Favorite Vehicles
A) Automobiles
I was just thinking about this the other day: It was my first car and Mom helped with the loan, ostensibly helping out only so I would stop borrowing her car all the time. But she had helped (she cosigned; we paid off the actual loan) with my sister’s and my brother’s car loans, too, so it was something of a rite of passage for each of us. I had chosen a Dodge D50 truck.
The Dodge D-50 was an unusual (for its time) product in that it was a Japanese/American cooperative effort. It was actually a Mitsubishi truck that was imported and simultaneously sold as a Mitsubishi Mighty-Max, a Dodge D-50, and a Plymouth Arrow. When I first brought it to the theater where I was working (and showed it off to my coworkers) one of the guys said something about it being noted for its acceleration, compared to other trucks. I shrugged because I didn’t know anything about that. All I knew was that it was black and I liked the sporty lines and, because I was in my super-altruistic phase at the time, I planned to stock it with first aid gear and mount a fuel can somewhere and… yeah, the ideas of rigging it up as an amateur EMT vehicle quickly faded when I started looking into the cost of back-boards and camper shells and push-bars and all that stuff. I later learned to like the long bed and single cab because I was able to haul my motorcycle with it.
What I was reminiscing about the other day was an incident one early Saturday when I found myself at the bottom of a hill in San Diego county, with a big Ford truck on one side of me and a big Chevy truck on the other side of me. Ford versus Chevy has been a notorious rivalry since Chevy was born and I could hear the guys on either side of me revving their engines while we all waited for the traffic light to turn green. When it did, I threw my transmission into first gear and expected my little 4-cylinder engine to whine away and choke on the behemoths’ exhaust as the machines on either side of me roared and stormed up the hill. Instead, the behemoths roared, my little 4-cylinder growled, and I found myself shooting ahead of the American trucks and zipping up the hill while they lumbered along. Someone later explained that my little toy was a sport truck, not a workhorse; the Mitsubishi/Dodge was designed and tuned to haul families and sports equipment (predecesors to the SUV, which is basically a truck with its camper-shell already built-on) while they were designed and tuned to haul construction materials. Trucks, for that matter, were not designed to be fuel-efficient commuters; my little Dodge got a maximum 25mpg on a good day while the big Ford and Chevy construction kings were typically doing worse than that. Their engines were tuned for heavy torque to haul heavy loads; my engine was tuned to move medium loads and (if empty) to accelerate well (which, at the conclusion of the hill incident, I suddenly remembered my coworker mentioning).
I had gotten The Black Beast used and mostly maintained it myself – in the process, learning about batteries and carburetors and cooling systems and all that. At some point it began stalling whenever I’d come to an intersection and despite replacing the timing chain, fuel pump, starter motor, and head gasket (twice) I couldn’t figure out the problem. It languished for a while (because I was focussing on motorcycles at the time) and when I brought it in to a Firestone where I had become friends with the manager, they put it back together and told me A) You were a mere three teeth off when you reinstalled the distributor and, B) The idle circuit solenoid needed replacing so we did that for you. I had never heard about that solenoid so I never knew to look for it; apparently it wasn’t used for many models so I couldn’t be blamed for not knowing about it.
But by then I had scarred half the cyclinders while trying to get things working and The Black Beast just didn’t want to walk (much less run) any more. And, besides, I was focusing on motorcycles.
Would I want to drive it today? Yes and no. I was thinking fondly of it because I remembered the bed was long enough to carry my motorcycle with the tailgate up, whereas today’s trucks seem to all use double- or king-cabs and the bigger passenger space tends to result in less cargo space. Then again, it never got (wasn’t designed or tuned to get) good gas mileage and by the time I gave it up it had barely squeaked by the ever-tightening emissions standards. I’m sure it wouldn’t pass today and I’d be irritated about spending so much on fueling the thing. So it’s mostly “Gee, I wish I could find a modern version of that thing.” And, yeah, I know there are turbo and turbo-deisel trucks offered today but that hardly seems fuel- or smog-efficient.
B) Bikes
The very first motorcycle I had was a Kawasaki KZ440LTD that someone had left behind at a gas station. The guy who worked the graveyard shift at that gas station came to me during my graveyard shift at the 7-Eleven across the street from where he worked and he said, “You want a free bike? It’s been sitting on our lot for three weeks and the boss says get-rid-of it or be-gotten-rid-of.” So in the morning he and a couple guys helped me load it into the back of my truck. I put out a notice and sent letters to the listed owner and got no reponse after 6 weeks, then filed the paperwork to get the forms to have it transferred to my name. During the 6 weeks I cleaned it up, replaced the instrument clusters that were broken and replaced the ignition key/steering lock (and learned that motorcycle gas caps at that time didn’t care which key was inserted; they just used a simple spring-and-wedge contraption to keep the tank closed). The problem, really, was that I didn’t know what I was doing. I had been a bicycle mechanic and did a lot of work on my truck, so a lot of things were just bigger or slightly different. But I screwed up by putting the wrong bulbs into the wrong holes of the instrument cluster and, after riding around on it occasionally for about 4 weeks I found I couldn’t figure out why the brake fluid indicator light was constantly on even though I had new pads and full fluid reservoirs. Eventually, the thing stopped running (while going up a hill, actually; that was fun getting it home) and I abandoned the thing at a nearby motorcycle scrapyard before ever finalizing the assumption-of-ownership papers. YEARS later I thought about that and realized my silly mistake with the indicator bulbs: That nagging little light was simply telling me my fuel tank was getting low, but I had it inserted in the wrong hole in the instrument cluster.
But the Bike Bug had bitten me and I decided to replace the KZ440 before the truck completely died from whatever was making it sputter at intersections. To me this was a smart decision: Not only would a motorcycle cost a lot less than a car or truck, but I would get better gas mileage, create less pollution, stop being ‘invited to help’ classmates move (for the reward of a few slices of pizza), stop worrying friends and family about my habit of stopping to assist strangers on the side of the highway, and stop needing to buy a campus parking sticker (what we called student lot hunting licenses) because there was free motorcycle parking situated closer to the classrooms than the student lots.
My really favorite motorcycle was the KZ550LTD that I just happened to find about three weeks after I abandoned the KZ440LTD. With the same styling but a bigger engine it was comfortable for my short legs without looking like a Harley Cruiser (I was a student and wanted to look like one, not appear to be some kind of an outlaw), and also got better gas mileage and even handled freeway speeds better than the KZ440LTD. It was a wonderfully fun motorcycle that lasted through the rest of my college years and a couple years beyond. When I returned from Japan I sold it and bought a Suzuki VX800 which never really fit me well.
The odd thing (to me) was that when I was commuting in a cage I could wear nice slacks and shirts to classes and, even as a freshman, my fellow students and even some professors spoke to me as if I was a grad student. When I switched to the motorcycle I wore jeans and t-shirts with leather jackets and, even as a senior, my fellow students and even some professors would speak to me as if I was a dumb freshman. It was interesting (but not completely unfamiliar) to literally be judged by my cover.
Would I want to drive it today? Like my Dodge D50, I’d like to find a modern equivalent. By the time I gave up the KZ550LTD it seemed like the motorcycle world had split into Cruiser-versus-Sportbike camps and, quite frankly, I don’t like either one. Cruisers weren’t comfortable to me because they made me feel like I was skidding along on my tailbone with my hands and feet splayed forward in a desperate effort to stop. Sportbikes weren’t comfortable to me because they made me feel like I was halfway into a face-first dive over the handlebars* and because I like seeing the engine and pipes so I think sportbikes are too shrouded in plastic. I eventually traded in my VX800 (sometimes called an Intruder) for a Suzuki SV650 (naked) because I had been watching that design for quite a while. Even though it claims to be more of an upright (cafe style) riding position, it still leans me forward; I ended up putting handlebar risers on the triple-tree so I wouldn’t be leaning forward so much. I’m proud of owning and riding the SV650 for a lot of reasons, but nothing was as comfortable as the KZ___LTDs.
–G!
*When my brother bought a KZ500 (the Ninja 500 without the insurance premium-boosting name) he asked what I thought of it. I remember honestly telling him, “I’ve got a girlfriend; I can do better than fu(%!ng a motorcycle seat.”
