Motorcycle Incidents

I have had a few minor motorcycle ‘incidents’ over the years.  Minor, but memorable.  The first one that comes to mind was back in December of 1988.  I had traveled to the San Francisco Bay area with my girlfriend Lona, my best friend Mark Smith and his girlfriend Christy to see the Grateful Dead’s 3-night New Year’s Eve run of shows at the Oakland Coliseum.  We were staying at our friend Vickie Page's house in El Cerrito just north of Oakland, and her brother had a sweet new Honda V65 Magna motorcycle.  This was a large powerful 1100 cc motorcycle.  At the time, the motorcycle I was riding back home in Minneapolis was a 1976 Suzuki 185cc Enduro…a very fun bike, but small, old and not that powerful.  Vickie's brother was out of town for the week, so boasting that I had been riding motorcycles for years I begged her to let me take the bike out for a ride.  After refusing at first and then hesitating, she finally relented making me promise I would go slow, just around the neighborhood once, and then bring it right back.  "Okay, no problem." I said, but the 22 year old in me was just dying to get on that thing and tear it up.

Keep in mind this is a very hilly area with houses perched on the hills and the driveways all short and steep.  The bike is in the garage which is beneath the house.  I got on the bike, which was facing out towards the 20 foot driveway that is probably on almost a 45 degree angle up to the street.  It is basically a ramp.  So I’m revving up the bike, showing off, confident in my abilities.  However with my little 185cc bike I had to turn the throttle all the way full just to get the bike to start moving forward.  With my hands used to that method, I released the clutch and turned the throttle wide-open as usual.  Well of course with this 1100cc monster engine beneath my legs, it responded to my full-throttle by instantly shooting forth like a rocket.  I held on to the handlebars for dear life as the thing shot up the driveway ramp, flew OVER the road, hitting the sidewalk on the other side of the street and bouncing into a chain-link fence.  The entire trip lasted approximately 1.2 seconds, so Vickie got her wish of me just taking it for a short ride.

On the other side of the chain-link fence was a children’s daycare center and of course all of the children were outside playing when this maniac suddenly comes roaring out from the underground bat-cave and goes airborne in a mad attempt to take them all out.  So they’re all pointing and screaming and running away as I’m laying there on the sidewalk in a heap with this big beautiful blue motorcycle on it's side.  The engine kills but the tires are still spinning as I extract myself from the bike and struggle to get it up.  All my friends who had witnessed this came running up the driveway, making sure I wasn’t hurt before laughing their asses off at the spectacle of me shooting up out of the garage like an unguided missile.  Miraculously I was unhurt besides a couple of bloody scrapes.  The only one who was not laughing was Vickie.  She was worried that her brother would kill her but a quick inspection revealed only a few scratches, and fortunately her brother had laid it down a week earlier going around a corner so it was impossible to tell the new scrapes from the old scrapes...we were off the hook.

The most recent incident was just last summer when I asked my friend Ernie to come over with his pick-up truck on a Saturday afternoon to help me bring my motorcycle in to the shop...the same 1985 Yamaha Maxim 700 from my blog a couple of weeks ago.  The carbs needed work so I had to haul it in to Minneapolis to get it fixed.  It's a fairly big bike.  For some reason I assumed Ernie was bringing some wood with him for a ramp to get the bike up to the bed of the truck.  Nope...he thought I had wood.  So the trick now was how to get this 500 lb hunk of metal from the ground up onto the bed of his truck.  We hunted around and found some 2x4’s in my garage…not wide enough or long enough, but they will have to do.  Wait…Ernie spots a 2x6 up in the rafters.  We bring that down…about 6 feet long.  Better, but is it long enough and can it hold a motorcycle?  Hmm.  We decide to brace it with a metal folding ladder I have. 

So we park Ernie’s truck down by the street, with the open back of the truck facing up towards the house.  We put the ladder from the ground to the truck and then laid the board on top of that.  Unfortunately the board is about a foot shorter than the ladder.  We figured screw it, by the time the bike is that far up the board it will have enough momentum to go that last foot.   We joked that we should get the video camera from inside so Ernie could film it to send to Youtube or America’s Funniest Home Videos, but sadly we neglected to do that.

So I sit on the bike, back it up to the top of my short, steep driveway, and gave a couple of pushes with my feet and start heading the 20 feet down till I get to the ramp.  Well…it went great until I got almost to the top of the board and then the bike stopped…I didn’t have enough speed.  “Uh, oh.” I said quietly as me and the bike slowly started tipping to the right.  You know that feeling you get right before something painful is about to happen?  Like when you were a kid and you are going over a jump on your bicycle and then in mid-air the bike starts nosing downward and you know you're going to go over the handlebars and it's going to hurt a lot?  Well I got to revisit that sad, helpless feeling on this particular afternoon.  As we started to tip I instinctively put both my feet down to where there would normally be ground, but of course there was nothing but air so I braced myself for the 4 foot fall off the side of the board while sitting on this 500 lb anchor. 

I managed to jump off sideways but still hold on to the handlebars while the back of the bike hit the ground.  Somehow the front tire stayed on the bed of the truck while the back was laying on it’s side.  Ernie’s eyes were like saucers as he ran over and helped me grab the bike and lift it up off it’s side.  But now what??  The front tire is still on the truck, the back is on the ground, and I’ve got sharp pain and future deep bruises on my left ankle and right hip.  We noticed some neighbors who were having a graduation party down the street all gathered out in their driveway with beers in hand pointing at us, but they didn’t think to come over and help.  Then a neighbor from the other side of the house came running through my yard to help.  He grabs the handlebars and somehow me and Ernie muscled the back end of the bike up on to the truck. 

I was in pain and dripping sweat, but we got the b*stard safely on the truck and tied it down.  There was plenty of cosmetic damage with a broken signal-light, dented exhaust pipe and numerous scratches on the side, but we both got off pretty good considering.  Same lesson learned in both 'incidents':  never attempt a tricky motorcycle/ramp maneuver when not running video.  That was just plain dumb in both cases.