I cannot focus. Two-wheeled daydreams have appropriated all available processing power. I am obsessed with motorcycles.
Please send help.
When I was about 11 years old, my middle school had a book fair, as middle schools often do. I bought a small, dense square of paper called Superbikes. Published just after the turn of the century, the book’s featured machines were no newer than the early 2000s. Many of them now look quaint but not classic, their values arriving at the last stop on the depreciation express.
I loved that book. I read it cover to cover, then read it again. I read about every single bike it contained, from the ones that still remain enshrined in memory (Ducati 916, the most gorgeous bike ever made) to the banal commuters that somehow snuck into a book named Superbikes (Kawasaki Zephyr 550, with all the flair of a filing cabinet). But even the humble Zephyr is evocative in its way: beating engine bared, exhaust primaries snaking towards a megaphone muffler, tank and tail simple yet graceful. My brain was Play-Doh and my heart was pure, and then I mainlined the details of two hundred motorcycles, one after the other, over and over and over. It’d have been safer to give an 11-year-old a pack of Marlboros and a Playboy subscription.
My recent browser history is littered with searches for the “superbikes” I deem reasonable enough to own one day. Ducati’s Monster and 748. Honda’s CB600F Hornet and CBR954RR FireBlade. Suzuki’s SV650, a world favourite, and TL1000R, a world flop. Intended to fight Ducati’s all-conquering V-twin race bikes, the TL-R was comically overweight, had a bizarre rear rotary damper, and rocked a tail unit resembling a duck’s quacker. It never started a World Superbike race. Suzuki nonetheless offered an optional “factory race kit” for the TL-R, all for the low, low price of £50,000. The bike moved off showroom floors slower than stoners get off a couch, and Suzuki didn’t sell a single race kit. But damn it, that bike was in Superbikes, and it got stuck in 11-year-old me’s brain goo, and I want one.
The TL1000R even had "V-Twin Superbike" on its fairing. At least it believed in itself.
All the bikes I just named are stupidly cheap today. Old Hornets and SV650s are easily had around two grand. Early Monsters —friggin’ Ducatis — can be bought for not much more. Even the litre-large FireBlade and TL1000R are obtainable for middle-four-figure sums. That amount of money seems like a pittance compared to what those bikes can do. At rest, a fantasy manifested in metal; at speed, a symphonic meteor piloted by a superhero (at desk, a writer laying it on thick). Somehow, helmets and leathers conspire to create an indelible sense of “other”, that he or she who dons them has taken a half-step outside the reality of mere mortals.
My mother would agree with that sentiment. A half-step outside reality, sure — another half step and you’re fully outside it. As in, dead. Motorcycles were strictly forbidden in our household. As a teenager, my only two-wheeled outlet was when I hitched rides to motocross tracks with a friend, watching him practice and race with joy and envy. He was fast, and he won, and he also crashed a few times, which gave my mother’s case an ironclad defence. On a couple occasions, that friend and his dad were kind enough to bring along a spare bike for me, which I rode around the flat, unused spaces surrounding the tracks. I never had the bike out of first gear, and it terrified me. It was love at first and only attempted upshift.
If a book and a dirt bike can influence a kid, so too can his mother. I carried her admonitions of safety with me throughout my early twenties. What’s the point of owning a bike, I reasoned, in a featureless major city like Houston, with nothing but straight roads, crushing traffic, and seemingly weekly motorcycle crash headlines? As much as I lusted to become a rider, an equal measure of risk aversion halted such schemes’ momentum. But now I live in the UK, and my frontal lobe is supposedly fully developed. There’s a 125cc learner’s Yamaha sitting on the back patio. Its 12 horsepower could be tamed by a coordinated toddler.
But hey, whatever, man. Every journey something something dinky motorcycle. Or more appropriately, superbike.