Cheesy Circumstances

Cheesy circumstances

LEANINGS

Peter Egan

LAST SUMMER, MY NEIGHBOR CHRIS Beebe saw an ad in the paper that said (I am quoting here from memory), "Three BSA 650s for sale, one good runner in nice condition, two parts bikes; $1000 takes it all."

Now Chris is not a die-hard BSA fan, but the deal seemed too good to pass up, so he made the call. The bikes sounded promising. The owner, who said he was riding the "good" BSA every day, lived about 20 miles out of town. Chris took the afternoon off work and drove out for a look.

When he got there, he found a sort of BSA graveyard in the front yard of a farmhouse. Scattered around were a frame and partially disassembled engine, a few buckets full of old BSA engine parts and another frame with a complete engine in it. The latter was missing its seat, fenders and lights. It had a non-BSA tank and a homemade exhaust system. Chris assumed this was one of the parts bikes.

But no.

The owner explained that this was the "good one" and the other scattered parts comprised the two parts bikes.

Chris looked around the yard perplexed. "You said over the phone you had a complete bike, but it looks like you don't quite have a whole BSA here..."

The owner grinned slyly and said, "Got you here, didn't it?"

Not being a violent man, and not having a large rocket-propelled grenade launcher on his shoulder, Chris simply shook his head and walked away. He got in his car and drove home.

When he told me this story later, Chris confessed that, for all his anger, he still looked back at those three partial bikes on the front lawn and felt bad for leaving them behind.

"I wanted to rescue them" he said, "just to get 'em away from that guy and out of that yard full of trash."

We'll ignore for a moment that the BSAs were the yard full of trash; there was in Chris's voice the same note of pathos you hear when a Humane Society worker fails to separate a mistreated dog from its abusive owner.

I knew exactly how he felt. It seems that at least half the old motorcycles I've bought in my own lifetime have

been acquired under what my friend Jeff Craig once so aptly called "cheesy circumstances."

The moral urge to lift a motorcycle out of a sordid or unhappy environment is often as powerful as the actual need to own and ride the thing.

My first Triumph, for instance, was bought from an otherwise very nice fellow whose only real crime was that he'd leaned his beat-up 1967 Bonneville against a barn and had then neglected to put it indoors for the winter. I somehow spotted the bike while driving out in the country, even though the only piece I could see was a handlebar end sticking out of a snowdrift.

Being a good Limey archaeologist, I immediately glimpsed that backswept, bird-wing curve of the handlebar, along with the chromed ball-end brake lever, and surmised that we had a Triumph under the snow.

I had very little money at the time, but I had to buy this bike. You simply cannot leave a complete Triumph Bonneville stuck in a snowdrift all winter. The rules of civilization require you to take it home.

While it's always nice to rescue a bike from an unpleasant owner or slow death by exposure, there is yet another whole class of cheesy circumstance that falls under the heading of Basic Aesthetic Nightmare.

This is where you find the Vincent Black Shadow that's been painted

metalflake lavender and are forced to buy the thing just so you can repaint it. Or maybe it's a Honda 400F with a great big Windjammer fairing held on by rusty pipe-strapping material. Or virtually any motorcycle with a seat reupholstered in white vinyl and red piping.

Whatever the travesty, real or imagined, few forces of nature are more powerful than the urge to rip someone else's custom accessories off a bike -, and toss them over your shoulder.

My freshman year in college I bought a Honda Super-90, partly because I needed transportation, and partly because the bike had German "iron cross" decals all over the tank, sidecovers and fenders.

When I went to pick up the bike, I took along a razor blade and a damp cloth. I handed over the check, shook hands with the former owner, started the Honda and rode around the corner. There, I immediately got off, crouched beside the bike and removed all the German crosses.

What relief. It felt, in some small way, like the liberation of Paris. Lowering one flag and raising another; a change of command.

Is it possible the seller was so clever he put those decals on his otherwise pristine silver Honda as a sales tool? I doubt it, but he might just as well have, in my case.

I used to think that the best way to sell a motorcycle was to clean it and polish the chrome, put it back to stock condition and display it in a spotless corner of your garage, as if to verify its place as the centerpiece of your life, which it had usually been.

But maybe I'm wrong. Maybe it's the snowdrift, the rusted luggage rack, the iron cross and the surly owner approach that work best. The will to rescue and reform may be stronger than our admiration for a clean and well-kept bike.

Perhaps the ideal newspaper ad should read: "Ugly troll with bad temper wishes to sell tangerine orange AJS-7R lying on side in yard, frozen in mud."

I know I'd call, and Chris probably would too. For some of us, there's a very small distinction between an effective classified ad and a ransom note.