The first real roadracer I personally knew lived in a bus.

I burned through a small town in Wisconsin the other month on the way to a middle school basketball tournament. This was a very small town, less than 100 inhabitants.

Seeing it drift away in the rear view mirror I remembered that a guy I knew once lived there in the '70s and 80s.

I don't recall his name.

Before we were roadrace enthusiasts my friends and I—and this was in the early 1980s—were drag racers. The lack of canyons in Minnesota sort of forced you to adopt a racing style that you could do on straight roads, so drag racing it was. We drag raced bikes for years, on dragstrips all over Minnesota and Wisconsin. We spent many night piled into cars and vans and trucks, sleeping outside the gates on Saturday night, waiting for the place to open on Sunday. Blankets, beer, girls ... cassette music.

Early on we usually showed up to race in very typical for the time idiot style. Helmet—check. Jacket? Maybe? Gloves? They make you wear gloves?! Boots?! We were straight off the farm; my dad was not a world champion and in fact no one in my family had ever ridden a motorcycle—ever. The learning curve was steep. We brought our winter milking gloves, which were leather, like most combatants did then. But you needed a leather jacket and boots to drag race.

So, we'd go through the line of bikes waiting to race and borrow what we could from people that five seconds before we didn't know. "Do you have a spare jacket? Any gloves? What size boots do you wear?" It always worked out. When you're 21 every day is like jumping out of a plane without a parachute and the sense that it would all work out was as sure as the sun.

One guy we ambled up to was there in a very minimal sense. He rode there, like we did sometimes, but had all the gear. In fact he had full Perron leathers, real European boots, custom made gloves made from thin leather. He came there to race for money; we just temped fate by racing for trophies. I don't remember his name, if I ever knew it. I can see him in my head through. 40s, black, thin, not an easy life vibe from him. He lent me his gloves once, when he finished early and could not stand that I was wearing leather barn gloves to race. They were nice, nicer than any garment I'd ever worn to operate a motorcycle.

His bike though, a Norton Manx, I knew. In fact, I was probably the only person there who knew as much about his bike as he did. He had purchased it at WIW Norton in Minneapolis, he said.

You see when I was in second grade, the library of the primary school I attended had in its library some sort of giant Encyclopedia of Motorcycles-type volume. I checked it out and rushed home to page through it. Now, this was the early 1970s, so the whole Easy Rider mania was in full swing. Peter Fonda, or the other guy, on his bike, were on a poster that hung above the bed of one of my friends bedroom. Fonda on one of those horrific choppers. Everyone thought that choppers were badass, and being the quiet kid I never stood up voiced my opinion, but something in me, from day one, found an unspecified aspect of choppers distasteful. I felt the same way about Evel Knievel. Sure, he seemed cool, to a degree, but watching him jump things just left me with a sense that there were technological answers to Knievel's bikes that he failed to explore. And I knew that crashing was not cool. And especially crashing and having your body mutilated because your jump bike only had three inches of suspension travel was nothing to be proud of, Rusty.

Back to the book in second grade. I brought it home, put it on my bed and started paging through it. At some point the book opened to a full page illustration of a Norton Manx racebike. I can't say enough about how much that simple illustration influenced me at that age. I still to this day have a deep romance with line drawings of motorcycles. I have service manuals for bikes that I have never owned and would never own, old Bultacos or Moto-Guzzis, that I am unable to throw away because of the artistry of the line drawings in the shop manual.

That Manx captivated me; I was mesmerized by that illustration. Now this was a real racing motorcycle: it had no headlight and every component designed and produced to be as light and minimal as possible at the time.

I stared at it for long periods, I tried to copy it with tracing paper—fail—and kept the book so long that the grade school librarian was on the verge of calling my mom and telling her to bring it in because clearly I could not part with it .

That simple picture spoke to me in a way that few things in my life ever did in my childhood. It was, I suppose, like seeing the naked form of the opposite sex and realizing that you're hetero. I just knew that racing motorcycles like that were something I was going to get as close to as humanly possible.



Faced with being without that picture was not something I wanted to endure, and after some deliberation, I carefully tore the page with the Manx illustration out and returned the book to the library. No one ever said anything about the now incomplete book. I think, now, that the giant Encyclopedia of Motorcycles wasn't a real hit in grade school. And no one knew enough about the book to see that a page was missing.

I had that illustration for years. I tacked it to my bedroom wall and I'd look at it, stare at it, well into my late teens. It would not surprise me to find it the attic of that old decrepit farmhouse tomorrow.

The nameless guy with the Norton Manx was quiet but I got to know him a little at the drag strip. I recognized his bike from the illustration in my bedroom on the farm so I showed some interest and limited knowledge of it. He mentioned that it was his sole means of transportation. I asked how he got around in the Winter and he said he didn't.

He had roadraced, he said. At Daytona, Loudon, Road Atlanta and other places I'd only read about in magazines. He spoke plainly, and remembered results and details of his racing exploits, and he just reeled them off like it was yesterday. He took his racing very seriously for a guy who did not have winter transportation. He raced in the money class at the drag strip, and there were side-bets between the competitors for each round. I asked him what he did if he raced someone, won and they refused to pay. He said that was why he carried a gun. He tolerated our assuredly idiotic just off the farm questions. The thing I remember is that he never got off his bike. He sat on it between runs, with his helmet in his lap, talking shit with/to all the other money racer guys. Once he hollered back to one of his rivals "Well, go get your grandma's car then!". I've remembered that phrase and used it myself.

Between rounds we drifted back to our van and sneaked beers or went to find girls. He sat in the hot sun in his leathers, helmet on the tank. Now, decades later, it strikes me that the Manx didn't have a kickstand. He could not just prop it up and get a Coke like we did. He was always alone.

He didn't confess to us that he lived in an old school bus, but on some night of drunken stupidity we ended up in the small town in which he lived and somehow learned that he lived in an old yellow school bus behind a bar. It was not a nice school bus. He had the Manx in the bus with him. He also was the first fellow I knew who had a motorcycle in his house.

I'd like to think that we sort of celebrated this fellow more. Here was a genuine roadracer like Kenny Roberts, but back then, for us, it was all about how fast your bike could run in the quarter mile. Whose bike was fast? Whose bike was going to get faster? "What did you run?" There had been two or maybe four generational shifts in motorcycle design since the Manx was relevant. I can't imagine the British men who designed and built the Manx conceiving that one would be drag raced, but there it was. Unfortunately, even my GPz550, with its bent bars, shagged tires, and clutch lever ground short from a crash, could easily humiliate the Manx in a drag race. So it was over.

Of course bracket racing is about being consistent. And he was robotic in the way he pulled 14.10s or whatever any time he dropped the clutch. He won money every Sunday with that bike.

I will never forget those thin Perron gloves he lent me. Feeling the controls on my bike through those gloves made me believe that there was a world out there I needed to find. A world where crude drag race bikes meant little or nothing. Those gloves bolstered what had been stirred in me with the illustration of the Manx in second grade. I wanted to know the world where one raced in full leathers.

I felt different when I pulled to the line in those gloves, felt the clutch lever and throttle like I wasn't wearing gloves. It vexed me. Sort of like looking at that illustration as a kid.