Fixing the bike
11 February, 2014
I was in Hobart at Salamanca, and had my old Triumph bike. I did some damage to the tank somehow and didn't know where to get it fixed. There was a young Asian guy on the footpath who gave me a address. I felt slightly dubious about it, but got him to arrange to have it towed to the place - which I hadn't heard of but was somewhere near Sandy Bay. He said that to get there I should catch the '156' bus, which I did. I didn't look at the address, but just assumed I should get off in Sandy Bay. When I got to lower Sandy Bay on the bus, I thought i might have gone too far so I got off. I wash;t sure what to do. The I found myself back at where Michelle and I were staying, and we had an old dark blue Volvo. We drove to where the bike was being fixed, which was in Taroona at a residential house on the lower side of the road. The young Asian guy was there as well as an oder guy who looked like Derek Jacobi, with dark hair and wearing a suit. He was the mechanic supposedly, but seemed more like a doctor, and a bit 'oily'. He showed me the bike inside his house, in what seemed to be his office. It had a big chunk out of the tank, which he immediately started painting with what looked like beige house paint. He obviously didn't know what he was doing, and the paint splashed onto a print of the Laughing Cavalier. This belonged to me and I was furious because it was special to me and I'd been travelling with it for a long time and he'd stupidly ruined it. It turned out he was a backyard mechanic, and really was a doctor who had fallen on hard times. The young Asian guy seemed to be his boyfriend. Michelle and I went to leave with the bike, but it started pouring with rain. We then went to find the blue Volvo, but it had disappeared. I was angry with myself for having trusted someone I didn't know to fix my bike, and it felt like a fuck-up all round.