My First Harley

The first bike I ever owned was a tiny Honda Rebel. Yeah, I know; a Rebel. I can hear all you fuckers laughing. But you know what? To a young shithead like myself (at the time), it was freedom on two wheels.

And before you yahoos start bouncing empty Jack bottles off my melon, shouting "This is supposed to be a first HARLEY story!", I'm leading up to it, so bear with me. Now where was I? Oh yeah…my first bike was a Rebel.

I'd been itching to ride for what seemed like 'forever'. With the amount of money I possessed, I could barely afford to look at a Harley, let alone think of actually owning one, so I knew I'd have to start out small and work my way up. I managed to score the Rebel from a guy a couple of towns over who hadn't ridden it in years. He didn't think it ran, but nevertheless, I plunked down my meager savings and loaded it up into my father's van (all under his disapproving eye).

Some carb cleanup, new plugs and wires, a few tweaks here and there and voila; I managed to get it running and proceeded to ride the shit out of it, all over the place. It didn't like the highways, as it had a top speed of about 50 mph (and at that speed, the motor was so wound out, it sounded like a vacuum cleaner on nitrous, about to explode). I’d get looks from other drivers (as they zipped by), trying to figure out if the ear-splitting, high-pitched screaming was coming from the machine (under protest), or from me (out of fear that said machine was about to grenade itself right there, in between my legs - and immediately below my favorite-est part of my anatomy).

Despite all the fun it may sound like I was having, I still knew that I needed to upgrade to the only bike that really mattered to me; a full-sized Harley. But in the meantime, I was riding (sorta) and that's what counted. Eventually, I got out of school, landed a full-time job and started saving up. It seemed to take forever, but eventually I'd been able to get a decent chunk of cash saved and I put the word out that I was looking. Luckily, a couple of the older guys I worked with rode bikes, and they kept their eyes and ears open for me. Out of the blue, one of them had a buddy who turned up looking to sell his HD quick, as he was long on bills and short on cash. I don't like taking advantage of someone down on their luck any more than the next guy, but the facts were simple; he was gonna sell the bike to somebody, so I said I was interested.

The day came when the guy was to bring the bike by the shop for me to check out. I could barely focus on my work – every time I thought I heard anything that might possibly be a bike, I’d jump up and look out the window. Look left…look right…look left again, sit down. Jump up, look right…look left…look right again…sit down. I was going insane! Finally I heard it for real; the low rumble in the distance, slowly getting louder and louder…it was coming!! I scanned out the window, my head swiveling left and right, unable to discern which side it was coming from…the sound was bouncing off the walls in the alleyway, making it hard to get a fix on the direction. Then I saw it; the guy came around the corner nice and slow, an easy lean to the bike, and brought her around and up to the side of the building. Stopping next to the curb, he killed it, set the stand and sat back for a moment. I was up and out the door in an instant. I was so nervous, it felt like someone was twisting my intestines in circles.

My buddy was already greeting the guy, so I walked up and intro'd myself and we did the small-talk thing, but the whole time I was eyeing the bike up and down, front and back. She was a Shovelhead Lowrider (an '83, I'd find out). She'd been painted a dark-plum, with a sea-dragon illustration on the tanks and front fender, and there was a little hand-etched work done on the dogbones, but nothing outrageous. The only thing that was holding her back was that she was stuck with stock mufflers and a windshield. I knew that if I wound up buying her, those were going to be the first two things I changed.

The time came to get down to business and I asked if I could take it for a ride. He looked at my buddy and asked if I knew how to ride. My buddy just shrugged and said "I know if I was gonna buy a bike, I'd wanna know how it rode." The guy looks me over, hands me the keys and said “Ok kid, see if you can start her.” (Maybe he thought I'd be thrown by the fact the ignition is down under/beside the seat? Hey, just because I didn't own a Harley, that didn't mean I didn't know jack-shit about them.)

Trying to act cool and calm, while at the same time feeling as nervous as a schoolkid on his first date, I got on, reached down behind me and slid the key in. The guy laughed and said “Ok, it looks like you know what you're doing.” Ha! If he only knew how fucking nervous I was! The butterflies in my stomach were multiplying out of control and it felt like my heart was going to bully its way between my ribs and take a look at the bike for itself.

I fired her up, set the kickstand home and headed for the open road…and promptly stalled it. Goddammit! There were about 20 guys standing around looking at me and I definitely wasn't earning any points for style. "Alright fuckhead", I thought to myself, "get it right. This baby weighs a shitload more than your little Honda, so don't expect her to jump to attention if you just dump her clutch out." I started her back up, forced myself to breathe, and eased the clutch out, waiting for her to grab the power instead of trying to make her take it. She responded perfectly and I slid easily out into traffic. I was in Heaven!

I cruised up a couple of streets, banked a couple of turns, hooked back around and brought her back up nice and easy next to the guy. I’d just ridden my very first Harley!!! He could probably tell by the look on my face that I was taking it, but the only words I could muster were; "Yep, sold."

We finalized the arrangements and I picked the bike up on the following Saturday. I'd already registered it, so I slapped the plates on it and headed for the highway. I'd planned on losing the windshield right away, but that task would have to wait until later, because you see; I wasn't going home. Instead, I was taking the bike out to the coast to meet up with friends and I couldn’t wait to show off the bike.

The sun was out, it was close to 80 degrees, and I was just flowing along the highway in all my coolness. Well, not much coolness, considering my outfit consisted of an old, battered non-motorcycle lid (think; Jack Nicholson in Easy Rider), a pair of welding safety glasses (complete with slag pockmarks) for eye protection, a hooded sweatshirt (leather was waaay out of my budget), jeans and workboots with the steel-toes peeking out. I was certainly quite the spectacle, but I was also now the proud owner of my very first Harley and I felt like a king.

I came up behind a bunch of traffic and had to slow down and that’s when I started hearing a slight noise. It was kind of a cross between a ticking and a knocking. I cocked my head down to the tank to get right in under the windshield and block out the wind noise, to try and get a fix on where the sound was coming from. I could still hear it but it was now muffled, so I sat up straight and there it was again, louder. I got my ear right down beside the engine and could hear it, but couldn’t place it. Damn, what the F is wrong with my bike!? I sat up and the noise was getting louder now. Now it’s a clicking/tapping sound and I’m checking out my tires to see if I’ve picked something up, but they’re clean. About this time, the noise suddenly changes to an unbelievably loud “WHAP!! WHAP!! WHAP!!” slapping sound…and I immediately realized it wasn’t coming from my bike. It was coming from one of the rear tires of the tractor-trailer directly in front of me. Shit!!…

It took my brain a split-second to register what was about to happen…and that split-second was all the time that that trailer’s tire had left in this world.

When I say that tire exploded, I mean it exploded!! Looking back now, it seems like it happened in slow motion since I’m able to rewind it in my mind and play it over and over. But at the time, it was instantaneous. One second the tire was there, the next; it wasn’t. There were fist-sized chunks of rock-hard rubber shrapnel blasting past my head on all sides. The last remnant of tire, a section of tread about three feet long was just launched straight out behind the rig. As I watched this thick ribbon of rubber sit seemingly motionless in midair, my mind was screaming at me that this innocent piece of material, which was gently starting to flow back to earth, was in fact on a perfect trajectory with my head. Not wanting to wait and see how accurate my mind's ability to predict the trajectory of falling objects was, I opted for the safer route of jamming the throttle and leaning hard to the side. The Shovel leapt to life and I sliced into the lane on my left, the section of tread just missing my cranium. Still wide open, I screamed through the dwindling cloud of rubber debris and around the truck. At the time I was thinking “What a fucking rush!!”, but now (a lot) older, I know Lady Luck was riding my wingman slot for me.

Thankfully there were no more road-type incidents in store for me that night and I spent the rest of the weekend riding around the coast, stopping by various buddy’s houses to proudly show off my “new” Harley. When I got back home on Sunday night, I went straight for the wrenches and removed the windshield and set it in the corner. Losing the windshield was only the first change, followed soon thereafter by a conversion to straight pipes. After that was several rewirings (to get rid of the shorts the previous owner had somehow managed to incorporate into things), new rear fender, S&S carb, hand made (by me) seat, new paint, new bars, new tanks, etc.

From there, it was many years of slicing and dicing roadways from Maine to New York to Connecticut and back. She had a habit of breaking down from time to time, so the long distance jaunts were few and far between, but she more than made for that by being quite the little bar hopper / late-night street destroyer.

Her last road excursion was in 2001 with Russell, Zig and Jess, as we all rode out to Niagara Falls and Olean for a week of relaxation. That plan went into the crapper (pun intended, for those that know) in more ways than one, but that's a story for another time. The trip ended with the Shovelhead arriving home in the back of my pickup, her drive belt sitting at the bottom of a trash barrel on the side of route 95 in New Hampshire. Since then, the poor girl has been sidelined as I focused on the Fatboy and everything else that life tossed my way.

And now we move on to the next chapter, and I will miss that Shovel when she’s gone. While it was always a great dream of mine to get her rebuilt and purring again, my level of available time and finances always dictated otherwise. That doesn’t change the fact that after all the years and miles we've shared, she certainly deserves a proper resurrection - and I’m happy to say that this will now happen for her. With any luck, I’ll be able to keep in touch with the guy that’s picking her up (tonight!) and will be able to see her running free once again, because she deserves so much more than to be shuffled back and forth between the dark and dusty corners of my basement.

I’ll wrap this tale up with a funny PS; my father was always against me having a bike – he felt they were too dangerous. So how come one day (years and years ago, back when I was still living at home) I came home from work to find that he'd rolled it out of the garage and was sitting there warming it up, with a huge shit-eating grin on his face? The fucker had been taking it around the neighborhood when I wasn't around. Man, did I ever bust his chops on that one. We had a good laugh about it and while he never wound up getting one of his own, at least he's had a bit of the wind in his hair. Which in turn helps him understand why riding is so much in my blood.

And that’s the tale of My First Harley.

Ride Hard, Take Chances
Dusty Dave