Men were men...up to the '80s

Up through the 60's and70's when a brother needed a ride he just jumped on the back of your bike and off you went, no one looked twice, nothing was said. Once the eighties rolled around, things changed, all of a sudden people started thinking twice about getting on the back of another dudes bike, it didn't matter the reason, all of a sudden it was "Riding Bitch" and that just wasn't cool.  The way i see it, if your sled is dead, and you need a ride and that ride is the back of another brothers machine, screw the insecure pansies, get on the bike and get where you've got to be.

Now, let's go back in time, back to that period where it didn't matter, I had a friend who was suppose to be on duty at the Fire department, he needed a ride and gave me a call. I backed the raked and chopped 1976 Honda 550four out of the basement and headed to Mystic to help his ass out. I pulled up in front of his house, he said goodbye to his ol' lady, and walked out to the street with a boom box (remember those?), under his arm. We strapped it to the back of the bike and off we went.
          That Honda had an occasional problem where it would not up-shift when you went through the gears fast. You would be in first, bang second, bang third but the gearbox really wouldn't, You would think it did because it should have, while in fact, even though the shift lever came up, it would still be in second. Grab the throttle and instead of sprinting off in teh next gear you just added a fist full of throttle to the same gear. This usually resulted in the front end coming off the ground by about two inches.

Now on this particular day, that is exactly what happened, first, throttle, second, throttle, second again, throttle.  This time though, with the added weight of a rider on the back, instead of the front end lifting off the ground an inch or two, coming off the throttle, and having it come back down, it went up high and the entire bike went to the left. Now, going to the left is usually a catchable circumstance, going to the left while the bike is standing up on it's back wheel...not so much. The bike went over, we went over.

I had road rash on my entire left side, from shoulder to ankle, my passenger just on his arm, the funny part?

As we were picking our selves up, my passenger picks up a piece of debris off the road and tells me that we may have a problem, we broke the motorcycle, and he hands me the debris. i looked at it and told him we should be OK. He asked if it was an important piece. I told him, not to me....but your Boom Box probably had a use for it. It was a round knob that read "Tune". I thought he was going to cry when he realized his stereo was all over the road in pieces.