Installment #05 – The Destruction of One Big Toe

In 1973, I had been working for Easyriders for a couple years. I was attending a community college and buying and selling auctioned Los Angeles Police bikes. I had left my first wife, who was extremely religious and couldn’t handle any aspect of my life, including the bikes, smokin’ dope and my pals. Don’t get me wrong, she would have hung, but the bastard in me said goodbye and I hit the road for wilder times. She is still deeply religious and perhaps her prayers have saved my ragged ass a couple times. Although this particular time, the drugs and booze overcame the prayers.

I had moved to Oxnard and bought my first pad for $23,000. Easyriders was still reasonably new. I was the only rider on board except for Mil Blair, who ran Jammer Cycle with Joe Teresi, so we didn’t see much of one another. My riding partner and roommate at the time was Mick Karr. He was, and still is, one of those brothers packed with heart from his big feet to the top of his pin head. I built some weird shit in those early days, but Mick built shit that should have been mounted on walls for artistic value, not ridden on the highways. I remember working all night to go on the Chino run. Mick had made his own springer front end that tracked all over the freeway. He couldn’t keep the chopper in one lane, but he kept riding that sucker.

Anyway, a couple riders came through town to meet the ER crew on their way to Frisco and we started smoking weed, taking whites and drinking whiskey. Mick was a wild man who worked his ass off in the oil fields as a driller. He was a big man who lived on the surface of his skin. He was on at all times, moving, partying or creating. He didn’t stop to think about shit. He was also a bad ass. Remind me to tell you about the time we rode to three runs in one weekend. Barely made it back from that one.

Meanwhile, back at my stucco box with rusting chains welded together to form towel racks, we were doing some heavy-duty partying when one of the riders suggested that we go to Frisco with them. At this point, any suggestion sounded all right to us. Mick’s ol’ lady was pushing hard for us to ride out. She was one of the most powerful women I ever met. Mick and I were both beyond 6 feet, but this woman had a 6-foot mouth. She was constantly instigating. So we went out to the garage and started to tweak for the run. As soon as the sun took the black out of the sky, we headed north.

We would have done just fine except riding choppers doesn’t make for long-range puttin’ and Mick ran out of gas just above Santa Barbara. By the time we rode up to a station, grabbed a can and returned to the dry tank, then rode back to the station to return the can, we had burned through an hour or two. Who the hell knew, we were still high and lovin’ every mile. So we headed out again, got another 80 miles and Mick ran out of fuel again. Then we started breakin’ down.

I was riding a ’68 Shovelhead that I stretched 4 inches up in the down tubes and ran an 18-inch over Durfee Girder with virtually no front brake. I had grafted a knucklehead rear section to the swingarm frame and formed a rigid. It still had black and white five-gallon fatbobs and I had painted sheriff’s stars on the sides with skulls and shit over them. My rear brake was a mechanical job and the rear fender was ribbed and bolted to the frame with a sissybar about 1_ feet above the fender, just enough to lean against. It was a rider, and I kicked back against an old Army blanket and my bed roll. Just south of San Jose, Mick broke down again and we had to find a welder. It was hot as hell and we looked worse than the devil. Both of us wore grease-soaked Levis that could stand in the corner. But every gas stop, every breakdown was an excuse to shoot the shit, get stoned or find another place to buy a new half-pint.

When we reached San Jose, the two out-of-state riders decided to escape the two freaks and the hot-headed blonde and ride on, or we decided to turn around, I’m not sure which. The memory is a fog of shuffled roads, drugs and bizarre motorcycles in the wine country. The heat was blistering as the sun reached high noon and the whiskey melded into a summer brain storm. We welded Mick’s frame in a smoldering tin shed and headed back.

Mick’s bike was even longer than mine — a black handmade springer with square tubing and flamed cut rockers. His frame was stretched about twice as far as mine and he had a sissybar to the moon. His woman, who was a tall, shrieking, brazen blonde, became more surly by the mile. She was a knockout though, and passed me a half-pint of Southern Comfort from the pocket of her black trench coat while she bounced around on Mick’s back fender. She had a spare half pint in her other pocket that flapped in the wind.

We entered Paso Robles, inland enough from the coast to be a sweltering 95 degrees with 50 percent humidity. We were toasting mentally and physically when Mick motioned for me to pull over. The long bikes floundered for the emergency lane with its gravel and discarded hubcaps. I released my black boots from my brass pegs and put my feet on the steaming asphalt. A rush of alcohol-induced spins shot through my body. The asphalt felt like wet clay under my leather riding boots and I swayed. Mick put his lengthened kickstand down and I let out my hand clutch to roll out of his way. My 74-inch rebuilt engine sputtered and almost died. In my drunken stupor, I recognized that my choke had inadvertently dropped a notch and closed a quarter stop. I reached under the handmade air cleaner, pulled the knob on the Tillotsen and reopened it. I turned back to Mick and said, “Be right back. I’m going to clean this thing out.”

I hit the throttle and it responded, but my body was alerting me that I was seriously fucked up, and I wanted to make sure the bike was running alright for the remainder of the 250-mile ride home. I pulled forward on the vacant stretch of highway and rolled off the freeway at the first off ramp. This is where the memory becomes seriously clouded. Rumor has it that I turned left and rolled under the freeway. There was nothing on either side of Highway 99 except acres and rolling acres of grape vines. Once on the other side of the freeway, I turned left again and shot down the paved frontage road and into a sandy gravel turnout. I’m not sure that’s really the deal, but close.

I woke up three days later in the Paso Robles Community Hospital. I was cleaner than I had been in months. My precious Levis were cut off me and a chunk of my hair removed. I had a few stitches in the back of my head, a couple of burns on my leg, and one on my right big toe. Over the next six months, the toe didn’t come around and ultimately was asked to leave. That’s it, no conclusions. Don’t ask me to balance on the edge of a fence, but I can still outrun most chumps. I continued to drink and ride for another 25 years. Tomorrow could be my day. Ya never know.