Like the enigmatic fortunes you find inside those folded Chinese cookies, our visit with Dr. John--the "frame doctor," was a mix of New Age mysticism and practical guidance. The week before, Bandit and I brought the rolling Pro-Street frame to the good doctor. We gave the him our best ideas of what we thought the bike should become. Basically, we wanted the bike to fit my body proportions, to shrink the frame around the engine and to still have elements of a street chopper.

Bandit and I had been trying to create a bike that had a real "signature" identity, yet we weren't sure what that would mean. We tried to convey our concepts with awkward babbling.

Stroking his long, gray beard with a knowing gravity, the doctor calmly listened to our ravings. Eventually he gave us a broad grin through the tangle of beard and said, "Don't worry, boys, I understand exactly what you need."

We had left the bike with vague misgivings. "Do you think he really has a clue what we want?" I asked Bandit.

"I dunno," Bandit said, staring off into the acrid, smog-laden sky. "The guy's kind of strange, but everyone I've talked to says the guy's a wizard," Bandit mused mysteriously.

When we pulled up to Dr. John's shop, there was our creation leaning up against the wall. Not averse to street-corner poetry, I intoned, "What a bitchin' fuckin'-lookin' bike."

"Man, that bike is really unique," Bandit exclaimed in a more civilized tone.

As we oohed and ahhed about the bike, Dr. John came around the corner, grinning. I jumped onto the seat-less bike and grinned. It fit perfectly, better than an O.J. leather glove.

"I really think you've got something good going there," the doctor spoke with unconcealed appreciation. "I wasn't sure it was going to work until I got into it. The bike began to speak to me. I think it's got the right karma," the doctor spoke with mysterious gravity.

All this mystery was not without reason. Dr. John started this trek to ultimate frame adjustment working at Goodyear Tires. A fortuitous opportunity, sponsored by Goodyear, for advanced training at L.A. Trade Tech gave him the chance to try motorcycle repair. Recognizing that he was more interested in bikes than tires, he began a course in bike repair with instructor Pat Owens.

Dr. John soon connected up with a bike shop called Motorcycle Menders. Right away, he could tell that he had a better-than-average sense of what was needed to fix most frames. Eventually, he opened his first shop in Covina in 1983. In 1990, he moved to his present location in Anaheim.

Dr. John's expertise is extended to both traditional street choppers and to the more exotic road race bikes, where competitive tolerances and alignment shave seconds off of lap times. The challenges to his expertise in frame adjustment include the extremes of creating a bike for a 6'9" rider and a Harley with a 25" over stock front end. For his own use, he is building a karma-tingling three-wheeler with a VW engine.

In his shop, amongst a tangle of tweaked Ninja carcasses, "destruction derby" ATV frames, twisted chopper forks and even a mangled Vespa body, Dr. John holds court. Side-tracking his stories about getting into the frame adjustment business, he mixes concepts of metal stresses with ideas of mental stresses, Eastern philosophy, acupuncture points, shakras and auras, martial arts movements, elements of a good diet and muscle alignment of the spine.

The conversation stumbles easily into his personal experiences. After an injury of his own, he explored a variety of methods of pain control, eventually meeting an American Indian psychic whose exotic beauty hypnotized him as much as her cosmic consciousness. Here, a glint comes to his eyes and a wry smile brings one corner of his mouth up. "A rare beauty," he muses. "An aura just like Cleopatra of ancient Egypt."

Bandit nodded in agreement repeatedly, like those Dodger dolls that bobble in the back windows of cars, to the good doctor's banter. Bandit slurped his green tea while listening to enchanting tales spun by the Doctor. While I shoveled in heaps of steaming and spicy-hot Kung Pao chicken, my eyes teared up and my nose started running.

"The magnetic flow is a flux of energy in the body of..." The steaming pots of green tea and plates of exotic Chinese food sent wisps and tendrils dancing in the air above our table like a chorus of swaying, sensual nymphets.

"The assorted colors of shakra balance..." This adventure had the aura of Zeke the Splooty about it. We were on a cosmic motorcycle Magical Mystery tour.

An hour or so later, Bandit and I were back on the 91 Freeway with the bike strapped to the bed of his pickup, staring ahead kind of dumbly. "What a trip, Dr. John is," I said.

"Yeah, but I think he did a great job on the frame," Bandit said.

"Yeah, cosmic man," my head was stuck in the '60s. "What do we do now?" I asked.

"Let's check out some trippy paint for the bike," Bandit smiled. "Let's drive down to Stanton and see if Wes at Venom can come up with something exotic enough for this mystery machine."

"Go for it," I laughed.

It's days like these that make bike building seem like the right thing to do. Bandit slapped in a tape of '60s funk and we were sailing down the road like a couple of latter-day Kerouac and Keseys.

On to Part 5........

Back to Part 3........

Back to Joker Machine on Bikernet........

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