An Episode of Motorcycle Madness
by Paul G. Chamberlain
It all started one hot, sticky afternoon in Africa when a missionary was bitten by a tsetse fly. It was decreed that Father Don Rodriguez should recuperate from his African sleeping sickness in Canada, and he was duly despatched to the Sisters of Saint Catherine near Niagara Falls.
The sound of the waterfall had a demulcent effect on the elderly priest, and the nuns were relieved to discover that it hastened his recovery. But, as his health improved, they noticed something disturbing. Instead of studying the Bible, and meditating with his amber rosary, as was his habit, the priest began to exhibit some alarming symptoms: glossy motorcycle magazines began to appear at the breakfast table each morning; there were discordant rumbles from underneath his bedroom door and, late at night, the restless figure of Father Rodriguez was seen wandering the corridors of the residence in a black leather jacket. Finally, Don Rodriguez disappeared altogether... until Sister Agnes screamed.
It will never be known exactly what happened to Father Rodriguez, but details of what had purportedly taken place during his disappearance were recorded in an extraordinary transcript which made its way into the hands of the Vatican. This transcript — based on papers which had been recovered from the missionary’s private effects — was provided by the Mother Superior of the Sisters of Saint Catherine. A Jesuati, who lived not far from the Sistine Chapel, was tasked with determining the nature of the subject’s unusual behaviour based on her testimony.
* * *
Father Rodriguez had gone to Dublin, Ontario, a few miles up the road from the Sisters of Saint Catherine. And it was here, whilst turning the corner onto Talbot Street, that Father Rodriguez bumped into a young man and accidentally knocked a manuscript from his bony fingers.
Don Rodriguez politely picked up the tome from the wet pavement and, squinting through the monocle on his left eye, noticed its title: “Odysseus.” He slid it back to the startled owner with an apology and suggested that the stranger change the title to “Ulysses.” The writer was delighted and invited Don Rodriguez into Malloy’s Tavern for a pint of Guinness.
As the priest stumbled out of the crowded bar an hour later, he straightened his dishevelled hair with pudgy fingers and noticed a Harley Davidson parked beside the River Liffey. ‘Blessed Jesus!’ he chortled and leapt on, thundering out of Dublin on highway 4.
A few miles east of the township of Strathroy, Don Rodriguez rode the motorbike into London, Ontario. He could smell the scent of tobacco leaves as he drew near, and a sign flashed by, shouting, “Stop Smoking, Start Vaping.”
On entering the city, he glimpsed London Bridge, and noticed the Thames flowing unusually swiftly under its walkway. Soon he was thundering down Pall Mall toward Marble Arch. That’s when he saw the queue outside Buckingham Palace: he drove around the back and parked in the garden.
Picking up a rock, he smashed a window and crawled into a room where he found the King sitting in font of an electric fireplace; his royal highness was holding a crown in his lap, and lamenting the news that India wanted its prized Koh-i-Noor diamond returned because it had been stolen by the East India Company from a Maharaja.
Suddenly, out of the corner of his watery blue eyes, the priest glimpsed a menacing figure striding into the room. He leapt out of the window and, with the wind blowing in his grey hair, he rode his chopper out of London on highway 24.
Roaring off to Paris, Ontario, Don Rodriguez felt like a mad dervish in the Bulldog Bash and, in less time than it took to say “Jumping Jehoshaphat,” he was on the outskirts of the Gallic metropolis. The sky was filled with aeroplanes shrieking in and out of Orly airport like demented yo-yos.
Hurtling toward the city centre, he tumbled down the Champs-Elysées and sped past the glittering shops of Christian Dior, Eve St Laurent, and Coco Chanel. Overwhelmed by a feeling of nausea, he tilted his motorbike toward the Arc de Triomphe and skidded to a halt underneath the Eiffel Tower. Here, Don Rodriguez was greeted by a cardboard cutout of Jules Verne advertising flights to the moon, and the priest was invited to watch a boxing match on the Trocadero.
After singing the Marseillaise while guzzling a magnum of champagne, the priest leapt back onto the Harley and sped off toward the Latin Quarter. As he squinted backwards through the monocle on his left eye, he was surprised to see how fast the Seine was flowing and, in the distance, he heard a warbling noise that tumbled through the air like an angry vacuum cleaner.
Performing a wheelie on the way to Lisbon, Ontario, Don Rodriguez began to shiver. An icy wind was blasting him now. It wasn’t the slipstream from the motorbike, however, it was something else. Moments later, he caught sight of Lisbon basking like a lizard in the sunshine and, after crossing the Tagus River, he was greeted by Prince Henry the Navigator, who was weeping because his map of the Canary Islands took up the whole of the city and his map of the empire was the size of Portugal.
After downing a glass of Ferreira port from a goblet of Czechoslovakian crystal, Don Rodriguez caught sight of another splashy billboard; this one pictured a sultry blonde flashing her bow wave seductively toward him. It read: “When you have savings, everything seems low cost.”
“The shopping mall is the new Church,” the priest lamented and, in a fit of plangent exasperation, yelled, “God is a VISA card!” Gunning the throttle of the Harley, he noticed that all about him now water was rising fast and, above the roar of the motorbike, he detected those cacophonous sounds again, only this time they were reverberating to a symphony of flashing lights that ignited the sky like fireworks. Something sinister was stalking the priest.
At last, Don Rodriguez careened into Brussels, Ontario. Supposedly in Brussels, Belgium, the jewellery capital of the world, and roaring along the River Scheldt, Don Rodgriguez entered an empty marketplace near the former house of the painter Peter Paul Rubens. Here, he found a statue of King Leopold swirling in water, and he rode up to the monument with a splash. The gigantic marble effigy of the King of the Congo glared down at him with contempt from the previous century, his piercing eyes sparkling like blood diamonds.
Someone had painted his marmoreal face with a Fu Man Chu moustache, and African children knelt at its feet, madly waving their arms. All of them had their hands chopped off. A rusty bronze plaque read in French: “Colonialism is the Gospel of Despair.”
King Leopold’s right arm was pointing at somebody. Don Rodriguez was frightened; the King was pointing at him! It was getting much colder now and, all about him, the water was rising ever higher. Terrified, Father Rodriguez heard those sirens again, and a rainbow of flashing lights, red, green, and blue, shot at him like buckshot from a blunderbuss.
In less time than it took to administer the Last Rites, the priest was surrounded by a flotilla of boats and men in black, waving guns. “Father Rodriguez,” a voice boomed out across the flooded square through a loudspeaker, “in the name of God the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost, I arrest you for theft, drunk driving, breaking and entering, and failing to stop at an international border.” Walking on water in a pair of shiny, black galoshes and wearing a white zucchetto, the Pope handed him an unpaid bill for a Big Whopper from Burger King.
* * *
The Jesuit priest in Rome scrutinized the transcript in front of him with some trepidation. Did Father Rodriguez warrant some kind of Beatification, he pondered, a sign of wonder that can only be attributed to divine power? Or was he guilty of serendae sententiae — a serious violation of canon law — to be decided by a synod? Or — and this was the most egregious conclusion of all — was his action explicitly, albeit unwitting, of Satanic practice? The Jesuit placed the transcript in a file marked “Classified.” There was no hurry.
Don Rodriguez was dead. His battered body had been fished out of the river downstream from Niagara Falls on the Day of the Dead, twenty-four hours after he had been reported missing by the Sisters of Saint Catherine, lending some credence to the theory that perhaps a strange attractor or the right hand of the Devil was indeed at work in the bizarre life and death of the unfortunate missionary.
But the devil was in the details: a stolen Harley Davidson had been found abandoned upstream from Niagara Falls, and a diary of the priest’s mad motorcycle journey was retrieved from the saddle bag — along with an empty vial of opioids. The monocle for his left eye was never found.
Inspector Malaprop wrote in his own official report that he didn’t think it looked right. The following day, news of the priest’s untimely demise made its way onto the front page of the Niagara Herald. Early in the morning, the newspaper was delivered to the Sisters of Saint Catherine. And that is why Sister Agnes screamed.
* * *
Documents marked “Classified” carry an implicit “Read Me” label. Sure enough, a younger curate at the Vatican Library read Father Rodriguez’s account and proceeded to include his own analysis in the file:
This droll story revolves around the surrealistic journey of a priest that takes place in southern Ontario on the Day of the Dead. Father Rodriguez appears to be experiencing a serious disconnection from reality involving a pathological aversion to capitalism, colonialism and corporate greed; it is a dilemma made all the more ironic given that Father Rodriguez was, himself, partly the source of the anxiety that he seeks to eliminate.
As the priest travels farther into his grand illusion, one senses that perhaps his journey is not quite as random as it might first appear, and one begins to wonder if a strange attractor — perhaps the right hand of the Devil — might be at work in the priest’s life.
However, the cause of Don Rodriguez’s dysfunctional behaviour appears to be triggered in part by his hospitalization. A clue near the end of his story, provides a source for his psychological disorder. As Cervantes tells us, “When life itself seems lunatic, who knows where madness lies?”
Copyright © 2025 by Paul G. Chamberlain
