How does a sleepy college town become cool? For that matter, what is cool? Harvard Square, Cambridge, Massachusetts had been, just a short time before, a place where you could get a squash racket re-strung or find books on 14th century Flemish poetry.
Next minute it seemed everyone I knew had a motorcycle. A Honda 305 Superhawk. A Parilla 250 single. A grunting BSA 650 twin. Jimmy Anzalone (where is he today?) was revving his road race Triumph 500 to 10,000. Club 47 Mount Auburn was where you went to see and hear Joan Baez. A friend living just off Putnam Square looked out her window one night to see Dylan stroll past.
I had no idea about motorcycle racing and my friends had no idea how to run a lathe or read a mike. I found myself trying to sleep on the hot floor of a Thames van, under and between two motorcycles, on our collective way to road races at Vineland, New Jersey. We all know that a motorcycle’s front end can wobble, but it was news to me that a van with loose steering joints can do it just as alarmingly. As we accelerated onto the open road, 42 mph proved every bit as much a barrier as it does to the rider of a large tour bike who has chosen this speed to do up his gloves. Wobbling! Wobbling! But stay on the throttle (or quickly put your hands back on the bars) and the wobble is quelled. We cruised. We bought gas. We ate cheeseburgers.
Soon we were venturing farther—to Harewood Acres on the north shore of Lake Erie, or to Danville, Virginia. After finding that production four-strokes strongly resisted being souped-up, I was fascinated to be working with a friend's Yamaha TD1-B two-stroke.
Over the winter I gleaned every tidbit of race-bike information from another friend's several-years'-collection of the English motorcycle weeklies. I have those notebooks to this day. I have also the manual for the Honda Benly 125—the tiny sportbike that pioneered electric start. It said, "Do not uselessly blow the engine" (meaning don't rev it just to hear the sound). I strongly remember the previous starting method for my AJS 500 single: retard the spark, tickle the carburetor until its float bowl overflows, use the compression release to ease the crank just past compression. Then, in an action like a whole-body sneeze, convulse yourself into the air and come down on the "commencer lever."
I loved the races and never wanted to come home. But my friends, who had accidentally launched me in this direction, had wider and more humane interests. They were learning to say, “Oh wow, man,” and had mastered the bird-like croak then used to greet the cool: “Far out!” Matters of importance became “heavy”. Wide-wale corduroys. Panama Red. Leary and Alpert had become “heavy chiefs”. Chiefs of what? Chiefs of the ‘too much’.
As a small boy I couldn’t make myself say “Old Maid”, so this new vocabulary felt equally made-up. My fingertips were silvery with Yamabond. When I ordered dinner at the service counter of Demo’s restaurant, the cook held out his hands, bearing stubborn evidence of mechanical work. He said, “You are a mechanic. Like me.”
That’s all the validation I needed. From that day forward it was off to the races.