A Lifetime of Experience - The Best Laid Plans

[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...)

[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.

[LaurenOE]

Awesome! Great read for the morning!

[binx_19]

i know how you feel, i bought a Nissan 240 in running condition, 2 months later i threw a rod, it sat in my garage for almost a year before i finally was sick of paying on a car that didnt work so i took it to a push pull drag sale and really fucked the dealer, but i will never try to fix something on my own again.

[ssrallyred]

I would rather read write ups like this than ever turn on the TV. Please keep them coming UG!

[binx_19]

so what was the deal with this brett dude?

[UberGoober]

You know, I'm not sure. That was the mystery of the whole thing. He was just too good to be there with us working for $5.00 an hour. Maybe he was between jobs or maybe he was just at a point in his life where he needed a break and took some BS part time job for beer money.

He was only there about 3 or 4 months before he left. I think he ended up working at the Boeing plant in Everett.