To Every Time, There Is A Motorcycle
It started when I was 16. I had to have a motorcycle. My friend’s brother, Kurt, just happened to have a ’65 Honda S90 for sale for fifty bucks, including a sparkling, metallic purple helmet and an oil-soaked cardboard box, full of unidentifiable parts. Well, second thought, let’s say it was sort of a Honda S90. You see, Kurt was something of a custom bike builder. He had raked and extended the front fork of the little cycle, added ape-hanger handlebars, a sissy bar, a rocket-shaped muffler, and a grape purple, metallic flake paint job to match the helmet. The “Chopper 90” (which my friends affectionately called it) was about as implausible a looking vehicle as anyone could imagine.
It had a number of idiosyncrasies, most notably a stripped kickstarter spindle, which meant that in order to start the bike, one had to run along, pushing the bike with the clutch in, hop on, drop the clutch on second gear, and bump start it. It, as a rule, never started on the first try, probably due to my forgetting to set the choke/open the fuel petcock/turn the key/put it in second gear/etc. The second attempt usually offered the best odds of bringing the little motor sputtering to life since I was still hopeful and fairly fresh, but with the third and fourth, optimism, speed, and my ability to impress girls would steadily deteriorate. I’m sure there were times when I had run halfway to my destination before the bike fired up (or I gave up completely). When I did get the bike running, I remember I was very reluctant to park it any distance from a good hill, even if that meant stopping blocks away from my destination. Thinking back, the ten block route to school really might mean me riding only three, but somehow that was still worth it.
On the other hand, once started, that Honda had the little engine that could. A tank of gas seemed to last forever, and, at 33 cents a gallon, running it was practically free. The Dixie cup-sized piston could rev to scary heights forever, and the crankcase never leaked a drop of oil. Granted, on hills the bike kept you busy downshifting while trying to sustain forward motion, and I also learned to wait for lots of lead time before pulling out on a highway, but that Honda could pull you and your girlfriend just about anywhere, as long as you didn’t care how long it took. We didn’t.
Although Kurt the customizer obviously had been big on cosmetic changes, he apparently wasn’t too interested in details like the electrics. The tail light, for instance, shown brightly with the bike parked, but seemed to cut out as soon as the bike started to move, which, along with a flickering headlight, could make the Honda virtually invisible from the back at night. The brake light worked though, which, on the nightly rides home from my girlfriend’s, often left me frantically tapping the brake pedal and redlining the engine in an attempt to escape the semi that always seemed to be bearing down on me.
A little about the girlfriend: she loved riding on the back of motorcycles (even the rolling joke I rode) but hated helmets (which at the time were legally required). She said something about freedom and the feeling of her hair blowing in the wind (it was, after all, the 60’s). She also always wanted to go faster, and had a way of persuading me, which, well, I can’t really describe in a family magazine. Fortunately, my top speed for the S90 hovered around 47 mph. I should mention that same girlfriend lived at the end of a two mile sand road. In it’s original incarnation the Honda could have frolicked off-road, but as a pseudo chopper, it shimmied and squirmed so much through the sand that I had to slog the entire two miles with both legs out to prevent putting the metal side down.
Preposterous as it was, the S90 lasted through high school and a year of college, whereupon I finally decided to sell it and move up to something more respectable, a souped up, red and white CB350, but that’s another story. The guy that bought the 90 planned to restore it to its showroom state, and I hope he did, but I never saw it again. Many different bikes and adventures were to follow the “Chopper 90,” but, looking back, it had done exactly what a good bike should do: it perfectly suited my bank account, skills, common sense (or lack of it), and lifestyle, all the while getting me to where I wanted to go as fast as I needed to, well, most of the time anyway…
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