The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

Back in 1978 I bought my first motorcycle — from my then wife’s boyfriend. I know what you’re thinking, I wasn’t, and you can congratulate yourself for wisdom I did not have at the time. The bike was a beat-up 1960’s Honda 350 that wouldn’t start, which is why my wife’s boyfriend was selling it. Cheap. Maybe it was the despondency over a marriage gone south, but that bike seemed like just the tonic to reinvigorate my depressed life. Right … get a suicide machine.

It took me months to get that crummy motorcycle to start, but there came a day when it sparked to life down in the basement of my ghetto house and triumphant, I brought that Honda out into the sunshine, popped the clutch and hung on for dear life as I menaced the car strewn streets of my shabby neighborhood. No license, no tags, no helmet — that’s right, amigo, bad to the bone!

Only a few blocks from my house the bike quit, stalled in an intersection and so I ingloriously pushed the thing back home, disappointed but still determined. If you’ve never sat a bike, that raw power between your legs, a monster growl snarling with the smallest twist of the throttle, the sudden acceleration from zero to 60 in seconds, you’re the lucky one. Only insane people and Tesla money love that G-force barely under control. Me, I knew this was a death machine. I could all too willingly hurtle into my dark future.

Lucky for me I spent most of my time with the bike working on it, not riding it. Dreams of horrible motorcycle accidents littered my night, recalled next morning as black omens, harbingers of an early and messy demise. An encounter with a black motorcycle gang at an intersection where we all stopped for the red light, the boys surrounding me right left front and back, revving their Harleys to red line RPM’s, then sprinting on the green, all but me, stalled out yet again when my ugly Honda died when I hit the gas, leaving me in their wake of oil and gas fumes and imagined laughter. I knew right there my days of being the Wild One had crashed and burned. Like Peter Fonda said to Dennis Hopper in Easy Rider, we blew it, man.

In the end I sold the bike. Back to my then wife’s boyfriend. Same price. Seemed only fair. And every once in awhile I wonder if maybe he took a turn too fast, laid that Honda down on some backroad blacktop in a shower of sparks and screaming metal, wishing he’d just kept my hundred bucks and my wife, called it a good deal all around, lived happily ever after. But then I think, we probably all got what we wanted, or at least deserved. Hopefully the only ones disappointed are the Hells Angels. Sorry, guys, I hung up my bike.

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