Hot. The kind of hot where your shoes get soupy, and your underwear get… Well never mind those. The sting of summer on my skin, like a good friend giving me the business.  I was just ten years old. And I was small for my age. I was small but fearless. I mean nothing scared me. In the back of a near collapsing garage behind an abandoned house I was hoping it would be cooler in the shade. It wasn’t really but at least the sun wasn’t burning me.

The garage was crowded with shadows and musty smells. Crammed full of old junk, furniture mostly. An old wringer washer, a bent up ironing board, some stuff I didn’t recognize and can’t remember today. Having nothing better to do I poked around in that junk just to see what I could find. Back in a corner, heaped over with old buckets, and rags and god only knows what else I spied a set of handle bars. Pulling and tugging I moved enough junk to see that it was a motor bike of some sort and thought I had to be the luckiest kid in the world.

Well I piled all that junk back on top of it, I didn’t want someone else to come along and find it. I jumped on my Schwinn and pedaled like mad all the way home. Seven blocks north and fourteen blocks east. Course at that age north and east meant nothing to me. Pouring sweat, and drawing huge gasping breaths I all but threw my once beloved Schwinn down the basement steps. That bike had been my most prized possession. My trusty steed. Now, now that I had found a motorcycle…not so much.

Stopping just long enough to guzzle just enough water to give me some respectable cramps from the outside spigot I set off again at a run. Seven blocks south, 14 blocks west. My PF Flyers slapping the pavement, and the sun slapping my bare shoulders and back. Even then I wore my hair long. Bleached almost white by the sun It hung heavy with sweat and hot against my neck. My hair lifted slightly as I ran the hot sticky air felt cool on my neck.

Pounding down the sidewalks I ran, as hard as a ten year old boy on an epic mission can. Dreams of dare devil stunts, of speed, of roaring engine and gleaming spokes flashing through my head I ran. Back to that falling down garage full of unwanted junk. My gut in a knot fearing the worst, just knowing someone had come while I was taking my bike home and found my treasure and taken it away.

Thundering into the garage at full speed I came pretty close to ending it all right then and there. I all but impaled myself on a broken shovel handle when I tripped over some anonymous yet no less malicious hunk of junk bent on the murder of an adventurous kid who knew nothing of caution. Tearing thought the junk and dust I dug it out.

I didn’t know what kind of bike it was. I didn’t know how to ride it or how to start it even. But as soon as I got it clear of junk and far enough away from the wall I jumped right on it. Making Vroom Vroom sounds and twisting the throttle like a retard. All set to ride it home, ride it to the park, ride it, ride it RIDE IT! If I could just get it started.

All of that had to wait though. Because the first thing I had to do was get it out of that garage full of junk. Cursing under my breath, then immediately giggling at myself and the use o the “bad word” I set to work. It probably took me about an hour, though it felt like an entire day of hoisting, pushing, grunting lifting and dragging to clear a path just wide enough to wheel that magnificent hunk of shit out of there and into the sunlight.

The only gleaming chrome on it turned out to be the foil wrapper from a piece of chewing gum. It had more rust on it than any thing else. My hopes and dreams seamed to dim a bit. But I started pushing. And pushing. Seven blocks north fourteen blocks east. It creaked and squeaked and sometimes didn’t want to go. The front tire was almost flat  and every so often it would make the bike try to turn or fall over.

I had found in the garage that I could reach what I though of as its “pedals” but I couldn’t reach the ground on it. When ever it would sway away from me it took every ounce of strength I had to keep it from falling over. There were a few times that if not for someone’s hedges I would surely have dropped it. But I kept pushing, and I kept dreaming of races, and of how envious all the other kids would be.

I pushed, and I sweated, and I grinned all the way home. Seven blocks north, fourteen blocks east. I was dirty, I was itchy, I was sun burnt. I had blisters on my hands and feet, and I was happier than I had ever been in all my ten years.

I got home, in the back yard and I parked it, leaned it against a cherry tree really because it didn’t have a kickstand and I couldn’t seem to get the center stand to stay down. There in the dirt, because we had no grass. Bicycle parts strewn around and stained with fallen cherries the ground hard to walk on if you were bare foot because of all the cherry pits I just stood there in the shade of that enormous cherry tree and stared at it. After a few minutes I started wiping at it trying to get the dirt and dust off. I got a bucket of water and a dirty old rag and started cleaning it up as best a dreamy headed ten year old could.

To tell you the truth that piss poor washing would have been all that thing would have gotten if not for an amused neighbor. That guy with the beard who always smelled like cold medicine and seemed to always have a cigarette hanging out of his mouth. He showed me how to get the rust off the wheels with a wire brush. I put air in the dry rotted tires with my bicycle pump.

He tinkered with it and muttered unintelligibly while I washed and wire brushed it and just generally got in his way. He showed me the kick start lever and told me what it was for. Showed me the clutch lever and brake lever. He took the tank off of it and we walked three blocks to a gas station And I spent my entire life savings to fill it with gas.

He reinstalled the tank and I kicked that thing until the sun went down and mom called me in for the night. I was dust dirt and grease from head to toe, there was a brownish blackish ring an inch wide around the tub after my bath. And under my finger nails was still black.

I woke the next morning to the usual sounds of the neighborhood. North east side of Cleveland Ohio 1982. Barking dogs, police sirens, ratty old cars screaming kids. The occasional gunshot. The smell of fermenting cherries mixed with the stink of one of the worst neighborhoods in one of the dirtiest cities in the country. A hand full of generic cereal and a Dixie cup of Kool-Aid for breakfast I fly out the back door to “work on” my motorcycle some more. It was yellow, or at lest had been at one time. And had a number plate on the handle bars. The number was almost completely worn off. I grabbed an old spray paint can from beside the collapsed chain link fence at the back of the yard and repainted the number. 16. That magical age I couldn’t wait to be.

I spent the rest of the day wearing myself out on that kick starter. Kicking, kicking. Switching legs and kicking some more. I’d stop for breaks and wash it some more with that dirty old rag. I’d tug on cables and wiggle the drive chain. I’d kick the tires and look at the wires then try kicking it some more. Then the process would start all over again.

The day passed into exhaustion without so much as a cough from the engine.

The next morning I skipped the cereal and carried the Dixie cup of Kool-Aid outside with me. I climbed up in the tree and ate some cherries. I had been thinking about pushing the bike over to the park. Because there was this hill. I was thinking I could “ride it” down the hill just coasting it. It would be fun to ride it even that little bit. But pushing it home. Pushing it back up that hill. Well that task took me all afternoon. But the ride down that hill was nothing short of spectacular!

The next day the guy with the beard came over again while I was again hard at work on the kick starter. He started working on it again and sent me over to his garage to get his tool box. I thought I would pull my arms right out of their sockets carrying that thing across the yards. But I got it there. A few minutes later he had the carburetor off and laying in the dirt. Much to my horror he had taken a part off of my motorcycle!!! It would never work now!

But he showed me how to take that carburetor apart. How to take an old toothbrush and a few wires from the wire brush and clean it all out. To get all the yellow stuff out. I didn’t have a clue at the time but I scraped all the gasket material away in pieces into the dirt. So he sent me in the house to get a cereal box. I came out with the big yellow box that simply said CORN FLAKES on the front in black letters. He pulled a gleaming switchblade which was the coolest thing in the world to me…well next to my motorcycle that is. Anyway he pulled that knife out of no where and used it to cut new gaskets out of that cereal box and we put the carburetor back together. “Well” I thought ” I’m a mechanic now. It has to run we fixed it.” So I spent another hour kicking it, just convinced that it was gonna start. The neighbor with the cold medicine smell and the beard just laughed to himself and wandered back over to his house.

The next day I decided to push the bike to the park again and once more know the thrill of riding it down the hill.

The following day the guy with the beard came back and together we pushed the bike over to his house, and rolled it into his garage. He showed me how to get it up onto the center stand. I could do it, but it took all I had. He pulled this little white thing out of the engine and went at it with a wire brush and some sand paper. Then he turned this little lever that was attached to the bottom of the gas tank. And he started kicking it. I nearly jumped out of my cutoff shorts cuz when he kicked it, it actually made engine sounds. As I mentioned I was small for my age, I really didn’t weigh enough to do more than get the motor to turn but one stroke. I could have kicked that thing for a year and it wouldn’t have started.

Anyway he kicked it a few times, twisted the throttle a few times and I dove under his junk covered work bench thinking someone was shooting at us when it back fired.

He just laughed at me, but not in a way that made me feel stupid. When I crawled out from under that work bench he didn’t say a word. Come to think of it he never did talk much at all. He just winked at me and he kicked that old rusty POS one more time and the world has never been the same for me since. The coughing sputtering  near death rattle of that motor was the most wonderful sound I had ever heard.

He took a screwdriver and poked at the carburetor with it, And he twisted the throttle and poked around with the screw driver some more and after a bit it started to smooth out a bit. He squeezed in the clutch lever and did something with his foot and I wanted to kill him when I heard something break in the motor at the same time the bike kind of jumped forward. He just chuckled again and motioned me over with his right hand.

Without a thought I climbed right up in front of him onto the bike and grabbed the handle bars. I revved it up!!! No more Vroom Vroom noises and coasting down hills only to have to push it back up!

He took me around the block on it a few times and showed me how to use the throttle and the brakes, how to shift. He let me have the handle bars wrapping his hands over mine. After a while he just kept a hold of my forearms. I can still smell the sun in the air, smell his cold medicine breath on the back of my neck. I can sill smell the rich sweet exhaust.

The next day we rode that thing all over the neighborhood and all through the park. I was the happiest poor kid in the world.

But it sucked. Because I still couldn’t get it to start. he always had to start it and he wouldn’t let me ride it by myself. For a WHOLE WEEK I had to beg him to take me riding. He kept telling me that if I couldn’t start it I couldn’t ride it on my own.

Somedays we would just roll it into his garage and I would work on the wheels with the wire brush while he did stuff with the carburetor or the engine. After a while I noticed some old pictures on the walls in his garage. Pictures of some guy on a motorcycle.

The summer kind of flew by that way. I was dreading the return to school. But was excited to tell all my classmates about my motorcycle. None of them seemed interested though. Most of them didn’t even believe me.

Winters in Cleveland are much like the Winters here in Milwaukee. Cold, wet, snowy, and just miserable over all. Sam, the guy with the funky breath and dirty beard, let me put my bike in his garage for the winter. Looking back I have to pause here. I expected to be telling you that over the course of the winter and the school year the bike slipped my mind. I thought I would be telling you that I didn’t think about it. But that’s not the case. most ten year old boys would indeed forget. At least sometimes. Everyday I thought about it. I would sit in school and day dream about riding it around the playground. Or about riding it in the park. Showing of for the rest of the kids at school.

I even imagined riding it in the snow.

One Saturday in spring I noticed Sam’s garage door open so I cut through the yards and went over to see what he was doing.

I was struck dumb. I thought I was going to puke. I thought I was going to pass out. I thought I was going to kill the crazy old son of a b*t*h with his own screw driver! Scattered all over the floor of his garage was what was left of my motorcycle!!! I just stood there with my mouth hanging open. When he saw me there he just smiled and told me I could “help clean up this mess”. I could utter but one word…”Why?”

He said “Well, winter is for tear down, spring is for clean up, summer is for riding.” After a while to get my now 11 year old mind wrapped around the situation I handed him tools, asked questions , annoyed him and got in the way while he put my motorcycle back together over the next few weeks.

I had grown a bit, but I still didn’t have enough a** to kick the dang thing started. He took me over to the park one day. To the hill. And  showed me how to push start it!!! I could start it myself!!

Every day I would push that thing to the park two blocks south four blocks east. And I would roll down that hill, and I would RIDE back up!!

I ripped around on that thing all summer. Spending my allowance on gas, cashing in soda bottles to buy gas. Every dime went into the tank of that thing.

By the end of summer I was able to get one foot solidly on the ground while sitting on it. When winter rolled around again it went back into Sam’s garage. Right around Christmas time that winter something happened to Sam. The police came, an ambulance came. I never saw Sam again. I’d been introduced to the word of illegal narcotics by then. Though I didn’t yet know the word narcotics.

The summer came and I broke into Sam’s garage to get my motorcycle out. I had a hard time getting it started that year so I sold it to an older kid from the west side.

Sam didn’t really teach me much about how to work on motorcycles. And as for teaching me how to ride, well that left a lot to be desired too. But If it weren’t for him I may never have gotten that thing going, and may never have gotten into motorcycles at all. But one thing Sam taught me is still with me to this day. Winter is for tear down, spring is for clean up, and summer is for riding. To this day, every winter, whatever bike I have owned has been torn down, at least as much as I had the ability to do so. Every spring it got cleaned up and put back together, and got the hell ridden out of it all summer.

For those of you who would care to know that rusty old bike was a little Harley known as a “hummer”. Kind of like the one in the picture.
 

In the months following the sale of that rusty old Harley I spent a lot of time running the streets, and meeting some pretty dangerous people. Not to mention getting deeper and deeper into some bad business.

I’d fallen in with a street gang. Back then we called ourselves M/O’s. Funny I never even knew what the letters were for. These days they are known as Bloods.

Even though I was all caught up in making money, smoking weed and beating the living crap out of anyone who didn’t like it. I still longed for a ride. I still missed the wind in my face, the power the freedom, the cool.

I had money for candy and wrestling magazines. Money to buy weed with. Money for new sneakers, for clothes.

When I turned 12 I threw a big party in my back yard. Hired a Dj. Hired local thugs as bouncers. There were a hundred people in my back yard and I didn’t know any of them.

I had gotten into burglary. Mostly in daylight hours when people would be out for the day. Boom boxes were popular then. Small tv’s, clothing, jewelry. Guns.

I got really good at it. Too good at it.

I broke into a house, went in through a basement window. I made several trips in and out of the basement making off with a couple of bicycles, a small tv, and some power tools.I then went up into the rest of the house. I snagged a huge boom box from one of the bedrooms. Some gold chains from another. I went in the kitchen and made myself a sandwich and grabbed a soda.

I stood in the doorway between the kitchen and living room and ate the sandwich, while the guy that lived there laid on the couch watching The A Team and dozing.

I was almost thirteen, and I was getting to be very street wise. I realized that I had gotten so good at burglary that I had gotten over confident, and was getting careless.

So I quit doing it. For a while anyway.

I want to stop for a moment and make it clear that I am not bragging, well at least not in the way one may think. No I am not in any way proud of being a thief. However I am proud of the skill I developed with it. One should be proud of anything they do very well. It was a bad thing, but I was damn good at it.

I was out and about one day, I had been making deliveries of weed for a local dealer, and carrying pills for my mother to another dealer. She would get the prescriptions from a dirty doctor and sell them to the dealer would the sell them on the street. I was the mule. Though I didn’t know that term at the time.

But that was how I started meeting people, and making connections. People started trusting me. I started hearing about a guy who was holding large amounts of heroine. I knew nothing about the drug other than there was a LOT of money to be made with it.

To skip over the unimportant details, I broke into his house and stole his stash. 17 kilos.

I hid it in the rafters of our basement. By that time I was carrying a gun at all times and usually had a thick wad of cash.

I took two kilos of that junk to a dealer I knew through the gang. All he wanted to know was where it came from. Word was already out that “Pretty Pappa” had been robbed of his stash.

The dealer bought the two kilos. Paid me a thousand dollars. God I thought I was rich!! And I had 15 more of them!

Word travels like lightning in the drug world. next thing I knew people were knocking on my door looking for this crap. Our front porch, which was falling down anyway got fire bombed one night. Drivebys were still a fairly new thing at that point and hadn’t become common place just yet.

“Pretty Pappa” was found dead a couple a days later. His old lady went with him. I was scared. I had never been afraid of anything in my entire life and I was scared, I was 13 and I had a gun.

My mother in a rare moment of responsibility decided it was time for us to get the hell out of there. I guess she knew it was only a matter of time, a very short time before I ended up with a terminal case of lead poisoning myself.

I’m leaving a lot out here, because I just don’t want to paint so ugly of a picture of myself, or my mother. She’s dead now, so her sins should die with her.

So we left Cleveland, we left Ohio all together. We ran, literally for our lives.

I was a city kid. Inner city kid at that. Running with a gang and selling drugs. Carrying guns and thinking I ruled the friggin world. I was a 13 year old smart ass who know way to much to stay alive very long.

So we ran, I say we but, it was all my mother. I didn’t want to go. But I was still young enough to believe I had to do what she wanted. So we ran. We threw our junk in a 73 Maverick two door. It was navy blue and had a top speed of 50 mph. it rattled and sputtered and stunk.

But it got us all the way to W.V. To some trailer park that literally was built over a garbage dump. Stuffed way back in a hollow on the back side of some God forsaken mountain.

People wore bib overalls! They wore cowboy boots and camouflage pants…ON PURPOSE!!

They listened to country music! And looked at me like some kind of insect from outer space when I played my Fat Boys tape, or my Run DMC tape.

They talked funny, and wore flip flops. They ate weird foods.

And they smoked the finest weed I’d ever known!!!!

Mountains, and more mountains, and trees, and rivers and green fields and birds and skies and God I was friggin miserable! Mountain roads. Nothing to do but walk around. Get stoned, and walk around some more. I went through the wost case of culture shock that is humanly possible to survive.

I began to like the woods. I found railroad tracks, I’d throw rocks at the trains and put shit on the rails to see it get flattened.I would hop on coal trains and freight trains and ride for days. It reminded me of the way I felt when I rode my motorcycle back in the old neighborhood.

I know that this part of the story has gotten away from motorcycles, I know it’s dark and dismal. Written here in black and white it’s pretty gruesome. But if you think it’s bad here you should have seen it in color. Yeah that’s a rip off from a recent country song. In Color by Jamey Johnson.

Anyway I told this part of my life to fill the gap. And to set the mood for the next chapter. To help you understand what it was like for me when I discovered that down the road a couple miles there was a guy who had a 350 Honda he didn’t want anymore.

It was covered in dust and leaves. Sitting behind the house leaning against the wall of a shed. The rear tire was flat and one of the front turn signals was dangling by it’s wires. The front fender was bent and the headlight was pointed at the ground. The seat was torn and patched with duct tape. The clear coat was pealing and there was a long deep rusty scratch in the side of the gas tank.
The guy who owned it literally lived on a hillside. I was baffled as to how the house managed to keep from sliding right off the hill into the road. But it just sat there with a death-grip on the earth.

I heaved it up from leaning on the shed and together we rolled it down past the house to his garage. He fired up his compressor and filled the rear tire. Then he called two more men from the house and the four of us pushed it back up the hill behind the house and he coasted it back down trying to push start it. Because it was fairly early in the year the ground was still pretty moist so it just slid and tore up his yard…not that it was such a great loss.

So. Much to my amazement these bumpkins produced a chain of biblical proportions. I was sure I had seen that chain before in an old movie. Someone had used to to hold down a giant monkey.

This chain was wrapped around the font of the bike in a sufficiently suicidal manner and the other end was attached to the rear bumper of a rather large Dodge 4×4 with huge tires that didn’t match. Four tires, four tire brands.

Out onto the street they went pulling/dragging the motorcycle and it’s rider to his death I was sure. Well long story made longer they pulled that thing up and down the road for about thirty minutes, before Captain Doodah and his merry band of Hillbillies realized there was no gas in it.

Of course by then the turning of the stator had put a little juice in the battery so I could see all the lights did work. Imagine that, a headlight! I could even ride this one at night!

So some gas showed up, another miracle I was completely puzzled by. And the filthy old hunk positively roared to life. Seems that at some point during it’s bout of being yanked back and forth by the truck it got so upset that it dropped one of it’s mufflers in a ditch. I didn’t care. My face lit up and knew I had to have it. Trouble was he wanted $300 for it. I was crushed. I had no money. I was poor again. I asked him If I could just take it for a ride. No I had no intentions of stealing it. I just wanted to ride.

Well he didn’t trust me any more than you did so I went home disappointed.

I’d heard some local boys talking about making a few bucks selling “bait”. Now here’s the thing. Before you all get to laughing about a kid who had no friggin’ clue what bait was, please remember that I grew up in a ghetto where fishing meant going to Long John Silver’s.

But I soon found out that people would actually give you money for worms, FOR WORMS!!

I went to digging in our back yard looking for worms. When my mother asked me what the hell I was doing she nearly laughed herself into a coma when I told her. One of my favorite memories of my mom was the night she handed me a coffee can and a flashlight and we went out into the yard and she taught me how to hunt night-crawlers. We spent hours bent over in the yard. She later taught me to water the lawn real good just before sundown so more of them would come out. It was years later that I realized that they were coming to the surface to mate. Made me feel a little weird knowing I was cock-blocking so many worms.

Anyway she told me I would need a worm bed if I was going to do this right, and she explained to me how to make one. I took an old wash tub and buried all but an inch of it in the ground, filled it with dirt and started putting my worms in there. I put corn meal and egg shells in there for them to feed on.

Soon I had some real monster worms. Word got around and folks were buying my worms! I got a dollar a dozen. I always made sure each dozen had at least 13 worms. Sometimes as many as 15.

Then it rained. A big fat downpour. Drowned all my worms! I was ruined. So I dug up the tub and drilled holes in the bottom. Ok I didn’t really drill them I punched them in with a hammer and a screwdriver.

I spent three nights combing our yard and everyone else’s and restocked my worms. Fed them. Let folks know I had worms again. My first customer comes he wants three dozen worms!

I go to diggin’ in my worm bed…nothing but dirt… not a single friggin worm to be found! They’d gotten out through the drain holes. So I gave up on the night crawler business.

By then I had a fishing rod of my own and had found that I really enjoyed fishing. Well I asked my mom one day to pick me up some live bait because my lures weren’t working very well. She got me hellgrammites.

Have you ever seen one of these hideous creatures? I open that styrofoam cup expecting worms. But this big ugly demonic bug from the red planet of gloom and doom poked it’s head up out of the peat moss and scared the living shit out of me. I tossed the whole lot of them right into the lake and ran like hell convinced it was the start of an alien invasion.

Turns out though, they were indeed really good bait and bait shops would buy them from you for like three bucks a dozen! But how was I to get to planet hellgrammite? Did I have to barter with Satan to get these bugs?

Nope! All I had to do was wade around in the river flipping over rocks and plucking them from the bottoms. And that’s what I did. In three days time I had collected 400 dozen of these nasty little bastards. I say little but they were about four and a half inches long.

I went to bait shop after bait shop after bait shop trying to sell them. Seems there were specific times of year to get them. I’d missed by a couple weeks. But the next cycle would be along in about a week.

Well by then I had lost almost 300 dozen of them. it was like they just sprouted wings and flew away!

Did you know that hellgrammites sprout wings and fly during their mating season? Well we do now.

What the hell do these god awful looking bugs have to do with motorcycles? Well I sold enough of them to buy that damn Honda.