[UberGoober]

Young people often make poor decisions. As I think over events long past and write these essays, it is amazing to me just how many times some adventure or other has begun with a poor decision that I have made in the spur-of-the-moment. The good news is that, at least in prior installments, the stories don’t always end up in the worst possible way. In fact, I feel safe in saying that my spur-of-the-moment decisions have usually wound up in a positive way.

Unfortunately, the opposite has generally been true for the more careful plans I have laid. It always begins the same way, some seed of an idea finds its way into my skull, germinates, grows and blossoms in my thoughts into a full fledged daydream. And while the dream always turns out perfectly, there is some disconnect when I take it out of my skull and try to make it into reality. For whatever reason, nothing turns out the way I imagine it.

At the time, you couldn’t have convinced me that rebuilding a 1978 Honda CBX was an idea better left alone in my imagination. I knew the bike I wanted, of course. I knew where it was sitting and even how it got there. Why I remembered it one day, and why I suddenly fixated on it so many years after I first learned of it, is a mystery.

In the years after I left high school I was at odd ends. I had drifted through school, generally getting by on my native intelligence and happy with the mediocre grades that came to a person who had talent but no actual drive to work at anything. It turned out that most companies were more interested in work than talent and so once I entered the real world I quickly moved through a string of low paying jobs, never sticking any where for more than a month.

Drifting around, I eventually wound up in community college. The experience was much the same as it had been in high school, me sitting in class three hours a day, disinterested in what was going on and doing the bare minimum it took to get by. But being a college student looks good on a job application and that’s what I wrote when I applied to work at a store opening in my town.

Schuck’s Auto Supply was expanding in the Pacific Northwest. I had seen their Sunday ads in the papers for years but if you wanted to shop there, you had to go all the way to Everett. Now they were coming to my town and they were looking for salesmen. Since my friend Rick was already working for them in Everett, I thought maybe I could do the same.

Rick was a lot different than I. He lived in a single parent household and his mom, a cashier in a grocery store, worked long hours at odd times to pay the mortgage and keep her two boys fed. Rick never had anything handed to him. He learned to work hard while he was young and as a result always had some kind of a job the entire time I knew him. Coming from the exact opposite situation, it took me until I was almost 20 to come to the understanding that I needed to follow his example if I was ever going to be anything more than a drifter.

This epiphany came about the same time I learned that Schuck's was coming to town and so I threw myself into getting and then keeping a job at this new store. I can say today that I probably wouldn't have hired the kid I was. Somebody saw something, however, and I was given a job as a part-time salesman. What I didn’t know at the time was that I was being set up for a fall. The store was over-hiring for the grand opening and planned on laying many of us off after the initial frenzy died down. Since I was clueless, I wasn’t fatalistic and I worked as hard as I possibly could. The good news was that for the first time in my life when the layoff notices came, I was one of only two people who didn't get one. Two months later I went to full-time and dropped out of community college without looking back.

I can’t say that other people were as determined to hang onto their job as I was. The other sales positions, especially the part-time positions, had almost constant turn over. One of the most surprising turn of events was when a guy named Brett came to work with us.

Brett wasn’t like the rest of the salespeople. He was in his 30s and was at least 10 years older than me and most everyone else who worked in the store except for the managers. He was also a real live ASE certified mechanic so he actually knew what he was talking about when he gave advice to customers. Based on the cars he drove, he even came down one time in a 1965 Corvette Stingray roadster, he had led a pretty successful life. I’m not sure why he ended up at Schuck’s, maybe he was going through a divorce at the time or his life was on the rocks some other way, but he was clearly too good for us.

In addition to the Corvette, one of the toys that Brett had was a 1978 Honda CBX. I knew this because I was just getting into motorcycles at the time and had just purchased my first bike, a 1984 Kawasaki Spectre 550. Back in those pre-internet days, learning about things was tough and you either went to the library or found guys who could give you advice first hand. I had already read all the books I could find and, when you lived in a small town like I did, there just weren’t that many riders around to get advice from. Naturally I gravitated to Brett like a moth to a flame.

Like all the other salesmen, Brett eventually left. Since we weren’t exactly peers, we didn’t hang around together outside of work and so when he left I quickly lost contact with him. But from time to time, I would run into him around town and would invariably ask about his bike. One day he told me that the bike was no more, it had thrown a rod and been consigned to the garden shed at his mom’s house. I thought that was too bad, it had been a nice bike.

It took a few years before I realized what a CBX actually was. It would have been around 1992. By then I was finished with the Merchant Marines and re-enrolled in Junior College. Since I had saved all my money from my sailing days and was still living at home with my parents, I had a reasonable nest egg saved up. Like a lot of people with money, I had no idea how just how hard life could be without it, so I spent most of my free time finding ways to squander what I had.

One day the seed of a thought took root in my mind and I knew I had to have a CBX. Perhaps I read about them in a magazine or saw some list of “future collectable motorcycles you can own for a song today.” Whatever the case was, I knew I wanted one. What’s more, when I thought about, I realized knew where I could get one.

Having spent most of my time in the Merchant Marines working on things, the prospect of fixing something didn’t frighten me. Engines were engines, how complicated could this be? I knew it had been blown up, but I could fix it, I was sure. The daydream took shape and soon I decided it had to become reality

(Photo Caption - A CBX 6 cylinder engine, not mine...)