When I finally got back, there were four messages on my answering machine from the guy. The last message was him almost begging me to call him when I got home-at the same phone number, no less. Apparently, the guy in the parking lot must not have been able to come up with the money. I reluctantly called him back, pissed off that I'd just spent eight hours dragging a trailer to Illinois for no reason whatsoever. After a short conversation, he said if I still wanted the bike he'd knock off $100 and bring it to me in a day or two. Sure, I said, thinking I must have a screw loose, or maybe bumped my head one too many times. We agreed to meet at a local bike shop close to the expressway so that it would be easy for him to find me. He called two days later and said he'd be leaving at 10 a.m. and should be in my area around 3 p.m. Wrong! Three o'clock, four, five, six...the shop closed at 6 p.m., but the guys stayed, thinking just maybe he'd show up. At 6:30 p.m., he called and said he was right down the road and would be there in 30 minutes.
Well, he did finally make it. We unloaded the bike off his little wooden trailer. To this day I don't know what kept it on there. Hey, maybe that's what took him so long; he had to stop and put it back on a couple of times. Reluctantly, I counted the hundreds into his hand and sent him on his way. Of course the bike wouldn't run, had more oil on the outside than the inside, and looked like it had been painted with a can of Rust-Oleum. At least it was all there. The battery was dead, so the guys at the shop let me leave it there overnight on the battery charger and said I could get it the next day.
"The next morning I picked it up to ride to my shop. It was 28 degrees out, with light snow and 15-mph breezes out of the north. At that point I knew I'd bumped the old noggin one too many times. Five miles from the shop, people were looking at me like I was an alien. The motor was starting to miss because the junk battery was getting low, and it didn't have enough power to overcome the rusty locked-up front brake, which was pouring smoke. I thought it was going to burst into flames and ignite all that oil at any second. Well, I made it to my garage, pulled in, shut the door, scraped the ice out of my mustache, lit a cigarette off the front brake, and got to work. What you see here is four and a half months of hard work. I did take a little artistic license with this bike, like the '05 FLSTC disc-brake frontend. I wanted the bike to stop, and the front drum just wasn't going to cut it. But the rest of it is real close to original. It's going to be hard to let this one go, but some lucky owner is going to love this bike as much as I do. Most importantly, I got my piece of history."