Unlike most jobs where a person punches in at 9 a.m. and clocks out at 5 p.m. Monday through Friday and avoids any thoughts of work on his or her time off, being an editor at a motorcycle magazine is a 24/7 commitment. We always have motorcycles on the brain; they dominate everything we do. Everywhere we go we look for motorcycles or motorcycle-related items, such as thumbing through every magazine that features a two-wheeled, V-Twin-powered machine while we're picking up a gallon of milk at the grocery store. Even when we attempt to take a break from the motorcycle madness, it seemed to follow us.
Take the raked and stretched black-cherry chopper you see here. Two years ago over Memorial Day weekend, we took a trip down to San Diego for a weekend of sun, sand, and sangria. The goal of the weekend was to not talk about, think about, and-if possible-not look at motorcycles. This was a weekend to recharge our creative minds and fuel up on fun. Everything was going great; the first night passed without the slightest utterance of the "m" word. But everything changed on Saturday afternoon, when we heard music blaring out of the backyard of a house party down the block. Being the inquisitive, self-imposing animals we are, we wandered out to find the location of the shindig and join in the festivities.
As we rounded the corner leading to the house, the wailing guitar riffs and intoxicated giggling of sorority girls had us entranced. We had almost made it past the front gate when, off in the corner of the front lawn, a glimmer caught our attention. Like bass spotting the flickering blade of a spinner-bait, we had to explore. As we wove in and out of the sea of people, we chased the shimmering light. Finally pushing through the last wave of people, we reached the source of the fascinating light. It was the mid-afternoon sun reflecting off a Mean Street super-fat and super-long, inverted, Wide Glide frontend.
Crawling all over the bike (with our eyes, of course), we noticed that the champagne-colored frame (the color of the bike at that time) wasn't just a regular Softail frame with a long frontend bolted to it. No, this frame was designed for that high-neck, raked-out look that was so popular in the '60s and '70s. The backbone appeared to be stretched some 5 to 7 inches, with at least another 6 inches added to the downtubes. The neck was raked out some 40-plus degrees, and the raked trees helped pitch the front wheel out far enough that the lower framerails sat parallel to the ground. No front fender, 8-inch risers holding a set of no-nonsense V-shaped handlebars, a RevTech motor tied to a Primo 3-inch open belt drive-this bike had that classic late-'60s/early-'70s chopper look with modern features. Someone-either the owner or the builder, or both-knew what they were doing when this bike was built. And like that, the no-motorcycle policy for the weekend was tossed out the window; we had to find the owner.
After several hours of interrogating just about every female in the vicinity and questioning the manhood of every drunk fratboy who claimed the bad-ass ride was his, we were about to give up and let this chopper go when we heard the familiar sound of a set of straight pipes coming to life. Rushing to the spot where we had originally found the chop, our hearts dropped when we saw it was gone. Fortunately, luck was on our side-but it wasn't on the owner's side. Apparently San Diego's finest didn't hold the same appreciation for loud pipes as we did and lit the owner up before he could even reach the end of the block. Never ones to interfere with an ongoing investigation, we patiently waited as the owner pleaded his case to the officer. After a few minutes of some heated debate, the cop kicked rocks and rolled out with a pissed-off look on his face.
We introduced ourselves to the owner and quickly learned that apparently luck was on his side after all. "Hey, man, what's going on? My name's Oscar Marin," he said. "Did you see that cop? He wanted to impound the bike. He was so pissed when I told him I was a captain with the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force. I guess he was in the military at one point as well and just couldn't bring himself to take the bike to write me up." Oscar then began to fill us in on the list of violations the cop wanted to write him up for: loud pipes, no turn signals, no registration, out-of-state plates...the list went on, but we were more concerned with who built the bike.