Cycle News - Archive Issues - 1990's

ed at various ports of call by setting up a makeshift circus that included t ra ined monkeys and se als and, of course, Speedy Babbs riding the wal l of death. But The Carma got miserably off course and ended up not in South America but Mazatlan, 1200 miles south of Los Angeles. Its bilge failed, its 40-year-old diesel motors were exhalin g filthy black smoke, and it nearly ran aground in the narrow estuary. Again, however, the show must go on . As a publicity stunt to attract suckers to the makeshift circus, the syndicate that had le ased The Carma ordered Babbs to ren t an airplane, go jump out of it, land in downtown Mazatlan, then fight a bull riding a motorcycle. Never a dull moment. . A stiff wind off the ocean threatened to blow Babbs not into Mazatlan but into shark-infested waters. Then another gust slammed him onto the roof of a hotel where his parachute got tangled up in the non-insulated high-tension wires. The hote l wa s three stori es hi gh. From the street below, it drunken mob rescued Babbs with ladders. Aficiona.d os from the bull ring planted him on their shoulders and carried him to the bull ri n g, wh ich wa s pa cked and waiting. Waiting for Babbs, too, was an old bull which looked as petrified of Babbs, as Babbs was of him. The crowd roared, an ticipa tin g blood being spilled - Babbs' and the b u ll's . " Thin ki n g th a t the bull wo uld be scared off by the noise of my Indian and its police siren was a big mistake on my pa rt," Babbs concede d later. "El Toro ran me ra gged." At one point, he attempted to gra b the baffled beast by its tail, missed, an d almost sailed over the handlebars for his trou ble. Then the clutch started sli pping, the brakes bu rn ed ou t, and the engine froze u p . Babbs was accorded a hero's ovation, anyway. In . celebration, he did Mazatlan that night. When an old crone. opened the door of the city's best bordello and demanded to know what he wan ted, Babbs ballyhooed himself as "El norte Ame ricano" with "motocllet a y un aeroplane." Then he p roceeded to screw everything inside, including the crone. He also dep arted wi thou t paying. Deserved retribution followed. Back on The Carma that nigh t, one of the circus monkeys , a fou l- tempered old brute named Chongo, proceeded to bite Babbs' ankle to the bone. When he at last returned to the U.S., Speedy was suffering from pneumonia, kidney stones, and had three centavos in his jeans. Life rolled merrily along, anyway. He got a job with the E.K. Fernandez circus and spent the summer riding the wall of death in Hawaii, breaking in a fellow madman named Lucky Wells as a riding partner, and thrilling the evil spirits of Okehaoliehao for the natives. Babb s continued traveling; always on the go . He defied the grim reaper from Boston to San Diego. He was a tremendous hit in Canada. He toured Germany, and tried , but failed, to haul a wall of death into Soviet Russia. Life sometimes stopped being merry. On June 29, 1949, for example, Babbs protege Lucky Wells got killed. He'd gone flying with another man's wife and was in the process of joining what a viators call the "mile high club" when his airplane went into a fa tal p lun ge over Pacific Palisad es . Iro nica lly, wi thin the same hour, consid ering the difference in time from New York to Califo rn ia, Sp eed y was busting his own posterior in a fall on Coney Island. Th a t sa me Nov embe r, healed up again, Babbs ship ped ou t from Miami to Port au Prince and Hai ti's Bi-Centennial Fair. The noise of his motorcycle caused the crowd to break through police lines and storm the wooden walls. Men on the ground helped others climb and shinny the 20 feet to the top. Hanging by the ir fingertips, the y peered, disbelieving, inside. Babbs: "I pulled the cord on th e police siren I always carried on the bike, then cocked the throttle, cut for the wall, shifted into high gear and was circling." Men hanging from the top became . so startled at the sight that they lost their grip and fell to the ground, landing on friends and relatives below . Conscious of the ruckus he was making, Babbs, himself, grew over-excited , steered his motorcycle clear to the rim and unintentionally ran over fingers, sending additional Haitians tumbling to the bottom. The promoter of the show skipped the country, Babbs never got paid, and then he came down with ma laria. As Babbs later recoun ted the story, it was a kindly young doctor named Duvalier who nu rse d him back to semi-hea lth. The kindly youn g doctor subsequentl y grew up to become the noto rious Papa Doc, the republic's president-for-life. The good doctor a ls o sch oole d Babbs in voodoo, or so Babbs liked to claim. It was a vocation Babbs said he later used to advantage when he cast a spell on a promoter who'd ripped him off. Another unfulfilled Babbs scheme was to emp loy voodoo to combat the smog of Los Angeles. Throughout the '50s, Babbs circled a globe of death - a steel-mesh ball, 18 feet in d iameter, b ig enough to ride around in - of hi s own invention. In 1958 in Ft. Worth, Babbs looped-the- loop 2,003 times without stopping, bellowin g vood oo chants and war whoops, while the globe was suspended 70 precarious feet above the circu s floor. Right in the middl e of the show, the globe su ddenly tore loose from its moo ring s and dropped four feet before settling again. Speedy never felt it; he was too occup ied wi th h is vood oo chanting. Babbs final days were spent in Florida, in the carnie village of Stuart, where he was a happy hermit living inside an abandoned Greyhound with his scrapbooks, memories, and wounds. Until the very end in 1976, he continued providing work for the osteopaths of the world. But no one will ever know why, in a last fit of nostalgia, he rounded up . an elderly fighting bull and decided to finish his life not on the wall of death, but as a "matador de toros" - just like in MazataJan, years and years before. COl

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