What Brought You To the Bars?
What brought you to the ‘bars? It seems I was born behind them. Other’s it seems they were destined to find them. They are on back roads and super highways across the world, every one of them have something just like you and I, an urge to ride a motorcycle. For no other reason than to ride, I don’t remember my first ride but I do remember Pop hauling me out of the back of his ’57 Chevy’s white vinyl back seat as he lifted the z50 out in one hand and myself in the other.
Children of the late 60’s and early 70’s were raised at a great time in the evolution of motorcycles. The really quirky European bikes with sketchy parts availability were relegated to the parts pile and the age of the metrics was in full bloom. There were UJM’s and the first age of sportbikes next to oily shovelheads in the parking lots. For just about everyone there was a bike at an affordable price. First and foremost it was cheap transportation to the public at large, while my friends were playing Dukes of Hazard I had King Kenny in my mind’s eye and anything I could get a leg over would give me that feeling of speed and control
There was never a question if I wanted to ride a motorcycle, it was omnipresent, everyone in my world rode a motorcycle. We never had the latest model or in the best of kit. When I saw one behind a neighbor’s shed or in a milk crate or two, I asked if I could fix it, could I ride it? No matter the bike. I’ve never had a new one and was rarely without one. That first one was an Aeromachi I’m told, then that first z50 begat another, then another that I also promptly disassembled, then a great Christmas brought a ct70 that I left mostly intact. Pop was a Honda dealer since the late 60’s, We were the nicest people you’d meet on a Honda.
Junior high pal Jimmy Holt comes over and declares the neighborhood guys with bikes are meeting this weekend to ride. I was working in a shop and begged an abandoned xl125 from the owner. It was old and hammered with a nickel sized hole in the engine case behind the clutch basket. Duct tape for a form and a tube of JB weld from the top of Pops toolbox had me pushing it home from the shop, only briefly interrupted by brrraps through the park and behind the Admiral Twin drive in. I worked that week for the Xl.
The meet up spot was at the site of a hotel being built behind our old drive in. A quick ride through the elementary school yard next to the Admiral Twin was all it took you get there, do’able for a kid with no truck, much less a trailer. After cleaning the float bowl out on Wes’s lawnmower Sears and pull starting Jimmy’s RM with questionable compression, the fun was on. It was cleared of trees and hard packed Oklahoma red dirt. A basement had been dug so there was a frightening drop in, dry pool on a bmx’er style, head down and wait to find the wall before the front tire finds the bottom. Immediately afterwards it finds the bottom of the suspension, flattening your chest to the tank as all that compression finds the far wall and ferociously climbs it to be popped out a few feet clear of the hole, to the cheers of the preps and hoods alike. Mind you the outsiders were being filmed at the drive-in.
After an hour or so of harmless red-mud fun we took a five minute break next to the pit. A new sound came round the dirt mounds and drain pipes, a roar so familiar that made me say his name just as Greenie’s Shadow fairing burst into view, lifted by the waterfall of pipes at eye level, backed by a blur of orange with Pop’s best friend astride and aloft, both on their ’73 CB750’s. After a couple of dirt slinging donuts and cheers and jeers from the crew as a whole, beaming from in a cloud of dust and in bright white Hodaka shirt, Pop shouts “someday you nancy boys will be abe to get out and ride those things if you don’t get locked up for riding here first” and rides out, off of the curb and roars up the onramp to the nearby high way.
If I wasn’t genetically locked up already, I knew right then, I’d be behind bars for the rest of my life. It’s wasn’t the noise, the adrenalin, chain wallets, patches or sexy leather that brought me here, it was the joy that I found in the fumes of a day well spent. It was the look on the old man’s face when he saw the look on mine, behind bars.
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