The Crossroads...

It was the kind of night made for sitting around an outdoor fire with your arm around someone who’d bring that heat to the sheets when the flames were reduced to embers. Yet here I was standing in the driveway alone... With a cigar the size of a bus muffler in my mouth and a glass of Irish whiskey in my hand. On the first night of the Columbus Day weekend I was still home, leaning on a cane. This was the best I had felt all week, with the razor-edged pain of arthritis dulled to butter knife status.

I had planned to ride my motorcycle in the morning with Clyde Jacobs. It would be the first time in 5 weeks that I had attempted to throw my leg over “Fire Balls.” Earlier in the week, an orthopedic specialist had drained 200ccs of fluid from my right knee, and given it a shot of cortisone . My left one had just received my fourth shot of Supartz. I was standing more or less upright and moving around without the cane from time to time. All I wanted to do now was ride.

My 1995 K75 was a mess in the garage behind me. The tail piece had been taken apart to receive a new running light -- a month earlier. The seat was on a shelf. Tools still littered the floor where I had last dropped them and the topcase squatted on the seat of a chair. I’d had a few of the guys over to show me how to do a simple bulb change on this rig, and I’d walked away from the work as soon as they left.

“Did you have an trouble getting that bulb in,” asked Mac-Pac member Dave Case recently?

“No,” I lied. “It only took a few seconds.”

“Did you really pop it in,” asked Case in amazement?

“Absolutely,” I lied again, more easily. “It only took a second.”

“Well I’d have lost that bet,”laughed Dave. “A bunch of us were thinking that bike would still be apart two months from now.”

Mac-Pac member Dave Case was one of many who graciously offered to change a running

light on my bike. The joke would have been, "How many riders does it take to change a light

bulb on Riepe's bike?" The answer: 50! One to change the bulb and 49 to pick his ass out of the seat.

(Photo supplied by Dave Case -- Click to Enlarge)

I flashed my best boyish smile and thought, “Fuck you and all those other smug, thin, uber-mechanic BMW-riding S.O.B.s.” (Any one of them would have been happy to do this for me, and about 2 dozen offered. Do you think I could find the damn replacement bulbs when these guys were there? I have lost two packages of #89 running lights on my desk in the past two weeks.)

My desk looks like a 450-pound hamster works here.

Coffee cups, news clippings, crumbs, and ideas pile up and fall to the floor.

Somewhere, are two packages of #89 running lights.

(Photo by the author -- Click to enlarge)

Arthritis is like being married to both of my former wives at the same time. The sensation starts in your joints and goes right to your balls with every movement. My zest for life has become tampered with a desire for numbness. When I find a position that doesn’t hurt, I tend to freeze in it. This is generally at my desk. Since I work at home, there is something of a payoff here. Yet there is a negative side too: I get sick of typing and talking on the phone. And by the end of the day it is guaranteed that I will have neglected to respond to some friendly e-mail or have failed to return a call. This is not out of contempt. It’s because I want to do justice to the situation and the effort is beyond me.

There are two people I have been trying to find the time to write a detailed e-mail to. They are Dave Campbell and Steve Asson. I just checked my last correspondence from these folks. I have been meaning to write Dave since March. I have been meaning to call Steve since June. (This is how people lose friends.) I’ve been looking for something I promised Harold Gantz for four months. I found it. It was under the thing I promised Rick Torpey at the same time.

Now here it was -- 10pm -- the night before a good friend of mine offered to ride with me, and nothing would be ready for the morning. Clyde Jacobs would be in the driveway in 12 hours. I sipped the Irish confidence, looked up into a sky as clear as miso soup filled with stars, and thought, “If I go to bed now, I can get up at 6am and still have everything put together in time.” And as I thought this, I realized it had the consistency of pure bullshit --even to me.

Leslie poked her head into the garage to make sure I hadn’t destroyed the maple tree in the driveway by hanging myself from it and said, “Is Clyde coming to fix your motorcycle tomorrow?”

With a reflex action that could trace its roots back to primal man, I started to say, “Eat shit and die;” but what came out was, “Yes, Dear. I think he is.”

There was no doubt as to who was going to put this fucking motorcycle back together.

Bathed in fluorescent light, the K75 looked like a battered lover in a third world emergency room. Replacing the rear running light on a K75 is the only thoroughly simple task on the whole bike. You don’t even need tools. I had the bulb secured in under two seconds, and the lens installed in under a minute. (It attaches through knurled thumbscrews.) 

I now systematically went through the machine’s documentation and discovered I had the wrong stamp on the plate. The correct stamp was in the manual. I inventoried the tool kit, and the ancillary tools I carry in a cloth bag, noting the two sizes of extra crush washers and the spare fuses. I tried out the LED MiniMag Light. It worked perfectly.

Next came the plugging kit for possible flats. I went through this to make sure the plugs hadn’t dried out and that the CO2 cartridges were intact. I couldn’t help but notice that there were fine holes worn through the tool kit bag and the cloth bag with my other tools from vibration... Vibration I cannot feel at the seat nor handlebars. The Airman Sparrow pump also had vibration bruises. Over the winter, I will line the tail piece with thin neoprene.

I opened the first aid kit for the first time ever, and took stock of the contents. It is perfect for dealing with the bare essentials, like a bee sting, a minor cut, or an even more minor hangover. All of this stuff went back into the tail piece, with room to spare. I keep it from moving around (to a degree) with shop rags. The seat slipped on like a prom dress and “Fire Balls” regained her dignity.

No one will ever call the BMW K75 "Sexy." But "Fire Balls" (left) had a look and spirit all her

own, parked among the heavy weights, dreadnaughts, and "Judge Dread" bikes up at

Hermy's open house this weekend. Lots of folks looked her over with lust in their hearts.

(Photo by the author -- Click to enlarge)

I switched on the bike and the rear running light glowed brightly, but the right MotoLight was out. This fix would be easy. If the running light was a cinch, replacing a MotoLight bulb (with the knurled lens rings) would take less time than lighting a cigar. This is the kind of hubris that takes down windbags like me every time.

Naturally, I couldn’t find the replacement 52-watt bulbs for the MotoLights. But I did locate a 32-watt bulb. This popped in like shit going through a goose. Power on, and nothing. The left one lit, but nothing from the right. I pulled out the spare and compared it with the original. Both were clear. I tried the “burned out bulb” in the left socket, and it worked just fine. Clearly this became a job for someone with a voltmeter and desire to trace wires under the gas tank. I reassembled the lights and resolved not to turn them on -- exposing my shortcomings -- during the ride the next day.

I mounted the top case and took stock of it’s contents, which included jumping cables, a camera (fully charged), a cell phone (fully charged) light riding glovers (perforated), and a folding cane. I then proceeded to go through my riding junk in the garage. When I was finished, it was 2am. But I felt like I had earned the right to ride this bike in the morning.

The last thing I did was to plug the machine into an Accumate battery tender. The battery tender generally indicates the battery needs a jolt even when I have come in from a long ride. I don’t know why. This is just part of the BMW mystery. This time, just the green “on” light indicated everything was “okay” with the tender. By this time, I was limping badly again. I winked at the whiskey bottle as I passed it and said to Leslie, “Screw Clyde and his mechanical abilities.”

I went through my riding gear in the morning. I chose the vented Joe Rocket Meteor 5 jacket over the mesh, as it was in the low 60’s. I cleaned the dead bugs from my Nolan helmet and wiped off the Parabellum Scout windshield on the bike. After a cup of coffee with Clyde, I mounted “Fire Balls” like a retired acrobat falling down a flight of stairs.

Clyde Jacobs is one of life’s true gentlemen and a great friend. He casually stepped up to the bike (to catch it if it started to fall) but looked away, laughing, so I wouldn’t feel like a cripple. I backed it out of the garage and hit the starter.

The bike demurely farted.

For those who have never ridden a BMW K75, it starts the second you breathe on the button. Rarely, do you have to do this twice. This is because you cannot do it a third time without frying the starter relay. That’s right. A low battery will cook the starter relay.

Clyde and I exchanged that apprehensive, “Well this sucks,” look common to WWII bomber pilots who smell smoke in the cockpit.

“Want to try jumping it,” asked Clyde?

I certainly knew where the cables were.

“How about rolling it down the driveway,” I suggested?

Did you ever find yourself in one of those situations where you knew exactly what the other person was thinking? The driveway has a slope to it and I knew Clyde was thinking, “How will me and 'the gimp' push this bike back up the hill if it doesn’t start?” And Clyde knew that I was thinking, “He and Leslie will have a bitch of a time pushing this thing back up the driveway.”

Clyde Jacobs (with his 2003 BMW GT -- "Red Molly") is a great friend and a 

pisser of a riding partner. He and Matt Piechota extended a good deal of 

patience on my behalf this weekend -- right up until the time they ditched me.

The bike had barely rolled three feet when it started as I popped the clutch in third gear. I let it idle at 2k for 5 minutes before we pushed off.

There are few things to compare with riding a motorcycle on a perfect fall afternoon. The sky was utterly cloudless and the kind of penetrating blue that mocks the most precious stained glass. There wasn’t a trace of humidity in the air, which was warm enough to ride with your face shield up three quarters of an inch.

Our destination was Hermy’s, the BMW dealer in Point Clinton, about 60 miles away. The route spanned some highway, a bit of which could qualify as slab. But most of it is two-lane country back roads through rural Pennsylvania. The terrain was heavily wooded in some places, where the cool scent of fall gathered under the shadow of leaves that would be green for one last week this year. I think each season has its own scent. Fall is the aroma of the spiced warm drinks, game dishes, and the bite of cooler weather.

Hermy's Tire and Cycle is the epitome of a what a dealership should be. 

Friendly people who give a damn,support local BMW chapters, and do whatever 

they can to make leave the customer smiling. If this place had a bar and 

slightly better entertainment, it could be mistaken for heaven.

(Photograph lifted from the internet so the author could plug the hell out of the place)

In several places, wood smoke curled from chimneys with a heady aroma far out of proportion to its thin blue tint. This is the season that best compliments the old stone houses that dot the Pennsylvania countryside. The harvest is pending. And the true strength of the nation is evident in the fields, the standing rows of feed corn, and the people who lure it from the soil.

There are at least two Harley dealerships between here and Hermy’s. Consequently, the road was thick with chrome cruisers and their volcanic growls. Yet the closer we got, German unicorn sightings became slightly more common. A GS here... A GT there... An “R” bike coming around a corner... And then there was Hermy’s. The entire block was a mad carnival of Euro-bikes. Perhaps 400 machines clogged the pavement.

By far the most popular sported roundels, but the Triumph crowd ran a close second. Speed Triples, Bonnevilles, and Thruxtons were everywhere. Quite of few had classic paint jobs. A Thruxton started and blew over an elderly woman who’d arrived on a Ducati. She picked herself up from the pavement, lifted up her shirt, and yelled “Yahooooo. I want one of those.”

The crowd was lined up to see the new models. Dick Bregstein, who had been previously committed to replacing his F800 with a Honda “Hobbit,” delighted in the geometry of the new F650 GS, and was told to stop drooling on the tank. There’s been nothing definite said, but it seems like Dick will be passing on the sushi in 2009.

The Honda Hobbit -- 30 years ahead of its time.

(Photo from internet archives)

Mac-Pac riders were in evidence everywhere! Cory Lyba, Ken Bruce, Scott Royer, Marge and Jack Busch, Dick Bregstein, and Matt Piechota were just a few that I saw. I rode my bike right up to the buffet table and helped myself to the pierogies. A dozen people said “hello” to me by name, and I couldn’t remember who they were. I apologize. Several commented on my work. One called me an “asshole,” but I think he meant Clyde.

I’m at a crossroads with this arthritis. I could barely get off the bike when I got home. Then again, who would willingly opt to get off a bike on a day like last Saturday?

©Copyright Jack Riepe 2008
AKA The Lindbergh Baby (Mac-Pac)
AKA Vindak8r (Motorcycle Views)
AKA The Chamberlain -- PS (With A Shrug)