Motorcycle's are a passion of mine.

A Personal Motorcycle History -
(I hope this page might be useful or interesting to a new rider thinking about taking up the sport or to an experienced rider reminiscing about their own entry in to motorcycling, but I am mainly putting it up because I have a shitty memory. If I don't write it all down, it'll be lost.)

Motorcycles are a passion of mine. I'm addicted to their frenetic dance. Ridiculous speed, weaving through cars, ultra acute lean angles and spinning tires all add up to an open air asphalt ballet I can't resist.

Where I started:


	My sister and I on a family friend's motorcycle in 1975.

Bicycles, of course. Every kid has a bike, or at least they ought to. I lived on a country road outside of a relatively small town in upstate New York as a kid. I rode my bicycle everywhere. Well, at least up and down my road, which was about two miles. I used to build ramps out of extra plywood and see how far I could jump. I cracked more than a frame or two in this fashion but my mother was kind enough to keep me supplied with various replacement used bikes. I developed a game in which my sister, our neighbors and I would ride up and down the street in front of our house trying to knock each other over. This was a good game and boatloads of fun but I don't really recommend it on a motorcycle. I had perpetual scabs on my hands and knees. When I was eleven we moved to New York City and I road my 10 speed Fuji Supreme everywhere. What a great bike. This is where I developed my predilection for weaving in and out of traffic. I would race messengers, run red lights, see how far I could ride with no hands (I believe my record was about 30 blocks), and ride over the Brooklyn bridge all fucked up coming back from parties. Ah, the salad years. I also took two bicycle-touring trips in the summer: one to Maine and Massachusetts (where I did my first century) and one to Europe. Later when I was an adult (sort of), I started riding mountain bikes as well as road bikes. I still ride bicycles every chance I get.

Why I got my first motorcycle:

Poverty of course. It wasn't actually a motorcycle. It was a scooter. A yellow Suzuki FA50. The first and last bike I bought new. College and I didn't quite work out on my first try, and I was back in New York City, needed some transportation and a scooter was cheap. Less than $600 I think. I bought it at Jim Moroney's Cycle Center in Newburgh NY, about 65 miles from New York City. It now occurs to me that I have absolutely no idea how I got it down to the city. I certainly didn't ride it. I wasn't that stupid. I hope.


*Not mine, but an FA50 non the less.*

Anyway, I know a lot of people have very strong opinions about what size bike one should start with, and I do too. This bike was too small. It was fine for riding in and around Manhattan and Brooklyn where I lived, but I got bored very quickly. It still would out accelerate an average car though. The first time I twisted the throttle in Moroney's gravel parking lot, the rear wheel spun, and I scared myself silly. Unfortunately, it was down hill from there. I was constantly trying to make the thing go faster than the 30 miles an hour or so it was supposed to do. It was small and light though, a major plus when I ran out of gas in the middle of the Brooklyn Bridge. I pushed the thing across the bridge with cars honking the whole way. I continued to push all the way across Canal street. to 6th Ave. and then up to Prince street where the nearest gas station I knew of was. All in all about two miles of pushing.

Why I got my first "real" motorcycle:


	My first real love.

More, more, more. I wanted more. I guess. My first real motorcycle was a 1983 Kawasaki CSR 305. I bought it used from a fellow in Queens who had bought it for his wife who never rode it. Now where have I heard that story before? Oh yeah, in every classified ad for small displacement street bike I have ever seen. Anyway, as I have said before, I have strong feelings about the size of first bikes. The CSR's 305cc engine was absolutely big enough. The bike was small, relatively light and would go 75 miles an hour on the highway if pushed. It was cheap and a bit natty (which was good because I tipped it over a time or two when I was first learning). This is all you really need to start. I was 18 at the time and didn't have the advantage of having ridden dirt bikes my whole life. Anything bigger would have been more than I needed and maybe too much.

How I learned to ride a motorcycle:

I had one friend who had ridden a motorcycle before. Though Walter was going to college in Ohio he was home visiting and helped me pick up my new (old) bike. Walter was already through with motorcycles at that point due to an accident. He had been unable to stay on the road going around a curve one night in Ohio. Here are the pearls of wisdom he imparted to me as he dubiously looked at me sitting on my new motorcycle: (This look I was to later learn is a constant in riding motorcycles, apparently a lot of people think it's a stupid idea.) "Eventually you will get yourself in a situation where you need to turn more. When that time comes, don't just lean the motorcycle, you lean too." Wise words, Walt. And with that I was off.
They didn't have Motorcycle Safety Foundation (MSF) courses back then. Most people didn't bother to get professional training or a license first. They just rode around with permits (if that). I taught myself to ride by riding. I got my license a couple of months later, but the DMV test was laughably easy. The amount I didn't know could fill a book, etc. etc. If you are considering taking up riding, I highly suggest an MSF course. I wish they had them when I was learning. Here are a couple more pearls of wisdom I would add to Walter's that I sure as hell wished I known when I started out:

1. Look where you want to go and you will go there. When you find your self in trouble don't look at the pothole, outside of the turn or the deer that just jumped in front of you. Look all the way through the turn. The bike will lean further than you think it will. Easier said than done. Practice!
The front brake is where it's at. It will stop you quicker than you can believe and make your private parts intimate friends with the gas tank. Do not grab it, squeeze it. Practice! If you ride a sport bike, practice it until you can get the rear wheel to come off the ground.
Look around all the time and be working on plans of what to do if someone does something stupid. Because they will. Trust me.
Practice. All the time.

There is more, much more to learn, but the above has helped me get through many sticky situations. You can learn all by yourself how to get in to them.

What I did once I had learned to ride:

Something really stupid: I sold the motorcycle and bought a car. I was going back to college and had saved some money after working for a year, so I could now afford a car. I hadn't yet realized that I'd started a life long addiction to motorcycles, and besides, it was a really cool car. A 1979 Mazda RX7. Don't worry though. I did the only sensible thing you can do when you trade in your motorcycle for a car. I totaled the car on a guardrail two months later. My father had suggested I get full insurance (thank you, Dad), so what did I do with my freshly cut State Farm check? Yup, my brain still addled from the crash, I went right out and bought a way over powered, shitty handling motorcycle. A used Kawasaki 1983 GPz 1100. This, my friends, was a great motorcycle if you wanted to go fast in a straight line, but I think that was about it. I didn't really know much about going around turns at that point anyway, so I don't think it mattered. It had a bizarre display pod on the gas tank that never worked, was a mean red, almost as long as a Cadillac, and was the reason I met my new friend Hiroshi.

How I began my practice of constantly changing motorcycles:


	Hiroshi on my old GPz1100

As Hiroshi told it, I was a real jerk the first time we met. Hiroshi was a Japanese foreign student at my college with a long-standing affinity for motorcycles. In Japan the vast majority (I would guess 98%) of motorcycles are quite small (400cc or under), so the ludicrously huge size of the GPz 1100 was appealing to him. Apparently, as I was returning from some outing one day, Hiroshi tried to engage me in conversation, and I was totally arrogant and obnoxious. I would like to believe that this wasn't true and it was merely a misunderstanding based on our cultural differences, but I doubt it. Luckily though, I was to get another chance. Hiroshi was friendly with a couple of English foreign students (Fiona and Helen) who lived across the hall from me, and they introduced us a second time. We proceeded to drink an entire bottle of tequila between the two of us and in short order decided on the following things: (1) Hiroshi would buy my GPz 1100 (2) I would buy another motorcycle to replace it (3) Hiroshi, Myself, Fiona, Helen, and Jack (A friend of mine from NYC) would all travel across country together. Actually, I think I may be condensing the decision making process a bit. All I really remember is the bottle of Tequila. At some point though, we decided on the other stuff.

My great cross country adventure:


*I still miss my Honda VF700F*

It didn't start out particularly well. Jack went out and bought a motorcycle for the trip, and I tried to teach him how to ride it. I think I was an even less effective teacher than Walter was for me. On our first training ride together, he crashed twice, luckily with no major injuries. That was it though, he had had enough. Fiona and Ellen had just bought a car, a 70 something Ford Maverick, and he agreed to travel with them. Hiroshi was on the GPz 1100, and I went out and bought a used 1985 Honda VF 700. This is the bike that is often given credit for starting the sport bike category. It was a great bike. It was far better suited to me than the GPz 1100 because I could actually make it go around turns relatively well.


	The Blue Ridge Parkway

The trip itself was fantastic. If you have never done it, I recommend quitting your job right now and going. Really, right now. I bet it's fun even in a car. We headed down south through DC, then south and west on the Blue Ridge Parkway (a must), through Nashville (where they only have domestic beer) to Texarkana (a well named town), all the way down to Corpus Christie. I know everyone knows this, but Texas is really fucking huge. In Corpus Christie I learned that the law can be a little more forgivingin Texas than it ever would be in uptight New York. I got busted doing donuts in the Maverick on the beach. The officer asked what I was doing, to which I replied "just fooling around".


Route 1 in California

He said not to fool around anymore, and told us to go back to our campsite. Thing was, Hiroshi, Fiona, Ellen and Jack were all on the roof of the car at the time. So much for the evil Texas police officer who just wants to fuck with a bunch of New York Jews and a couple of foreigners. From Texas we continued on through Arizona, New Mexico and into California, then up route 1 to San Francisco. I had to get back for my sister's High School graduation in New York, so I headed east by myself. I drove from San Francisco to Ithaca, New York in two and a half days, going 90 - 100 miles per hour on most of Route 80. Only two things of note happened: My chain fell off in the middle of the Nevada dessert. I limped in to the next town, Winnemucca, where I had a new one installed while I sat on the curb and watched johns go in and out of the brothel next door.


	The Ninja 900, one of the great ones.

Funny thing was they didn't look that much happier after they came out. I also fell asleep for the first and only time while driving a motorcycle. Thank god route 80 is so straight and has huge shoulders in Iowa. Once back in New York, I sold the Honda for capital to start a business buying and selling motorcycles. I made a couple of bucks and came out at the end of the summer with a used Ninja 900, Kawasaki's answer to the Honda VF series. I really loved that Ninja 900. It was comfortable, had a ton of power, turned great, and served me well for over a year.

My great cross a different country adventure:

I had transferred to a new school for my sophomore year and now I was in a bind. My new school required a proficiency in at least one foreign language. Most student's high school French or Spanish was enough, but being dyslexic, languages had always been a challenge for me. More accurately, I sucked at them. I had tried both French and Spanish in high school but was never able to pass any kind of standardized test. I had to do something. Rather than just try another romance language, I reasoned, I would be better off with something completely new. I would try and break my string of failures by pursuing a language for which I had absolutely no knowledge base. I was obsessed with Japanese motorcycles, one of my best friends was Japanese, and so the choice was obvious. Yeah, it was hard. Really hard, but still not nearly as hard as Chinese or Russian. I think Japanese was basically the only thing I worked seriously at in college. Even with all the studying, it became clear after the first year that in order to make it through, I was going to have to do something more than just pour over textbooks every night. I figured I needed to go straight to the source. I sold the Ninja, packed my bags and headed to Japan for my junior year of college. After traveling across this country had been so mind bendingly fun, I concluded the way to see Japan was similarly from the seat of a motorcycle. I don't think I was in the country more than a week or two before I purchased a (used) Honda VFR400R.


*Another fantastic V4 from Honda*

What a revelation! I don't really think I understood at all about how to make a motorcycle handle before I rodehis bike. 400cc and smaller motorcycles are de rigor in Japan and common in Europe, but with all our straight roads in the USA, we are obsessed with quarter miles, top speeds and the big heavy bikes that excel at them. Japan is different. It's basically all tiny roads with an abundance of twisty mountains ones. A motorcyclist's paradise. Traffic is always snarled but lane splitting is approved of. So, while other foreign students were out visiting temples, attending tea ceremonies and studying kabuki, I was soaking up a different aspect of Japanese culture. Exploring endless twisty back roads, mountain passes, and the inside of Japanese police stations. I probably put 15,000 kilometers on the bike over the year. Though my VFR400R turned far better than anything I had ridden so far, it's great handling didn't do me any good when I came around a turn on a mountain road no wider than the average US expressway's shoulder and was surprised to find another motorcyclist heading straight for me. I followed my instincts and leaned hard to my right. The thing is, they drive on the other side of the road in Japan, so he followed his instincts and leaned hard to his left. Bang. I had collided into a Japanese postman on his appointed rounds at about 20 miles per hour. No one was really badly hurt, but neither one of us was particularly eager to get up off the ground either. My Japanese just wasn't up to dealing with the torrent of expletives coming my way, so I struggled to pull off my helmet. This way he could see that the indignity of lying in the middle of the road was compounded by the fact that he had been knocked there by some foreigner who had no business riding up in the mountains anyway.



	*In the mountains of Japan*

This inauspicious start was actually the beginning of one of the most interesting experiences for me in Japan. First, I was carted off to a hospital in an ambulance and looked over by a Japanese doctor while he smoked a cigarette. Luckily I didn't really have any serious injuries, so I was quickly joined at the hospital by a bunch of Japanese cops who drove me back to the accident sight so I could tell them in detail what happened. In Japan it is the law that you must be driving slowly enough at all times to avoid having an accident. Therefore, by definition, if you get into an accident you have broken the law. Besides, this was pretty clearly my fault. Luckily I had been in Japan long enough to know that the key to a situation like this was to apologize and throw yourself on the mercy of your superiors (in this case, the cops). I visited the police station a number of times over the next few weeks where I apologized profusely to anyone I met. I think this went over doubly well because they sseemed to be expecting something more obnoxious from an American. In fact, I really was sorry. I felt like a heel for knocking the poor guy over. At the suggestion of my home stay family, we later visited the temporarily disabled postman at work and brought him a large box of fruit. I said how sorry I was to him personally, gave him the fruit and that was it. I had seen the inside of a Japanese ambulance, hospital, police station and post office up close. My bike was out of the shop in a little over two weeks. Not so bad really. I was back seeing Japan the way it should be seen.
Unfortunately, not all of my experiences having to do with motorcycles in Japan were so positive. Hiroshi had completed school in the states and had returned to Japan and taken a job at Yamaha. He was living in Tokyo while I was in Osaka, so we hadn't seen each other much. He invited me to come up to Tokyo and join his college motorcycle club in a reunion ride. The trip was three days spent entirely in the mountains near Tokyo staying in Ryokans (traditional Japanese hotels ideal for groups). It was an absolute pleasure for me, as I had been riding mostly solo up to that point, to be riding around Japan with 15 like-minded motorcyclists. After three glorious days of fantastic roads we met up with the current university club at a mountain top rest stop. They had also spent the weekend touring around, and the plan was to all return to Tokyo together. We were now 30 riders or so. About 4 kilometers from the rest stop, I was passed by one of the current members riding hard. A couple of turns later I came around the bend to find one of those scenes that make your heart stop. The rider who had passed me was down, lying on the side of the road near the guardrail, his bike bent, broken and leaking gas in the middle of the road. As I arrived, a few others were running up to him. They pulled off his helmet and bent over to talk to him. His face was contorted in pain but also somehow totally placid and without color. As I watched, I swear I could see life leaving his body. As more of our group arrived, he was soon surrounded, and I couldn't see him anymore. He died in the ambulance on the way to the hospital. His back and neck had been broken. The drive back to Tokyo and then Osaka was an awful one. Every mark in the road became an imagined obstacle rearing up to knock me off my bike and send me into the nether world. It took me a long time to come to grips with what I had seen.

The wasted years:


*The FJ1100 was a great bike*

Upon my return to the States, things started out well. It didn't take me long to procure a new bike, a 1985 Yamaha FJ1100. I have had both great and not so great bikes in my life, but this one definitely falls into the great category. Oodles of torque, a fantastic fairing and dash, and a super comfortable seat meant it was a great bike for long trips. I bought my first pair of saddlebags and spent many happy days aboard exploring upstate New York. I had come back from Japan with a new Japanese girlfriend, Yumi, and it was a great ride for the two of us. Unfortunately, I had another accident. Crossing the Brooklyn Bridge into Manhattan one evening, it started to rain. I turned around to tell Yumi that I thought we should return rather than get soaked, and when I looked back, there was a station wagon stopped about 15 yards ahead. There isn't much in this world slipperier than the Brooklyn Bridge right after it starts to rain, and I got nothing much from the brakes. We hit the back of the station wagon at less than 10 miles an hour causing some minor fairing damage, a bruise to my ego and quite a scare for Yumi. Between the accident and the incident in Japan, I decided it was time to get a car. I sold the FJ and bought another Mazda RX7. After returning to school for my senior year, I found myself unable to be without a motorcycle, so I bought a used 1988 Honda Hurricane 600. This was not a great bike for me. Though the magazines raved about it, and it was certainly fast and competent, I found it utterly boring and uninspiring. After graduating, I hung onto it but rarely rode it. My new girlfriend Kathy, was absolutely terrified of motorcycles, so it languished in my father's garage until he got so fed up with it sitting there, I was forced to give it to his neighbor. I spent approximately 7 years not riding motorcycles. This was a mistake, an absolute waste of a perfectly good three quarters of a decade. If this is the state you find yourself in right now, I only have one thing to say. Snap out of it!

Salvation:


	The ZX9R, a raucous pleasure.

Salvation came in the form of 1994 Kawasaki ZX9R purchased in 2000. It seems sometime in those 7 years without a motorcycle, I became an adult, though I'm not quite sure when. Being an adult can get a little boring, what with the constant work and all, so I did the only thing an adult can do when they find themselves with a little money: I bought another motorcycle. The funny thing is I got faster as an adult, not slower. It seems like I had retained all the info and skills I'd gathered in my youth but lost some of the fear I'd always had. I think modern tires had a huge effect on my newfound abilities. No matter what the cause, I was going faster and having as much fun as I'd ever had as a kid. The ZX9R is a great bike, sharing some of the best qualities of my earlier Ninja 900, FJ1100 and VF700. Fast, Nimble and comfortable enough to ride all day on. My girlfriend, Diana and I have had endless hours of fun touring here, there and everywhere.

How I spent my summer vacation:


*The ZX6R at Pocono International Raceway*

The whole working and having a little money thing brought with it another boon. I was finally able to afford some of the things I used to dream about. I took a motorcycling vacation in Spain with Diana, we rented motorcycles in Thailand, and some friends and I traveled through the Southeast USA on some of the best motorcycling roads in the country (including the infamous Deal's Gap). I always wanted to ride around on a racetrack, so that's what I've been doing. I sold my ZX9R and bought a smaller and lighter 2000 ZX6R so I would be better able to learn, signed up for a few track schools and have been having an absolute blast. I want to race but am too chicken. Who knows though, maybe someday.

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