The Superbike by Patrick Sean Lee (best book clubs TXT) 📖

Jimmy McGuire, Mickey Fumo and I decided to start a brand new project. One destined to send our names into the heavens in lights. Well, it was Jimmy anyway who decided we should build something.

We spent a balmy Saturday afternoon, all day Sunday after Mass, and every day after school the following week giving birth to Jimmy’s insanely wonderful, hairbrained invention. A bike to make every eyeball in the neighborhood snap to attention when we shot by.

The Superbike, he called it.

Jimmy had gotten a brand new, Schwinn, 26-inch cruiser for his birthday three weeks earlier, and it was elected hands down over my shitty old 20-inch wreck next door to undergo the operation. He wheeled it into his garage, and there in sight of God and Mary and all the saints in Heaven, we stripped the gleaming present of its red and white fenders and the plastic tassels cascading from the rubber handlegrips. Clear to the bone we stripped it. We removed the wheels, the drive chain, the seat as well, and especially the wire basket bolted onto the handlebars.

That particular item, Jimmy said, pegged it more than any other thing as being totally effeminate, and therefore inappropriate for our miraculous machine. Lying there utterly naked it somehow looked more powerful than ever. Lean and kind of angry.

“Now, get the motor,” Jimmy instructed Mickey when the undressing had been accomplished. “It’s ready."

Mickey took off to the rear of the garage through a debris field the size of the city dump. He fetched the gas-powered motor (that two days earlier had been the key ingredient of Margaret McGuire’s brand new lawnmower) and lugged it back out to Orville and Wilbur. The Wright brothers would have been proud had they lived to see the pile of tools, nuts and bolts, metal shrouds, and candy bar wrappers that littered the floor, but Jimmy’s mother was going to hit the ceiling when she eventually lifted the overhead door one day soon. By that time we’d be long gone, riding three-up on the most remarkable and noisy bike in all of Denver.

Then again, maybe she’d never even notice a thing. You see, Mrs. McGuire had a propensity to drink too much. Since her husband Sam abandoned her and her young son five years ago for whatever reason no one really knew, she’d spent a considerably growing amount of time guzzling down tumbler after tumbler of Old Crow. She worked the graveyard shift at Gates Rubber Company, nearby, and after the monotonous hours at the plant ended, her M.O. was to race home and pull her 1949 Plymouth into the driveway, next to the kitchen door. Her first stop after entering the house was the cupboard in the kitchen, packed with bottles of booze.

Now it was not our place as kids to question her right to get drunk every morning before ten if she wanted, and the topic of her condition was rarely ever broached, except on a few occasions at our dinner table in the house next door. Every now and then, with a smile as big as the world, she’d walk on eggs to the Morley residence to inquire if my dad and mom cared to join her in a drink. Being Irish, and being something of a drinker himself—though not at all in Mrs. McGuire’s league—Pop most often invited her and her bottle in. Mom usually declined the offer to get shit-faced with them and stood close by to make sure Mrs. McGuire didn’t fall out of her chair and crack her skull open in our kitchen where most of the really serious drinking took place.

Jimmy’s mom was a good enough woman in most respects, even though her drunkenness necessitated her staying in bed all day Sunday, missing Mass. She was forgiven that huge sin by Mom, I suppose, because in my mother’s saintly wisdom, Mrs. McGuire’s condition was seen as endemic to our particular nationality. Further, the spiritual aspect of the problem was no doubt covered by Mom’s unique relationship to God, and by virtue of the many indulgences she uttered. As such, when the final day of reckoning arrived, Mrs. McGuire would be allowed through the Pearly Gates thanks in large part to Mom’s intensity of prayer in her behalf. To Mrs. McGuire’s credit no man was ever seen entering her home after Sam left town.

That's what was most important in the end, my mother noted many times. Mrs. McGuire was a drunk, but she was a moral drunk.

His mother’s nasty habit didn’t seem to have any discernable effect on Jimmy. For now, if we kept the noise down to an absolute minimum and stayed out of her way, we were as safe as the gold in Fort Knox to do pretty much whatever we wanted to on her property—short of bringing the tiny brick house they lived in down on top of everyone inside in the heat of one of our sometimes-explosive projects.

So. Mickey lugged the handsome two-stroke engine back to the front of the garage where Jimmy and I were kneeling on either side of the naked Schwinn. Two priests in attendance of a dead man, or more aptly, Jesus and his sidekick about to raise it from the dead.

“How are we going to attach it to the frame?” I asked.

Jimmy stood up, took a step backward, and rubbed the grease on his hands onto his tee shirt. As though the palms of his hands contained his brains and were now cleansed and capable of deep thought, he folded them and brought them to his lips. Staring straight ahead with a blank look on his face, but tapping his upper lip with his fingers, we waited for his burst-of-genius answer. Somehow I knew whatever it was it wouldn’t work. He finally spoke:

“Duct tape.”

“Duct tape?”

"Huh?"

“Yeah. It’s perfect. Strong as steel if ya’ use it right. Go find a roll.” He seemed confident enough, but I thought he was crazy. Even so, I took off for the cabinets to search for the roll of tape while he issued further orders to Mickey.

“Get that piece of wood.”

“This one?”

“No, the flat one next to it. And hand me that drill.”

“This one?”

“Yeah, that one. Criminy, Mickey, it’s the only drill in here.”

Twenty-five minutes later the project was precision. We had the engine wrapped like a mummy onto a twelve-inch board that Jimmy had bolted onto the pedal-sprocket housing, but I noticed something wrong.

“You laid it on its side. Why?” I asked. “And we’ll never get the pedal cranks back in with those bolts stickin’ through the sprocket housing.”

“No need to,” Jimmy answered. “No pedals required. It’s on its side so that we can put the chainwheel thingy onto the end of the engine shaft. Then we’ll just put the chain back on—and we’re off! We’ll need a sledgehammer.”

I blinked, but gathered up a three-pound sledge from a box of assorted tools as instructed and handed it to Jimmy. He proceeded to beat the hell out of the smaller-holed chainwheel, ramming it onto the shaft of the slightly larger engine shaft. In another moment he somehow had gotten the thing positioned just the way he wanted, and then for good measure mushroomed the end of the shaft…”so that the chainwheel can’t slide back off.”

It was ugly, but it was masterfully engineered in a strange way. After gerryrigging the fuel tank onto the new top of the engine so that gas wouldn’t dribble out so quickly, we slammed all the parts that would fit back onto the bike. No frills. Two balloon tires, what was left of the old frame, the set of handlebars, and, of course, the padded seat for Jimmy, the driver. The very last adjustment he made was to pick up a hammer and beat the small muffler off the engine.

“There. Now we’re ready to roll. First thing before we start, though. This bike don’t have a clutch, so when we fire up the engine it’s just gonna’ go. I got the throttle cable hooked up to the frame right here,” he said pointing to the small lever attached to the gooseneck. “I’ll keep it throttled back until we’re all on, then I’ll let it rip.”

“If it don’t have a clutch, how are you gonna’ get it moving?” Mickey asked.

“Skip, get on the handlebars.”

I did.

“Alright. I’m going to pull the starter rope. Mickey, you push like hell after it hits, then hop onto the rear axel bolts. Hold onto the seat for all you’re worth.”

Mickey looked down at the bolt nubs sticking out of the rear-wheel chain sprocket, shaking his head. “I don’t think so…I’d have to have toes like visegrips to…”

“Horseshit, son! Just do as I said…and don’t get your feet tangled up in the spokes. It’s just a matter of balance.” Jimmy looked at Mickey and smiled. “Push, then jump on. Easy as pie.”

“Push, then jump,” Mickey muttered, shaking his head. “Push, then jump. Push…okay, let’s get it over with.”

“Good. On three, then,” Jimmy said. “Ready? One. Two. THREE!” He yanked the rope and Mickey began to push for all his worth. The engine sputtered and coughed a horrific cloud of gray smoke—and then it hit.

“Faster! Push harder!”

Mickey put his back into it, and with the help of the long, sloping driveway, we gained speed. The engine smoothed out to an ear-deafening, constant roar.

“Now! Jump on, Mick! Do it!” Jimmy screamed.

Mickey performed an acrobatic maneuver that I was unfortunately unable to witness, as I was busy simply trying to remain upright in the face of the shocking forward momentum. We hit the gutter at the end of the drive and bounced into the street. As though we’d practiced it a thousand times—and we had, on the once-proud Schwinn—all of us leaned left and we rattled and shook into a wide turn, heading down Meade Street, gaining speed.

Mr. Linden, the neighbor living to the north of us who I guessed to be about a hundred and fifty years old, was out for his afternoon walk. He carried a cane to ease the burden on his right leg caused by a nasty case of rheumatoid arthritis, and when his weak old ears caught the artillery roar coming his way on the far side of the street, he shuddered to a stop. We all waved a quick hello-goodbye to him. I glanced back through the smoke screen behind us and saw him weakly raise the cane up as he turned to watch us motor to our deaths.

“I think he likes it!” I yelled.

“I think he wanted to hit us with…”

“Look out!” Mickey screamed. Thirty feet dead ahead a mustard-yellow station wagon was bearing down on us, horn blaring, although it sounded anemic and distant over the din our lawnmower engine made. Jimmy had yet to fine-tune his control of the bike, in part because the out of balance chainwheel made the duct tape give at critical places, causing the machine to vibrate badly. Couple that with the fact that my back blocked his vision, and it isn’t surprising that he swerved from one side of the road to the other.

“Left!” I screamed. “Right!” Mickey screamed at the same instant. Jimmy stayed the course, as, I suppose, he couldn’t be certain which instruction was least deadly. The driver of the stationwagon snapped the wheel hard starboard, and I felt my right foot graze the gigantic rocket-fin rear fender as it sailed by us.

“You goddam crazy kids…” was all that I heard as we gained more speed, rifling down the street in an ever-increasing wall of noise.

Within a block or two, Jimmy finally began to gain full mastery of the bike, which enabled him to pick a side of the street he liked and stay pretty much on it. I hunched my back forward as far as I could without falling face first