ON A BUDDHIST BENDER WITH BAZEMORE AT 5000 FT. ... OR ... WHO KNEW SIDDHARTHA HUFFS NITRO AND CLIMBS ON A BIKE?

By Cole Coonce
2/8/05

“It’s all about pain and suffering.” The voice was Funny Car hero Whit Bazemore, but the words and wisdom were pure Siddhartha. The basic tenet of Buddhism, at least as understood by quasi-spiritual Westerners like this writer, is that life is suffering. Yer’ born into it... you exit out of it... and a traumatic existence is what’s in between the ingress and egress, too. Once you embrace the suffering – when you become at one with the pain of merely being alive – then you can reach a transcendental state.

“It’s like running a racecar then,” I exhaled.

“If only you knew,” Bazemore replied.

We were climbing a mountain. On a bicycle. And I was suffering, all right. With all that respiratory and muscular pain, enlightenment seemed imminent... A funny thing though: It is hard to absorb any metaphysical knowledge with your tongue hanging out like a mangy mutt in the dog days of doom and your guts ready to heave like Bukowski on a bus bench after a barfly bender.

But Bazemore was breathing easy. An avid cyclist since it was recommended to him by his physical therapist as part of his recovery from leg burns suffered (there’s that word again!) from a motorcycle incident, Baze was riding blithely towards the outer space, becoming one with blue skies and splashes of puffy white clouds.

We were entering the heavens. Only to me it felt like the Seventh Circle of Hell.

Ahh yes, the climb... The ride began where the drag racing stars park their state-of-the-art motor homes perpendicular to the pits at Pomona Raceway. I had arranged to meet Bazemore after a staging lane conversation revealed our mutual love for cycling.

He suggested a ride to Mt. Baldy on a morning before he had to suit up for qualifying attempts for the Winternationals. I agreed. It was 40 miles round trip. It, you know, seemed like a good idea at the time.

We putt-putted around Puddingstone Lake and talked in the abstract about the issues facing modern drag racing: creeping technology, sundry bureaucratic possibilities to the limiting of racecars’ performance, and the delicate nature of competition under the employ of various multi-car teams. It was all off the record, of course, as I wasn’t rolling tape and I have the memory of marshmallow paste.

Then the chitchat was over. We began our ascent on what the locals call Pumphouse Road, which is the back way up to Mt. Baldy. Climbing uninhabited switchbacks with gradients that felt at least 90 degrees to common sense, I was immediately reminded of the scene in From Here to Eternity when scofflaw soldier Montgomery Clift is commanded by superior officer to climb a mountain off of Pearl Harbor on a bicycle. It was his punishment.

And this too was punishment... and it felt like eternity.

The climb continued. Bazemore kept his cool, sandbagging on his titanium-framed road bike and keeping me company while I unceremoniously blew snot out of any orifice that would pass it. Baze was slick. He knew I was on the verge of nosing over – if not tipping over, but he hung back and made conversation, deftly sculpting any questions into something that required a monosyllabic answer. He would query my opinion on his interests such as clutch management, photography and the Tour de France and I would gutturally proffer “yeah" or "no...”