I walk back outside and some of the neighborhood kids come running up to me yelling, “Motorcycle man, motorcycle man” and they ask me all sorts of questions while I uncover my bike and do a pre ride check.

Once I get done looking things over, putting on my gear, and answering all sorts of questions like, “What’s that?” and “Why do you wear a helmet?” it’s time to fire up the bike. I ask the kids to step back just a bit and press the ignition switch. The engine kicks over and I give the throttle a little twist to impress the kids.

I pull out of the driveway and sit at the stop light for a few minutes until a car comes up behind me. The city put in these great pressure plates a while back, but my bike just isn’t really heavy enough to trip them. It doesn’t really bother me all that much I guess; it sort of gives me another minute to let the bike warm up and for me to get used to the idea that I’m sitting on a three hundred and eighty pound rocket.

The light finally flashes green, and my heart stops for just a second. Here we go, this is what I’ve been waiting for. I pull out slowly and make a left across the street. As I finish the turn I lean the bike back up and hammer on the throttle while leaning forward just a bit. The bike jumps forward and all I can do is hang on. I rev right up second gear and barely have time to bang it into third. As I go up into third I’m a little further back in the seat and when I snap the clutch out, the front wheel hovers just a little off the ground. The wheel sets back down and I take a quick look down at the speedometer to check how fast I’m going. Just a touch over seventy as I ease off the throttle a bit. Not bad for the first five hundred feet of my ride.

I take it down a notch and work my way through town at a comfortable speed. No tickets yet, please. I finally pull up to the entrance to the highway and do a quick scan for cops. None to be seen. A small smile creeps onto my face as a slammed Honda pulls up next to me and starts to rev his engine. Goddamn, I hope these punks never learn. I can see out of the corner of my eye that he’s checking me out. He wants it, I can tell. I give a sharp pull on the throttle to let him know that I’m game and then the light turns green. Sure as shit the little punk floors it. What fun! No wheels off the ground this time. I tuck my head down and just hammer on the throttle as hard as I can and pull onto the ramp, then bang, I’m in second, then third, and I have some time for a quick mirror check. He’s not even close.

Now comes the humiliation. I pop up to fourth and cut it loose, the v-twin beneath me roars as I slap it up to fifth. I peek at the speedo .. one hundred and three and climbing. A quick shift to sixth and about 4 seconds after I left the light I’m on the freeway and doing a solid hundred and five. The Honda’s about half way down the ramp. Never even had a chance. Punk. I slow down a bit and wait for the Honda to pass. He does, trying not to look at me. Damn it, today is going to be a good day.

I stop at the bridge toll and pay my two bucks, and it’s off again. I keep pace with traffic for a bit until I hit the foot of the bridge to be sure I don’t get nicked in a speed trap, then it’s all open. I tuck in as small as I can and shift back down to fifth. Roll the gas on and we’re moving. 70 .. 75 .. 80 .. shift back to sixth .. 90 .. 100 .. 105 .. I’m holding my breath now. I grip the bars as hard as I can and seat my ass way back in the seat to keep my profile as low as possible .. 110 .. 115 .. I see an opening in the traffic up ahead and start to aim for it .. 120 .. my helmet has pressed against my face now and my teeth are clenched .. 122 .. I’m almost to the top of the bridge, but I hold onto it for just another second .. 126 .. 127 .. she’s topped out, and I’ve reached to top of the bridge. I ease off the throttle and sit up a bit. The wind slows me down pretty fast and I get down to a normal speed again pretty fast.

I’ll never forget the time I was on this bridge going full out and a minivan pulled out into my lane about two hundred feet in front of me. Trying to find just the right point where my rear wheel wouldn’t lock at 110 mile an hour was not a high point. But I’m still here, so I guess I must have done ok.

A few exits up I pull off on to route 84 and start my ride for real. I traverse another town at comfortable speeds, especially at the base of La Honda road, because the cops are out here for one thing and one thing only... to bust crazy motorcycle drivers. It’s all for good reason I guess, as there is almost always at least one major crash on Sky Line per weekend, but I’ll be damned if I’m going to get nicked before I even start my ride. So even when the guys on the R1s slide past me at the lights, I keep it in check and wait my turn proper. I reach the bottom of La Honda and it all starts to become worthwhile.
I warm my tires up a bit on the last quarter mile or so before the road breaks off, and as I’m rocking the bike from side to side I really start to get pumped. This is what it’s all about. My brain goes empty and my pulse picks up. I get a little presquirt of adrenaline into my blood and then I’m there. I roll into the first turn and it’s mother fuckin’ on.

I push the bars hard and lean into the turn while holding my speed. As I reach the apex of the turn I roll the throttle on and sink the bike just a little more. I pull the bike back up and roar down the straight and set up for the next turn. I slide my ass off the seat this time and hold the throttle a little tighter for this turn and push the bars up far enough to rest my elbow on my high knee and the low peg just starts to scrap the pavement as my bike roars out of the corner.

This goes on for about three miles and then I come out onto Skyline Boulevard and the famed Alice’s Restaurant .. not for the song mind you, but for the fact that Sky Line is one of the best spots to ride in the entire country, and Alice’s is the meeting place for literally hundreds of motorcyclists every weekend. The place is literally packed with people talking about bikes, looking at bikes, swapping bike stories and tips. And then there’s the bikes .. during the course of a day you can see almost any sort of bike ridden by almost every sort of rider. I’ve seen a vintage one cylinder Harley next to thirty thousand dollar Ducati with both the riders admiring the others' ride and talking about how they got their bikes and where they like to ride and stuff like that. Alice’s is sort of the heart of the motorcycling in the bay area, and nearly everyone there on a Saturday afternoon has one goal in mind. To put some pavement under them.

After hanging out for a bit I decide to get going and hop back on my bike. I pull out of Alice’s and take it easy past the crowd of people. I’ve seen too many squids try to pull a crowd pleaser of some sorts and wind up making a complete ass of themselves in front of a hundred people as they flip a wheelie or crash a stoppie to even bother with it. I save it all for the corners that are about to come. I get a little ways away from Alice’s and I turn it on again. Here comes my shot of adrenaline and once again I’m off. This time it’s a bit different though. This is my favorite part of every ride, this one stretch of road. It’s full on nice gentle sweepers and I don’t really have to slow down. At all.

I roar through the corners I get my bike way down low and my head is turned almost sideways as I look through the turn. Every corner is another chance to twist the throttle a little more and by the time I reach the next Vista Rest point I can barely hear the scream of the engine over the screams of joy in my helmet. There truly isn’t anything better than this. The euphoria I feel when I park my bike after a hard ride is not all that unlike the feeling of rolling over for a cuddle after great sex.

I’ll sit in my chair and shake for an hour or so after I get home, and the grin on my face is next to impossible to wipe away. Yup, for me there are few things better than riding my bike, and there sure as hell isn't anything like it.

When I was fifteen I moved out of my parents house. “Moved” should be visualized as my mother and father dropping off a suitcase with some of my things in it off at my friends house and asking me not to come around anymore. But that’s part of a different story and only important to set the stage for what was to come later on. I wandered through a few homes and families of friends for a while until I ended up at the Thomas’ humble abode.

A bit about the Thomas’... The Thomas’ were a family I stumbled upon who took me in as one of their own. There was Adrian, the son and my friend. There was Jack, Adrian’s father, and Beatrice, Adrian’s mother. There were a few other additions and side shows that came and went such as Jack's second wife Betty (Beatrice being the third); Jack’s second son, Adrian’s half brother; Jeff and Linda, some drinking buddies of the family; and a few others. I can sum up the entire circus of a family in two adjectives: insane and dysfunctional. Where to start?...

Adrian was a teenage alcoholic metal head with coke-bottle glasses and long frizzy hair. He was a bit on the insane side and often found joy in the torment of his mother (I’ll get to that later.). Adrian also fancied himself a musician and would spend hours on end playing his out-of-tune guitar slightly off time and off key to Doors songs on the radio while smoking his generic-brand cigarettes to the filter. He prided himself on his introverted behavior and would go out of his way to abuse anyone who would allow him...sort of like a hundred-pound bully who would drink too much at a party then get his ass kicked by some trailer trash, because Adrian would call the other guy’s girlfriend a “fat-ass bitch who needed to suck him off right now.” But for all that, Adrian had a small charm about him and could be tolerated, for the most part, if you just got past his “I wanna be a rude boy” façade...and besides, with Adrian around, something entertaining was bound to happen.

Then there was Jack. Jack’s real name was John, but he opted to adopt the alternate name, “Jack,” for obvious reasons. He was a sort of intellectual old hippy type who had a degree or two in human psychology and philosophy and wound up putting them to good use in the moving industry. Jack drank too much and spent a majority of his time sitting downstairs in the living room with all the lights off humming along to old Neal Young or Sonic Youth albums. To describe Jack is difficult, to say the least. He was a saint and a bastard all in the same breath, but he had taken me in and fed me mustard sandwiches and cheap beer so I couldn’t complain too much.

Adrian’s mother was a different story. Beatrice was completely insane. She was a diagnosed schizophrenic paranoid who could be pushed over the edge at any moment by something as simple as a light switch. She was an irritable bag who had thick calluses on her elbows from years of just sitting at the kitchen table drinking beer and smoking cigarettes. She rarely bathed and could be heard most of the time yelling obscenities at Jack while he hum, hum, hummed along to Sonic Youth. She had been in and out of institutions over the years, but due to lack of state and personal funds she was unable to get the real care she needed. Between Jack and Medicare she was able to maintain a steady supply of medications...except of course when the beer money ran low. Then we would get to see Boyd, Jack’s second son, and the pills would be replaced with some cash.

Which brings us to Boyd. Boyd was a true drug addict who peddled and used any controlled substance he could get his hands on. He had done so much LSD that his spine was permanently damaged to the point where he had to wear orthopedic shoes and pee while sitting on the can. He died a few years back after popping a handful of his dead mother’s (Jack’s second wife, Betty) lithium pills and wandering outside in the middle of a blizzard. They found his body in the spring about a hundred yards down the hill behind his house. He had fallen, hit his head, and then froze to death while being covered with four feet of snow.

This was the Thomas family. My family. This household could have been a poster child for dysfunctional families, and the whole time I lived there, about two years in all, was like some horrible dream filled with drunken insanity and all I could do was sit back, watch in rapt horror, and try not to laugh to hard.

So it was late summer, and I had been away for a few days and had returned to find a small party in the making. A friend of ours had managed to dig up a few guys to come over and drink some brew with us that night. John, the friend, had informed us that there might be girls in the troupe, and we expected his prophetic enlightenment to prove true. Adrian was suddenly a bustle of activity. Ashtrays were emptied and bookcases were straightened in the anticipation of the fairer sex actually being present in his room. Floors were vacuumed and beer was ordered and everything was made just so for the proposed arrival.

And wouldn’t you know it, just as the candles were being lit for mood lighting a car full of youths pulled up and amongst the group were indeed two attractive young lasses. I use the term attractive fairly loosely. In this case, attractive meant showered and female, and Adrian was in heaven. At last he could strut and pomp around and show these wonderful young ladies the time of their lives. I approached the whole situation with a bad mood because I knew what was coming, and I knew these poor girls would not have a thing to do with me within the hour.

As everyone made their way to Adrian’s room I grumbled something about a long day and made my way to my own room in hopes of escape. I made it for about a half an hour, but then succumbed to the desire to at least witness the failure in progress instead of having to listen to alternate stories told by Adrian over the next week. I walked into Adrian’s room to find him sitting on his bed with a stoic “I’m a bad ass, worship me” look on his face and the last part of a bowl going around while some jazz musician played just one click over the comfortable volume level on the radio.

Things seemed to be going well for Adrian. One of the girls seemed to be genuinely interested in his ramblings about musical theory and the quality of his new Ernie Ball guitar strings that he spent twelve dollars on at Percy’s music shop earlier that week. But then things took a bad turn for Adrian when she turned her attention to another one of the guys in the group. I could see it on Adrian’s face. He had to think of something fast. He had to keep this girl’s attention on him or she might be lost to him forever. So he did the only thing he could think of. He picked up a bottle of rubbing alcohol from his nightstand and popped the cap off. This seemed to get the girl’s attention again, which in retrospect was probably not so good for him as he was now bound into doing something stupid in a misguided attempt to show off for this fine peach of a girl who sat here in his room directly across from him.

So Adrian takes a quick survey off the room and discovers everyone is now watching him. He looks at the bottle for a second then tips it back and takes a mouthful in. With his head tilted back he turns to me, and while looking out from under his glasses, he gurgles “light me up” to me. It just so happens that I’m in the process of lighting a cigarette and have a Bic lighter in my right hand. I look over to my friend John for a moment and see he has a stunned, almost “you’re not really going to do this are you?” look on his face. My gaze then travels back across the room to Adrian and along the way I see mostly puzzled looks. It’s like no one can see this coming. They can’t seem to fathom the idea that in the course of about six seconds Adrian has a mouth full of a combustible liquid and I have a lighter in my hand. I would under normal circumstances tell Adrian to quit being an ass and spit that shit out, but I was feeling a bit pissy that night so I leaned in and gave the flint wheel on the lighter a spin.

Sure enough a small flame appeared out of his mouth. I think I heard one of the guys start to say “cool,” but before he could get it all the way out the two-inch flame in Adrian’s mouth has turned into a four-inch flame. At this point all Adrian had to do was close his mouth and the flame would have been extinguished, but the flames had burned his lips and he panicked. He started to make this weird gurgling noise and leaned forward to spit the mouthful of alcohol out. Wrong move. Within seconds his whole face was ablaze. His hair crackled and shrunk away form his face as the molten liquid dripped from his chin and onto his chest and lap. He was making this “uuunnnnggg” noise as his shirt caught fire, so I grabbed a blanket from the foot of the bed and made my way over to help him put himself out.

It’s amazing how hard it is to put out a combustible liquid fire once it gets going. Put one part out and another part springs back up. At about the same time I sprung up to put my friend out, his love interest started shrieking, “Oh my god! Oh my god!” over and over. I gave half a thought to just letting him go to see just how crazy everyone would get, but I figured Jack would be pissed at me for torching his son, so after a few tries I finally managed to extinguish poor Adrian. It turned out that he was only lightly burned on his face, like a sunburn, as rubbing alcohol doesn’t burn all that hot. He had some pretty good sized blisters on his chest where his shirt had melted through, but all in all he would be able to sleep it off, and as soon as his eyebrows grew back he would be tip top again...except of course for his love interest.

For a while afterwards everyone just sat quietly in the room trying to think of funny things to say that would direct thoughts away from what had just happened. But in the end I think it was the lingering smell of burnt hair that prompted the early departure of our guests. I think it took about fourteen minutes from the time he popped that cap off until the doors on their car closed, which left Adrian, John and I alone to discuss the height and color of those flames in detail for the next few hours over a couple six-packs of beer. Later that week John slept with Adrian’s love, and their friendship was never really the same again.

So there’s a brief insight to one of many, many crazy happenings at the Thomas household. I’ll tell some more stories in the future, as I happen to reminisce about them.