Scoot Tweet

I'm probably going to talk a lot about my Vespa, a 1973 Sprint that I named Kelor after a visit to a supposedly haunted island in Jakarta harbor. I rode that thing everywhere when it was working, which was most of the time.

There's a real community among Vespa riders in Indonesia — moreso than I've seen among strangers anywhere else. Once, when Kelor broke down after I crashed it (him?) into the back of a minivan, a cabbie saw my friend Dan and me pushing the poor thing down Jalan Rasuna Said, one of the city's big, six-lane boulevards. He was on duty, wearing his uniform and everything. Nevertheless, he slowed and hailed us.

"What's wrong?"

"I don't know, it doesn't work."

"Broken?"

"Yeah, the throttle's loose like it's not attached." I twisted the limp hand grip to demonstrate.

"Alright, let me help. I have a bunch of Vespas at home. I'm crazy about them," the guy said. So I got out my tools and he took off the engine cover and the top of the carborator. "So many keys, but you don't know what to do with them!" he said, laughing at me.

Another guy pulled up on his Vespa and squatted next to the cabbie, unrolling his bunch of wrenches. The cabbie figured out pretty quickly that a tiny pin way inside the carborator had come loose and would have to be jury-rigged. He lit a cigarette, unhooked the fuel line and got to work.

With gas spilling out over the engine and carborator, our cabbie smoked and removed screws. Dan and I looked on nervously and I even suggested to him that he should put out the smoke. "No, it's fine," he said. The other guy laughed at our over-abundance of caution.

When he'd gotten a wire wrapped around the throttle cable and some wax melted onto the pin to hold it in place (I was disappointed he didn't use chewing gum), the heroic cabbie slapped the carborator back together and gave us a huge grin as he clapped his hands together. We tried to offer him money (he was on duty, after all), but he just said, "No, it's Vespas. We help each other."

Oh, and, the reason this post is called "Scoot Tweet" is that I named my twitter stream after Kelor since I had to sell him. So, please follow.