Journey to My First Bike

© Ken Bingenheimer / RumBum.com

As a kid I was desperate to get a motorcycle, and would have done so except that my mother would not allow it. Then a friend who did have a bike lost a leg in a really bad crash, so even once I was out from under my mother’s roof my ardor was dampened for a number of years.

Fast forward way too many years, and my buddy Christopher picked up an old BMW for not much money. He rode it over to my house one night and asked me if I wanted to take it for a spin. All my experience on bikes to this point had been on small ones, and this was not a small bike. I looked at it and was intimidated by the size and bulk of it and declined. It just looked like too much for me to handle.

That must have rekindled my yen, however, because it wasn’t long after that that my roommate and I started talking (naively) about renting a bike for the summer that the two of us could share. There was a dealership just a few blocks from our house so we figured we’d just drop in over there, look at the used bikes they had for rent, and take one home.

I don't know where we got the idea you could rent a bike. You couldn't (not then). And if we could have it would have been ungodly expensive, at least based on what it costs today to rent a bike. No, we were naive and had no clue. If we had looked a little further into the idea, we would have found we could have bought a bike for not much more than we somehow thought we could rent one for for the whole summer.

Then one day he showed up on this little (I can call it “little” now) 750cc Virago and asked me if I wanted to go for a ride. Well, of course I did. And for the next couple months, any time I could get him to take me for a ride that’s what we did.

At that point it probably would have been a no-brainer for me to get my own bike except that I was out of a job just then. In fact, I was having trouble scraping together the money for my mortgage payment. So I determined to call upon the time-honored resort of the Bank of Mom and Dad, and borrow $1,000. But then on an impulse, I asked for $2,000 instead and I used the additional cash to buy my Honda CB750 Custom.

Considering my mother’s unchanged feelings toward motorcycles, it was quite awhile before I told them what I had done with the money they loaned me. But I did eventually get a job and I paid them back what I had borrowed. Then when they came to visit, about a year later, I wanted to go for a ride and my dad wanted to look at the bike. I offered to take him for a ride, but he just looked fearfully at it and shook his head no. So I climbed on, fired it up, and off I went.