I almost killed myself and crashed my motorcycle last night, and the engine wasn\u2019t even running.<\/p>\n
I\u2019ve 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\u2019t have overnight permits for the trailers, so we\u2019ve been towing them back to the producer\u2019s 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\u2019ll be at for the next three days so we wouldn\u2019t have to start and end each day with setting up\/breaking down everything and towing to\/from Northridge.<\/p>\n
The only problem with this solution is that me and the other driver\u2019s vehicles were still back at the producer\u2019s house in Northridge, so we took off to get them and bring them back to set. Why we didn\u2019t have a PA drive us so we could each drive our own vehicle, I don\u2019t know. That\u2019s 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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
The other guy got the great idea to load my bike into the back of the stakebed and I\u2019d drive it back to set while he followed in his van. That way we\u2019d have both our vehicles and the stakebed back at set. I didn\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
(That\u2019s called \u201cforeshadowing.\u201d)<\/p>\n
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\u2019t moving, is it? Naaaah, it\u2019s not moving. Holy shit, it\u2019s moving! No, wait, maybe it\u2019s 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 \u2014 the one my boss had rigged \u2014 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.<\/p>\n
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\u2019 idea of \u201cwe\u2019ll back it up to a hill or steep driveway\u201d 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.<\/p>\n
Now, what transpired from there was partly my fault because using the grip truck liftgate was my idea. But it was mostly my boss\u2019 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\u2019t want to contradict him, even though I didn\u2019t like the way we were doing it.<\/p>\n
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\u2019 liftgates met. I was walking it back, I pushed with the left foot, pushed with the right foot, pushed with the le\u2013 When I put my left foot down to push, I put it down into air. I had gone too close to the edge.<\/p>\n
The bike started tipping and I couldn\u2019t hold it. In my mind I did that fast-forward thing I\u2019ve 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 \u2014 I jumped.<\/p>\n
It was a beautiful move, that jump. The timing was perfect, the form was excellent, it was graceful, it was an aerial ballet \u2014 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 \u201cOoooh!\u201d from them when I hit the ground.<\/p>\n
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\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n
Fortunately, the bike didn\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n
When I was finally able to breathe and move again \u2014 I came out of it with just a scraped elbow \u2014 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.<\/p>\n
\u2026and that\u2019s the whole story. It\u2019s not really about riding per se, but it involved a motorcycle and it is what I\u2019ve said this blog is about: tales of and from the road. And perhaps above the road\u2026<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I almost killed myself and crashed my motorcycle last night, and the engine wasn\u2019t even running. I\u2019ve 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\u2019t have […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-688","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-neutral"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.deadpan.net\/ridereport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/688","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.deadpan.net\/ridereport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.deadpan.net\/ridereport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.deadpan.net\/ridereport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.deadpan.net\/ridereport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=688"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.deadpan.net\/ridereport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/688\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":692,"href":"https:\/\/www.deadpan.net\/ridereport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/688\/revisions\/692"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.deadpan.net\/ridereport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=688"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.deadpan.net\/ridereport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=688"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.deadpan.net\/ridereport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=688"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}