It would be easy to allocate responsibility for the weird and wonderful experiences of my time with various Harley-Davidson WLAs (and one 10/12) to the motorcycles. I have been doing this, I think, with these tales of pushrod pleasures. But of course that is not true.

In truth these were my somewhat irresponsible (some people might say “wild”) years, and while the choice of motorcycle was significant, it was not determinative. It so happened that these bikes were cheap, they forgave an almost total lack of maintenance, they were versatile, and they were cool. Bingo.

In those years, mainly the late ‘60s, there were some certainties about living in Sydney. One of these was that there would be a strike by the beer delivery drivers in the time leading up to Christmas. This was their best chance to get a pay rise. After a while, the fuel delivery drivers caught onto this simple blackmail trick and also struck.

This was potentially a serious problem, but the blokes with whom I was sharing a house would drive out to the country, where there were still fuel stocks when the cities had run out, and come back with 44-gallon drums of petrol which we stored in the back yard of the terrace house we shared. Not only was this illegal, but also horrendously dangerous because the entire row of houses could have gone up if a cigarette butt had found a leak.

When I call the WLAs versatile, what I mean is that you could do just about anything with and to them. That was useful because petrol was still in short supply. We discovered that due to the low compression of the 750 side-valve engines, they would run on easily-available kerosene as long as they were primed with petrol and bump-started down our steep street. You just had to make sure you applied the kick starter immediately if you stalled, otherwise the engine would be too cold to fire up again.

Among its many other virtues, the standard WLA, as purchased for the princely sum of A$400 from Johnno’s, or Redfern Motorcycle Spares as it was officially known, in your choice of color featured sturdy front and rear crashbars. These were not only designed to protect the bike in case it fell over or slid down the road, but also to make it a snack to pick the bike up if it had fallen on its side. The pivot point meant that the average ringtailed possum could do it.

酒吧的pickup-ability the WLA was what I mainly used, but I did on at least one occasion also avail myself of their crash protection. I do not remember the precise circumstances of this event, and you would not want me to make up a pack of lies, would you? I mean, I could claim that I “had to put it down” and who would know better? But I think that would lack verisimilitude.

However it came about, I found myself dropping the bike preparatory to sliding down the road. I have an aversion to pain, so I was not keen on skidding along under or with the bike. Thinking quickly—well, actually probably just reacting—I swung myself on top of the now–horizontal motorcycle. I seem to remember cheers from my companions, but I could be wrong.

At any rate, my next memory is of searing pain in (or is it on?) my left buttock. Sitting on the sliding bike, I had the choice of a limited number of places where I could place my derriere, and I had unknowingly settled on the cooling fin at the head of the sidevalve engine. Being a cooling fin this was, predictably, hot. I wore the rectangular scab for quite a while and sat carefully to one side on bar stools, while my jeans never did recover.

This was not the only time my WLA attempted to injure me. One of my housemates was working at Johnno’s and he serviced the bike. I never understood what servicing a WLA involved, other than changing the oil and tightening the chain, but I was to find out. Riding home, I suddenly heard a “clang” and felt something whizzing past my right thigh, followed by a noticeable loss of power. It turned out that my mate had failed to secure the rear sparkplug more than finger tight, and it had unwound before being blown out of the head.

Fortunately, the trajectory of the plug was interrupted by the corner of the fuel tank. Had it not been, the first thing it would have encountered was my right testicle. As it was, the “clang” was the plug hitting the tank and then departing for places unknown across the road, missing my vitals by inches. I did not look for it, and I reassessed my friendships.