Bruce Meyers, the Meyers Manx and 50 years of unfinished business

They left the staging area at 1 in the morning. The Manxter Dual Sport dune buggy was holding by faith alone -- it had been repaired over and over again, parts tied or taped together, seldom replaced; covered in the acrid dust of the desert, a dust that fills your lungs and face, a dust that worms its way into the cabin and across every surface. The GPS navigation was out. The radio was out. All the lights were out, or almost all of them of them: just one lower right headlamp still worked, jostling up and down erratically over the bumps and nearly useless. More than 100 miles lay between them and the finish line at La Paz, the last stage of the Mexican 1000. To finish, at this point, was just enough. In the cold and pitch-black night of the Baja Peninsula, the yellow buggy set off.

Bruce Meyers was driving, and Brad Bollman was attempting to navigate. The helmet-to-helmet intercom was out. They devised a system of hand signals that consisted of two commands: "turns" and "danger." That was all they needed. Occasionally, Bollman would grab onto Meyers when they had to hit the brakes -- that was another signal. "He's got OK vision at night," Bollman noted.

This worked for them for nearly the entire 110-mile route. They approached a village somewhere within sight of the finish line. Bouncing feverishly over the rocks, the light shining every which direction, the noise and heat and dust stirred up by the car rattled the brains of the two men inside. They were deviously, desperately off-course. The Manx hit a patch of silt, and the rear wheels dug in. Stuck.

They sat there and watched the sun rise over La Paz -- streaks of clouds emanating from the horizon, lit pink and purple over the Gulf of California. Eventually, the chase cars rushed over from the staging area and dug them out. Meyers, then 78, felt rather terrible about the whole situation. When they found him, they rushed him to a hospital so the doctors could understand what equal parts desert prowess and insanity could do to a person at that age. The next morning, the chase cars towed the little dune buggy across the finish line. The crowd cheered. Bollman was just happy they made it.

Meyers failed to finish the Mexican 1000 in 2004. Of the 10 times he raced the famed off-road odyssey, he never drove to the finish line save for one time, in 1967 -- possibly the only time it mattered. Meyers, with his friend Ted Mangels in tow, drove the world's first Meyers Manx down the length of the Baja Peninsula, from Tijuana to La Paz, in just under 34 hours and 45 minutes. The previous attempt was run by Bud Elkins on a Honda CL72 Scrambler in 1962, five years prior. Meyers and Mangels beat this by five hours. They proved that a four-wheeler could go anywhere a high-piped scrambler could, even when ridden by a legend. "Buggy Beats Bike in Baja!" read the headlines.

A few months later, an ex-Marine by the name of Ed Pearlman, who had co-founded the National Off-Road Racing Association the year before, would organize a 1,000-mile event that largely traced Meyers' and Mangels' route. On Nov. 2, 1967, Mangels and Vic Wilson won the first official Mexican 1000 -- later the Baja 1000 -- in a Manx buggy. (Meyers had to talk his friend Wilson, a diehard Jeepster, into driving a Manx: "It can go anywhere your Jeep can't!") The duo obliterated the record in 27 hours and 38 minutes. But Meyers, in a sense, won the very first Baja 1000 -- before there even was a Baja 1000.

In the 2004 documentary "Dust to Glory," the soft-spoken Wilson said: "As you go through life, if you knew you were making history you would've paid more attention to it."

"Mackerel is red, full of bones," said Meyers. "You gotta cook the hell out of it to eat it. This place would rattle and clank and keep me awake at night like a bunch of Model Ts. It used to make cat food. Isn't it interesting that we named the buggy after a cat?"

Meyers was standing on the steps of the Cannery Seafood of the Pacific, a posh restaurant in the gutted and resurrected remains of Western Canners Company, which shut down in 1966 -- back when this place was a shantytown of fiberglass sailboats and corrugated garages, populated by fishermen from the canneries who would come in on their trawlers with hauls of mackerel. It was nicknamed "Dreadnought City." It was the sort of place where a man could rent a suit for $7 to go to a wedding, or a funeral. Meyers laughed as he reminisced. "Hell, what's the difference?"

Meyers lived in a garage at 509 34th St., down the road from the clanking machinery of the Western Canners that kept him up at night. He was fresh out of the Navy, where he had survived a kamikaze attack aboard the USS Bunker Hill. He had bummed about Tahiti for two years, where he ran a trading post and where the island girls would swim up, shimmering. He had finished a bit of art school in San Francisco and Los Angeles, and he was making $70 a week shaping surfboards, $10 per board, underneath a catamaran named Hihano, "which was named after the flower," said Meyers, "which was named after the beer." The fiberglass experience for the boards and Old Red, he had earned building Cal 40 sailboats for Jack Jensen. On the weekends he would make $15 per night playing Tahitian music on guitar. He slept in a bunk bed in the tool crib of his Newport Beach garage with his then-wife Shirley, who worked as a receptionist at nearby Road & Track during the day and asa cocktail waitress at night. "The engine of my life," Meyers remarked -- one of six women he married, though not at the same time. During the day she would sit on the sink and shave her legs as the fishermen walked by and gawked.

At night he would go into the garage and lay fiberglass resin over a shortened Volkswagen Beetle chassis and a Chevrolet pickup suspension. Like the mackerel the fishermen brought in for the clanking cannery, it was painted red. Old Red, Meyers fittingly called it. He had chopped the wheelbase on the Beetle and raised the fenders, rendering them in compound curves for strength and clearance for tall suspensions and knobby tires. The standup headlights resembled that of a small frog, or the first Austin-Healey Sprite which had ended production just three years before. The fenders had to be flat to hold a bottle of beer upright. The sides had to keep the mud and dust out of the driver's face. Above all, it had to look good: "I added all the line and feminine form and Mickey Mouse adventure I could," he said. It had to look like it came from California, from Meyers' California, where he would "smoke a little grass, race a '32 Highboy Ford at the lake beds, chase pretty girls." He did just that.

Meyers figured he'd do 10 orders a year, and that'd be it. He even turned down an offer from EMPI, which had been making Volkswagen parts for nearly a decade. "It would have been the perfect arrangement," said Meyers in a 2006 interview. "But I said no. I was the stupidest guy in the world, as Joe would have delivered 10 orders a day!" Eight years later in Newport Beach, he expanded on his own hindsight: "Nobody knows what you got ahead of you in life when you got busy fingers building things."

It was equal parts Steinbeck and the California dream -- this humble garage by the beach in shantytown Newport, before the yachts and the condos and the Porsches that meandered down Lido Drive. A Hot Rod cover in August 1966 exploded the Manx into popularity. A year later, Car & Driver put it on its April 1967 cover with the promise: "YOU CAN BUILD THIS FUN CAR FOR $635!"

Meyers sold 350 cars overnight. He stacked Manx bodies in his garage like paper cups. The Mexican 1000 beckoned, and he answered. But such hubris is unsustainable, lasting dreams untenable. The concept was so simple that companies started answering the demand for dune buggies with thinly veiled knockoffs, even full moldings -- by 1968, even EMPI was in on the game. The business was biting the artist. Meyers sued unsuccessfully to protect his copyright and his own genius, but a Sacramento judge ruled that because he had built Old Red a year before he filed a patent, it was deemed "public use." Meyers fumed. "He didn't know a dune buggy from a shopping cart," he said.

Meyers went on to develop the fiberglass hot tub. He developed an early form of bedliner for the back of pickup trucks. He created the Night Racer, a race car bed for children; it bore a not insignificant resemblance to a Can-Am racer -- fresh out of college, Stewart Reed designed this for Meyers along with the scissor-doored, street-tired Manx SR. He met his sixth wife, Winnie, while playing guitar. And on the Seventh Day, he rested.

But the knuckle-dragging fights, the legions of copycats, the shaken faith in the legal system -- they got to Meyers. Growing increasingly angry and despondent, the once-tranquil life he had slipping further away, he moved further inland to Fountain Valley to build more buggies -- eventually a little over 6,000. By his estimate, 70 companies had ripped him off and built a total of 250,000. In 1971, he shut down the business, and himself. A bitterness folded over his once-peaceful Californian dream. "They were all of the last dregs of my last passions and energies, to keeping B.F. Meyers and company alive," he said. "I didn't even want to hear the words 'dune buggy.' I was just possessed with self-destruction."

Unfinished business lay in front of him.

It took a Frenchman named Jacky Morel to bring Meyers back into the world of the living. He invited Meyers to the 1994 Super VW Nationals at Le Mans, which Meyers accepted reluctantly. But in France, 16,000 Manx fans treated Bruce like a hero. When Meyers saw the parade of Manxes around the famed racetrack, all that bitterness seemed to evaporate. "When you're surrounded by love," said Meyers, "it's pretty hard to be unhappy."

Two decades had passed while Meyers quietly seethed, disavowing any memories of his beloved creation; two decades of willful dissociation, fueled by the powerlessness to protect his creation. The depression had gnawed at him. But that week in France, Meyers took away one thing Morel had told him. "Forget the car," Morel had said. "Remember that you made them smile."

Everything Meyers created, he figured, had brought joy to people. There were no frowns in a hot tub. Children would sleep at night in their Night Racers, dreaming of race car stardom. "If you frown, you'll get lonely," he philosophized. "If you get lonelier, the frown will deepen. Then, you fall into the downward spiral."

The car that Meyers drove in 2004 had raced Baja six times. Like Meyers, it had never finished once.

It had originally been built in 1967, though the license plates say "1964," for poetic sake. In 2002, in conjunction with the relaunch of Meyers Manx Inc., the car saw a conversion into a Manxter Dual Sport: full-length pan, new fiberglass body, 6-inch wheelbase lengthening, 3 inches of additional wheel travel. A man named Bob Konkoff bought it in 2005 "because I didn't want it to disappear." That year, it raced in the Mexican 1000 again. The battery pulley came off -- which broke the alternator, which broke the power steering, which stopped cooling the motor. "And at some point," said Marty Fiolka, "the transmission blew."

Fiolka, who learned to drive on a Manx at age 9,had helped produce the award-winning "Dust to Glory." He approached Meyers last November about driving the Baja Peninsula one last time for a new documentary, a labor of love Fiolka titled "Baja Social Club." Meyers agreed. Fiolka and Dakar veteran Andy Grider would do most of the driving, but Meyers would drive the last section, 40 miles to the finish line in Cabo.

The car had sat since 2005, badly in need of repair. "They kept globbing on welds, and all this junk," said Fiolka. In the two and a half weeks before the 2014 Mexican 1000, the sponsor funding came in, and a band of 10 volunteers stayed up for nights on end completing the restoration.

"We have spare engines," said Fiolka. "Spare tires. Spare transmission. We have a chase truck. We have a lot of supplies from the off-road community that [Meyers] started. They totally get it.

"This is the right race to finish this deal. So we're gonna finish this deal."

"Are you Doc or are you Mack?" I asked Meyers, who had described his life in the '60s by quoting Steinbeck's "Cannery Row": "a poem, a stink, a grating noise…a nostalgia, a dream." Meyers paused for a second. "Doc," he concluded. "The drunks loved him, the whores loved him…yeah, I'd say so."

As we were talking, Elana Scherr from Hot Rod magazine, the magazine that had elevated Meyers to superstardom, approached her old friend with a hug. She had written a profile of Meyers last year.

"Are you going to come join us?" Meyers asked, hopefully.

"I can't pack that fast!" she lamented. "I need at least two days' notice!"

He seemed genuinely remorseful to hear this. In just a few hours he would be heading to Tijuana, ready for another chance to finish the race he never finished, in a car that never finished. Ten years ago, after all, he had tried and failed. But it could have been worse: in 1968, a year after he and Mangels set the record with Old Red, he entered again. That year, he tried to chase Parnelli Jones in a Meyers Tow'd and drove into an unseen embankment, breaking both of his legs in compound fractures and nearly losing his left foot. He spent 22 hours in pain, alone in the desert, before a camera helicopter spotted him and airlifted him to a San Diego hospital.

At age 88, he would have few chances left. Meyers, bearing the scars of those past races, would celebrate his creation's 50th anniversary by reinforcing its legacy: a triumph over the cheaters and the lawsuits, the tax problems and the ex-wives, even -- a fitting victory, 50 years in the making! Or he would be towed into Cabo four days later, just as he was 10 years ago -- an ignominious ending, a disappointing fate. The chance, the possibilities, the risk that lays ahead for the next four days…he didn't know, none of us did, but it was evident in his eyes and his voice that he desperately wanted the victory, the chance in itself.

This was unfinished business.

"We'll do it next year!" Scherr promised.

"Elana," Bruce said, with a certain pang of weariness in his voice, "I wish. I just wish."

The 2014 Mexican 1000 is happening now. Visit the event's website for more information.

By Blake Z. Rong