{"id":124,"date":"2026-09-02T14:00:00","date_gmt":"2026-09-02T14:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/phred.boppers.net\/hw\/podcast\/2026-09-02-indian-warrior\/"},"modified":"2026-09-02T14:00:00","modified_gmt":"2026-09-02T14:00:00","slug":"2026-09-02-indian-warrior","status":"publish","type":"podcast","link":"https:\/\/phred.boppers.net\/hw\/podcast\/2026-09-02-indian-warrior\/","title":{"rendered":"Harry and the Indian Warrior"},"content":{"rendered":"

Read the source essay \u2197<\/a><\/p>\n

PHRED: G’day. Phred here.<\/strong><\/p>\n

MAXINE: And Maxine.<\/strong><\/p>\n

PHRED: Right \u2014 before we start, I need to get something off my chest. Harry mentions cleaning the carburetor on this bike, and I just want to say: if I’d been there in Caracas, I’d have been right in there up to my elbows in petrol. Probably making it worse, definitely convinced I was making it better.<\/strong><\/p>\n

MAXINE: Phred, you are a platypus. You have flippers, not elbows. The carburetor is not your people.<\/strong><\/p>\n

PHRED: Figure of speech, Maxine. The point is \u2014 mechanical things, you know? There’s a satisfaction in taking something apart and hoping it goes back together.<\/strong><\/p>\n

MAXINE: This is a Phred predilection, not a Harry one. Harry actually admits in the piece that he was “never good at” tuning carburetors. He had a professional do it.<\/strong><\/p>\n

PHRED: …Right. Well. I still feel seen.<\/strong><\/p>\n

MAXINE: You feel seen by a carburetor mention.<\/strong><\/p>\n

PHRED: You’ve identified my spiritual condition, Maxine. Can we do the show now?<\/strong><\/p>\n

MAXINE: Please.<\/strong><\/p>\n

PHRED: We’ve been burrowing through Harry’s archive for a good while now \u2014 ninety-seven of these, if you can believe it. England, MIT, the Army, his years in New York and Abingdon. We’ve heard him sing about Caracas. We’ve read the broad sweep of his teenage years in Chapter Six. And today we’re doing something I reckon we’ve earned the right to do: we’re zooming in on one single story. One machine. One summer in the City of Eternal Spring.<\/strong><\/p>\n

MAXINE: Harry wrote this in March 2020 \u2014 he’s eighty years old, locked down like the rest of us, and he opens a Word document to tell the story of a motorcycle. A 500cc Indian Warrior, probably a 1951 model, that his friend John Pickering gave him in the summer of 1956 in Caracas, Venezuela.<\/strong><\/p>\n

PHRED: The piece is called “Harry and the Indian Warrior.” And it’s about so much more than a bike.<\/strong><\/p>\n

[SFX: DRUMROLL]<\/p>\n

MAXINE: Was that necessary.<\/strong><\/p>\n

PHRED: It’s a motorcycle piece, Maxine. You need a little rev before you kick it over.<\/strong><\/p>\n

MAXINE: We’re not kicking anything over. We’re reviewing an essay.<\/strong><\/p>\n

PHRED: And we’re doing it with production value. Anyway \u2014 it opens with a hierarchy. Harry had a Lambretta scooter \u2014 125cc, bought with paper-route money \u2014 and he was, and this is his exact phrase, “very happy to have the scooter. However, it was not even close to having the aura of having a motorcycle.”<\/strong><\/p>\n

MAXINE: The aura.<\/strong><\/p>\n

PHRED: The aura! I love that he names it. It’s not speed he’s after, not even really the machine \u2014 it’s the aura. The thing that settles on a sixteen-year-old boy when he’s finally holding something with real displacement.<\/strong><\/p>\n

MAXINE: It’s a precise word choice. “Aura” suggests something almost spiritual \u2014 a halo, a field of presence. He’s not describing horsepower. He’s describing identity.<\/strong><\/p>\n

PHRED: Right. And speaking of precise word choices \u2014<\/strong><\/p>\n

[SFX: HORN]<\/p>\n

MAXINE: Oh no.<\/strong><\/p>\n

PHRED: THAT’S THE WORD OF THE DAY! “Aura.” I picked it because Harry only deploys a word three times when he’s building a cathedral around it. By the third mention he wants you to feel it, not just read it.<\/strong><\/p>\n

MAXINE: You picked it because it’s in the first paragraph and you didn’t read past the first paragraph before choosing.<\/strong><\/p>\n

PHRED: I read the whole piece, Maxine. I just have excellent instincts. “Aura” \u2014 from the Greek for breeze or breath. In Platypus Corner we’d call it the electroreceptive field around a particularly attractive piece of machinery.<\/strong><\/p>\n

MAXINE: There is no Platypus Corner in this episode.<\/strong><\/p>\n

PHRED: There could be. I’ve been workshopping it.<\/strong><\/p>\n

MAXINE: You’re always workshopping it.<\/strong><\/p>\n

PHRED: And yet you never attend the workshop.<\/strong><\/p>\n

MAXINE: Can we return to Harry?<\/strong><\/p>\n

PHRED: Right. John Pickering was a year older, lived two blocks away in the Gallipan building, had a BSA 250. His father bought him this old Indian \u2014 an American bike in a city where nearly every motorcycle was European \u2014 so they could work on it together. John went off to VMI that fall, and he gave the Indian to Harry. By then it barely ran. They thought it might never run again.<\/strong><\/p>\n

MAXINE: And this is where the story becomes Harry. He doesn’t just get the bike. He builds a world around it. The area behind his garage \u2014 paved bit, grass bit, basketball hoop nailed to a box on the roof, a warped plywood ping-pong table \u2014 becomes “Taller Baya.” Named after Taller Barbieri, the real repair shop in Petare run by an older Italian man Harry admired.<\/strong><\/p>\n

PHRED: Three to eight boys hanging out, taking shots, playing ping-pong, working on scooters. Harry says he spent hundreds of hours there, many of them alone with the Indian.<\/strong><\/p>\n

[BED: motorcycle-engine-idle]<\/p>\n

PHRED: Hold on… there we go.<\/strong><\/p>\n

MAXINE: …What is that noise.<\/strong><\/p>\n

PHRED: It’s atmosphere, Maxine. It’s called production value. You’re sitting in Taller Baya now. Can’t you smell the oil?<\/strong><\/p>\n

MAXINE: I smell a gimmick.<\/strong><\/p>\n

PHRED: A gimmick with ambience.<\/strong><\/p>\n

MAXINE: Phred, that’s genuinely interesting as a concept, but let’s bring it back to what Harry actually wrote. He’s telling us something about himself without quite saying it. The improvised, the makeshift, the slightly wrong \u2014 he doesn’t just accept it, he claims it as an advantage. The ping-pong table was “several feet shorter than a real table” and warped by rain and sun, and he thought that helped his game.<\/strong><\/p>\n

PHRED: The warped table helped his game. That’s such a Harry thing.<\/strong><\/p>\n

MAXINE: You do that with everything. Including this ambient engine.<\/strong><\/p>\n

PHRED: The engine stays until you admit it adds something.<\/strong><\/p>\n

MAXINE: It adds tinnitus.<\/strong><\/p>\n

PHRED: It adds texture.<\/strong><\/p>\n

MAXINE: Harry’s dimensions are precise \u2014 fifteen by twenty feet, twelve by twenty. He remembers the space like he’s still standing in it.<\/strong><\/p>\n

PHRED: And then the miracle. The bike’s been sitting for months. Someone pushes the starter pedal and there’s a kind of \u2014 and Harry actually writes this \u2014 “woomph” sound. A double-woomph, even. They can’t get it started with the kick starter, so they tow it up Avenida Venezuela with the scooter and a rope, push it to the top of a hill, and John lets out the clutch going downhill.<\/strong><\/p>\n

MAXINE: And what happens next is one of Harry’s strongest memories. His words: “The entire street at John’s location became filled with a huge cloud of black smoke. We could not see him or the motorcycle for at least 5 or 10 seconds.” And then \u2014 “when John let out the clutch there was an explosion that sounded a little like a bomb going off. I wondered then if the motorcycle had exploded.”<\/strong><\/p>\n

PHRED: But from a block away they hear the roar. And Harry writes: “The son of a bitch had started. Far out. Utterly amazing. This was a small miracle to us.”<\/strong><\/p>\n

[SFX: AIR_HORN]<\/p>\n

MAXINE: Phred.<\/strong><\/p>\n

PHRED: I’m celebrating, Maxine. The man wrote “The son of a bitch had started” at age eighty. That’s worth an air horn.<\/strong><\/p>\n

MAXINE: It’s worth noting. It’s not worth an air horn.<\/strong><\/p>\n

PHRED: I want to pause there. Harry Baya, eighty years old, writing in his study in California, and he still reaches for the exact vocabulary of a sixteen-year-old in 1956. He doesn’t clean it up. He doesn’t translate it into adult language. He lets the boy speak.<\/strong><\/p>\n

MAXINE: That’s trust, isn’t it? Trusting that the moment was what it was, and that the words it wore are still the right ones.<\/strong><\/p>\n

PHRED: That’s trust. And also \u2014 he remembers the feeling better than he remembers the facts. Which is something I want to come back to.<\/strong><\/p>\n

MAXINE: After that, Harry becomes the owner of a 500cc bike. He cleans the carburetor \u2014<\/strong><\/p>\n

PHRED: There it is again!<\/strong><\/p>\n

MAXINE: \u2014 changes the oil, checks the chain and brakes \u2014 though he admits he probably had Barbieri tune the carburetor, because he was “never good at that.” He paints it bright shiny black with a slanted yellow diamond on the gas tank. He takes it on one long trip to the coast, passing smaller bikes uphill with a passenger, and he writes, simply: “I loved the power.”<\/strong><\/p>\n

PHRED: “I loved the power.” Four words. No elaboration. He just tells you.<\/strong><\/p>\n

MAXINE: But the piece doesn’t turn into a triumph lap. The Indian is unreliable. The kick starter fails. He pushes it until “the anger pushed me to my limit.” The front fender cracks because he didn’t replace the struts. The handlebar shock absorbers are worn, so the front wheel shimmies dangerously above fifty miles an hour. He disassembles the motor and gets stuck. And then there’s the gearbox.<\/strong><\/p>\n

PHRED: The gearbox is the heart of this essay, I think. Barbieri can’t get new parts. So Harry hears about a junkyard full of old Indian motorcycles \u2014 hundreds, maybe thousands, piled like something from a Mad Max movie. He climbs through them and finds a gearbox he can remove. Except \u2014 and he flags this himself \u2014 “this part of the story may be apocryphal.” He thinks he accidentally bolted a 250cc Scout gearbox onto his 500cc Warrior engine.<\/strong><\/p>\n

MAXINE: Which meant the bike could peel out and pop wheelies with almost no effort, but couldn’t actually go fast. He’d redline at fifty because the gears were wrong. Harry suspects this might just be a story he told himself to explain the bike’s behaviour. He admits he doesn’t know. “I can’t say for sure that this view is anything other than an attempt to explain my experience.”<\/strong><\/p>\n

PHRED: That right there is the Harry we’ve come to know. The operational honesty. The willingness to say \u2014 even about his own teenage legend \u2014 maybe I just made this up. Maybe I learned to control the bike better and invented a mechanical explanation. He holds both possibilities.<\/strong><\/p>\n

MAXINE: It’s remarkable. Most men his age are burnishing their legends. Harry is fact-checking his own mythology.<\/strong><\/p>\n

PHRED: And I reckon that’s why the piece feels so alive. He’s not protecting a memory. He’s examining it.<\/strong><\/p>\n

[BED: END]<\/p>\n

MAXINE: Thank you.<\/strong><\/p>\n

PHRED: You’re welcome. Now \u2014 the death. He’s riding to Barbieri’s shop, two hundred feet away, when a rod breaks through the engine casing. Oil pours onto the street. And Harry writes: “I could not help but feel that my horse had died and spilled blood in front of all the other people who worked with horses.”<\/strong><\/p>\n

[SFX: SAD_TROMBONE]<\/p>\n

MAXINE: That did deserve a sad trombone, actually.<\/strong><\/p>\n

PHRED: Right? It’s a stunning line. A sixteen-year-old boy in khakis and Keds, watching American oil pool on a Venezuelan street, and he reaches for a cavalry metaphor. The horse. The blood. The shame and grief of a public death.<\/strong><\/p>\n

MAXINE: He thinks there may have been laughter.<\/strong><\/p>\n

PHRED: Yes \u2014 imagine that. The indignity of your horse dying in front of the other stable hands. And Harry feeling every drop of it. Then he writes: “that was the end of the Indian.” And closes with “Thus endeth the saga of Harry and the Indian.” Almost biblical. Almost a joke. Both at once.<\/strong><\/p>\n

MAXINE: I’d like to ask him about that closing phrase. “Thus endeth” \u2014 is he mocking his own solemnity? Is he quoting something? It has the cadence of King James, but the wink of a sixteen-year-old who knows he’s being dramatic.<\/strong><\/p>\n

PHRED: I’d ask him about the crowbar. An army officer \u2014 an engineer \u2014 helps him separate two stuck engine parts, tells Harry to leave the room, and there’s a loud bang. The crowbar ends up on a ledge in the top of the garage. “Whatever he did must have flung a 5lb+ crowbar across the room. I was impressed. He seemed more amused than anything.” I’d want to know if that officer is still alive in his memory as clearly as the bike is. Because that little aside \u2014 someone else’s competence, someone else’s amusement \u2014 it sits in the essay like a gift Harry didn’t know he was giving.<\/strong><\/p>\n

MAXINE: What’s striking is how this essay relates to the broader memoir we’ve been reading. The Lambretta, John Pickering, the Gallipan building \u2014 they pass through Chapter Six as background details. Here they become the foreground. This is what happens when Harry stops and opens one drawer. One machine. One summer.<\/strong><\/p>\n

PHRED: What strikes me is how much this reveals about his relationship with physical things. We’ve seen Harry the thinker, the programmer, the philosopher of belief and assumption. Here he’s Harry the tinkerer \u2014<\/strong><\/p>\n

MAXINE: You and the tinkerer angle.<\/strong><\/p>\n

PHRED: \u2014 sanding paint, pushing a dead bike up a hill. The same person who would later write about machine consciousness and the flat world \u2014 but at sixteen, he just wanted the aura.<\/strong><\/p>\n

MAXINE: And he got it. “I managed to get a little bit of that aura for at least a little while.” That’s the closing frame. Not the power, not the wheelies, not even the friendship \u2014 though all of those matter. It’s the aura. The feeling of arriving somewhere he’d wanted to be.<\/strong><\/p>\n

PHRED: The piece is about three thousand words, and it doesn’t drag. He moves from the scooter to the gift to Taller Baya to the hill-start miracle to the paint job to the mechanical failures to the junkyard to the death. It’s episodic but propelled by this underlying hunger \u2014 the wanting, the getting, the losing.<\/strong><\/p>\n

MAXINE: If Harry were sitting with us, I’d want to ask about the apocrypha. The maybe-wrong gearbox. Did he ever tell that story at reunions? Did it become true through repetition? He’s so careful to flag it here, at eighty. I wonder what the sixteen-year-old Harry believed.<\/strong><\/p>\n

PHRED: Who was the intended reader here, do you reckon?<\/strong><\/p>\n

MAXINE: I think he wrote it for the boys who were there. For John Pickering, wherever he is. For Fred Hill, who maybe climbed through the junkyard with him. For the ones who remember the Gallipan building and the warped ping-pong table. But I also think he wrote it for himself \u2014 to prove he can still feel the woomph. That it’s still in his foot, pushing that pedal, sixty-four years later.<\/strong><\/p>\n

PHRED: That feels right. And for the rest of us \u2014 it’s a window into the kind of memory Harry prizes. Not the valedictorian medal. Not the MIT degree. The afternoon a cloud of black smoke swallowed your best friend, and then you heard the engine catch, and for a moment you were the kid with the aura.<\/strong><\/p>\n

MAXINE: It leaves me with the image of oil on asphalt, and a boy who loved a machine enough to mourn it in public. That’s not nothing. That’s a whole life, in miniature.<\/strong><\/p>\n

PHRED: Reading this piece, I get the smell of petrol and the sound of boys laughing on a Caracas hillside. And I get the sense that Harry’s whole life \u2014 the zest he calls his defining trait \u2014 maybe started right there, in Taller Baya, with a boy pushing something broken until it roared.<\/strong><\/p>\n

MAXINE: Shall we?<\/strong><\/p>\n

PHRED: Let’s.<\/strong><\/p>\n

BOTH: Let’s celebrate most joyously our being here… at all. Goodbye.<\/strong><\/p>\n

[SFX: OUTRO_MOTORCYCLE_REV]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Read the source essay \u2197 PHRED: G’day. Phred here. MAXINE: And Maxine. PHRED: Right \u2014 before we start, I need to get something off my chest. Harry mentions cleaning the carburetor on this bike, and I just want to say: if I’d been there in Caracas, I’d have been right in there up to my […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","episode_type":"full","audio_file":"https:\/\/phred.boppers.net\/hw\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/2026-09-02-indian-warrior.mp3","cover_image":"","cover_image_id":"","duration":"00:13:21","filesize":"10092620","date_recorded":"2026-09-02","explicit":"","block":"","filesize_raw":"10092620"},"tags":[],"series":[2],"class_list":["post-124","podcast","type-podcast","status-publish","hentry","series-harrys-world"],"episode_featured_image":false,"episode_player_image":"https:\/\/phred.boppers.net\/hw\/wp-content\/plugins\/seriously-simple-podcasting\/assets\/images\/no-album-art.png","download_link":"https:\/\/phred.boppers.net\/hw\/podcast-download\/124\/2026-09-02-indian-warrior","player_link":"https:\/\/phred.boppers.net\/hw\/podcast-player\/124\/2026-09-02-indian-warrior","audio_player":"https:\/\/phred.boppers.net\/hw\/podcast-player\/124\/2026-09-02-indian-warrior<\/a>","episode_data":{"playerMode":"dark","subscribeUrls":[],"rssFeedUrl":"https:\/\/phred.boppers.net\/hw\/feed\/podcast\/harrys-world","embedCode":"

Harry and the Indian Warrior<\/a><\/blockquote>