Rebel Without a Clue

At some point in the life of an adult male, he is going to want either a motorcycle or a twenty-year-old girlfriend. After a brief discussion with my wife, during which she failed to express any rudiment of enthusiasm for either option, we decided that the motorcycle would be the less dangerous choice. My wife didn’t think I would make it to next Tuesday with a twenty-year-old girlfriend. In her view, the motorcycle didn’t get me much further into the week. Most wives understand that at some point in the marriage a man is going to develop a state of mind which will necessitate some careful guidance on her part. The goal is not to assist the man in navigating through this difficult time of life, but rather to prevent him from making a fool of himself.

The stage of life where a man’s thoughts turn to motorcycles is called “mid-life crisis”. Personally, I have been in my mid-life crisis for about twenty-eight years now, with no end in sight. Mid-life crisis is not to be confused with male menopause, which is characterized by an enlarged nose, saying “what?” when someone speaks to you , having to shave your ears and the top button of your pants not being buttoned. Just as a matter of clarification, neither mid-life crisis nor male menopause has anything at all to do with the fact that I have been tempted to place a Folger’s coffee can beside my bed at night. That is a totally separate matter.

I had successfully suppressed the urge to buy a motorcycle for the first twenty-six years of my mid-life crisis, but it was evident that I was weakening, so, one Wednesday afternoon my wife and I drove down to Finger to talk to a man who converts two-wheeled motorcycles to trikes. Trike is another word for a motorcycle with training wheels. Knowing how Harley Davidson owners scorn any non-Harley bike, I can only imagine how they feel about Honda trikes. Once my wife learned that motorcycles came with training wheels, she lovingly encouraged me in that direction. I don’t think she wanted me to die and leave her with a lot of paperwork.
Apparently, as long as I can keep an abundance of paperwork in my life, I have job security.

After a short drive down Highway 45, we arrived in Finger (pronounced Fanger) and turned into the gravel parking lot of the Finger Cycle Shop. It wasn’t hard to find since Finger has only one street and just the first three numbers of a zip code. Printed near the bottom of the Finger Cycle Shop sign were the words, “We trike your bike while you wait.” The proprietor of the shop saundered out to greet us. He was a stocky barrel-chested man with one tooth, named Hershel. Hershel was his name, not the name of the tooth. I can’t say that he had named any of his teeth, although Doyle Ray Scruggs named both of his back in junior high. Hershel looked like he had thoroughly enjoyed being at the top of the food chain. A package of Red Man chewing tobacco protruded from the pocket in the bib of his Big Smith overalls.

My wife and I sized up Hershel and decided that he might not know much about much, but judging from his tattoos and ponytail, we were confident that he knew more about motorcycles than we did. In reality our dog knew more about motorcycles than we did. My wife and I believed we were in good hands. I thought about breaking the ice with a hearty handshake and a boisterous “How ‘bout them Vols?” but we decided to cut to the chase and get our long list of stupid questions out of the way first. We thought that if we found any deal breakers, that would save us, as well as Hershel, a lot of time.

My first question had to do with his sign.
“You don’t really convert bikes while we wait, do you?”

“Sure do, but I reckon you might want to wait at home. It’s likely to take upwards of two weeks.” I liked Hershel already.

“Don’t you get wet when it rains?” I asked, moving on to serious inquiries.

“Yeah, but you dry off pretty fast, ‘specially if you crank ‘er up a bit,” he replied as he spat a long brown stream of Red Man juice.

Next question. “How do you keep from getting hot in all that leather in August?”

“You don’t. It’s hotter than blue blazes, but once you get so hot, it don’t matter no more.” Hershel was grinning. He was enjoying this.

“Do bugs fly into your mouth when you ride?” we asked next.

“Not if you keep your mouth shut”.

“What happens if an eighteen-wheeler hits you at seventy miles per hour?” I already knew the answer. My wife had posed that question along with the answer many times in the last twenty-eight years. I just wanted to see if she had been messing with me. She hadn’t.

“They’ll likely need a spatula to get you off the road.” Hershel answered, spitting out another stream of Red Man juice, just missing his sleeping hound. I wanted to ask if there are a lot of topless women at the annual motorcycle rally in Sturgis, South Dakota, but I didn’t think my wife would be interested in knowing that, so I let it go. Besides, it probably isn’t a good idea to show up in Sturgis on a Honda trike. I didn’t get this old by being stupid.


Hershel graciously offered me a ride on his trike and I immediately found out that getting on a three-wheeled motorcycle is not as easy as it looks. You can forget throwing the leg over unless you are over seven feet tall. I had to sort of back into the seat, which is really hard because my head doesn’t rotate all the way around anymore and my bifocals throw everything off when I try to look backward. After feeling around with my butt for a few seconds I finally got into position. During the process of mounting the trike, I heard Hershel emit a sound that reminded me of the death cry of a mortally wounded wombat. I have never actually heard the death cry of a mortally wounded wombat, and don’t even know if wombats have death cries, but I figure that if they did, that is probably what they sound like. I must have put my foot on some part of his motorcycle that wasn’t meant for feet. I decided that when it was time to get off the motorcycle I would remove my shoes, stand up on the seat and jump off. I did not want to hear that sound again.

Once I was in position, then came was the matter of the helmet. It felt relatively light when I was holding it in my hand, but when I put it on I was transformed into an aging yuppie bobblehead doll. If I got it balanced perfectly vertical and didn’t move, everything was fine. I was about to find out that holding still is totally impossible when riding down a bumpy country road at eighty miles per hour while screaming at the top of your lungs. Hershel got on in front of me and asked if I was ready. In truth, I was not, but I told him I was. I didn’t want to sound like a city boy who was on his first motorcycle ride. I wasn’t sure exactly how to hold on. I knew that putting my arms around Hershel’s mid-section was out of the question because if I died on a motorcycle, I wanted it to be from a wreck. Neither did it seem like grabbing his ponytail was appropriate. Fortunately, I located some handholds just in time for takeoff. I clasped the handgrips with all my strength and clinched the body of the motorcycle firmly between my knees. I was as ready as I would ever be.

I had never seen a vehicle go from zero to sixty in point-four seconds before. Beam me to the other end of the road, Scotty! Hershel was talking to me through a wireless headset in the helmet that sounded like the speaker at Sonic, where I think I am ordering a Route 44 grape slush and wind up with four cheeseburgers and a forty-pound bag of tater tots. I never understood a word he said and I think he must have had the same problem hearing me. For some reason, Hershel thought I wanted to see how fast the trike would go. Hershel dodged a pothole and negotiated at curve during which I’m sure at least two of our three wheels “caught air”. I made out the words, “highway” and “striped- (garbled) ape”, through the headset. Remembering the euphemism from my childhood, I was able to convey the concept of “no” to Hershel just in time to avoid total freakout.

I had managed to conjure in my brain a motorcycle fantasy that had absolutely no basis in reality. I had imagined myself gliding down the highway on a fire engine red bike accompanied by the soft purr of a finely tuned Honda engine with the wind wafting playfully through what is left of my hair like a gentle tropical breeze. I would be wearing a red jacket with the collar turned up like James Dean in “Rebel Without a Cause”. The chicks would drool. There would be snow-capped mountains on one side of the road and a pristine mountain stream on the other. I would be engaged in serious guy conversations with my fellow bikers who would be riding along side me smiling and giving me thumbs up and victory signs.

What is it really like to ride a motorcycle? Imagine being strapped naked to the wing of a 747 during takeoff. I couldn’t tell, but I am reasonably sure that my face was contorting like those guys in centrifuges training to be F16 fighter pilots. I think my eyes got further apart. I spent most of the ride in survival mode, hanging on for dear life and making promises to God. I promised that if I ever got off that thing alive I would stop watching “Baywatch” reruns and become a missionary to the pygmies wherever the pygmies live.

When I dismounted, my legs were like jelly from squeezing the body of the trike as if I had been trying to break a wild stallion. My butt was sore, my eyes were burning, I couldn’t hear and I had a wedgie of Biblical proportions. When I removed the helmet, it made a sound like a brontosaurus pulling its foot out of the mud. My hair was sticking straight out on the sides like I had just removed my finger from a wall socket. I thanked Hershel for the ride, told him I would think about it, threw up in the shrubbery, and headed back to Medina much wiser and more content with my life. On the way home, I decided to accept my life as it is and abandon the foolish notion of regaining my youth by purchasing powerful machinery. My wife was visibly pleased with the outcome of the adventure. Perhaps she could put off all the paperwork for a while longer. When we got about a mile from home, a homemade ultra-lite aircraft flew over. That looks like fun, I thought. I didn’t say anything out loud though. I didn’t get to be this old by being stupid.