[UberGoober]

Finding Brett wasn’t hard. I knew where is mom lived and old people never move so I just went over and asked about him. She gave me his phone number and pretty soon I was over at his house pitching my deal.

I got the bike cheap enough, I traded a .30 caliber M-1carbine with two 15 round magazines worth about $200 at the time and gave him another $200 cash. The next morning I met him at his mom’s house and together we went to the small metal garden shed in the corner of the garden. We pried open a pair of doors that probably hadn’t been opened since the bike was put in and rolled the bike out into the sunlight. There it sat in all its glory, my own CBX.

I didn’t see it then, but I can tell you now that the bike was in pretty rotten shape. Left on its own in the drafty little shed meant to hold lawnmowers, shovels and planting soil, the bike had not been totally spared by nature. About the best thing I can say was that had been out of the rain. It was covered with gunk and grime. Spider webs hung over it as if it were a prop in an old time Hollywood horror movie and a long abandoned hornets’ nest hung from one of the mirrors.

The bike had also been wrecked at one point prior to meeting its demise. The handle bars were twisted and the bar ends scuffed. The headlight bezel was out of round and the glass of the headlight itself was cracked. Beyond that, it had been placed in the shed with no plans for a long term stay and so it still had decade old gasoline in the tank and a long dead battery still under the seat.

All of this paled, however, in comparison to the giant jagged hole in the crank case. Big enough to put my fist through, the hole looked like it belonged on the bow of the Titanic. It had been made when a flying piston rod had come loose from crank shaft and hammered its way into the outside world. As evidence of this catastrophic engine failure, there, still hanging through the hole it had created, was the bike’s mechanical iceberg, the piston rod itself still dangling freely through the fatal wound it had created. I saw none of this of course, or rather I saw it all but because image in my mind had not had a gaping hole in it I failed to understand what I was seeing.

My dad later told me that the difference between a man and a boy is that in his mind’s eye a boy sees how nice something could be if he fixes it, while a man pictures how much work the fixing will involve. I must have been more boy than man at that point because I loaded the bike in the back of my dad’s old truck just knowing that with some well spent cash I could have this thing back on the road and accruing value as a future collectable in no time at all.

As in the case of other projects I have dragged home, my father was quite angry when the CBX showed up. Angry enough that he wouldn’t let me work on it in the garage and so I rented a lock and store down town from which to work. With no benches at hand, I covered the floor with a thick layer of cardboard boxes I brought from my part time job at the hospital warehouse and started tearing into the bike.

I wish I could say the rebuild went great but it didn’t. The famous CBX 6 cylinder it turns out is a very complicated engine and the average schmuck working on the floor of a lock and store atop a pile of cardboard boxes with simple hand tools has very little chance of actually getting the engine to run right. I spent hundreds of dollars ordering engine cases from a supplier in Arizona. Hundreds more sending the crank to one of the only machine shops in the USA that would work with it and still hundreds more on pistons, rings, gaskets, carburetor rebuild kits and on and on and on. All to no avail.

My father eventually relented and I got to bring the bike home, but by then what had started out as a lost cause had become a real live basket case and I began to get my first inkling that I might really be screwed. Patience, time and still more money would be required to get the bike running and as the summer wore on I gradually came to the understanding that the only thing I had left was time – and since I was almost out of money and had to start working full time, even that would soon be in shorter supply. I just didn’t have what it took to get the bike together an the time had come to walk away.

Over the next few days I slapped together the engine and rehung it in its cradle, put the old carbs back, on and generally got the bike into one single non-running piece. I then called the local motorcycle wrecking yard, Bent Bike, told them what I had and made an appointment to bring it down.

The manager at Bent Bike looked over the bike, listened to my story and smiled a big knowing smile. “I’ll give you a $700 for it.” He said.

I wanted more and we dickered a bit, and in the end I walked away with $750.00. “I really thought I could fix it.” I told him as I signed over the bike’s title, “Maybe someone else can.”

The manager smiled that knowing smile again and, once he had the title safe in hand said, “I love bikes like these. We’ll probably sell this bike again and again over the next few months. Guy after guy will come in and buy it, spend a bunch of money on parts, a lot of it here, and then give up on it and sell it back to us. It could see three or four owners before someone who really knows what they are doing gets it and really puts it back together.”

I was speechless. I knew the moment he said it that he had spoken the truth. How do you even reply to something like that? My $750 was better than nothing so I put it in my pocket and left quietly. As I crunched the numbers in my head I realized that for what I had spent trying to make a silk purse from this sow’s ear, I could have bought a low mileage example in premium shape and ridden all summer. It was a sobering thought.

I still think about mechanical projects from time to time, but since that day I have never brought home any kind of a vehicle that required anything more than a wash and a wax to be in perfect running order. I guess I learned my lesson. Using my dad’s criteria, I guess I could say that bike made me a man. Maybe, just maybe, it didn’t end in the worst possible way after all.