High Finance

High finance

LEANINGS

Peter Egan

NOVELIST D.H. LAWRENCE ONCE asked how it was possible that so many young Englishmen were able to leave the green, pastoral beauty of their farms to work in the coal mines, living deep underground for all their daylight hours. His answer? Motorbikes.

Young men wanted motorbikes, he said, so they could return to their villages and farms, take their girlfriends for a ride and generally Be Somebody.

Personally, I never worked in a coal mine to get money for a motorcycle, but I did plenty of other odd things. So did my friend Denny Berg.

Denny owns a motorcycle shop called Time Machine, only a couple of blocks from my office. Eve been spending a lot of time over there lately, partly because it’s a good place to hang out in the presence of Gold Stars, Harley XRs, Royal Enfield Interceptors and other treasures that are being restored with meticulous care, and partly because Denny is building my Triumph engine.

The last Triumph engine I built myself inexplicably burned a quart of oil every hundred miles—on the left cylinder only. Two re-rings and a re-rehoning later, it improved slightly. But then I was always hearing Sounds.

This time I decided to set aside an engine fund and let a true expert lay his hands upon the venerable Twin. Denny used to build flat-track Triumphs for fast guys like Eddie Lawson and Dick Lewis, so he knows where these engines fail, and why. The goal here is a long-lived Triumph engine that doesn’t have to come back out of the frame for the foreseeable future, or the rest of my life, whichever comes first.

Other than watching the engine progress, the best part of hanging around the shop is just talking about bikes. Even though Denny is a few years younger than I am (like, it seems, most of the human race), we seem to have lived parallel lives in our early motorcycling, both having owned a succession of small-bore Japanese bikes.

When I dropped by the last Saturday, we got to talking about these early motorcycles, and the subject turned to the various financial hoops we jumped through to get our hands on them.

Denny told me that in order to buy his first bike—a Honda Sport 50—he took a job at a grocery store as a carryout boy and put in long hours to pay for the bike. This income was later supplemented with snow-shoveling, a paper route and working in a butcher shop.

In my own case, that first bike was a Bridgestone Sport 50, and in order to convince my doubting parents that I deserved this luxury, I had to agree to take on a second summer job. I was already working at my dad’s printing shop, where I could usually be found running a hand-fed press, printing infinite millions of pink lunch tickets for the local school. Unfortunately, the proceeds from that job were slated for the dreaded College Fund. If I wanted something as frivolous as a motorbike, they informed me, I could find extra work, after hours.

Father Bernard Schrieber stepped in at that moment (Deus ex machina) and offered me a job mowing the St. Patrick’s Catholic Cemetery, evenings and Saturdays.

Father Schrieber took me out to the cemetery, opened the equipment shed and said, “If you like machinery, you’re going to love this. It’s called a Turtle.” He dragged out a big green mower with no wheels and a shape that really did look like a huge sea turtle with a 5-horsepower Wisconsin engine resting on its back. “It works on the hovercraft principle,” he said. “You start it up, engage the clutch, and it hovers on a cushion of air created by its own blade. No wheels needed.”

It really was a remarkable machine. You could swing its considerable bulk around effortlessly, like a floor buffer on waxed tile. I was in business.

The Turtle and I hovered religiously among the tombstones evenings and Saturdays (no Sundays; this is Church work, lad) through the summer and into the fall. Gradually, I paid off the $275 loan on my Bridgestone 50, at roughly $25 per month, including the exorbitant 6percent interest charge.

It was actually a pretty nice job. I was out of doors, got to ride my Bridgestone up through the green hills to the cemetery after dinner each evening, and when I was done mowing I would put the Turtle away, lean back against a tombstone, light up one of the Luckies I had hidden in the shed, and gaze upon my new motorcycle as the sun went down on the new-mown grass, with my hometown in the distance. Then, there was the pleasure of the ride home, with evening coolness descending into the low valleys, and a stop at the A&W root-beer stand for a cool one.

The only disconcerting part of these rides home was that there was something slightly odd about shutting down a lawn mower with a big four-stroke Single, and then firing up a motorcycle with a 50cc fan-cooled two-stroke that would have been right at home on a lawn mower. I felt, as Kurt Vonnegut would later say, that some terrible mistake had been made. Bigger bikes with Turtle-quality engines would come later, along with larger loans.

But then, as now, motorcycles were a powerful incentive to find a job. Or even two jobs. In fact, I’ve often thought that, in order to end the high youth-unemployment rate, the government need only develop a powerful psychological campaign to interest the young in small, affordable bikes.

Denny and I are living proof that a 16-year-old will do anything—mow anything, shovel anything, carry anything or (dare I say it?) print anything—to get the money for a motorcycle.

Nothing ever changes. We simply dream of better coal mines and faster motorbikes.