Triumph Deferment
Triumph deferment
LEANINGS
Peter Egan
IT WAS, SO FAR, THE COLDEST NIGHT OF the year, said the TV weatherperson: 27 below zero, with a wind-chill index of 55 below, for those of us who like to torture ourselves.
Nevertheless, I climbed into my Ford van and hit the starter. It cranked over with a slow groan of protest, but fired right up. Good old modern fuel injection.
It was a terrible night to be out, with wind sweeping dry snow across the road in headlit clouds of instant snow blindness, but I was on a mission from God: buying back my old 1968 Triumph 500 Tiger Competition.
A few years ago my friend Brian Slark, who was then a vintage motorcycle dealer/restorer in St. Louis, called and said he’d run across a good,/ restorable, low-mileage 1968 Triumph T100-C, the high-pipe, street-scrambler model for which I have always had a weakness. A little weatherbeaten, he said, with gawd-awful goldmetalflake paint on the tank and sidecovers, but mechanically excellent and otherwise correct.
So, of course, I drove down to St. Louis and took it off his hands. Once home, I polished the bike up a bit, but managed not to launch into a major restoration. The bike ran so nicely I didn’t want to take it off the road. I rode it around all autumn, ignoring its cosmetic flaws, even if the paint job made me feel like I should be wearing bell-bottoms.
Came winter, and I decided a new, reliable van was in order, so I did a major garage cleaning and reluctantly sold the nice little T100-C. It went to a local businessman named Joe Robertson, who said he would probably do a full restoration.
I had all but forgotten about the Triumph when my friend Jeff Weaver, an old riding buddy of Robertson’s, mentioned that Joe had ridden the bike only twice and then parked it in his garage. It had been sitting there for two years, on semi-flat tires in his unheated garage, gathering dust.
Now, I don’t know about you, but images like this weigh heavily on my imagination and make sleep difficult. It’s like hearing that Michelle Pfeiffer is cold and homeless, camped in your front yard. A selfless, charitable act of rescue is called for almost immediately.
So, I called Joe and bugged the poor guy for about two weeks until he finally admitted he probably wouldn’t get around to restoring the bike and agreed to sell it back to me.
“I’ll be right over,” I said. Hence my precipitous drive on the coldest night of the year.
The bike was a little dusty, but none the worse for wear. Still gold, still complete. A slightly tarnished gem.
When I got it back into my own lavishly heated garage, I cleaned and polished for about two hours, then mixed up a small blenderful of Margaritas, sat back in my bike-appreciation garage rocking chair and stayed up until about 3 in the morning, soaking it all in.
Everyone has a bike, I suppose, that represents unrequited love-the bike you wanted but couldn’t have at some awkward, poverty-stricken time of life-and the 1968 Triumph T100-C is exactly that bike for me.
One Saturday in the spring of 1968, my college roommate, Pat Donnelly, talked his dad into driving us to a Triumph shop in the town of Richland Center, Wisconsin, where a “Triumph Blowout Sale” was in progress.
When we got there, the dealer had two identical high-pipe Hi-Fi Aquamarine Green T100-Cs parked outside in front of the showroom. Perfection.
While Pat and I ogled the bikes, Pat’s dad, who is the Bargainer from Hell, went to work on the dealer. After about 45 minutes of relentless hammering, he somehow got the dealer to agree to sell the matching pair of bikes for $1800. Nine hundred each!
How he did this, I don’t know. There was a healthy demand for Triumph 500s in 1968, and they normally sold for around $1100. At any rate, Pat and I were elated. We’d both been unloading Coca-Cola trucks at night to save for Triumphs, and this was a huge price break. Pat’s dad told him he could take out a student loan for the :balance (we had each saved about $450), so all we needed to cinch the deal was my parents’ permission for me to do the same.
My parents did not say, “No way in Hell!” because they didn’t use that kind of language. But that was the message. “Forget it,” they said. “You aren’t buying any $900 motorcycle while you’re still in college. You can pay for your room, board and tuition.”
“I already did,” I pointed out, “working on the railroad section crew last summer.”
“Then you can buy more of your books and clothing,” they replied. “Besides, you’ve already got a motorcycle.”
Yeah. My old Honda CB160. Not the same.
In retrospect, I suppose this sounded like a huge amount of money then-like a kid coming home from college today and telling his folks he needs a new Ducati Monster, on sale for only $7999. But I was not a happy young man.
I could see the whole golden summer stretching out in front of me while I rode that beautiful green Triumph everywhere-in a dream that was now melting like April snow. I can honestly say I have never wanted any material object so badly in my life, before or since.
The denial of this request to take out a $450 loan had a great deal to do with my quitting college later that year and joining the Army. I had suddenly lost my taste for being somebody’s 20year-old kid.
All of this passed before me as I sat in the garage the other night and stared at the T100-C. For three hours or so, hardly moving.
People occasionally ask what it is we see when we spend long periods of time contemplating an old motorcycle. Sometimes you can’t even begin to explain.
