I’ll start this Blog article by saying I’ve always loved motorcycles.  As a small child, I had the Evel Knievel Action Figure with the motorcycle that you could wind up.  You’d crank it up, hit the button and Evel would take off across the floor.  Most people won’t remember or have ever even heard about the Evel Knievel Action Figure.  I must be getting old, lol.

I rode on the back of motorcycles as a kid and I loved it.  Then when I was in my early 20’s, I bought a little yellow Yamaha 50.  It had 3 gears and was easy to ride.  I used it at work when I worked at the Waterpark.

I had fun on that little bike until I crashed with an attractive girl on the back of it with me. We were both very intoxicated and shouldn’t have even been on it, but that’s drunks for you.

I had been running around the apartment complex, where I lived with 3 other lifeguard buddies.  We were having a party that night and there were lots of people in our apartment and out in the parking lot.

When I would buzz by, this one girl would yell at me to give her a ride.  I always said no.  I was having fun jumping over this ramp the cracked concrete had made.

She kept pleading for a ride, so finally I gave in.  She hopped on and off we went.

We made the lap around the complex and I headed for my little concrete ramp I had been jumping all night.  It was only about 6 inches high, so it wasn’t very big at all.  But when you’re drunk, anything seems fun.

When we hit my little ramp, the girl had a very tight grip around my waist.  Our combined weight bounced hard and we flew into the air.  I was knocked unconscious for a few seconds and when I came to, the little bike and the girl were on top of me.

We got up and were in shock that we had crashed.  We walked to our apartment and went inside the party, where others were also shocked that we crashed.

My right foot was fucked up.  I was riding bare footed and my foot got caught underneath the bike and the two of us.  The top of it was severely scraped.  I was bleeding up and down my right leg.  And I had scratches and scrapes on my right rib cage / under arm area.

The girl was hurt to, but I think I got the worst of it.

The next thing I know is that I’m in the back seat of my friends convertible Mustang and we’re speeding to the hospital.  I remember how much my injuries hurt from the wind coming from riding in a convertible with the top down while flying down the interstate.  We were going so fast that we passed up an ambulance that had its’ lights on and flashing.  I guess I can thank my friend for getting us to the hospital quick.

At the hospital, we had to wait for a while before anyone would see us.  My pain was incredible.

Finally, we were brought into an examining room where the Doctors and nurses began to look us over.  It was the first time that I ever heard the words “Donor cycle” and “Murder cycle”.  The nurses were using a play on words to call motorcycles bad things.  I wasn’t amused.

When you get scraped up by the road, you’ve got dirt, small rocks and all sorts of debris in your wounds, so they have to scrub you down with Betadine.  It’s called ‘The Betadine Scrub” and it hurts like you’ve just landed in Hell and this is the first punishment.  They scrub your open wounds and this causes them to start to bleed some more.  But, it’s better to get the debris and dirt out of the wound so it won’t get infected.

When they had me all scrubbed up, the doctor came in to examine my wounds.  He looked over my foot for several minutes.  Then he had me move my toes up and down a few times.

The verdict was that I had skidded so hard on the top of my foot that I had severed the tendon on the top of my little toe.

The doctor said that the doctor who could sew it back together would be there in about 3 hours.  I didn’t want to wait, so I asked him what would happen if I didn’t get it reattached.

He said that over time my little toe could curl under my foot and I would not be able to pull it back up because the tendon had been cut.

I decided to take my chances and we left the hospital.

It’s been many decades later and my little toe is fine and in the place it’s supposed to be, so I guess I’m lucky it didn’t curl under my foot.

During the time of this crash, I was Student Teaching for College Credit and had to go to school on crutches, with my leg all bandaged up.  Try teaching some unruly high school kids like that some time.  It’s no fun.  I still got an A for my teaching assignment.

I didn’t ride a motorcycle after that crash for several years.

The next motorcycle I decided to get was a little red one.  It didn’t have a big engine, so I couldn’t get on the interstate with it, but it was fine for regular roads.

After a while of riding that little red motorcycle, I felt it was time to move up to a bigger bike.  I went to Stubbs Cycles in Houston, TX and picked out a nice, black Suzuki GS500.

I had fun on that bike.  Fun until I slide under an 18 wheeler on it.

One day, I was going home from work and I was riding on the feeder road.  An 18 wheeler crossed over three lanes and was now near the interstate.  It looked like the guy was about to merge onto the interstate.  I continued forward.

Then, all of a sudden, the 18 wheeler takes a hard right and crosses back over the three lanes of the feeder and blocks it off.

It happened right in front of me and I had no choice but to lay my bike down and slide up under the 18 wheeler.

He was wanting to take the right turn all along, so he went left first to give himself some room to turn in.  The problem is that he didn’t see me and he also didn’t have working tail lights.  He had no blinker on telling me he was about to turn right in front of me.

I was pretty scratched up.  All up and down my leg and on my back. I was wearing shorts and a muscle shirt.  Luckily, I had my helmet on.

My bike was ruined.

Two years later, I finally got a small settlement.  The trucking company waited until days before the case was to go to trial, then paid the settlement fee to avoid court.  So, they got to gain interest on their money for two years, then finally pay me for my bike and pain and suffering.  I didn’t get much.  I’d still like to beat the shit out of that truck driver.

After my black GS500 Suzuki, I decided to get an even bigger bike.

I found a blue and white GSXR1100 for sale by a person… William Thacker.

I mention his name because he screwed me over.

I bought the motorcycle from him and after I had the bike for a few days, I noticed there were no filters on the carburetors.  I should have noticed, but I was excited to get the bike and didn’t notice.  William Thacker is a big penis for selling me the bike without all of the parts.

It took me forever and a day to hunt down the parts I needed.  I would like to meet Mr. Thacker in a dark alley too.

One day, I was riding home, when I turned onto a main street near my apartment and was going down the street at the posted speed limit.

Then, all of a sudden, a car pulls out of a grocery store parking lot and stops in front of me. The traffic going in the opposite direction was totally stopped.  This car was trying to squeeze into that line of cars, but they were all stopped, so she had nowhere to go when she pulled out.  So she stopped in the street and totally blocked off my two lanes.

I wasn’t going fast, but I was going fast enough that I couldn’t stop before I knew that I was going to hit this car.

I grabbed the brakes and squeezed.

Just when I was about to hit the car, I jumped up in the air to avoid slamming into the side of this car.

That’s all I remember.

The next thing I remember is that I was looking up into the clear blue sky.

I was laying on my back in the middle of the street, on the other side of the car.  I had flown over the car and crashed into the street and it knocked me out cold.  Luckily, I was wearing my helmet or I could have died or had brain damage from crashing into the hard concrete street.

The girl who hit me was Hispanic and didn’t speak English that well.  I found out later that she had mental problems.

While I’m standing there trying to get some info, her boyfriend drives up.  He starts all kinds of shit and I wish I could have knocked the hell out of him for being an asshole.  He was trying to blame the wreck on me.  He wasn’t even there.

I was never able to get any insurance info from them because I don’t think they had insurance.

My bike had some damage to the front end, so I pushed it the short distance to my apartment and parked it.

I remember going into my apartment and sitting on the couch and just staring forward for many minutes, almost as if I was in a trance.  I was reliving the crash over and over in my mind and kept thinking of how close I came to dying.

Later, I got the parts and fixed my bike myself.

I sold that bike later on and didn’t own a motorcycle for a while.

Then, one day, I decided to get another bike.

I went back to Stubbs Cycles and found a nice looking, all black, GSXR1100.  I bought it and I loved that bike.

I liked that it was all black.  It looked very fast… and was.

I had many mishaps on this bike.  Once, I was riding on the interstate in the rain when a car changed lanes and ran me off the road.  I hit the grass on the side of the interstate and me and the bike started flipping.  Again, I was knocked unconscious.  When I came back to consciousness, I was on my knees and I had grass all over me from flipping around.

My bike was lying nearby.

Another motorist saw what had happened and pulled over to check on me.  He helped me pick my bike up.

When I got it up again, there was a long green branch sticking out of the side of the bike.  I grabbed it and pulled it out, then I tried to start it up.  It cranked up on the first try.

I thanked the guy for stopping, hopped on my bike and took off down the interstate in the rain.  That was a wild experience and I’m lucky my helmet didn’t cause me to break my neck because of the extra weight on my head as I was flipping across the grass.

I rode this bike 165 mph on the interstate.  Now that was a rush.  I went faster on my motorcycle than I did when I was driving NASCAR race cars at the driving schools.

When you’re going 165 mph, everything is a blur and things in the distance come up real close, real fast.

In this photo below, I’m doing a burn out.  What happens during a burn out is this… With my right hand, I put my middle finger on the brake lever and grip the throttle with my hand.

Next, I pull in the brake lever with my middle finger and hold it tightly.  Then I begin to turn the throttle with the same hand, giving the bike some gas.

When I begin to give the bike some gas, I release the clutch that I’m holding with my left hand.

The rear tire will start to spin because you’re giving the bike gas, but the bike stays where it’s at because my middle finger of my right hand is holding in the brake lever.

You give the bike a lot of gas and the back tire spins faster and you get more smoke as the tire does a burn out.  It’s amazing to think that that much power from my bike is being held in place with just my middle finger.

If my finger should slip, the bike would lurch forward and run into a brick wall going very fast.  I’d be dragged along with it and probably get seriously hurt.

My bike was even used in photo shoots.

There’s nothing like beautiful models and good looking bikes.  They make lots of calendars with girls and bikes.

I never changed my own oil in my bikes.  I always brought them into the shop for service.  I trusted the shops and I hated doing maintenance on my bikes when I didn’t have the tools to do the jobs.

Once, I was riding on this bike at night, in the rain, flying down the interstate in Houston. All of a sudden, I lose power.  The bike just dies.  No engine, no lights, nothing.

I was in the fast lane, so I had to quickly cross 4 lanes on a dead bike to get off of the interstate.  Luckily, I had good momentum from going so fast that I made it off of the interstate and into a parking lot.

The guy I was riding with comes up and says he was shocked I didn’t crash.

I asked why.

He said my chain had popped and was dragging behind my bike, hitting the interstate and causing sparks 6 feet high.  That must have been quite a sight to see.  I had to spend lots of money to get my bike fixed after my chain popped.  The broken chain had flown into the engine and caused some damage.

One night I couldn’t sleep.  I had just finished packing for an out of town trip.  The next day, I was traveling to a NASCAR race for my marketing job.

I decided to take my bike out for a ride.

I rode up and down Westheimer, a main road in Houston, and pulled into a Taco Bell parking lot.  I went inside to get something to eat.

Since I was not sleepy, I ate leisurely and even ordered dessert, which I never do.  I remember I was sitting there eating and reading a magazine.

Finally, I was ready to leave.

I walked up to my bike and I heard someone say something about my bike.  If you ride a motorcycle, people will want to talk to you about your bike, so I thought that’s what this was.

I put the key in my bike and I hear someone talking again.

I turn around and about 15 feet away is a black dude.  He has his hand on a gun that he’s holding near his waistline.

I begin to stare at the gun.  I was trying to see if it was real or not.  If it was fake, I was gonna kick his ass.

Then he tells me, “I ain’t gonna tell you again, let me get that bike”.

I was pissed.  I told him madly that the keys were in it.  He said, “Start it up”.

So I turned around and started my bike.  Just then, another black dude comes from behind the truck parked next to me and gets on my bike.

He backs it up and the other guy gets on and they drive off.  This all occurred in a few short minutes.  Maybe 2 minutes.

As I was standing there in shock, a guy runs over and asked if I just got robbed.  I say yes and he offers to chase them down.  I jump in his truck and off we go.

We never could find them.  I had a fast bike and they were gone.  Besides, he still had the gun.

I went back to the Taco Bell and filed a police report.

The cop told me that there was another bike stolen earlier in the same manner and that both guys had guns.  It had to be the same two guys.

The cop told me that they were probably just out ‘Joy Riding” and that I might get my bike back in a few days.  I doubted him, seriously.

I remember thinking, as I rode home in a cab, how fucked up criminals are.  There is a special place in hell for thieves.

About four days later, I get a call that they found my bike abandoned.  I was ecstatic.

When I got my bike back, it had some sand in it, so I know they went to Galveston with it. Dicks.

I was happy to get my bike back.

The photographer wanted to put on my sunglasses, jacket and gloves to pose for a picture on my bike.

One time, I was riding from Houston to Louisiana and it was at night.  As I’m going about 75 mph, my headlights shut off.  The bike was still running, but there must have been an electrical short because only the lights on the bike went out.

When I tell you it was pitch black, it was so dark that you could not see your hand in front of your face.  There was no moon out and I was hauling ass down the freeway, but couldn’t see a damned thing.  I didn’t know if I was still on the road, the emergency lane or about to run off of the road.

I was pretty scared about what was about to happen.  Would I crash, stop immediately and be stranded in the middle of nowhere in the darkness with no help or what?  I just didn’t know what to think.

Just then, a car passed by me.  I gunned my engine and caught up with the car.  I could see the road in front because of the cars’ headlights.  I rode the rest of the way to Beaumont tucked in right by this car.  I bet they never saw me.

I was extremely lucky that that car passed by when it did.  If I had slowed down any more, I would not have been able to catch up to them and I wasn’t about to haul ass into the darkness to try and catch a car when I couldn’t see the road at all.

I got a hotel room in Beaumont and rode the rest of the way to Louisiana the next morning in sunlight.  I got my headlights fixed right after this incident.

Another friend wanted to use my gear to pose for a picture too.  I owned the bike, but I would never take a picture like this.  It seems too cheesy to me.

But I guess for those that don’t ride, this looks cool to them, lol.

My mom even wanted to take a spin on my bike.  We had a nice ride and it is a memory I’ll have forever because of this picture.

Once, I moved to an area of Houston called The Montrose.  It’s got cool bars and many coffee shops.

I liked going to the coffee shops, but not on my big bike.  It became too much bike for what I wanted.  I decided to trade my GSXR1100 in for a scooter to ride around the Montrose coffee shops.

I went back to Stubbs and found this little black scooter and liked it.  I traded in my bike and got this nice scooter.

The funny thing is this… when I was riding to Stubbs on my GSXR1100 to trade it in, I got pulled over for speeding.  It’s easy to speed on those bikes because they are so fast.

I tried to plead with the cop by telling him I was on my way to trade the bike in for a scooter.

He didn’t care and gave me the ticket anyways.  So, the last day I owned a bike I loved, I got a ticket on it because it was too fast.  That sucked.

I rode this little scooter around the Montrose and it was fun.  Then I moved to the other side of town, where it was dangerous to ride a scooter.  So I sold it.

Several years go by and my father passes away.  When he does, he leaves me a little money. I decide that I want a Harley Davidson motorcycle this time.

Bikers call my old bike a ‘Crotch Rocket’ because they are so fast.  Harley’s are for cruising, not racing.  The saying is, “One’s for show and one’s for go”.

Here’s the Harley I bought.  Notice the back rest for the passenger that I added on and also the saddle bags for carrying things.  I wanted my passengers to feel safe while on the back of my bike.  With a back rest, they could lean back and enjoy the ride. Without it, they’d have to hang on to me to keep from falling off the back.

This picture was taken the day I came home with the Harley.  Notice how the back doesn’t have the back rest yet nor the saddle bags.   I also added a custom exhaust system to it, to give it that traditional Harley sound.

I would go on group rides with friends and other riders who would meet up at a large parking lot, then go for a group ride.

People in vehicles would ride along with us and take photos of us.  These last two photos are from them.  I think they were cool for doing that for us.

I had owned a pair of knee high, leather riding boots for years and when I got the Harley, I was ready to go.  I think I paid $400 for the boots because they were custom built for my feet.  I had to measure my feet and send in the dimensions and shape. These boots are very cool.

I had a friend put red, running lights underneath my bike.  At night, when I’m cruising around, a red glow would come from under my bike.  It looked cool.

I enjoyed having a Harley because I could give friends rides.  When I had the crotch rocket, giving people rides is not as easy.

I was always extremely careful when I had someone else on the bike with me.

And they wore a helmet.  You don’t have to in Texas, but it’s good to be safe.

This is my neighbor’s mom and she loved going for a ride.

In this photo, I had just had my bike detailed. I always kept it clean.

I decided to sell my bike when I didn’t ride as much anymore.  My bike would sit idle for weeks at a time.  Then when I was ready to go for a ride, I’d put all of my gear on and go to the bike.  When I would try to start it, the battery would be dead from sitting idle for so long without running. It got to be a real pain in the ass.

And besides, I think I’ve cheated death and serious injury enough.  I thought it was time to stop riding because of the dangers that other driver’s cause by not seeing you.  That was the cause of all my serious crashes.

I still have all of my riding gear and still wear it in the colder months of the year.

I paid $400 for this Harley Davidson jacket and it’s a really nice one.  Thick for biking safety and warm.

I also still like to wear my traditional Bikers’ Jacket.  I’ll always love these jackets.  Nothing says “Attitude” more than a black, leather, Bikers’ Jacket.

During the really cold winter days, I’ll wear my boots and especially if it’s raining on a cold day.

When I bought my Harley, I also bought a Harley Owner’s Ring for $800.  I still wear it on occasion, but not as much since I sold my Harley back to Stubbs Cycles.

I hope you’ve enjoyed reading about my motorcycle adventures.  I’ve been through quite a lot as a Rider, but I loved being a Biker.

You may stop riding, but you never lose the Attitude.

Spider Michaels

https://SpiderMichaels.com