Tailgate Party
Posted in Pix on Jan 27th, 2008
I was riding with some of my club brothers this afternoon on the way home from our meeting when ***plink!*** my throttle cable snapped. One minute I’m accelerating my way through a turn, the next my throttle is twisting freely and not doing a damned thing and I’m slowly coasting to a stop because all I can do is idle.
Not good.
Fortunately, I immediately knew what was wrong with it because the same damned thing happened three months ago, almost to the day. Unfortunately, this time it didn’t happen in my front yard. I broke out my tool roll and opened up the throttle assembly to try to jury-rig the cable with a knot to hold long enough to get it home, but it just wasn’t happening. The cable was fraying and wouldn’t knot neatly enough to fit in the ferrule, and when it did manage to fit it wouldn’t hold. We dicked around with it for close to an hour.
By “we,” I mean several guys from the club. First it was just the four of us who were riding together working on it. Then another brother drove by and pulled over to help. Then Prospect #1 pulled over in his pickup. Prospect #2, who’s a chronic fuck-up, stopped to ask if we needed help, but we lied and told him everything was fine — we had enough trouble on our hands without him adding his own special blend of clusterfuck. We ultimately ended up with six guys standing around looking at it, which obviously meant it was broken.
Meanwhile, all this was happening during a break in the torrential downpour we’d been enjoying all day, and ugly, even more ominous storm clouds were closing in. Plus, it was about 4:30 pm and it was getting dark. Also: cold. So we gave up and decided to throw the bike in Prospect #1’s truck and get it home that way so I could fix it in my garage later.
Prospect #1 and I drove to my place in the truck, while the other guys rode behind us on their bikes. The skies opened up and dumped on us. It was raining so hard that the windshield wipers couldn’t keep up and we could hardly see the road in front of us. Behind, the guys on bikes were just getting hammered by the weather. I don’t think I’ve ever been gladder not to be on a bike than I was on that ride home.
When we got to my place, I got out of the truck all toasty warm and dry and walked over to them, dripping wet and freezing, and innocently asked “Hey, you guys didn’t get wet on the ride over here, did you?”
This is the response I got:
