Note to self: avoid shopping on eBay Motors late at night, after several glasses of red wine. The results can be embarrassing. Witness the 1970 Honda Z50 minibike now occupying a dusty corner of the garage.
In the pantheon of irrational motorcycle purchases, this is surely one of my most infamous. Visitors justifiably ask if my wife and I are planning another child anytime soon (now that ours has graduated from college). Maybe I’m practicing for a circus act involving clowns and trained monkeys? Or do I actually plan to wrap my six-foot frame around the shrunken example of a motorcycle?
The truth is, I have no good answers to these questions. When it comes to a rationale for motorcycle purchases, I rarely have good ones.
If everyday uselessness is the object, the Z50 would win the magazine shootout every time, scoring high points in nearly all categories: lack of speed, inadequate brakes, agonizing discomfort, non-ease of starting, and poor suspension (it’s a hardtail). And the winner is…the yellow bike with the thimble-size piston!
I’ve purchased quite a few bikes over the years that make scant claim to practicality and usefulness. It’s not likely, for instance, that I will cross swords with Silicon Valley commuting traffic on my old, much-loved but antiquated 1969 Triumph 650, with its Hail Mary front drum brake. Ditto my recently departed Honda CB750—a wonderful bike in its day, but in absolute terms not as competent as a $750 used Nighthawk. Yet I bought them both, and invested thousands of dollars in their restorations, impelled only by my inexplicable and perverse logic.
Blame it on eBay, which is a little like peering into every garage in the nation—a sort of motorcycle voyeurism. Who knows what I’ll find? Maybe a treasure. Or maybe a wheezing, 30-year-old minibike. Lucky me!
This eBay problem is always exacerbated when I start looking after a good dinner, with a glass of Merlot close at hand and the credit card within easy reach. Then I am like a sailor home on leave that suddenly wakes up with a battleship tattoo and a marriage license.
Or a Z50 minibike with no battery or lights.
When your weakness is motorcycles, you can only hide your indiscretions for so long. A minibike may be mini, but it’s not as easy to hide as say, an iPod. A few days after the illicit deal, I am summoned downstairs by my wife. Being a sane person, she is trying to filter these events through the conventional apertures of reason, finance, and usability.
“Honey, a truck just pulled up out front and the man is off-loading what looks like a child’s bicycle.”
Uh, that would be for me.
“So, will you ride this bike?”
No.
“Will someone you know ride this bike?”
No.
“Will we, say, use it to get around the campground or pit area or the back 40 we have always dreamed of owning?”
Not likely, I admit.
“Then why?” she asks in a familiar tone of futility and resignation.
The truth is, I have no idea. It’s only the inexplicable result of a momentary impulse, bad judgment, senility, or some evil alchemy of all three.
But it sure looks good in the garage. Its presence there, wedged in between the other four motorcycles and 10 bicycles that I do not have room for but purchased nonetheless, brings a kind of warmth to my twisted little heart.