I’ll often say that I’ve been riding since I was big enough to lift a 50cc Honda off the ground. That was my grandfather’s rule, never ride a bike that you can’t pick up after dropping it. This rule was born of his understanding that “once you get on one, you’re going to come off it,” which was his advice to me when I bought my first motorcycle. For many years he kept a couple dirt bikes in his garage and whenever we’d go down to Florida to visit them riding was always top of my mind. This is my mother’s father I’m talking about, a wildly different man than my father’s father. When my mother was a teenager, the two of them would ride from New Jersey to Daytona for the bike rally there. I remember him telling me that she’d whisper into his ear, “faster, daddy, faster.”
The combination of wanting to get in on the action, a growing friendship with an avid rider that he knew through church, and the early onset of a midlife crisis (though in hindsight it was precisely the middle point of his life) led my father to begin riding in his mid-thirties. He got himself an old Kawasaki, and rides with him on the weekends were a thrill. On Mother’s Day 1992, he and I were out for a ride down a two lane county road in Delran, NJ when someone turned left in front of us to pull into their driveway. I remember the trees whizzing past. I remember Born to Be Wild playing inside my head. I remember a brief panic, and then I remember coming to while laying on the ground. Years later, perhaps decades, my mother told me that for a very long while I would have flashbacks and panic attacks when someone would turn in front of us, but I have no conscious memory of the accident itself.
I was told that my father made the right choice, that in that moment the best thing to do was to lay the bike on its side and slide into the car. In fact he walked away from that accident with just a sprained ankle. I was not as fortunate, as when we hit her, to everyone’s best guess, my left foot was caught in the free spinning back wheel. I remember a bit after that, including sitting up, looking at my foot, and passing out from the sight of it. It took nearly fifty stitches to put my foot back together and a couple months of recovery time. It has been a source of pain for me ever since, and it was the beginning of the end of my parents’ marriage.
As brutal as it was, that wreck did nothing to dampen either of ours fascination with motorcycles. My father continued to ride, just no longer with his children on the back, and it was fourteen years later when I bought my first motorcycle. With my grandfather’s advice in mind I bought a bike that I wouldn’t be afraid of dumping, an old Honda that I got for a few hundred bucks off of Craigslist. I rode it for a season, mostly without my license, and since I didn’t drop it I felt I was ready to upgrade the following year.
I lucked out and found a great deal on a one year old Triumph Bonneville. Some middle aged doctor had bought the high end model. He gave his wife one ride on it and she was hooked. They then decided to buy something larger to accommodate the two of them, and I was the beneficiary of this. It was British, it was black, and the price left me with enough to spare to make it loud and fast. It was perfect. That bike rode like nothing else I’ve ever been on. Night after night I would push it to its limits through the streets of Philadelphia, often after drinking and almost never with a helmet on. This combination of speed, agility and recklessness couldn’t last long.
On Father’s Day 2007, I got back into the city after an afternoon barbeque with family and decided to take a quick ride from my south Philly apartment up to the Lukoil at Spring Garden and Delaware Ave. As I pulled onto Delaware to head back south, two women on Harleys pulled up next to me at the red light. They teased me a bit for my “little trumpy,” which I took in good nature, and we cruised with each other from red light to red light along the river. Halfway down the city, a handful of crotch rockets weaved through traffic and stopped beside us at a light. This time the trash talking from the girls was not good natured. Everyone was too engaged in the yapping, and so when the light turned green I was the first to take off. I had third gear wound all the way out when a car in the right shoulder decided to make a quick U-turn across three lanes of traffic. There was space in the median for them to clear out of the way, but by the time I realized they weren’t going to it was too late to do anything but lock up the brakes and jerk the bike to the left.
I smashed into the car, at a pretty high speed, and bounced off it landing on my back. My first instinct, as is usually the case, was to stand up as quickly as possible. The crotch rockets speed off, but the Harley girls stopped. They were arguing with the people in the car while I went through a quick self-diagnosis. Everything felt pretty okay, except something felt tight in my right arm. I looked down and saw that it was shaped like an S. The adrenaline started to settle into my stomach, and by the time the ambulance got there I had to lay myself back on the ground to cope with the dizziness. I was taken to hospital where they resecured my arm with a plate and screws.
Once again, this was not enough to stop me from riding. I almost immediately began searching for another bike, as the wreck had ripped the forks off the neck of the Triumph. This time I wanted something that wouldn’t tempt me to push my limits. I found a ’79 Sportster that had been bobbed out and painted primer grey. It was loud, it was heavy, and it did very well going in straight lines. There’d be no weaving in and out of traffic on this bike, it was much more form over function. This was the last model year before Harley started putting a rubber mat in between the engine and the frame, so after every ride something had rattled loose and needed retightening before being able to be ridden again. This was fine for the three months that I was out of work healing from the wreck. However, once I was back to work, I didn’t have the time to keep putting it back together and it sat in my mother’s garage for months.
That winter I began looking around for something that was more reliable but still unlikely to encourage me to push the needle. I eventually came across a guy who had this shop in Bordentown, NJ. He subletted the front portion of his store to a few antiques dealers and in the back sold vintage motorcycles. In addition to the vintage bikes, he was also one of the few licensed dealers at the time for Royal Enfield in the US. He offered to sell the Harley on commission, use that as the down payment, and let me pay off the rest of the balance over the winter so that come spring I had a brand new bike. It was light and agile, had the style I wanted, and with a 500cc single cylinder engine it did not have the capacity to get me in trouble.
I owned that bike for close to ten years. A lot of that time was spent riding it regularly, but a lot of that time was spent with the bike in storage. I moved here to Illinois, later brought the bike over, and eventually sold it for the down payment on a house in Minnesota. That was the spring of ’18, and I was without a motorcycle until this year. Shortly after buying both the CB and the Goldwing, my daughter and I flew out to California to visit my mother. She had just moved back to the foothills of Mount Shasta after spending a few years in Alaska. Her husband has this small displacement Kawasaki street bike. After a couple days of learning the bike and learning the local roads, I gave my daughter her first ride. It was a quick trip through the neighborhood and around the lake there. The next day she wanted to ride again, this time she said she wanted to go further and faster. History doesn’t repeat itself, as Mark Twain said, but it rhymes.