I didn't hear my knee break when the dirt bike went down. I didn't even realize it was broken. It did hurt like a mutha tho. My perfect, powerful little legs would never be perfect again. Me and my buddy Bob had been riding the powerlines for an hour. I just fiqured I had sprained my knee really bad, so we rode back to the truck. That's when I found out just how much trouble it was to push in the clutch on my car.

Two hours later, I was in unbelievable, serious pain and my knee was the size of a basketball. At the hospital looking at an X-ray, the doc shook his head and said to me, "You must have really whacked this hard. Knees don't usually break like this."

The upper leg bone had come down against the lower one and sheared off 1/3 of the knee cup. The sweet buzz I got from the Vicodins didn't take off the sting from the knowledge that I wouldn't straddle my recently purchased 1200 Sporty, anytime soon.

The next day I was anchored down with my leg in a cast as my roommate Matt told me about a 250 Ninja listed in the paper. The guy wanted $900 for it. An hour and a half later, we were looking at a white and red Ninja. Matt rode the bike around the parking lot and pronounced it mechanically sound. The confused look on the seller's face was priceless as Matt picked me up and set me down on the bike seat. I was wearing a long white dress and a cast. Hey, I had to sit on the bike before I bought it. Even with the cast, the bike felt good. The doc said after the cast came off, that it would be months before my leg was fully healed. I needed a lightweight bike to ride in those months and this little baby fit the bill. After handing over $600, we loaded the bike on the trailer.

Two months rolled by and even though the newest x-ray showed a hairline crack that hadn't healed, the doc removed my cast. He advised me to stay away from ski slopes and motorcycles for the rest of my life. I stayed away from ski slopes for two years. I stayed away from motorcycles for the entire 10 minutes it took me to drive home from the doctor's office. My left leg had the muscle tone of a bag of wet oatmeal, but I could put weight on it. I opened my garage door and rolled out my baby Ninja. It was late Nov and the riding season in New England was drawing to a close.

AJ, a bike-painting friend of mine in Memphis, called me and said, "Let's go to Florida and check out the bike painting opportunities there." I had to peel-out to Memphis anyway to drop off two paint jobs. AJ figured we could go to Florida from there. I loved Memphis. The blues clubs, the music, the people, were all-good.

So I spilled the beans, to my friend Crazy Angie, while sitting at the bar in the Red Dog Saloon in Middlefield, CT.

"Then you should meet this chick Lorin!" Angie said. It was at this point that this wild looking blonde woman came over to me and said, "I want to go with you to Florida!"

That's how I met Earthquake Blake. She was laid off her job and had some time on her hands. She also had a brand-new truck, big, shiny, and black. She also had a trailer and one very fine looking custom 1200 Sportster, complete with lots of chrome and a wild, black and pink Billy Streeter paint job. The back fender of the bike had "Wild Child" lettered across it. It was most appropriate.

"You'll be on your sporty right?" she asked.

I told her, "No."

"Not the ninja!!!!" she cried. Her perfect little nose wrinkled up as she grabbed her beer and drained it.

"You mean I've got to ride next to a Ninja?"

She pulled up to my house in a cloud of dust. "Mustang Sally" was blasting out of the stereo. Two friends, seeing me off, just looked at each other and shook their heads. We loaded up the bikes and cut a dusty trail for Memphis. Yes, we were going to Florida by way of Memphis! We would pick up AJ in Memphis, in addition to dropping off some paintwork to pay for my little adventure.

AJ had told me when I met him, a year earlier, that he lived on 160 acres in a house that "looks just like Graceland only bigger. " I thought it was just another tall tale. He said he was the son of a prominent doctor and raced bikes professionally. Also, he had this insane idea that he wanted to paint bikes. He was 26 years old, very handsome, 6'2", with long brown hair and native America tattoos. He could and frequently did, also charm the pants off most women with his oh-so-sweet southern accent and his sly smile.

We were all young, too young to realize the miracle that lay ahead. We were just going on a simple road trip. Nothing more. None of us had regular jobs, children at home, major bills, or related responsibilities. I didn't think we'd make the trip of a lifetime. A trip that none of us would ever experience again. A trip that would change all our lives forever.

It was 800 miles to Memphis. The back of Lorin's truck was filled. We weren't restricted to packing just bikes. We could haul as much crap as we wanted. After the many bags of countless pairs of black jeans, sweatshirts, tank tops, belts, who knows how many leather jackets and two large cardboard boxes of riding boots, there was barely enough room for two sets of sheetmetal. Yeah, the bed of that that Dodge Ram was packed full. Two chicks on a trip and no guys to bitch about how much shit we could bring. The drive west was a small slice of heaven, great weather and great conversation. We wondered and pondered how towns got their names, like Bucksnort, TN. Lorin, a native Alaskan, told me about growing up in Alaska. She tested for her pilot's license at age 16. She traveled the entirety of North America for the past 16 years. She spent a year in Mexico, where she sang in a band at night and tanned on the beach during the day. She ended up in Wallingford, Connecticut, where she lived in her own two family house, that she was remodeling. There was a bullet hole in the floor where she shot a man who wouldn't take no for an answer. In Nov, when most of us Connecticut people wore leather while riding at night, she wore only jeans, boots, and a tank top. Her thin yet muscled and tanned arms showed off an elegant tribal tattoo than ran just above her left bicep.

We definitely stuck out in a crowd. No matter where we pulled in, all attention was drawn to us. Maybe it was the bikes, maybe it was the fact that two chicks were in the truck. Most likely it was the leggy blonde that was built like a brick shithouse, who walked around as though she owned the planet.

After carefully following AJ's directions we pulled into what appeared to be the right driveway. I was about to find out if AJ's tale had been fact or fiction. It was a very long driveway, actually a road. A brick gate announced we had arrived at the correct place. We buzzed over a hill and looked down past the rolling lawn to a mansion set into the countryside. It looked like Graceland, only bigger.

Next Week---Bike Paint, Tornados, BB King's place and screams at midnight.

On to Part 2....