Me
Who am I? No one special; just an average American guy. I graduated high school, went into the military, started working construction after that, and have just been a middle-class, blue-collar American since. I grew up in the Midwest in a middle-class family; Dad worked construction, Mom was a teacher, and my younger sis was a pain in the ass, in a little sister kind of way. We lived on the edge of the country and small-town suburbia. If you stood on our roof and looked south, it was corn fields as far as you could see, and to the north were small subdivisions scattered around till you got to town. I did all the normal kid things, played baseball, basketball, and football; we were outside more than inside. We even had our own big-wheel gang that ran around the streets when we were little kids. It wasn't until I was a little older that my love for dirt bikes would be discovered.
Heading down the street with my friends to play baseball at the park, one of the older kids in the neighborhood came ripping down the street riding a wheelie on his dirt bike, then he jumped over the ditch into the park area. We all went running down there to watch him ride around. Somehow, he convinced us younger kids to lay down in a row on the back side of a dirt hill, then proceeded to jump over all of us.
Whoa!! . . . watching him fly through the air over all of us; I was hooked! I thought, One day, I'm going to have a dirt bike like that! But for now, all I have is my cheap bicycle.
Behind the park where we all played ball, was a tree line, then open fields with hills everywhere. The older kids made BMX tracks all through the fields and hills and us younger kids would go hang out and watch them ride and race each other. One day while hanging out watching the cool older kids race around on their BMX bikes, one of them asked if they could take my bike around the track and hit some jumps.
Wanting to be cool and fit in with older kids, I said, "Sure."
Me and my buddies watched with excitement as he rode my bike around the track hitting the jumps. When he came up to the biggest jump on the track, he jumped off of it and ghosts rode my bike. We all watched as my bike flew through the air, then crashed and flipped 100 times through the dirt. We all cheered, thinking that was the coolest thing ever! Later that day riding my bike home, peddling as fast as I could down the street, I was playing out scenarios in my head of me riding on the track, hitting all the jumps. I was about 100 yards from my driveway and as I put the force of my leg muscle on the pedal, my cheap Kmart bike broke in half! Literally in half! As it crumbled to the ground, I ate shit, face-first into the ditch on the side of the road. Dazed and confused with a bloody elbow and scratches on my forehead, I looked up at my bike in two pieces!
"Oh, crap!! Dad's going to kill me!" I picked up the two halves of my bike and did the walk of shame, dragging my bike the rest of the way home and hoping none of the neighbors saw me. I was half-excited that I might be able to get a real BMX bike, but the other half was afraid I would get my ass beat for ruining my bike.
That night at dinner . . .
"Ummmm Dad . . . I was riding my bike home from the park, and it just broke in half."
"What? How did it just break in half? Were you out jumping it with the older kids?" he asked.
"Ummmm . . . No, I was just riding it down the road." That's my story and I'm sticking to it! I thought.
Luckily, my birthday was coming up soon and I asked for a new BMX bike. A real one this time; one that could take the abuse of riding offroad. Till then, I had no wheels. Time to play war in the woods with my friends, shooting BB guns at each other.
"Don't shoot your eye out!" Mom would always say. But what's more fun than running around the woods playing war with your boys?
When my birthday finally came around, I ran out to the garage and my dad was putting together a ten-speed road bike. What? What is this?? I thought.
"Dad, I need a BMX bike, not a road bike!"
"Son, we're thinking ahead, soon you'll be older, and you'll want to ride on the roads."
The devastation ran through my head! "No! I don't want to ride on the roads; I want to be in the dirt forever!"
The road bike sat in the garage most of the time. I had a new plan; I would take the money I made in the summer from mowing the neighbors' grass and I would start buying bike parts from my friends or anyone that had extra parts and build my own BMX bike. My plan was working; I loved getting my hands dirty and working on things. I finally had all the parts to complete my bike. I sanded and prepped all the parts, spray painted them, and put it all together. I was sitting on it, making sure the handlebars were at the perfect angle, and the brake levers were in the right spot, one more scan of the bike, tighten the bolts, adjust the chain tension so it wouldn't come off . . . I was so excited to show off my bike at the park where everyone was riding. I jumped on and headed down the driveway, turned onto the street, and peddled as fast as I could to get there.
Ha! . . . there's a big bump in the pavement, I'm going to hit that and fly through the air! That will be my first jump on my new bike! My adrenaline was pumping when I hit it, it was like slow motion as my bike hit the bump in the road and lifted off the ground; I felt freedom and excitement. I'm one of the cool kids now!
As the slow motion continued . . . Ummmm. . . . What is that? ran through my head as I watched my front wheel take off ahead of me and roll down the road!!
Oh, shit!! You dumb ass! You forgot to tighten the front wheel bolts!
The slow motion continued as I watched my front forks stick straight down into the pavement and not budge as the back end of the bike came flipping over, launching me headfirst through the air into the pavement! I tumbled like a gymnast on a floor routine, a solid 6.7 for the landing in my opinion, as I came to a stop in the ditch covered in mud. I looked up and watched my wheel disappear down the road.
A year or two went by and I still didn't have a dirt bike or anything with a motor on it. But we were in junior high now, almost adults in our minds, so I started dropping little hints at dinner, before bed, on the way to church and whatever inappropriate time I could find, I would drop a hint about getting a dirt bike. Hopefully, to annoy my parents enough that they would just give in and buy me one to shut me up. Then it happened, one day after school, my buddy, Brian, showed up at my house on his Honda XR 200.
"Whoa! No way!" I stood there in awe looking at it in my driveway.
"You want me to take you for a ride?" he said.
"Hell yes! Wait, what if my parents see me on it?" I asked.
At this point, I still hadn't ridden on a dirt bike yet and didn't know how my parents would feel about it.
"I'll meet you down the street, at the corner," I said.
He took off and I ran down the road and jumped on the back, hoping my parents wouldn't see! Brian took off full-throttle, running through all the gears as we flew down the road, no helmets or protective gear! I was having the best time of my life! Time to step up the pressure on the parents.
"Dad, we need to talk about something, I'm getting older now and . . ."
"What? Is it time for the sex talk?" he asked.
"What? No!!"
"Time for the birds and the bees talk and all the ins and outs."
"Huh? No!! We already learned about that in health class."
"Oh, you did?"
"Yeah . . . this is about riding on my friend's snowmobiles and dirt bikes, I want to ride with them but don't want to get in trouble, so I'm asking first."
"That's it?"
"Yeah."
"Ok, that's fine, I don't care if you do, just be careful."
Cool, greenlight! That's all I needed to hear. It seemed like all my friends at the time were all getting some kind of cool toy to have fun on. Steve's family had snowmobiles, Arron's family had dirt bikes, Jeff recently moved into our neighborhood, and he had a three-wheeler, Eric had a go-cart, Mark's dad bought him a three-wheeler, and Warren got a dirt bike. I felt like I was the only person in the world without something cool to ride. That would end the Christmas of 1985.
The parents finally gave in and said they were thinking about getting me a three-wheeler. I told them they could have all the money in my bank account if they needed it; whatever it took to get one! Heck, we didn't even have a truck, how would we get it home?
The first day was the best but it sucked; I had never ridden anything with a manual clutch before; all my friends three-wheelers had automatic clutches, just shift gears, and go. That first day, I spent four hours trying to go around my yard one time. I got so frustrated trying to figure it out, but I wasn't going to give up! Ha! Once I figured the clutch thing out, it was on! We were never home, always out riding, straight off the...
