Chapter One: Genesis - Parts One & Two

Chapter One: Genesis

Part One: WTF

"Very dangerous!  And anybody who tells you differently is a liar.  A fucking liar!"

"Why do you do it then?".

"I don't care.  Like Sitting Bull every time I get up in the morning I think "Today is a good day to die."

"Seems stupid."

"Oh it is stupid.  Every minute you're riding a motorcycle at sixty miles an hour, or more if you're really stupid - which is most of the time, for me - you have to focus on just staying alive.  Any second some catastrophe could happen and "Blam!" you're dead or really badly fubarred, which is actually worse than getting dead.  For me that is relaxation.  Laser focused, but not thinking."

I appear to have a blinking whirly-gig light on my head and I don't seem to know it...

"When I start thinking, I start feeling sorry for myself.  Every mistake, every screw-up in my life starts running though my head.  I start punching myself in the brain for each and every one of those fuck ups.  Over and over on a loop that never stops."

...you're staring at me...beginning to edge away.  Trying not to be obvious, uncomfortable with the direction this conversation has taken...

You see fear where I apparently can't.  In your mind riding a motorcycle is somewhere just below sky-diving without a parachute, and a hair above ice climbing. Ice climbing: in super cold climates, waterfalls freeze.  Nutty people climb them like stone cliffs.  Except ice is very brittle and dangerous.  If you fall, first land on more ice, which can break and then you are in a freezing river and then the ice cliff falls on top of you.

I have witnessed your reaction, heard it all so many times.  In the beginning, just learning to ride and dealing with my own fears.  Staying on the road.  Hell, just trying not to drop the 600 lb bike at every stop light and stop sign.  Riding just to learn how to ride.  Traffic.  The Interstate, where I was terrified the first time.  A first I would be all, "Oh, it's great.  You should try it!  It's not really, like, all that dangerous.  You just have to be careful."

After years, hundreds or more, of water-cooler and lunch break conversations, where someone else brought it up,  someone who thought roller-skating was walking the edge, fuck-it.  You think riding a motorcycle is dangerous and nuts, fine.  Don't ride a motorcycle.  Don't even touch one.  You might get danger cooties.

Second in popularity to the "you're crazy" is the "I used to."

"I used to ride a bike.  I had a 1946 Harley Super Knucklehead 5000 ZXL" (not a real bike model)

"Uh-huh."

"Yeah.  Young and crazy.  Can't do that anymore.  I did love it though."

Bearing in mind that nearly every person I hear making this statement is no less than twenty years my junior.  Most of, well half, of the active riders I know are near my age or even older.  And women.  The older I get more often than not the rider is a woman who appears to be around my age.  Never let her know you might be estimating her age though.  Women motorcycle riders are generally a demographic you do not want to piss off.

Part Two: I Buy a Bike

"When you buy your first bike, go with the smallest engine your ego will allow you to get."  The words of my Virginia State Motorcycle Course instructor.  She and her partner had been an excellent teachers, so I took her words as gospel.

The year when I bought my motorcycle was one of those periods of American social environmental insanity.  Hummers were all the rage.  Gas was expensive, but if you were on the low end of the millionaire status you could delude yourself into believing the world supply of gasoline would last forever.  A vast seeming majority of Americans of moderate income have a genetic brain disorder that tells them they really are millionaires and are never going to loose their job.  They will never know poverty or adversity.  God just plain loves them uniquely and above everyone else.  "I want a Hummer,  it looks big and bad, so I'm agonna git one!" 

Both of my motorcycle class instructors had Harleys.  Admittedly beautiful machines, immaculately kept up.  The lady instructor's was some kind of lady-color she had custom done.  She had tassels and flappy thing streamers hanging off her bike everywhere.  I got the image she must look like a shuttle-cock at sixty miles an hour.  The guy's was black with everything that could be chromed up chromed up.  Very masculine.  Neither of them were large people.  Both bikes were in the large category.

Being Harleys both bikes had taken over a year to get.  Harley-Davidson are beautiful bikes.  Running down the road they sound cool as hell.  Frequently the popular models are back ordered no less than six months.  Any manufacturing custom work you want done adds another half a year, or so.  Long term riders, who already have one working machine, are ready and willing to pay the premium money and wait in line for however long it's gonna take.  I wanted to ride, not to wait.

A personal note here.  I have had long stretches of time in my career where I didn't make much money at all and several brief periods where I have made very good money.  I also fathered a large family.  My disposable income, or what my wife has let me spend on myself, is very very limited.  So...anything I am allowed to buy for myself I research, think four times about it, take notes and research it again.  I read all the buyers reviews and talk to everybody I can find who has ever bought that particular thing.  Then I go with my gut and jump in with both feet.  Ninety per cent of the time it works out great.  Ten per cent of the time, it's a disaster.

I met my wife.  We went out on maybe two dates.  She moved in and a month later we got married.  That was in the early 70's.  We're still together and it has been well within that ninety per cent of the good.

As to my motorcycle buying research.  Above the 750cc engine size mark the gas economy drops to the forty-five mpg range.  Without exception.  Or, big engine, crappy mileage.  Being as it was a Hummer era, none of the large motorcycle manufacturers were making small bikes in the fuel efficiency range.  In each model category Harleys seemed to average a thousand dollars more than any other make.  Once again, worth it to riders who had been on the road for while and knew what the hell they were doing.  That was not me.

I also found that many riders on non-Harleys, who also seemed to know what they were doing, had once been Harley riders.  Here are a few of their observations.

"They never stop leaking oil." 

"You have to haul a trailer to carry all the parts that fall off." 

"It's in the shop half the time."

"If you don't keep it spotless or get a tiny scratch on it, all the other Harley riders will give you constant shit about it."

Raising four boys, two girls...hockey players, skate boarders, all of them learning to drive.  Plus an long assortment of dogs, cats, rabbits, zebra finches and even a box turtle.  I have spent my early adulthood, and most of my middle age, fixing shit.  I should say - first finding my tools, going to the hardware or auto part stores to replace my ruined and/or rusted-up tools - and then fixing shit.  I love my children.  They were all wonderful children.  They all grew into amazing and wonderful adults.  But, as children, they did bust up a lot of stuff...furniture, stairs, doors, windows, car bumpers, etc..  Numerous lawn mowers were left in the rain.  One mower was left outside for an entire New Hampshire winter.

The killer was a tiny 49cc motor scooter I rode to work for two years.  When I got it to start to get me to work, it wouldn't start to get me home after work.  It would start to get me to the library, it wouldn't start to get me and fifty pounds of books home.  Always when it was raining and cold.  Always.

This means:

            I wanted; first...get on it, start it (must start first time, every time) and ride; second...requiring maintenance is reasonable, requiring fixing is not; third...fuel efficiency, gotta put in lotsa miles on the cheap; fourth...can't be black, black paint requires a lot of cleaning and I simply don't clean transportation, ever.  I generally buy silver painted stuff.  Silver doesn't show dirt or scratches much.  So; fourth...(precisely) it had to be silver.

Last; fifth...it had to be a showroom new bike.  I was a novice, a virgin rider who didn't know a damn thing about motorcycles and I did not want to discover any hidden secrets with my body and life on the line at sixty miles an hour.

Must start.  No fixing.  Cheap to run.  Silver color.  No secrets.

As I began to go to showrooms and sit on various machines it quickly became apparent there was a sixth requirement   I am short.  My feet had to be able to set squarely and firmly on the road when stopped.  The only motorcycle I had actually ever driven was the one they loaned me in the state run motorcycle course and it fit so well I hadn't noticed or thought about "fit".  It was only as I straddled a variety of bikes that "fit" became an obvious crucial requirement.

Handlebar width and grip angle were noticeably unique to each bike model.  Some felt normal, natural, others just seemed weird.  Saddles, or seats, were subtlety comfortable or uncomfortable.  I am strongly right handed.  I shoot hockey lefty.  Snowboard goofy foot.  My right leg is slightly longer than my left and yet my left foot is slightly bigger than my right.  In normal life a lot of these body uniquenesses might go unnoticed.  When you race bicycles, ski race, play hockey...these little quirks can lead to really painful blisters, bunions, crashes.  Lot of visits to the chiropractor.  Knee braces.

As I was to learn, fifteen miles on any motorcycle is a fun ride.  A hundred miles on a motorcycle that doesn't "fit" is torture.  I think I would prefer being water-boarded to riding the wrong bike for a hundred miles.  At the time of shopping for my first, and only, bike, I was shooting in the dark.   Just didn't know it.

At the time, in the entire state of Virginia the only under 1000cc, non-Harley, showroom-new - I mean the only one I could find - just happened to be silver and it was a Honda.  True, the dealer was about a hundred miles away in the Virginia state capital, Richmond.  But that was it.  I had already driven to Harrisburg, Lynchburg and other Virginia cities even further away and been disappointed.  Wrong color, didn't feel right, too big, the dealers were dicks. 

Side-note; never buy a large complex machine from a dick, be that dick a man or a woman.  My experience; once you leave the store, if you have a problem that person who sold it to you is not going to somehow magically become nice. If they were obnoxious when you bought it, they will be worse if, or when, you have to deal with them again.

My bike was at a tiny dealership, in a beat down squat building on a narrow one-way street. A street that was a moonscape with potholes and deep cracks everywhere. And not in a particularly up-scale part of Richmond.  Sandwiched between a State Liquor Store and a pawn shop.  From the outside it did not inspire a lot of confidence.  My wife and I circled around the two block radius trying to figure out just how to get to the place.  We shoe-horned our mini-van into a parallel parking spot and hurried into the showroom. 

The contrast between everything outside and everything inside was slightly numbing.  Clean, orderly, the dealer was a really nice guy.  My silver Honda Shadow VXL 600 (sixty miles to the gallon) was in the middle of a row of much larger bikes.  It stood out like Jack in The Land of the Giants.  My bike was Jack.

It was two years old, but it was showroom new.  Never had gas in the tank.  It felt perfect.  The dealer got the financing rammed through in a cheerfully short amount of time.  I had my bike.

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