Ground Zero

GROUND ZERO

Choppers from the Blowtorch School of Design

PETER JONES

My attraction to choppers and bobbers is for their original, postwar concept of performance on the cheap. They were the first bikes whose attitude surpassed their engineering. In the 1940s and `50s bikes were overweight and underpowered, but forget about prototyping parts on a Bridgeport; an afternoon with a hacksaw and a six-pack was a "man's" route to creating a hopped-up machine.

As the ’50s progressed into the ’60s, the Harley Sportster was one of the world’s quickest streetbikes. But dangerously close to equaling the performance of Harley’s 900cc V-Twin were Triumph’s 650s and Honda’s pesky 450.

And so, in the race for street cred, those were the bikes to

chop, although eventually everything from CB350s (that’s Mr. Editor Edwards’ fine example above) to inline-Fours got the chop.

Jay and Pete, two guys in my high school in upstate New York, built and rode what would now be considered alternative choppers. Or less politely, junkyard bikes. Jay’s was built from a CB450, while Pete’s was based on a Triumph.

Jay’s Honda chopper was the more finished of the two, with added bits of chrome and a custom paint job. My memory of his exhaust system, though, is that it was nothing more than two truncated headers. It was loud. Jay, like Pete, didn’t just ride a motorcycle, he lived for all the bad it said about him. Each could see, even as teenagers, that a certain power came with riding noisy, gnarly beasts. So did being on a first-name basis with the local police.

Pete and his bike had more of an impact on me because, well, he lived on my street. He was the coolest guy in my neighborhood. He was as bad as they came. He had a marked deck of cards. He drove a ratted-out Corvair. He protested in the streets. He smoked cigarettes.

But, worst of all (for my parents) and best of all (for me), he dated my sister.

Pete’s chopper was built from a Triumph Thunderbird, which was the single-carbed version of the Bonneville. A tiny, lonely Amal faced a forked intake manifold, each tunnel fighting for a share of the arbitrary, confused spits of fuel mixture. Being only 18 years old, Pete’s cool was on a tight budget.

And so was his chopper’s styling, based on the teenager-witha-blowtorch school of design. His craft fully respected the abrupt indelicacy of the word “chop.” He hacked off the fenders, chopped the frame and, of course, tossed the mufflers. The only parts I remember him adding to the bike were extended fork tubes, a banana seat and an iron sissybar that reached some three feet up from the back of the seat, ending in a giant, chromed diamond. It was beautiful.

Pete took me for rides on his chopper whenever my parents

weren’t around. Often, we’d go down to the local reservoir for some two-up hillclimbing. It was sort of an urban-Steve-McQueen-twinsescaping-into-Switzerland-from-Nazi-prison thing, or so I imagined.

Then, suddenly, my dream life of cool bikerdom by proxy was

threatened: Pete broke up with my sister in a feral fit of teenage testosterone overload. You know, lust. My sister wouldn’t put out and he had found a girl who would. Damn it.

I was heartbroken. I was terrified of never again seeing my biker friend, of never again riding on the back of his chop job with my $5 head in a $10 helmet. My biker cool, which was wholly defined by Pete standing next to me, was dangerously at risk.

So what if he smoked cigarettes, cheated at cards and slept around? He rode a motorcycle. Why couldn’t my stupid sister appreciate the value of that virtue?

I pleaded with her to abandon her prissy attitude and whore it up a bit. I tried convincing her that being a slut would be fun and make her popular. If she’d just put out a little, my biker cool could be assured. I mean, girls have given it away for dumber reasons. And hey, we weren’t talking about her being deflowered by some wussy jock, Pete was a bad-ass biker dude. Giving it to him would not only help make me a cool biker-type dude, it’d make her a cool harlot. Everyone would be happy.

Well, the selfish girl wouldn’t buy any of that.

Thankfully, Pete was happy for me to hang around with him even if he wasn’t dating my sister. I wondered if maybe he thought it would be a good means for finding his way back into her graces?

Or maybe he thought I was naturally cool and deserved to be sported around on the back of his bike? Or maybe our living only three houses apart made me impossible to escape?

One day, while Pete was working on his Corvair, his chopper was parked out front in the driveway. I sat on it, trying out the fit and reach' to the controls. Seeing me on the bike, Pete offered that if I could start it, he’d let me ride it the half-block up to where our street dead-ended.

I turned the key on, folded the kickstarter out and held the throttle slightly open, just as I’d seen him do. I jumped into the air and drove the full force of my 109 pounds down onto the lever. The bike slowly cranked over and stopped. Pete told me to roll the engine over to the compression stroke and try again. This time, my kick had the engine spinning faster and before it lost inertia, it fired into life. I was on a chopper, the controls were in my hands, the engine was running, I was 14 years old.

I banged the bike into gear and rolled to the end of the driveway, looking right to the end of the street, seven houses away. I paused for a moment, then twisted the throttle, feathered out the clutch and turned left. □