Sometimes it is hard not to have fun with a story; sometimes the stories have fun with you. (If they’re true!) This one falls into the nanosphere between -- it’s certainly all true and, looked at from the right point of view, fun.
But not if you’re my brother. People talk about making a deal with the devil to give their right arm for success. Tommy actually did, though whether it was the devil he made the deal with I can’t attest. It was certainly a higher power.
But I’m getting ahead of myself. This goes back to the ‘70s, when my brother Tommy decided to ride his motorcycle around the world. Now, in the wake of Ewan McGregor and Charley Borman’s “Long Way Around” (2004, HBO), that may not seem weird. On the other hand, one was a movie star, the other’s dad a famous film director, and they had mucho corporate support. In my brother’s case, he had an idea, some savings and, in the early ‘80s, set out.
Ironically, he chose to leave from Los Angeles, where Newsweek had just shipped me to be a correspondent covering the ’84 Olympics. Tommy rode south through Mexico and the troubled Central American isthmus, through Sandanista roadblocks and Noriega drug deals, down left side of South America across to Argentina (a reverse of Che Guevera’s “Motorcycle Diaries”) before putting his bike on a boat for the Dark Continent crossing over Arabia to India, where he found himself in hiding with the Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka’s war for independence.
Truth in advertising: I didn’t go. Most of what I know if from postcards sent back (taking weeks to get to L.A.) Where I pick up the story is what happened next:
One night around 3 a.m. in the mid-‘80s, I got a call from the police that my brother had been in a motorcycle accident in Venice. In my sleepiness, for some reason I assumed they meant Venice, Italy, and wondered why they were calling me. Eventually, it became clear that he had taken a break from his world tour, flown home and gone to the Long Beach Grand Prix.
Cruising down Venice Boulevard a VW panel van had suddenly cut in front of him. There were no drugs or drink involved, but he couldn’t stop, hit the van and went flying over the handlebars. Like any halfback, he ducked his head (wearing a helmet) and hit the side of the van with his right shoulder. Unfortunately, he’d met a charming young Latina he’d given a ride to from the race and, as his shoulder was hitting the side of the van, she came flying over his back.
While (as the doctor explained) he might have gotten off with a broken collarbone, the force of a 105-pound Latina slamming into him turned a broken collarbone into a fractured neck and would probably require amputation of his arm. The girl broke her pinkie finger.
