two-stroke knows, if you retard the timing enough, the engine runs backwards. That’s what happened this time. The customer came in and Fungus cranked it up on the center stand, ran through the gears and revved it up and down the scale and it sounded fine. So the customer took it outside, cranked it up, shifted into first, grabbed a real handful and dropped the clutch. The bike took off instantly at about 6000 rpm but it was running backward. It flipped the customer over the handlebars and stood him on his nose. Then the bike ran across the street in front of a police car, climbed the curb and went between two elderly ladies who were carrying their grocery bags home.
One of ’em had a dozen eggs, the other had a case of Pepsi and it made a mess. But that wasn't the worst of it. The bike ricocheted off the front of Superior Printing and cracked the display window then went back across the street and just missed Mr. Ambrose of Ambrose Insulation Co., who was getting out of his car in the parking lot. Then it wobbled somewhat and crossed the street again, causing a city bus to slap on its brakes and hurl all the straphangers onto their faces. It ended gloriously when it ran into a pile of paint pots that the Turner Sign Co. help were unloading from their van. Clay Turner cursed every time he saw me for the next week and we like to have never got all the wet paint off my customer’s bike. The insurance company cancelled my business liability policy, too, so you can see I was busy for a few days.
When I finally got around to visiting Hamby in the hospital I sort of wanted to take him something to cheer both of us up. First I got an 8 x 10 enlargement from the last season at Daytona with me leading Fungus out of the last turn into the infield. Fungus was riding his customized mongrel that he called a “Yamazuki 650” with his number 101 Vi and the Green Hornet painted on the fairing. I was on my hotted up Triumph, “Old 97, The Wreck of the Southern.” Just for kicks we had dubbed in Fumio Ito’s Works Yamaha with Floyd Clymer on it, riding backward, taking the lead. I was proud of that picture because I obviously wasn’t running last and we didn’t have to tell anyone that Fungus was. But I vyanted to take Fairingnose something else.
In the drug store I came across these packages of plastic bugs and figured that was just the thing. The boys had already smuggled enough booze into the hospital so that Fairingnose was in danger of having to be treated for the DT’s.
Bugs were just right harmless enough, you know, and pretty convincing. There were centipedes, spiders, cockroaches, caterpillars, cinchbugs, ticks the whole works. I didn’t have any exact idea of what we could do with 'em but I thought a screwball like Hamby would figure out something interesting.
Not long after I got into the ward and showed Fairingnose the bugs, he really did get an idea. He explains it to me and orders us two cups of coffee. Then we fill out mouths full of bugs and wait. Pretty soon the nurses’ aide comes in and asks Hamby how he is and he takes a sip of coffee, casually spits a cockroach onto the floor and says, “Okay except for that leg stretcher you’ve got me tied to.” “What's that?”asks the nurses’ aide looking at the bug in dismay.
“Cockroach, I think,’’ says Fairingnose calmly. “Did anybody ever tell you that you’ve got the best figure of any nurse in this joint?”
“Cockroach!” shrieks the girl, “Is that what you spit out?”
“Was I supposed to swallow it?” asks Fairingnose. “I ain’t that fond of ’em. They sort of tickle when they go down and besides I'm afraid one might grab a tonsil on the way down and stay there for a while.”
“Was that in your coffee?” asks the now thoroughly horrified girl.
“Did you think I trapped it just so I could hold it in my mouth and then spit it
out?” asks Hamby.
The nurses’ aide takes off like a raped ape and Fairingnose winks at me. Pretty soon the day ward R.N. flounces in and says, “Hamby, are there insects in your
coffee?“
Fairingnose takes a sip, spits out a spider, a ladybug and two centipedes and says, “Aren’t there usually?”
I get a wink from him and take a sip and spit out a caterpillar and a horsefly and say, “By George, there sure are!”
“Is that one?” asks the RN, somewhat pale around the gills, as she points at a spider on the sheets, “Oh! It looks like a black widow!”
“No matter,” says Fairingnose. “The hot coffee kills 'em. If the heat don’t do it the caffetanic acid do.” Then he turns to me and says, “I'd have passed George Roeder if I hadn’t crossed her up too soon and hit that pothole.”
“You mean you’ve had them in your coffee before this?” demands the RN with a note of hysteria creeping into her voice.
“Not any live ones so far,’’ says Hamby, spitting a cinchbug onto the counterpane and turning it over with a fingernail, “but them dog-ticks sort of turn my stomach. It’s not the taste of ’em. In fact, none of ’em have much taste. It’s just the idea of it.”
“When was the first time you had insects in your coffee?” demands the RN.
“You mean you didn’t have anything to do with it?” asks Hamby, looking surprised.
“Of course not!” snaps the RN.
“The first cup of coffee I got was full of bugs,” says Fairingnose. “Of course I thought it was your way of initiating a new guy so I didn’t let on I noticed it. You know, sort of like hazing. They do stuff like that in college and on the chain gang so I figured hospitals did too. Do you mean everybody may have been getting bugs in their coffee and not noticing it? Do you suppose they’ve been drinking them? Golly! They’re probably in the milk and orange juice too!”
“In the milk?” yells the old red-faced guy in the bed across the aisle. His face turns a nice mauve shade, his eyes bulge and he shakes a fist and says, “And me with an ulcer! I'll sue, so help me!” Hamby says, “I thought at first they were coffee grounds ’cause most of ’em settle to the bottom. But now and then you get a mouthful of floaters.”
Then he turns to me and says, “How’d Imola turn out?”
I saw the RN turning green around the gills and moved my head so she couldn’t see me grinning. It was hard to keep a snicker out of my voice when I answered. “In the five hundred class it was Hailwood first, Allen Shepherd second and Kitano third. The two fifty class was Kitano, Ito and Hailwood and Camathias won the sidecar class. Anderson won the one twenty five. I believe Hailwood will take the two-fifty at Turin on a Honda Four. They’re running it next week.”
Fairingnose dumped the contents of the cup on the floor and said, “I’ve heard Harley-Davidson is signing Ronnie Rail to back up George Roeder in the halfmile.”
“And all that was in our orange juice!” yells a fat guy three beds down the row, suddenly turning pale blue and falling back.
“Call the doctor!” yells the RN to the nurses’ aide as she takes off for the guy at a dead run. “Don’t get excited,” she pants, “think of your blood pressure.” And she crams a pill in his mouth and forces a drink of water on him, but he strangles, blows some out of his nose like a whale sounding, you know—sort of a vapor and spits the rest on the RN’s uniform.
“He'd never make it, even as a spectator at the national half-mile at the Winston-Salem fairground,” says Fairingnose reflectively. “Maybe as a spectator at a mud run or a seven-day trials or a club motocross he could stand it.”
Well, the doctor arrives and goes to work on the guy with the high blood pressure and two or three more patients get out of bed and hobble over to look at all the plastic bugs and start yelling about calling their lawyers.
I figure it’s time to leave and as I start out I hear ’em phoning the exterminators. Fairingnose is propped up in the bed eating salted peanuts and reading English Motorcycle and Scooter Weekly
Fairingnose told me later that they had the exterminators work over the whole hospital from stem to gudgeon and it took ’em durn near a week to finish. Maybe Hamby didn’t dispose of all the plastic insects and the exterminators found one and squawked to the hospital superintendent.
The next time I went to visit Fairingnose the security guard stopped me at the door and told me that I was not to be admitted even if I was bleeding to death. What’s more, they were trying to transfer Fairingnose across town to Cone
Memorial but Cone wouldn’t have him and had alerted their security guards as to my appearance so that the only way I could get in would be to go disguised as a fire inspector. Then I got a letter from Piedmont Memorial telling me that if I got seriously injured to try to check the bleeding and remember that the VA Hospital was only a 60 mi. drive and that I should bear in mind that services there were free. Meanwhile, their own facility was terribly overcrowded and I probably wouldn’t like the chow.
It strikes me that doctors as a group have a very poor sense of humor.
About three months later the Highway Patrol caught Fairingnose broadsliding a semi with a 55-foot trailer through a turn on Interstate 95 and he got grounded. He came to me saying he wanted full-time work and couldn’t make it moonlighting for me any longer.
He couldn't have come at a better time. The last caper the insurance lobby had rammed through the Legislature had made it nearly impossible to sell a motorcycle until it was licensed and totally impossible to license it until it was
insured; the cost of insurance was becoming completely impossible and financing was even more difficult yet.
The Northeastern Division of Chicago Bridge and Iron had gratefully accepted my offer to paint a 50,000-gal. golfball tank in Aberdeen, Maryland, and I was packing my duffle bag and wondering how to dispose of my floorstock. I was trying to remember how I’d gotten to the swayrods to paint them on the 150,000gal., double-eliptical elevated tank I last worked on when Hamby arrived, saw my For Sale sign lying on my desk and changed his mind about asking for fulltime employment. He asked me how much for the shop and I told him to take up the payments on the floorstock and give me my equity in it as he sold it off. Meanwhile I wanted cash for the tools and furniture. He offered me $200 and after I searched him and found only small change left I agreed. So that was how I left the motorcycle business.
I got lead poisoning at Mount Pleasant, Penn., and after a trip to Walter Reed I came home pretty well stuffed with money and belly cramps. Fairingnose somehow got a finance company to float loans on motorcycles and had begun to make money. Then he got to sponsoring his own machines in drag racing and was using the upstairs over the shop to make his own nitro fuel. I don’t know how he made it. Probably boiling dynamite or something.
Anyhow they had a fire one night and I arrived just as the firemen were charging bravely upstairs. The chief stopped to ask Fairingnose what was up there and when he got the answer the chief yelled, “Run for your lives, men!” And the firemen ran off and left the hose halfway up the steps. Half a block away the fire chief told Fairingnose that if he would go upstairs and carry out the nitro fuel the firemen would be happy to return and see what they could do about the fire.
That sort of ends the story because Fairingnose did just that and the firemen put out the fire.
I told him he was awfully brave. He said he hadn’t thought much about it at the time. What worried him was the two sets of Avon racing tires he had stored in the shop. If he’d lost them he couldn’t have run VIR the next month.
Anyway, I retired. Figured to build a house with the money I didn’t spend racing and besides, I was 54 years old.
Haven’t seen Hamby in years. Maybe I should call him. Now that I’m on Social Security I’ve got plenty of time to practice. Fairingnose ain’t much over 50 and I hate to see a feller quit in his prime and besides, neither of us has ever raced at Atlanta.
Personally I think road racing is for old guys. Young men haven’t got the time and money to spare. ES
