I have been having the dream again, the one that surely plagues every motorcyclist: At sixty-seven I can no longer start my bike. I can't kickstart. It is probably funny to you, a joke a comedian tells about how his father was compulsive about correctly refolding roadmaps, something like that because what do you know about kickstarting a bike? In the dream you think I dream, I am sitting on my bike and I go to kickstart it but my leg breaks off and I fall over and die like in a cartoon. But there is never any need to get on a bike and hurl yourself upon the kickstart lever like you are a banksafe falling atop an unsuspecting bystander. You are merely asked to apply enough force to spin the crankshaft. This task can be easily done by simply standing alongside the bike with one hand on the throttlegrip and the other hand placed for support towards the rear of the seat. First of course the bike must be suitably prepped (most important). A gentleman should be able to fire up his mount with at most three kicks. So you see the real exertion does not come in operating the lever with your foot--it comes in that brief but critical ritual involved in prepping the bike. Guys who have not learned how to prep their bikes are the ones you spot jumping up and down, up off the seat and back down, brutalizing the frame, the suspension, the kickstart lever, the crankshaft . . . all you have do to is stop and think about the motorcycle; after all it has an anatomy like a woman--the important parts are hidden away inside but that doesn't mean they must remain a mystery. You can learn what is in there and how to facilitate easy starting, if only you will take the time and energy to prep the bike before every ride.
First you must roll the bike to a suitable location to start it. (A Vincent weighs 468 lbs. dry.) Then after hoisting it back on its rear stand, you must kneel and bend as you turn on the gas taps and tickle the carburetors until you feel gas ooze onto your fingertips, then you engage your dual chokes. And while you are doing all this, you are looking for anything--oil, gas, grit, grease, anything not where it should be, does the throttle snap back, are the hoses and cables correctly secured and positioned--and it is then in the dream, while I'm on a knee, breathing hard, that is when my heart fails me. Or else it is when I am kicking the bike over, and the bike backfires. A backfire forces the crankshaft to reverse its spin, which (think about it!) spins the kickstart lever backwards, up into the foot, hitting you like the recoil of a gun. Bam! Once upon a time, you see, there really was a reason for thick rubber-soled motorcycle boots. Sustaining the force of a 1000 cc Vincent Black Shadow backfiring clad only in loafers is enough to leave a black bruise on the bottom of the foot, or even a fracture, and a young man hobbling for days. That was another advantage of a kickstart lever over an electrical starter--it provided a moment in which the rider was reminded that this bike had enough teeth to rip you a new asshole.
So that is the dream--being too old to do all this hard work in the hot sun on a summer morning, the only reason for being a motorcyclist. Sure you can modify your Vincent and fit an electric starter but that is such a violation of its spirit. It's like throwing a dress from Montgomery Ward on Anita Ekberg. The violence to the purity of the motor, the ghastly addition to the handlebar, once so elegant in its layout. Why slash up the beauty now at the end, especially when you can go out and buy a new Ducati 888 Desmo which came into the world with an electric starter. But what you do know is that you don't want to be found sprawled out alongside your motorcycle, dead in your own driveway for want of a button. And then while you lie there, some demonthug gets on your love and rides away. No, you wish to reserve the right to die with dignity and we learned all about that at the feet of Hemingway. The time comes when you understand the appeal of a shotgun.
A kickstart lever. Big deal, right? But it was something that caught up everything, all my concerns as a man. I said before there will be no more motorcyclists, or at least a very few of them, and let it stand here and now that this is another example that the world was a finer place when you had to do more then flick a switch and press a button to start out on a jaunt. Young fellows out there can sympathize with what I mean--but not empathize now that a kickstart lever has become a symbol of cool luxury. Robert Taylor, Keenan Wynn, Lee Marvin, Steve McQueen--they were what my generation considered real men; they would understand: They would know that it was OK for Ann Margaret to fit an electric starter to her Triumph TR6 (which she did). And they would know that in the end, when your fame and the opportunity to entertain are no more and you are forgotten and the great action pictures you made bore the teenagers raised on Die Hard and the cancer is eating away at you; in the end, you know that a day spent in an old time bike shop is just about the best way to pass this time on earth.
I was there in Mac's shop that day McQueen came in, walking slow and favoring one hip. He sat on an old van passenger seat Mac kept flush against the counter with the display shelves. McQueen's image was cast upside-down onto those glass shelves while we talked Triumph: the great Bud Ekins from whom Steve learned so much, and those great California races, the Big Bear Run and the Catalina Grand Prix, and from somewhere Mac found some old colored shots of when McQueen rode for the Triumph team in a six days trial. McQueen of course had no recollection of the photographs but they had made the rounds among Triumph dealers. As sick as he was, Steve McQueen remained a gentleman, a regular guy who loved bikes to the extent that talking about them lessened the pain of continuing to live.
