A Lifetime of Experience - Kamikaze Death

[UberGoober]

I started college with little more than an interest in the Japanese language and the vague idea that I might one day become a teacher. The first year was a snap, I had plenty of money saved up from the Merchant Marines and didn’t have to work at all during the school year. I spent the mornings in class, two afternoons a week volunteering at a local elementary school, and the rest of my time riding my bike, cruising around in my car or out in the mountains shooting what had become a fairly large collection of guns.

The second year I had to work a little harder. The summer after my first year in college I managed to score my last job as a Merchant Mariner, a great job as Chief Pumpman on an oil tanker that sailed between Valdez Alaska and Puget Sound. I only worked for 2 months but made almost $10K. I used some of that money and the remaining month of my summer vacation to join a three week student exchange trip to Japan.

With the shorter working year and the outlay of cash for the trip, I knew I couldn’t make it through the whole year on my savings alone and decided I needed a part time job. It was no problem at all and I eventually took a fun, silly job at Toys R Us where I worked in back building bicycles and getting video games out of the security cage. At the start of winter quarter, when money became more of an issue, I moved on to much higher paying job a local hospital where I worked in the warehouse.

My personal life was going a little better than it had been. My Japan trip had allowed me to move into a new circle of friends, I met a nice girl and there was lots to do that year. Generally college was working out and I was pretty happy.

There was bad news too, however. During the three weeks I was in Japan, my father had been rushed into emergency surgery for a burst appendix. Oddly enough, he didn’t have appendicitis so the doctors had to work hard to determine what had caused his problem. The answer was not good. It turned out he had cancer and that the tumor had grown so big that it had rubbed against his appendix and caused it to burst. The rupture and blown cancer cells throughout his body and he was given a year to live.

Between my father’s illness, my new girlfriend and my new job I found myself a little distracted from school and ended up taking fewer classes that year. My father fought really hard and his extra efforts allowed him 15 months, 3 more than the doctors had said. Of course, while all this was going on I took my eye off the ball and didn’t actually get my Associates Degree until the following Autumn, right about the time my father finally passed away.

The following spring I enrolled in night classes at Western Washington University’s Seattle Community College extension program. By then I had moved into a full time permanent position at the hospital so I worked all day and then drove down to Seattle at night. My girlfriend, meanwhile, went off to Eastern Washington to attend Washington State University. So, on top of everything else, I soon found myself driving 6 hours each way to visit her almost every weekend. It was strenuous but manageable so I struck with it.

That summer, my hospital merged with the one across town and the combined management team decided to start laying off people. Since I had just come on full time, I was one of the first to go. Oddly enough, if I had stayed as a "part timer" working 40 hours a week, I would have been safe, but that's how it goes sometimes.

I didn’t waste time after getting laid off, however, I snagged the first job I could find, driving a truck for a local flooring company at a $4.00 an hour pay cut. I liked truck driving a lot, but as any professional driver can tell you your schedule is at the mercy of the traffic. After grinding out 8 hours in Seattle traffic, I turned right around and drove another hour back to Seattle where I often found myself arriving late for classes. I got a lot of grief from my professors and even today this surprises me, after all the program was supposed to be for “working people.” Apparently no one realized that working people have other demands on their time at that they sometimes might be late to class.

Given the amount of grief I was getting, one day I just snapped. That afternoon, instead of turning south after work to go to school, I turned east and headed home. The next day was the same, then the next and in the end I never went back to my classes at WWU. Hell, I never even told them I was quitting, I guess they figured out though.

Without school to tie me to the region and after months of steady pressure from my girlfriend, I eventually quit my job as a truck driver and moved East to be with her. I figured I could find a job doing anything and be just as well off there as I was at home. But it turned out to be harder to find a job there than I had thought. Most local companies didn’t want to hire someone from out of town and those that did were looking for students who would work for a pittance. After weeks of looking I finally got on as a laborer at a heating and air conditioning company. I had been there about four months when construction business tanked in the winter and I found myself out of work again. That was OK, by then I was enrolled at Washington State University anyhow and I started classes a week later.

I did well at Washington State. Despite the fact that I was living well below the poverty line and racking up massive student loans, with my mind back on education full time, I excelled in my classes again. With the help of my girlfriend, who as much as I hate to admit paid most of the bills, I kept my nose to the grindstone and made it through two long years to graduation. I flirted briefly with going to law school but due to the high cost of the application fees I only applied to two schools, both of which, after much consideration I am sure, quickly rejected me.

No matter, now that I had my degree in hand I knew my life was going to change for the better. After many months of poverty and too much time sponging off others, I was headed back to Western Washington where knew I was going to land a great job right away. The sky was the limit. Except that nothing worked out that way.

Despite several promising interviews and several close calls, it took me a couple of months to actually get a job. When I finally did, it was as a paralegal in a downtown Seattle law firm, which sounds great until you look at the fact that my salary was less than I was making as a truck driver and that I really didn’t have the skills to be successful at the job I was assigned to do. Still, it was a job and I was on my way.

Thanks to my pitiful salary, however, I ended back up at my mom’s house out in the country and getting to and from work became a challenge. I rode the bus at first, but given how far out in the mountains we lived and by the time the stops were all figured in, my commute was almost 2 hours each way. A better answer would have been an economy car, but the only car I had was a giant GMC K5 Jimmy that I had stupidly paid way too much for and financed with a 7 year loan while working at the hospital. I had been a fool to buy it and despite two years of payments I was still so far upside down in it that no one would take it in trade on anything smaller. With no other way out, my venerable 850G, now painted like a kamikaze plane, was pressed into daily long range service.

(Photo Caption: The final iteration of my GS850)

[UberGoober]

My GS was in good shape, but I think now that even the best 20 year old motorcycle would have problems with a daily 100 mile commute, especially with all the vile weather that the Pacific Northwest can throw out. Problems started creeping up on me a little at a time. The first was a broken throttle cable that left me stranded in downtown Seattle for hours until my friend Brad agreed to come all the way across town in rush hour traffic with his truck to drag me and the bike all the way home.

A couple of weeks after I resolved that, the bike developed a misfire on the way home and I had to stop and clean the plugs. It was a real hassle, most of the parts stores were well off the highway and just getting to where they were took a lot of time. The next week or two, the bike ran fine but one night, again on the way home, the bike started misfiring again. This time, rather than stop and go through the trouble of cleaning everything out yet again, I decided to ignore the trouble and push on. I had about 35 miles to go.

I ran up interstate 5 to Everett, turned east on Highway 2 and finally dropped off the highway onto the back roads that led up into the hills and home. Despite the fact the bike was misfiring, I had a good head of steam up, and was running well above the posted speed limits. I was close now, the miles rolling off while I stayed on the gas hoping to keep up my momentum as I headed further up into the hills.

About a mile from home I slowed to turn on to a side road and started to work my way back up through the gears. This was my home turf and I knew every bend. Despite my wounded mount, I felt relief at the fact that I was going to make it. Just a few more turns now, a little jog to the right and into the well banked left hand sweeper – just tip in…

Without warning the engine stopped and the back wheel abruptly locked up. Fortunately I had been guiding the bike towards the inner apex of the corner and hadn’t been fully leaned over when the worst happened. In full control, I stood the bike up and let it skid to the edge of the road.

In the eerie yet familiar silence of the deep forest at dusk, I put down my kick stand and took off my helmet and gloves. Reaching up, I turned off the key and immersed myself in the growing darkness, a moment's pause before leaping back into action. I had been there less than a minute when a neighbor came by and offered me a ride home. 10 minutes later I was back with my dad’s old pick up truck and had the GS securely in loaded in the back. A half an hour after that, bike was safe in its usual spot in the garage, fully dead but looking for all the world like it was only sleeping.

I knew then that this was just latest thing in my life that had turned to shit. A lot of good things had happened since I started college, I had, against what I think now were surprisingly long odds, actually finished what I started. I had met a good girl and despite the fact that her parents had done their utmost to keep us apart, we had been together for years. In some ways it looked like my life was really on the right track.

In other ways, partly due to poor circumstances and partly due to poor decision making, I was not where I wanted to be. My paralegal job was obviously not working out. No matter how good or bad I was at it, the truth was that the pay was too low and the commute was too long. The situation was unsustainable. Now, with my bike dead, I would have to ride the bus everyday and that wasn’t going to cut it. The next morning I took my GMC to Seattle and quit without notice. Something would turn up I thought, and something eventually did – almost 8 incredibly long months later.

With some of my free time, I turned my attention to a post mortem on the GS. I tore into the engine to examine the possibility of a resurrection and discovered that I had managed to seize a rod bearing. Maybe with more money and more effort I could have fixed it, but flat broke and with my failed attempt at rebuilding a CBX still fresh in my mind, I chose not to risk it. Instead, I dumped the engine in the metal recycling bin at the dump and walked away.

The GS’ frame stayed in the garage with the garishly painted tins and all my special add-ons while I struggled through the next few months of unemployment. It remained there while I sought a new direction in my life by going to Japan as an English teacher and was still there waiting for me almost three years later when I came home. With no great prospects for repair and my mother’s decision to sell my childhood home in order to move into a retirement community, I let the bike go to someone who saw what remained of it parked in the garage when they came to check out the deals at my mom’s moving sale. And just like that, the bike I had owned for more than a decade, the bike that had seen me through some of my best and some of my worst times, a bike that I had doted on like a child, was gone from my life.

If you have read my other articles, you’ll know that my life did get better. Teaching English in Japan was one of the greatest things I have ever done and it really changed my life. The girl who helped me get through school and I eventually broke up. Don’t tell my wife, but I still keep track of her and we even correspond from time to time. She was always smart and she went on to become a doctor. Today she is one of the top AIDS researchers in Japan. I ended up in a job with the government, something I tested to do while I was teaching in Japan, and eventually ended up moving all over the world.

I spent two years in Kingston, Jamaica and eventually ended up back in Japan where I have lived for the past six years. I also bought another Suzuki, a GSXR1100 that should have been in every way superior to my old GS but, like any purebreed, was a sensitive and temperamental beast. But I'll write more about that later...

[blurr]

the rising sun bike

[UberGoober]

That bike got so many comments. hell, the day I finished painting it, got the tins back on and took it to the gas station for the first time, some guy took photos of it to show his buddies.