Fast-Track came down from Seattle this weekend to be there for Mr. Drywall‘s surprise birthday party. It was a fun party and afterward we headed back to FT’s folks’ place to say good-bye before heading back over the hill to home.

Of course as we were departing I noticed FT’s little brother coming out of the house and I had to stop and say a quick “Hi” since I hadn’t seen him in ages. We chatted for a few minutes and pretty quickly the topic of his new bike came up.

He has one of those mini-motorcycles: Not the eensy ones that stand maybe a foot and a half tall and make grown adults riding them look somewhat silly although everyone riding them always seems to be having a great time. No, FT’s brother’s bike is about twice that size, standing three feet off the ground but still much smaller than a regular motorcycle. Of course once HB heard about this, he was instantly asking to ride.

HB zipped around the neighborhood for a while and FT’s brother finally had to head out since he had been on his way to other activities. He let us continue to fiddle with his mini-bike and after FT and HB had their turns I gave it a whirl.

The little bike probably gets up to 50 mph when properly tuned, but there was some sort of problem with the bike’s body that made it rattle fiercely when it got up around 30 mph. Still, 30 on a three-foot bike feels pretty fast and the bike wasn’t exactly made for performance turning so it was a hoot as long as you were going in more or less a straight line.

I was having a total blast zipping up and down the street a few times. Eventually I resigned my turn and we asked if Nik or Gin wanted a ride. At first they refused but eventually we were able to get Nik to get on provided we stayed with her, running down the court as she puttered along, keeping close watch to make sure she didn’t fall. She seemed very nervous at first but she was smiling wide when she reached FT’s driveway safely. After a few moments we even talked her into making another lap on her own. She certainly didn’t crank on the throttle the way the guys did, but she rode all the way down and back without incident and declared the experience to be a lot of fun when she was back on solid ground.

So we were having fun, and of course HB decided he needed a real motorcycle fix so he talked FT into dragging out his actual Harley and giving it a spin. At some point (I’m not sure how exactly since I was zipping down the street on the mini at the time) he hit a squirrelly patch of pavement and almost dropped the bike. He caught most of the weight and wasn’t going fast at all so there was no damage but it did force Gin to run down to the middle of the court in uncomfortable party shoes that were more designed for looks than function. HB was fine and the bike looked to be no worse for wear so disaster averted.

It was shortly after that HB and FT began urging me to give the big bike a try.

I should preface this by pointing out that most of my friends are into motorcycles. If they don’t actively ride now, they did at some point in the past and probably 80% of them own or have owned their own bikes. Me, not so much.

I don’t know what it is, really. I mean, I like motorcycles; I think they’re cool. What’s not to like, really? They’re cool looking, loud machines that you can tinker with and ride around and a lot of them go really fast. That’s a guy’s toy if I ever heard one described. But for various reasons I always admired them from a distance and never felt (much of) the urge to procure or ride one. Perhaps part of it is that I’ve always felt they were expensive to the point of being a luxury that I haven’t had a lot of opportunities to afford.

The extent that I’ve stayed out of the motorcycle game is such that aside from the mini bike I had just ridden a few moments earlier and a couple spins around the block on another friend’s little zippy go-kart (which doesn’t really count but is closer to riding a motorcylce than I’d ever gotten to that point) I had never even sat on a running motorcycle.

So I get on FT’s Sportster and he and HB are barking all sorts of tips and explanations: Here’s the clutch, that’s the shifter pedal, this here is the throttle, etc. After several moments of instructions I tried to put the bike in gear and killed the engine. We spent a few anticipation-draining moments trying to get it started again (some sort of fuel lever was acting goofy) but finally it roared back to life and rumbled underneath me.

“Just down to the end of the block and back,” FT said.

“And don’t forget to repsect the power of it,” HB added, “It’s a lot more machine than that little mini over there.” I nodded grimly. Power. Respect. Got it.

I eased off the clutch and twisted the throttle gently, not too much. But I let off the clutch too quickly and the engine died again. I pulled the clutch back in and gave it some gas as I hit the starter switch and listed with satisfaction as the obnoxiously loud engine gave another approving roar. I had coasted a bit toward the end of the driveway and I didn’t have as much momentum to worry about, so I eased back again and turned the handle for some juice. And I started to move.

The first few seconds were a bit nerve-wracking, as I wobbled a bit under the weight of the machine and the painfully slow speed. I remembered how the mini bike was much easier to handle when you got going so I tentatively applied more pressure to the throttle and sure enough, the wheels stabilized under me and I jet forward, amping my speed faster than I expected from such a minor throttle adjustment.

A slow grin spread across my face as I rumbled past the inlet to the twin courts toward the opposite end. I glanced at the speedometer and noted that I was traveling at about 23 mph, which seemed pretty fast on the short stretch of road. The houses that curved around the dead-end street began to loom in my vision and I decided it was time to slow it down and turn back around.

I pulled smoothly on the right handle, the brake, and waited for a second to adjust to the slowing speed. Except right from the start I knew something was amiss because my velocity wasn’t decreasing as I expected, and the houses ahead were still getting closer. I tried gingerly to turn just a bit to my left to avoid rushing up on the neighbor’s driveway in a barely-controlled, unfamiliar machine and applied more pressure to the brake handle.

Suddenly things went very wrong. The front forks began to wobble violently and the speed of the bike still had not gotten much lower than twenty miles per hour. I felt what control I had slip away rapidly and I launched my feet out to try and gain some purchase. Of only the stupid thing would stop moving so fast…

The bike tilted heavily to the right and I planted my foot on the asphalt in an effort to keep from going over. The weight of the bike and the speed (maybe 15 mph by this point) landed square on my right leg, which caught the momentum of the tilt and pushed back: Equal and opposite reactions. At the same time my grip and control over the handlebars was forgotten for just long enough to allow the front tire to twist sharply to the right, almost facing the headlight back toward me at a 45° angle.

Still my own momentum and the rebound from the salvaged tip to the right acted on the bike and my body, sending the machine down to the left and tossing me foward over it’s twisted handlebars and into the street where I broke my fall the best I could with my arms, felt my head hit the ground and I rolled over myself coming to a stop on my back.

I felt HB’s presence before I actually saw him, as he squealed to a halt on the mini bike just behind me. I tore myself from the ground in an effort to appear brave or tough or whatever. I tried to take a mental stock of my condition but my brain received only one message from my body: “Malfunction!” I staggered over to the low brick wall that leveled out the neighbor’s yard from it’s natural downslope and sat down, shocked and hurt.

My hand broke through the general chaos of sensations first, reporting serious road rash on my left palm. I glanced at it and noted the nasty torn hole that was seeping trace amounts of blood around embedded gravel chunks. HB was coming over now, asking how I was. I grunted a reply at first, still unsure how bad off I was. As if accepting my ability to hobble to the brick wall and make noise as indication that I wouldn’t require a paramedic immediately, he went over to check the bike’s condition.

For a moment I forgot about my own condition: I had lain my friend’s bike down. Unforgivable sin? Minor inconvenience? Pricey mistake? I didn’t know the reaction I would get, nor the damage I had done, and I suddenly had to know. I managed to get up and felt the first gripe from my right hip as I stood. Okay, left hand and right hip so far, I thought.

The left turn signal was broken off and the left rearview mirror swung wildly on its peg. The left rear saddlebag was badly scuffed and in the relative darkness of the evening streetlamps, I couldn’t see how badly damaged the black gas tank was. My heart sunk. I had wrecked FT’s motorcycle. Some friend.

I felt my hands start to shake. HB said something reassuring and immediately began to try and coax me back on the bike. My right elbow suddenly piped in with a belated status report, “Pain here!” it announced. I checked it and noticed a grim slash of bloody cuts and dirty, ragged skin hanging loose from raw-looking scrapes. There was nothing I wanted less at that moment than to sit back on the motorcycle.

“Don’t let it beat you like that, man,” HB said matter-of-factly. “Here’s what you did wrong: You didn’t respect the power. Now this time…” I cut him off.

“No way, man,” I said. “I’ll just take this little one back.” I slapped back the kickstand and started to push forward on the safe little toy bike.

“Come on, dude,” HB pressed sternly. “You just got going too fast. This thing is heavy, it’s powerful. Look, you don’t even need the throttle, just use the clutch to control your speed. You have to take this back to the garage.”

For a moment I caught myself in the midst of a waging war within my head. On one hand the aching parts of me, now increased to my right arm, wrist, shoulder and especially hip as well as my left hand, screamed in unison to not dare getting back on that death-trap and expose them to such agony again. On the other hand my brain was calmly, rationally telling me that it was stupid to make one mistake and then give up. No one learned by quitting.

So I put the kickstand back down on the mini bike and walked a bit shakily back to the Harley. I swung my leg over it and ignored the groaning protest in my hip as I righted the bike toward the home end of the courts (HB having already turned it around for me). I gently tested HB’s clutch theory and the bike moved a little under me. A thrill of fright spread through my entire body as the wipeout from moments before replayed in my mind and I quickly squeezed back on the clutch and brake. HB noted that I needed to apply both when it was time to stop.

Of course. Duh.

I know how to drive a manual transmission car, why was this different? You can’t just brake, you have to apply the clutch too. That must have been why I didn’t stop the way I expected to the first time. But no matter what, I wasn’t risking using that throttle. So I tried again, easing back on the clutch until I was traveling fast enough to stabilize my balance and pull my feet up to the pegs. In less than twenty seconds the ride was over and I pulled tightly on both clutch and brake as I drifted casually to a stop in front of FT’s driveway where I gladly killed the engine and stepped off the bike, feeling a new wave of pain hit as I stepped down on my right foot.

Of course at that point I was finished and I deflected HB and FT’s efforts to get me back on the bike for a more triumphant second attempt. Eventually they realized I wasn’t going to give in and they changed their tune, handing me congratulations for getting back on and riding back after the fall, which didn’t feel like such an accomplishment—more of a brain-rattled snap decision, but I sincerely appreciated the sentiment regardless.

We went our separate ways shortly after that, my hip growing more painful the longer I stood or walked and the stinging in my hand and arm building to an uncomfortable whine in my head. I apologized profusely to FT for wrecking his bike, which it turned out was not much worse for wear aside from the originally noted turn signal and mirror (which HB was quick to point out he could fix quickly and with parts he already had lying around his garage). I tried to offer to pay for or do whatever I could but FT seemed more interested in having me try to ride again than whatever might be wrong with his bike. Somehow it made me feel worse, him being so understanding about it.

So that was my first experience with a motorcycle: A real motorcycle. It took me less than 90 seconds to lay it down and mess myself up fairly significantly. I woke up the next morning with my back hurting, possibly from trying to compensate for the pain in my hip, possibly a latecomer to the pain parade the fall started. Either way it’s been a fairly uncomfortable weekend, but I’ll survive.

As for me becoming a biker… I don’t really see that happening. I don’t think the experience gave me some unnatural phobia of motorcycles, but I know two things to be true: One is that I don’t like big, heavy bikes. If I ever try riding a motorcycle again, it will be with something more my size and speed (by that I mean small and slow). The other is that when it comes to single-person vessels, I much prefer jetskis.

They hurt less.