The Ride Report

I almost killed myself and crashed my motorcycle last night, and the engine wasn’t even running.

I’ve been working in the transportation department on a low budget movie the last couple of days, towing the wardrobe trailer and the honeywagon to and from the shooting locations. This show is so low budget they don’t have overnight permits for the trailers, so we’ve been towing them back to the producer’s house and leaving them on the street there overnight, then picking them up in the morning to go back to set for the next day of shooting. Pain in the ass. So today we finally browbeat them into paying the extra $$$ to get permits to leave the trailers at the West L.A. location we’ll be at for the next three days so we wouldn’t have to start and end each day with setting up/breaking down everything and towing to/from Northridge.

The only problem with this solution is that me and the other driver’s vehicles were still back at the producer’s house in Northridge, so we took off to get them and bring them back to set. Why we didn’t have a PA drive us so we could each drive our own vehicle, I don’t know. That’s what we had talked about, but when we finally hit the road it was just me and the other guy in one of the show’s stakebed trucks. Long story short: this meant only one of us could get his vehicle because someone was going to have to drive the stakebed back.

The other guy got the great idea to load my bike into the back of the stakebed and I’d drive it back to set while he followed in his van. That way we’d have both our vehicles and the stakebed back at set. I didn’t love the plan, but the other guy happened to be my boss and I want him to call me for work again in the future, so I went along with it.

Getting the bike on the stakebed was a pain in the ass. The truck had a liftgate that the bike barely fit on, and then to maneuver it into the bed we had to remove one of the wooden side-rails and sort of slide the bike on an inch at a time with half my front tire hanging off the side of the truck. I thought for sure we were going to drop it then.

(That’s called “foreshadowing.”)

So I drove back to the set while he followed in his van, and the whole way back I was watching my bike in the mirror and thinking Is it moving? It isn’t moving, is it? Naaaah, it’s not moving. Holy shit, it’s moving! No, wait, maybe it’s not. When I got off the freeway 15 miles further, I took a good hard look during a red light and saw I had been right: the damn thing was moving. One of the tie-downs — the one my boss had rigged — had totally come off. My tie-down and a kickstand was the only thing keeping my bike on the truck. I re-strapped it down and we continued on to the set.

Getting the bike off was going to be a challenge. As hard as it had been getting it from the liftgate and into the bed of the truck, it was going to be even worse getting it off. It was just too dangerous and maybe even impossible to do it the same way. We needed a different solution. An abandoned loading dock would have been perfect. My boss’ idea of “we’ll back it up to a hill or steep driveway” would have been fine if we used a ramp, but had a liftgate. So I came up with the bright idea of using the liftgate on the grip truck since it was bigger.

Now, what transpired from there was partly my fault because using the grip truck liftgate was my idea. But it was mostly my boss’ fault for rushing it and trying to do it fast and risky instead of slow and safe. But it was ultimately my fault because I went along with it against my better judgement. I had my eye on getting work from him down the road and didn’t want to contradict him, even though I didn’t like the way we were doing it.

Long story short: We backed the stakebed up to the grip truck at an angle instead of straight in, and when I was straddling my bike and backing it up onto the grip truck, I ended up at an angle at the edge of where the two trucks’ liftgates met. I was walking it back, I pushed with the left foot, pushed with the right foot, pushed with the le– When I put my left foot down to push, I put it down into air. I had gone too close to the edge.

The bike started tipping and I couldn’t hold it. In my mind I did that fast-forward thing I’ve talked about before and I mentally played the scenario out to its painful, dead-Chuck ending, with me on the ground and the bike landing on top of me. Fuck that — I jumped.

It was a beautiful move, that jump. The timing was perfect, the form was excellent, it was graceful, it was an aerial ballet — right up to the part where my foot got hung up during the dismount. After that it turned into an ungainly belly-flop onto concrete from 4 feet up. There was a small crowd of people watching all this go down, and I remember hearing a horrified collective “Ooooh!” from them when I hit the ground.

On the ground, my first instinct was to get the fuck out of the way, because I knew the bike was coming down right behind me. Thing is, I couldn’t move. The bellyflop knocked the wind out of me and all I could do was lay there, croaking like a toad and waiting to get crushed by 750 pounds of plummeting Road Glide.

Fortunately, the bike didn’t fall. The one bright spot of this whole carnival of stupidity was that the bike got hung up in the side-rail and the other guys on the liftgate were able to grab it and stop it before it went over.

When I was finally able to breathe and move again — I came out of it with just a scraped elbow — I climbed back up on the gate and finished the job and got the bike safely down on the ground. I felt like an ass when all was said and done. I got lucky on that one. It could have gone a completely different way and ended really ugly for me.

…and that’s the whole story. It’s not really about riding per se, but it involved a motorcycle and it is what I’ve said this blog is about: tales of and from the road. And perhaps above the road…