This story was originally combined with the introduction to this series. For consistency, I have broken it out separately.
Billy Pirkle was the same age as me, the same grade as me, lived right next door to me. But that was just about all we had in common. With no siblings, he was a good-looking kid with two working parents, two St. Bernards, and already at age 11 on his way to becoming a star quarterback or some multi-sport athletic prodigy. Not that I was envious. I enjoyed hanging out with my little brothers and was glad my mom was the stay-at-home variety, especially at meal times. And we had dogs, too. They were mutts, of course, but they barked at or chased suspicious folk who wandered by foot, three-wheeler or car down our small-town, suburban cul-de-sac. And at that age I wasn’t yet worried about what anyone, especially girls, thought about my looks.
But it was Billy Pirkle’s motorcycles that soaked me with envy and would change my life forever, albeit indirectly. By the time his family moved next door to us on Cowpoke Lane, he already owned a beat up, yellow Yamaha 80cc that had seen much better days. I secretly dubbed it Old Yeller. Even so, my Western Auto minibike was no match. It didn’t even have a clutch and you started it with a pull-string like a lawnmower. Once on board, you just pulled the throttle back and putted (crawled) up the street at 25 mph. But Billy’s yellow dog had real shocks and multiple gears and it was all scratched and dented from what seemed years of adventure. And on that cycle he would ride like crazy through the woods surrounding our houses for hours after school like a precocious Steve McQueen imitator. It was a world I knew nothing of, but something inside me wanted to experience that much danger.
Now for his twelfth birthday, his parent’s bought him a brand new, reddish-brown Kawasaki 100. It was much sleeker, faster and louder than Old Yeller, and for awhile my envy was burning a hole in my chest. But one day, Billy came riding over and asked if I wanted to ride with him. He intended to allow me to ride his old Yamaha. Now of course, I wanted to go , but I was terribly nervous because I didn’t know the first thing about how to shift gears or how to stand up on the foot pegs when you’re riding over rough terrain or how to use both the foot and handbrakes simultaneously to make both tires slow down at the same time to keep your body from flying over the handlebars (minibikes are lousy teachers). But Billy was patient and gave me a crash course in all of these tricks, so I gave it a go. There were a few rough trips out to nearby farmlands where I practiced what he had shown me in a small area while he rode around the acres, circling back to see how I was doing ever so often. Eventually I learned how to stay on Old Yeller and was actually having fun riding around with the prodigy next door. Keep in mind, these are not the days that changed me forever. They were just the warm-up act.
One Saturday not too long afterwards, my Dad arrived home from town with the trunk lid to his car propped up, tied down with a string and unable to close because of something jammed in the back. Curious, but not thinking it was anything important, I glanced over from dribbling a basketball to watch my Dad pull the scariest thing out of that trunk and then start rolling it down the driveway with a huge smile on his face. I stood there in disbelief, the basketball forgotten. It was a shiny, new metallic-gold Kawasaki 100! Now, Billy’s new motorcycle was very similar to this beast but unlike his trimmed-down dirt bike, this new gleaming machine had a big round headlight and turn signals. It was actually a KE 100, which stood for “Kawasaki Enduro” and was supposed to mean it was versatile – a hybrid of street legality and off-road capabilities. And the leather seat smelled like a brand new pair of boots. It was gorgeous! It was so tall, I couldn’t even put both feet on the ground at the same time while sitting on it. After helping me put an unusually heavy helmet on my head, my Dad helped hold the beast up so I could kick start the engine. Even the sound was immaculate.”What d’ya think?” he asked. I was scared out of my mind, but I just nodded my heavy helmet-head up and down, my eyes smiling bright from behind the face guard, in total disbelief. I was the proud new owner of my very own motorcycle!
I soon learned to hold it up with one foot, then slowly let out the clutch and throttle the gas to get moving and only then put both feet on the foot pegs. And it had power! The speedometer registered 80 mph and it didn’t take too long for me to learn how to make it scream down the gravel roads that ran beyond our neighborhood for miles. For a short while following, I rode around with Billy to figure out where to ride and how to get to the best dirt trails. But sport practices and seasons eventually took him away. So it was then I started exploring the acres of woods and trails where we lived for hours, days and what seemed like eternities, alone, like a cowboy movie hero on his horse bringing reign to the wilderness. I would roll up to the bottom of steep, lofty embankments that terrified me, and then finally race to the top after a litany of self-coaxing. If there was a large berm perpendicular to the trail, it called out for a hard pull on the handlebars to see how far you could become airborne, like Evil Knievel. Sometimes I would ride the same trail over and over again and each time trying to see if I could take it a little faster, a little more aggressively, a little more dangerously. If my mother had seen it, she would have looked at me with one eyebrow up and one furled down which translated means “stop immediately, or else.” But she was far, far away in a safe place. I was living a boy’s dream…adventurous, heroic, dangerous.
And here is the most dangerous thing of all to me in this entire story – my Dad, after noticing me riding Billy Pirkle’s loaner, spent probably half a month’s salary to give me the keys to all of that power…to let me know that he believed I had what it would take to handle it. He knew there was tremendous risk in me riding all over the countryside for hours at a time; over pot-holed gravel roads and foot-wide trails with low-hanging branches and broken beer bottles and God knows what else. But he took that risk. Before then, I was a sixth grade kid riding my bicycle (or the safe minibike) within the sound of my mother’s dinner call. Safe and comfortable. But after the day my Dad pulled that golden beast out of his trunk, letting me know he believed I had what it took, I was changed…forever. And for that day, I am forever grateful.
learning2breathe 