secret kawasaki
My life has had many, many low points, but one of the lowest was the year of 1989. I was 19 years old, living at home with a shitty minimum wage job and no girlfriend. (I got laid once when I was 18, and then didn't have sex again for an entire year). I had dropped out of college after completely losing focus of what I wanted to do with my life after I didn't make it into UCLA film school. Meanwhile, I was having panic attacks on a nightly basis. The panic attacks started from smoking pot, but they soon crept into other basic facets of life, like sleeping. Whenever I would try to fall asleep at night, all I could do was lie there and listen to the sound of my heart beating in my chest. It would kind of weird me out that I had this strange organ pumping in my chest that I had no control over. I would lie there in the darkness and wonder what was making it go and what was keeping it from stopping. Just thinking this would make my heart beat faster with anxiety. And then when my heart beat faster I got more nervous, and it created a vicious cycle. After a long, long time of lying in my bed and obsessing over my heartbeat, I would eventually get worn out and sleepy. But just when I was dropping off to sleep I would awake with a start as if something horrible had just happened and the whole process would start all over again. Often I would go to junior college classes the next day with little or no sleep. I thought I was completely losing my mind.
After a couple semesters of this anxiety and misery it was time for me to go to my second summer of training in the Army Reserves. Joining the Army had to be about the most stupid and impulsive decision that I ever made. A couple of recruiters had actually come to my house to talk my sister into doing their GI Bill program, but my sister declined. I remember I was lying in my bedroom in a depressed stupor and suddenly I had this idea that joining the army would shake me up and get my ass in gear and make some sort of a man out of me. I went down to my living room and told one of the recruiters that I was interested and from that point it was all over. The recruiters rushed me down to a stale and dusty office building downtown where I sat and waited with a lot of rednecks and highschool dropouts and then filled out thousands of pages of paperwork and had a pakastani doctor look up my asshole with flashlight.
Anyway, by 1989, it was time for me to be shipped off to my second summer of Army training. My first summer was were you learn all the basic stuff like marching, and shooting m-16s, and making little army beds. The second year was for my "Advanced Individual Training" or AIT. My training code was 88Kilo, which meant I was to be a watercraft operator.
We had to get up at four o'clock in the morning and take these classes that were excruciatingly boring. I remember one class was about how to wash a boat.
"Where do you start washing a boat?" the army instructor asked us.
"I don't know," said the private that he pointed to.
"Well, where do you start washing yourself when you're in the shower?" the army instructor said. The army instructor pointed at his head to give the private a clue.
"My head?" the private said.
"Exactly!" said the army instructor. "So when you wash a boat, you start at its head, or the bridge. That way all the water and soap and dirt goes down with the gravity."
These classes went on all day and it was a constant battle to keep from falling asleep. Never in my life had I felt a sensation of such compelling sleepiness. You could drink a dozen cups of coffee and bite the inside of your cheek and put toothpicks in your eyes, but the next thing you know your head would be slumping down and a sergeant would be yelling at you to wake up.
Meanwhile, I was still having the anxiety attacks when I tried to sleep. Some nights I could walk it off in the hallway or just toss and turn until I wore myself out. But one night it was really bad. My heart was just pounding in my chest. I was hyperventilating and thinking I was going to have a heart attack. Finally, I figured I better tell someone and get some kind of help.
I went downstairs where this really mean, bulldog faced black lady drill sergeant was on duty. I really didn't really know how to explain to a mean, black lady drill sergeant that I was having a panic attack.
"Something's wrong with me," I said, approaching her and breathing heavily. "I can't catch my breath and my heart is beating really fast."
"What's the matter?" the mean, black drill sergeant lady said.
"I'm not sure. I can't catch my breath," I said again. But I don't think panic attacks register as any kind of real malady to a mean, black lady drill sergeant. Either you're bleeding to death or your have broken bones or your fine.
"You probably just had a bad dream," the mean black lady drill sergeant said. And just her staring at me with her mean, black, drill sergeant lady face that said, I don't have time for no crazy whiteboy problems kind of made me calm down and feel better.
"Yeah. You're probably right," I said.
Anyway, I digress. This story is supposed to be about a motorcycle. It was while I was at my second summer of Army training, learning how to wash boats and having panic attacks that I first picked up a biker magazine that belonged to one of the other privates in the room. A biker magazine wasn't the kind of reading material that I would normally peruse, but since there wasn't a Barnes and Nobles on the base I ended up looking at every picture and reading every word. Before long I became enchanted with the notion of becoming a biker.
According to the magazine, there seemed to be this magical world of motorcycles and bike fests, sort of like renaissance festivals where jolly fellows with big beer bellies ate turkey legs and swilled beer and rode around on their noisy bikes. And right behind the biker dudes were biker chicks that wore leather pants and looked really sexy and cheered their biker dudes one. One specific picture that I remember showed a biker dude bashing a japanese motorcycle that was hanging from a tree while all of his friends and biker chicks looked on and cheered. They called the japanese bike a rice rocket.
For some reason I was totally mesmerized by this magazine. Maybe it was because it portrayed a world that was far away from living with my mom and dad and taking pointless junior college classes and working at shoe store. I imagined myself become part of this brotherhood of roadwarriors, headbutting my comrades by the campfire and then taking my biker bitch back to my trailer and having sex with her.
I figured there was just one essential thing I needed to escape my depressed, homeboy loser life and live out this great fantasy. I needed a motorcycle.
(to be continued again. or maybe not. its getting to be awful goddamn long and I haven't even got to the motorcycle part yet. now I'm going to go out and do something with Whitney. Tomorrow I have to go to traffic school all day long so my goddamn license doesn't get suspended. Its going to take up my whole weekend. If you don't hear from me again you'll know that I went out and got drunk and then went to the traffic school all day the next day. Meanwhile, I heard today that the groper and the psycho-bitch discovered my story on the internet. Or at least they heard about it from someone else. The psycho-bitch is "contacting her attorney." As if people with no money and no jobs have these hardhitting attorneys on retainer to sue hapless bloggers. Meanwhile, the psycho bitch was also crying because now she is "in love" with the groper and the blog post made her think that the groper is interested in other women than her. (The groper is married.) Bob Bandit told the groper and the psycho bitch that I was out of the car and let me surreptitiously listen in on their conversation. Okay, that's all. See ya.
8:07:17 PM 
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