The Ride Report

I went out for a late night ride along Pacific Coast Highway tonight, down through Malibu and up to the Ventura County line. Having a bad night, needed to get out and clear my head. Just lost my job, no prospects in sight, don’t know how I’m going to cover the mortgage next month, not getting along with the wife, thinking of putting the bike up for sale to cover some bills, feeling like hammered shit… I needed a night ride.

These night rides usually help me feel better about whatever’s bugging me. Tonight, not so much. My problems are stronger than cool, night air in my face, too sinister for the rumble of the exhaust, too big for my helmet to hold. Tonight I rode and rode and rode and came home feeling spent.

On previous night rides like this one I look at the lights in the windows of the houses I pass in Malibu, the buttery yellow, warm, secure houselights, and I feel sorry for the people who live there, people who I imagine think they have it all, think that living there along the moneyed edge of high-end real estate means they’ve made it to the pinnacle of success. Normally I feel a little bit superior to them because while I may not have the million dollar ocean view and the German luxury car in the driveway and the fat bank account and the smug condescension of looking down (literally) on the “little people” on the highway below, I have something they don’t: freedom, wind, the visceral thrill of riding along the ocean at night. I who have little think of them as the Have Nots because what little I have trumps their tame possessions.

Tonight… Tonight, I felt like I’m the Have Not.

One of the local power clubs threw a big fundraiser party last Sunday. There were hundreds of bikers there from at least 25 different clubs — some of them Christian clubs, and everything went very, very smoothly. The party was held at a VFW post in a relatively remote and unpopulated suburb, in an area that sees a lot of motorcycle traffic owing to its proximity to some great canyon riding. The VFW has a large parking lot that held at least 300 bikes, and the overflow parked along the highway shoulder outside the gate. There was a live band on stage, the food was catered by a local Mexican restaurant, and everyone had a good time. Having been there personally and seen it all happen, I can tell you that the entire event was peaceful, was a success, and went off with zero problems. The closest it ever came to being disruptive to the community is when a hangaround out front stopped traffic on the 2-lane road from time to time to allow groups of motorcycles to pull out safely.

But that’s the story from the inside. Outside, the cops were running wild. There are three main roads leading to the VFW and the police had what amounts to roadblocks set up on each one where they were harassing bikers going to and from the party. I heard stories of groups of 10 and 20 bikers at a time — charters from the hosting power club riding together as a pack — being pulled over at gunpoint, only to ultimately be issued bullshit helmet and exhaust tickets. Two guys from my own club got pulled over and hassled for at least half an hour before one of them was given a ticket for his “modified” aftermarket exhaust. They were going to write the other guy up for the same thing before he got it through the cop’s thick skull that a stock exhaust system is just that: stock, aka “unmodified.”

And then today I stumbled across a story in the local rag about what a dangerous, disruptive event this party was and how the cops had to scramble to deal with it. The lead from the story started with this and then went steadily downhill: “Several dozen deputies were called in to address a growing concern in the community regarding suspected outlaw motorcycle gangs congregating at local establishments.”

Oh no! “Suspected” motorcycle “gangs” were “congregating”! Lock up your women and children! What bullshit.

The story went on to talk about how disruptive the party was, how the cops were spread so thin that they had to call in reinforcements from other departments, and basically painted the party as the third coming of Attila the Hun and his barbarian horde. It was so slanted that it might as well have been written by the local cop shop’s desk sergeant.

The cops have a vested interested in harassing bikers and drumming up bullshit charges — it’s all about the money. If they play the Gang card, then that opens the floodgates to a bunch of extra money that protects them from layoffs, lets them get more overtime, buy new toys, and even hire more cops. They have a strong incentive to build mountains out of molehills, and the local cops have said that they’re going after bikers specifically to keep the money flowing. So they roll on a well-organized, peaceful party like this one, act like it’s World War III, and then sit back and count the money rolling in. And reporters like this one, who don’t do their homework and let the cops spoon feed them the story without questioning it, don’t help at all.

One last thing to think about on this topic… The next time you hear about a big police raid on a biker club (note: club, not “gang”), pay attention to how many arrests they claim to have made and what charges were filed — and then go check it out again six months down the road. You’ll be amazed at how many of those charges have been dropped. And then another year or so down the road, after the cases have gone to trial (if they even go that far), check out how many convictions there were. You’ll be amazed at what a colossal waste of resources it’s been.

Me and a bunch of guys from the club went for a ride through the back roads of Ventura County farmland Sunday. There were about ten of us, including a couple of prospects riding at the back of the pack. One of these prospects is a kid we’ve been hammering on to work on his riding skills.

He’s not a very strong rider, which is a problem. First of all, it’s a problem for the club in general: We ride hard and fast, side-by-side and butts-to-nuts on the straights and in a tight single-file in the twisties, and having a guy in the pack who can’t hold his line is a danger to everyone. Secondly, it’s a problem for him: When you’re a prospect, there’s a lot of self-imposed pressure to look good, to keep up with the pack, to not be “that guy” who rides like he’s on a tricycle — basically, to ride over your head. We always tell the prospects to ride their own ride, to ride only as fast as they feel safe doing, to not ride outside their abilities — but there’s that pressure to do exactly that.

I took the kid out once to give him some pointers and help him work on his cornering, and he said afterward that it helped. He’d never heard of counter-steering before I showed him how to do it, and by the end of our session he was scraping his floorboards through the turns. Of course, he’d then immediately swing wide and cross over the double yellow into the oncoming lane on the next turn and scare the shit out of me, but it was a start. The thing he needed most was saddle time — just going out and riding, eating up the miles and gaining experience. I noted his odometer reading once and told him that when I saw him a few weeks later I wanted him to have added 1,000 miles to it. He didn’t make it, but he came close. So the kid was learning.

Unfortunately, he forgot it all on our ride. He was doing just fine for most of it, keeping up with us pretty well — and we were cooking and booking, so he had to be riding well to keep up — but then came a sweeping left turn with a few dried-up dirt clods in the road. It was a simple, shallow corner with a nice long straightaway leading into it, no reason at all not to make it. But there were those dirt clods to make him worry about traction, and there was a nice wide shoulder covered with sand on the outside of the turn to make him think about crashing… So he looked right at it and never looked away.

Seasoned riders already know this truism for motorcycling, but newbies or non-riders might not: On a motorcycle, you look where you want to go, because the bike is going to go where you look. When you’re carving through a long sweeping left hand turn, you don’t look out in front of you, you turn your head and look at the turn’s end. You don’t look at a curb you’re afraid of hitting, because that’s exactly where you’re going to go if you do. Look where you want to go, not where you don’t.

Unfortunately, the kid looked at the sandy shoulder with a laser-like focus, so that’s exactly where he went. Once he was in the sand he then compounded his error by grabbing a bunch of brake and it was all over. The back end broke loose, the front end washed out, and the bike tossed him and started cartwheeling. Fortunately, he survived. Didn’t even really get hurt too badly — banged up a bit, but nothing broken.

View Larger Map

The scene of the crime

Same pic twice of the scene. It’s hard to see the skid marks, so I circled them.

I felt kind of bad for the kid. First of all because he hasn’t even had the bike for a whole year yet and he totaled it. Second because he was embarrassed to have gone down on a club ride in front of all of us. But mostly because of the utter lack of sympathy he got from us. Once we knew he was okay, that’s when the lectures started: You shouldn’t have looked at the sand. You should have counter-steered. What’d you crash for, you could have made it! Who gave you permission to crash, prospect? Etcetera.

And then we went all pick-your-part on his bike, with guys calling dibs on his wheels, his exhaust, his seat, his floorboards… “Hey, your bike’s totalled anyway. Can I have your calipers?” Etc… (Okay, I’ll admit that was me with the floorboards.) The poor kid’s laying there in the dirt, bleeding, with his beloved motorcycle in pieces, and he has all these hard-asses yelling at him and cannibalizing his bike. But it was all done out of love and he knew it. And once he realized he wasn’t hurt too badly he started joking around and laughing along with us.

He was released from the hospital later that night with nothing more serious than a swollen knee and skinned elbows. He got lucky; it could have been a lot worse than it was. We all got lucky…

I stumbled across a picture of the first motorcycle I ever owned tonight and it was like finding a picture of the first girl who let you touch her boobies. You remember the thrill and excitement of the moment, but you’re also struck by “Wow, she’s not as hot as I remembered. I guess it didn’t take much then, did it?”

Here’s my first love, a Suzuki GS 450L:

She doesn’t look like much now, looking back on her after almost 30 years and countless, uh, “partners” since we had our little fling, but she sure did it for me then.

Good times, good times…

The speakers in my Road Glide’s fairing started sounding like crap and I thought I had blown them out by playing them too loud. The problem was worse than I thought when I finally took the fairing off and went in to see what was what.

The speakers are secured by three screws that screw into mounting posts that are molded into the fairing. They look a little something like this:

The yellow circle shows one of the mounting posts. There are two more on the bottom right and left corners of the speaker itself. The problem was that the posts had sheared off on the right-side speaker — all three of them. Here’s a sheared-off mounting post and where it’s supposed to be:

Absolutely outstanding product design, don’t you think? What it really needed to hold up to the forces of the motorcycle’s vibration and the weight of the speaker was some reinforcement, so that’s what I did when I fixed it — I glued the posts back on with ABS cement, then wrapped each post with some aluminum screen, extended it out on to the surrounding fairing surface material, and gunked the hell out of with ABS cement.

It lasted for all of about five minutes. I was torquing the last few turns on the final screw to tighten it down when >>plink!<< it snapped. And then while I stood there cursing at it >>plink!<< - >>plink!<< the other two snapped as well. That was fucking awesome. So at that point I was faced with the certain knowledge that no adhesive product was going to hold those mounting posts in place — not even the duct tape or hot glue gun my wife suggested. Looking at the second picture above, you can see the solution I came up with: I drilled holes in the fairing and mounted the speakers with bolts. I drilled through the base of the sheared-off posts and ran bolts through them. These two pictures here give a close-up view of the just how ugly the fix is from inside the fairing.

And here’s the damage from the outside. It’s not too terribly bad, I guess, but I sure wasn’t happy about drilling holes in my fairing. It was kind of like piercing my favorite body part.

One of my friends says I’m well on my way to having a rat bike. Maybe, but at least it’s in stereo again…

When it rains, it pours. I started the week with a traffic ticket, and now I’m closing out the week with a second traffic ticket. Awesome!

The one I got today was from one of those damned red light cameras. The light turned yellow as I approached and I was close and fast enough that I would have had to brake hard to stop, but far enough away that it was going to be a little, well, “orange” if I blew through it. The intersection was clear with no side traffic in sight, so I took it, and as I went through I looked up and saw it turn red just as I entered the intersection.

I also saw a flash of light as the fucking red light camera took my picture.

So that’s just awesome. I have a commercial driver’s license, which means I can’t go to traffic school when I get a ticket. Also, I get 1.5 times the points as a “civilian” driver for a moving violation. And most non-production driving jobs want someone with a spotless record going back ten years. So I have well and truly boned myself now. Awesome.

The best part is that I got both these tickets in my cage, where I drive about 50,000 times more safely and legally than I do on the bike.

I’d better start looking for a law degree by mail correspondence course, because it looks like I’m going to be spending quite a bit of time in court soon…

I tend to ride like a bat out of hell and I’ve been saying lately that I’m lucky I haven’t gotten pulled over for it yet. I’ve had a feeling that there’s a ticket floating around out there with my name on it and it’s getting closer. Well, it found me yesterday: I got a ticket.

The crazy, stupid, ironic part about it is that, for all the speeding and mirror-shaving that I do on the bike, I got this ticket in my car. For turning right on a red light, to add insult to injury. There are maybe 2 intersections in all of California where you can’t turn right on a red light, and I managed to find one of them, time it so the light was red when I get there, and turn in front of a cop. Go figure…

I see a court date in my future. Cross your fingers that he doesn’t show up…

I have a Garmin Zumo 550 GPS unit that I bought in summer of ‘07 for my trip back to Colorado. It’s really a great unit — it does the GPS thing, obviously, and it also plays MP3s, so I have about 2 gb of music loaded on it with a plug running from the headphone jack to the input on my Harley’s radio. It also does Bluetooth for a cell phone or for helmet speakers if I had them, but I get enough crap from the guys for riding a Goldwing as it is. I like to joke that between the fairing, the speakers, the cup holder, the cruise control, the GPS, and the heated vest, all I need now is cable TV.

Aaaaanyway… So I got the Zumo back in July of ‘07 and it’s been great. I use it every time I ride the bike, and it came with a separate car mount so I can use it there too. It’s been great. Until recently, when it went haywire.

The touchscreen started acting up and got worse and worse until it was virtually unusable. So I called Garmin and found out that they warranty these things for a year, which was great, only I had bought mine a year and a half ago so I was six months out of warranty, which was bad. But the guy on the phone said they’d cover it anyway, which was great again. So I shipped my Zumo off to them, felt naked without it for a week or so, and they sent me a “new” one back (I don’t know if it’s new or refurbished and I don’t care) and now I know where I’m going again.

So that was pretty cool. And the coolest part is that on top of them covering it even though I was out of warranty, the new unit also had the updated maps for 2009. Score!

Garmin gets two thumbs up from me.

I lost my cool and dished out a little street justice this weekend. My wife just shook her head when I told her about it, my riding buddy probably wishes I hadn’t been there, there’s a gardener out there somewhere who’s probably still looking over his shoulder, and I feel like an idiot.

My friend and I were gassing up as we prepared to ride up to Thousand Oaks to return the “floorboards” I bought from the idiot I talked about in my last entry. We pulled out of the gas station together side-by-side and we were turning left onto a major street at an intersection, joining traffic that was stopping for a red light. A pickup truck was approaching as we pulled out, and my friend and I were both timing our approach to pull in behind this truck as it passed and stopped at the light. Suddenly the guy driving the truck slammed on his brakes, and our carefully-timed turn to drop in right behind him turned into a “holy shit” handful of brakes because we suddenly had a pickup truck in front of us instead of an open lane. I managed to stop in time. My buddy didn’t.

To my right I heard a thud-crunch sound and looked over to see my buddy doing his best to drive his bike under the truck and hold it up at the same time. He was heeled over on his left side with his front wheel socked neatly into a front-wheel-sized divot in the bottom rail of the truck’s left rear quarter-panel. Here’s an illustration I’ve created of what the critical moment looked like:

His front wheel was tucked under the truck and he couldn’t stand the bike up or move it back with the truck where it was. I had managed to stop in time, so I put my kickstand down and went to the drivers’ door. “Pull up a little,” I said.

I’ll admit I may not have been as calm and pleasant as I sound now. The driver looked at me through his rolled-up window, eyes wide as saucers, frozen.

“Pull up!” I repeated, in what might have been a not-friendly voice. “NOW! Then pull over!”

The driver inched up … and up … and up… And then the light turned green and he floored it and took off. I ran to my bike and yelled over my shoulder to my buddy, “I’m chasing him down!” And the chase was on.

I caught up to him and pulled up next to his door when he got caught at the light at the next intersection. I went to his window again and told him to pull over. He refused to look at me and stared straight ahead. His window was rolled up and his door was locked. I told him to pull over or, well, unpleasant things would happen. The light turned green and he took off again.

I chased him down again, rode next to him and yelled to pull over or else. He had to stop for another red light and I got off my bike again, told him to pull over again. This time he sort of nodded and inched forward. I walked around to the passenger side and stopped traffic to let him get over … and he took off again.

I was already angry, but this put me over the top and sent me into a blind rage. I did the only thing I could think of: as his truck went by, I wound up and punched the fender as hard as I could. It didn’t stop him, didn’t even slow him down, but now he had dents in both quarter-panels to worry about.

Long story short, I kept chasing him even after he got on the freeway and eventually he figured out that I wasn’t giving up. He finally got off the freeway and stopped on a surface street. By this time I had calmed down a little, so I didn’t take his head off when he got out.

The guy told me in broken English that he didn’t stop because the accident wasn’t his fault and because he was afraid of me. I told him that in this country, we stop even for accidents that aren’t our fault, and that I only started yelling at him when he looked like he was going to take off. He refused to show me his license because “You’re not the police” and I suggested that he should go ahead and call them. After that he just kept repeating that it wasn’t his fault, and I started agreeing that maybe it wasn’t, maybe my buddy’s insurance would have paid for his damage, but he took off so now he was fucked because hit-and-run is a felony.

I called my buddy up on the cell, told him what was going on, and got the report from his end: his bike had a few minor scratches on the fork cover, but aside from that it was fine. He actually kinda wanted to let the whole thing go because he thought the accident was his fault and he didn’t want it on his insurance.

Well, hell. Here I had chased this poor schmuck halfway across the valley, punched in the non-accident side of his truck, threatened him with murder and all-around bodily harm, and generally scared the hell out of him — and now my buddy wanted me to let him go because he hadn’t done anything wrong? Where’s the fun in that? And more importantly: what’s the exit strategy that gets me and my buddy off whatever hooks I’d hung us on?

I bluffed him. I told the guy “My buddy wants me to let you go. I think I should kick your ass and call the cops. What do you want to do?” The guy was in his truck and gone in a flurry of dust inside of 30 seconds.

And that, kids, is why street justice shouldn’t be anything more than a TV series starring Rocky’s Apollo Creed and the guy from Will and Grace — because you just never know where it might lead.

I went back and met up with my buddy and sure enough, his bike was almost spotless. As I said to him later, after he swore me to secrecy (and you see how well that’s working out), “It’s almost as if it never happened if I hadn’t been there.” He has all kinds of excuses about why it wasn’t his fault and that the guy shouldn’t have stopped like that and how good he is at “predictive riding” when people drive “like they’re supposed to” and blah blah blah. I just keep reminding him that, at the end of the day, he hit a big white truck that everyone else managed to avoid, even the guy who was riding right next to him and making the exact same turn.

He’s still working on a comeback for that.

I received a package in the mail today that really annoyed the piss out of me. It was some parts I bought from a RUB with a new Harley who was obviously “customizing” his new garage queen with what I assume was standard H-D over-the-counter bling. He had put up a post on an internet message board listing the parts he was selling:

* Mirrors (2)
* Floorboards
* Brake lever and pad
* Brake Light
* License plate bracket
* Shift linkage
* Handlebar levers (2)
* Shift levers and pegs
* Speakers (2)
* Air cleaner assembly
* Rear turn signal lens (2)

An obvious new-bike bling job, yes? Someone with too much time and money on his hands bought a new bike, walked over to the accessory counter and picked out a bunch of crap with skulls or eagles on it, then paid even more to have the Service Department put it all on for him. Then he put all the take-offs up for sale.

Well, there’s nothing wrong with that, I guess. Me personally, I would have installed it all myself, but then I don’t have too much time and money on my hands. But more power to him for being able to do that, and more power to me for being able to get brand new parts on the cheap.

You see, I’ve been looking for a new pair of floorboards for awhile now. The ones I have now are ground down to just about nothing from scraping in the turns, especially the right-hand one. That one has been ground all the way through to the rubber pad your foot sits on (the “insert,” as we’ll learn in a moment), and my calf rests right against that razor-sharp edge when I put my foot down. Care is in order there. Care, and new floorboards if I can get ‘em. Which made me notice this clown’s ad.

Long story short, I sent him a check for his floorboards and a couple days later a box shows up on my front step. Inside are my like-new take-offs from his Harley. Only… they’re not floorboards. They’re floorboard inserts — the rubber inset that you put your foot on. What an idiot.

On the one hand I blame myself. It was obvious that he was doing the new Harley Chrome Consultant dance, so I should have known he meant the inserts rather than the floorboard pans themselves. Riders like this guy don’t replace the pans — Harley doesn’t make shinier ones for him to buy. On the other hand I blame him, because how fucking hard is it to call a part by its actual name? What he did is like selling shoelaces and calling them shoes. I mean, for fuck’s sake, he obviously bought floorboard inserts to replace the crap he sent me and it says right there on the box “Floorboard Inserts.” How hard is it to copy that?

I don’t know why this got under my skin so badly, but it did. I guess I can’t expect him to know the difference — this is the kind of guy who slaps down a credit card and has the Service Department do everything for him. He’s the epitome of a RUB. But come on dude, get it right!

Now I have to argue with him over who’s going to pay to ship it back, I have to go to the post office to mail it, I’ll have to go to the bank to deposit his check, and on top of all that I still have to find new floorboards, so I’m going to keep cutting the leg of my jeans…

Argh. Stupid, know-nothing, poser RUBs…