My Motorcycles

I got my first motorcycle at age 13, when I got my motorcycle license. You could do that at 13 in Arkansas in the early '70s. You had to be 16 to drive a car. My parents bought me a Kawasaki 90 the spring after my birthday. I still have no idea what prompted them to do that; neither of them much cared for motorcycles, nor had I much thought about it. The little Kawasaki racked up a lot of miles, got traded up to a Kawasaki 175 enduro, and then a KZ400 street bike. I kept the KZ400 until I was a senior in high school, when I replaced it with a '65 Mustang. I picked up a Kawasaki Mach III 500 shortly after, Da-Glo lime green with Denco expansion chambers. I had it a year or so, then spent a little time back in four wheels before a series of assorted bikes, mostly junkers, until I bought the Seca Turbo in 1984. It was a repo from the local Yamaha dealership, 1000 miles, never titled. The "never titled" part should have been a warning; I had to fork over $618 in sales tax to get a $7 license plate. The Turbo became my primary transportation for the next several years, including winter, rain, and snow, as the car sat on blocks in the back yard with an expired license plate. I tweaked the boost up from 5 PSI to 20 PSI, which made the bike considerably quicker than it was before.


On the way to visit AB's Dad. We're in the mountains north of Nashville, TN, at a little country store on a two-lane mountain road. It's early November, probably 1985 or 1986. It had been misting rain for the last hundred miles. I was amusing myself by riding 300-yard wheelies up the mountains; the Turbo made much more power in such weather and would easily loft the front wheel, particularly two-up. AB had kept ramming her helmet into the back of my head; I finally pulled over to complain about it. Turned out she had been totally unfazed by my wheelie prowess; she'd fallen asleep back there and her head would fall forward when she nodded off at 100+mph.

Visiting AB's father in Clarksville, TN, some 400 miles from home. The Turbo is parked in what used to be a barn. We were only there a couple of days; a cold front moved in and the weather dropped from high 70s to low 30s. We hadn't expected it, and hadn't brought clothes for it. We left immediately, wrapped in what spare clothing we'd brought along. Damned near froze to death on the long ride back. Took almost all day since we had to stop at every rest stop and camp out under the hot-air dryers to warm our frozen body parts back up. The people at the rest areas thought we were crazy.

Winter in Arkansas. Coke bottles keep rain from running down into the turbo (which is under the swingarm) and freezing.

Summer in Arkansas. Somewhere around 1986. A tank of MTBE-contaminated fuel had turned all the rubber hoses and gaskets in the fuel system to black goo. I was replacing bits piece-by-piece. 3-liter Coke bottle contains gasoline; the foam is because the fuel pressure regulator dumps excess fuel back to the tank. A VW Rabbit EFI fuel pump was a near-as-dammit replacement for the hideously expensive Japanese pump that died from the black goo.

A neighborhood vermin found a nifty place to take a snooze.
A DWI got me on the way home from work one evening, and that was the end of the Turbo. I got a shortened left leg with a steel rod and the doper got away scott-free. I put the word out for another bike and my buddy Doug in Colorado Springs found a primo Seca 900 in Denver. I sent him the money and he got the bike. I made a lightning run up there and back with a pickup truck to snag it. The Seca 900 was a drop-dead beautiful machine even if it wasn't as fast as the Turbo.

Fall of 1989, going from Little Rock to Colorado Springs, 1100 miles. I'm at a rest stop east of Oklahoma City. The pillow is because the narrow sportbike seat and my big butt aren't compatible enough for 1100 miles nonstop. That's right, Pig Wing fans - I made that trip more than once, too. That's a $600 pillow, by the way - that's what the hospital billed the insurance company for as "miscellaneous bedding" when they were doing a half-ass job of putting my leg back together.
The 900 saw a year or so in its stock form, then I swapped in the 650 Turbo driveline from the wrecked Turbo. The 900 became quick enough to thoroughly abuse the newest Ninja-squidbikes, at least in a straight line. I put 10,000 more miles on it, then it began to develop strange electrical problems. I lost interest in it for a while, and it's been sitting in the back yard since late 1994. The sun and rain have not been kind to it. My goal is to refurbish it by spring of 2002. My buddy Jay has been running his Ninja with the MSRRA trackie bunch in Memphis, at Memphis Motorsport Park. It's a lot cheaper than the car track events. I'm planning to run the Seca there. I don't have any current plans to license it for street use; all the fun places I used to ride are all subdivisions now, and my daily transportation is now a pickup truck, because I am usually hauling something that *needs* a pickup truck. I can't bear to part with the thing, though, so turning it into a track slut is better than letting the poor thing rot.