A Brief History of My Motorcycles, Part 1: The Starter Bikes

          Me, circa 1977

I won’t bother counting as 'motorcycles' the first motorized two-wheelers I rode.

The first was a hand-me-down Puch Maxi moped I got from my brother when I was 15 when he’d moved up to having an actual car. Likewise, I rode it until I got my own first car at 17. 

The second one was my girlfriend’s Honda C90 3-speed step-thru scooter that I rode for about a year when I was 18.

So excusing those underpowered laughingstocks, my first ‘real motorcycle' was a 1982 banana-seat Suzuki GS450L, which I got in 1988 when I was 25. It was a silly little learner’s machine so uncool that other motorcyclists averted their eyes out of embarrassment for me. 

My neighbor Larry sold it to me for nearly nothing, quickly and at night. The poor thing had already had a hard life before falling into my incompetent hands – it was sagging, rusting, and leaking. It needed a new chain, a tune up, new tires, brakes, some electrical fixes, and the registration was way out of date. But for all that, it was my first machine with a clutch and I rode it proudly, knowing that I had finally graduated to ‘real motorbikes’. You know – the kind that can be legally ridden on the freeway. For months I did nothing but fill it with gas and ride it, until I met Rex. I didn’t even have a full motorcycle license in those days, just a 90-day learner’s permit, which had expired. What’s that saying – God looks after drunks and fools? I was no longer drunk in those days, but calling me a fool would have been generous.

Rocket Rex, who rode a naked ’83 Suzuki GS1100E, helped me fix the worst squawks. He also taught me about basic maintenance, and staying alive in city traffic while I learned to ride. 

I met Rex while I was riding to a 12-step meeting that I needed at 25. He pulled alongside me at a red light on his mighty 1100, gave me a nod through the visor of his full-face Arai. (I wasn’t wearing a helmet, in accordance with California law and my stupidity at the time.) When the light turned green, he pulled away from me, and then, to my great alarm, slowed down, opened his visor and rode next to me for a few hundred yards, frowning at me. “What the fuck is wrong with your bike?” he shouted at me. “I don’t know!” I squeaked, and promptly took the next right turn to get away from the scary man on the big motorcycle.                                                                           

Rex's extremely cool 1983 Suzuki GS1100E

I took an alternate route to the meeting, and as I parked, was horrified to see the 1100 turn the corner from the other direction and come park next to me. Turned out we were going to the same meeting. He just glared at me and went inside. After the meeting, Rex walked up to me, scowling, and demanded – without a hello or what’s your name – “What are you doing this Saturday?” “Nothing.” I answered weakly. “Yes you are,” he said, pulling out a scrap of paper and writing on it. “You’re coming to my house and we’re gonna work on your bike. You need a new chain, a new front tire, and I don’t know what all.” He handed me the paper on which he’d written his address. “Be there at ten.” I was. Yes, he was scary and brusque, but that’s how Rex is, and he also turned out to be indescribably helpful, and mercifully patient with my vast ignorance of all things mechanical. Some weeks later his old housemate moved out of the half-duplex he rented, and I moved in. We went to a lot of 12-step meetings on our bikes, which made me feel as cool as his 1100 looked.

In early 1989, having never actually registered the little Suzuki, I sold it back to Larry the original owner at a loss, and replaced it with a Honda Nighthawk 650 for the compelling reason that I guy I knew was selling it. I had never heard of one until then.

Sidebar: In Europe the Nighthawk 650 was dubbed the CBX650, without the silly avian moniker. Another time that happened was with the Kawasaki GPz900, the bike made famous in the movie Top Gun, which was named the Ninja 900 for the American market. (It’s a Ninja? Really? Wow.) The silly-name-game is not only for the Americans, as evinced by Yamaha when they called their YZF600R and the YZF1000R Thundercat and Thunderace for the European market. That’s some spectacular silliness right there if you ask me. (It’s a Thunderace? Really? Wow.)

The Nighthawk was foisted on me by an old guy I knew named Lyle who’d bought it cheap from a distressed seller and wanted it out of his garage. It looked fast and it ran well, but it had a dodgy front end. The dark blue front fender didn’t match the rest of the black bike, so I guess some or all of the front end had been replaced, something I only noticed after I’d handed over the money. The front wheel had a tendency to tuck under if you took a corner sharply, which provided some exciting moments for the ol’ sphincter, but most importantly it looked cool and was considerably faster than the Suzuki in a straight line. That inline four (with self-adjusting valves!) was simply bitchen* compared to the sorry parallel twin of the Suzuki 450, and anyway, all the really cool bikes in the ‘80s were inline fours (like the Ninja 900).

* bitchen is Southern California surfer slang for amazing, fantastic, very cool. Not related to the word bitch.

Truly, now that I think about it, other than that inline four, the rest of the bike it was pretty much crap. But at the time, I prized it beyond reason. I knew nothing of decent brakes, or suspension, or how to evaluate a bike’s handling qualities.

I never left town on either of these bikes, they were purely city-runabouts. I just wanted to be – and even more, to be seen as – the kind of guy who rides a motorbike, and these were the machines that made that a reality. They were the bikes that brought me into the lifestyle, culture, and mentality of being a motorcyclist.

Rex packed up and moved to San Francisco for a job in late ’89. I sold the Honda and moved into a small rented room in some stranger’s house from an ad in the paper, and started learning to fly airplanes.

During the next five years I didn’t own a motorcycle, as I poured all my money and attention into flight training and flying. By early 1995 I’d worked my way up the aviation career ladder far enough to have rented a nice house with a big garage, and it dawned on me that I could also consider owning another bike. 

End of Part 1.