Like any good story (or terrible mistake), this starts with a girl.



I wish I could say it started when I met her, but really it didn’t. At the point of this story, I had been dating Clare for about a year and a half. We had talked about motorcycles some due to my infatuation with cars and speed, but mostly in passing. She had mentioned that she wanted to ride on the back of a bike with a hot guy (riding on the back of her gay roommate’s scooter left her sorely disappointed) and I took some photos of some vintage bikes when I was at a car museum for her. But that was it. Mostly motorcycles took a large backseat to video games, comic conventions, and just being college students. But that soon changed.



It was summertime and I was about to start my grad program. I had moved out of my apartment in my old college town and had yet to move into my new place in Austin, so I and all of my belongings were staying at my parents place for a week or so. In the meantime, I was stuck appearing to do more work than actually accomplishing, as any free time has to be earned in the Whitney household. Given such a situation, I did what anyone would do: I wasted time on the internet.



While lazily browsing through old Facebook photos of my girlfriend, I saw her first ever profile photo: a Vincent Black Lightning. For those of you who don’t know old British sports bikes, calling the Vincent Black Lightning a legend would be like calling Tolkien a legend in fantasy literature. It’s not quite wrong, but it’s an order of magnitude different. The Black Lightning was the world’s fastest production bike in 1948; a record that was not broken until the Kawasaki Z1 hit 132 mph twenty-five years later. The bike also set a few records for modified motorcycles. With Rollie Free stripped down to nothing more than a swimsuit and a helmet, this icon pose resulted in one of the most iconic photos in motorcycling history, as the “bathing suit bike” broke the American motorcycle land speed record at about 150 mph.

Of course, I knew none of this. My basic thought process was that this was an old British bike. And like anything old and British, someone was probably selling it on Ebay. And maybe Clare might like one. So why not go see how much they cost?

Okay, huh. How about just Google “Vincent Black Lightning for sale”?

Oh.

Hmm… what about the Vincent Black Shadow? Similar bike, but a good bit cheaper and more popular, so maybe…

Well okay then. So that was out. Plus, a little Googling let me know that I started in the Marianas Trench end of the swimming pool. So why not see what a modern British bike went for? I mean, there’s no way in hell I could afford it now, since it’s probably 20 grand or something. So I searched for a Triumph Bonneville, since even I had heard of that bike.

That woke me up. I had almost that amount in my bank accounts at the time. I had done a hell of a lot of saving in college, so my meager income plus graduation presents had led me to a point where this suddenly changed from something that might happen eventually, to something I could almost make happen tomorrow. So I began to broaden my search. I found that low-end brand new bikes have a retail of about 4 grand and most starting used bikes are between 2 and 3 grand, with nicer ones being closer to 4 grand and the bottom-end being around $1,500.

So there I was: 23 years old, fresh out of college, about to enter grad school. And seriously considering spending most of my money on what 24 hours ago I would have called a pipe dream. What do I do?

I sit back and say it’s a stupid idea. I’m only going to a master’s program. I will probably have to leave in two years. I’m still dependent on my folks financially a good bit. Why not save up for two years then do all this crap? I mean, I have a good (if rather boring) car. I might have unexpected expenses. Buying a bike now is, by all accounts, a terrible idea.

But the seed had been planted. I now started including bike forums in the websites I frequented. I got familiar with the costs of ownership, from MSF courses to gear. I realized that I could only realistically look at bikes that were a grand or two. I casually browsed the motorcycle sections of Craigslist as a terrible way to relax. I knew what I wanted. A single or twin-cylinder bike under 800cc, so I could manage it with little previous experience. I wanted something newer and fuel-injected, so there would be less maintenance. It had to be a standards or UJMs (Universal Japanese Motorcycle) to keep that whole “British bike thing” sort of present. But nothing was really showing up for me.



A few weeks later, I was mentioning my search for bikes on Craigslist to a one of my friends who rode. I knew he was selling his 2006 Suzuki SV650S, but it was way outside my price range ($3400 listed on craigslist), not anything close to a standard motorcycle (it was a sports-standard, but had the low clip-on bars of a sports bike), in Wisconsin (I’m in Texas), and if I’m honest, kind of ugly. After trying to help me search for a couple days, he basically said, “Fuck it. Buy my bike at $1900 and give me $1000 when you sell it and it’s yours.” After zero thought, I told him let’s do it.

So fuck me, I just bought a motorcycle. It was the wrong type, ugly, and several hundred miles away. But I now had a bike.

Fuck.

