One of last week’s Five Things was Bring A Trailer and in the description, I mentioned a recent auction they had for a 1974 Honda CB360G motorcycle in practically mint condition. Since watching the walk-around video in the listing and listening to the engine settle into its sewing-machine like parallel-twin cadence, I haven’t been able to stop thinking about my old 1974 CB360T, or, as I called her, Jasmine. Remembering exploits on that thing remind me of the crazy, idealistic, reckless kid I was. There’s the old saying, “God looks out for old folks and fools,” well… I wasn’t an old man, but somehow I survived that transition from teenager to “adult” on that CB360 — which, I will note, had the same birthday as I did: October, 1974.
That wasn’t the first thing I noticed when I saw the motorcycle. Shawn had just gotten off at Orchard Supply Hardware and one of his coworkers was selling it. I noticed the color first – a teal green. It was the nineties, after all, and I don’t know how that color went over in 1974, but in the early nineties it fit right in. I also noticed it wasn’t running. Shawn was confident we could get it running easily. One of the mistakes I’d made was trusting Shawn’s mechanical acumen. I mean, he told us he rebuilt the engine in his Chevy stepside pickup himself and that was a lot more than any of us did, so…
I usually refer to the CB360 as my first motorcycle, but that’s not quite true. The summer after my dad died, I picked up a smaller Honda CB200. That first motorcycle was short lived. It was 1991 and we nicknamed that CB200 “Perot” because you never knew if it would run or not — nothing as evergreen as a 90’s political joke. It wasn’t long, though, until Perot wouldn’t go into first gear. Shawn said we could fix it. It would be easy. We’d have to “crack the cases” to get to the transmission, but that was fine. We started dissembling the bike, then we pulled the engine. To keep track of what nut and bolt went where, Shawn had a great system: everything went into a bucket. One bucket. All. The. Nuts. And. Bolts.
Perot (my Perot) never ran again. We never did crack the case. And knowing what goes into that process, it’s for the best.
But I suspect Shawn was feeling a little guilty for Perot’s fate when we looked at the CB360. “It’s just the carbs – we can rebuild those!” he said. I still believed him. Come to think of it, his truck never did seem to run perfectly. But I didn’t think about that then. We got it back to the garage at the house on Bonita we had moved to not too many months back and started working. True enough, it was just the carbs. Though, I think I managed to mess up the rebuild of at least one. But I learned. And soon enough Jasmine coughed to life.
So a note on the name “Jasmine.” Given when I got her (again, early nineties) I think most of my friends believed I had named the motorcycle after princess Jasmine in the Disney animated movie “Aladdin.” Not true. No, there was a flowering jasmine bush outside my window and in the morning I loved waking up to the smell of jasmine coming in through my (always) open window. Similarly, working on the motorcycle I found myself drawn to the smells of things in the garage – the metallic tang of used motor oil, the stale funk of old gasoline, the acerbic sting of carb cleaner. It wasn’t some kind of “Let’s huff fumes!” attraction, it was more that this was the olfactory imprint of the mechanical world, of a well-used garage and tools, and I was falling in love with it, like I had fallen in love with the morning scent of that jasmine bush. Jasmine. That’s where it comes from.
In high school I had the luxury of not relying on Jasmine as my primary transportation. I had a car (oh, stories there…), and I even acquired an old Spanish moped that my mom sewed a tiger striped seat cover for, I hose clamped a golf flag to the back, and with my Little Mermaid lunchbox bungied onto the front rack I’d mosey to school more often than not with my Birkenstock-clad feet stretched out on the running boards.
Yeah, I was that kid.
But I sold my car to pay for part of the first year at UCSC, and the moped wasn’t going to make it to Santa Cruz, so anytime I wanted to go farther than the bus would take me I had to rely on Jasmine. For a kid born in 1974, I was just coming into my own in 1993. But for a Honda twin of the same age, it was vintage. And I was pushing it way beyond what I should have…
The RA of my dorm that first year, Sol, and his friends were putting together the Cigar Aficionado club. It was their way of sort of putting a finger in the eye of the UC Santa Cruz hippie image, and I wanted in. I told my then-girlfriend about it and she couldn’t have more strenuously objected. She thought it was disgusting and how could I even think about it? That was a long-distance relationship that carried over from high school. She had gone to UC Berkeley, and I to UC Santa Cruz. I cared about her opinion even if she wasn’t there and I told Sol in the dining hall at lunch I wasn’t going to take part in that night’s first gathering. I still vividly remember what he said: “Jordy,” he had this cadence and presence that reminded me of Vito Corleone even though he was from Fremont, California, “I totally understand.” Dramatic pause. “But I’m going get an extra cigar for you in case you change your mind before tonight.” I thanked him, but assured him I wouldn’t be there.
After lunch I decided to take advantage of the gorgeous fall day and go for a ride. I still try to go back to Santa Cruz in the fall because the smell of the leaves mixed with the sea breeze… it’s utterly intoxicating. My mom forbid me to take the underpowered motorcycle on the notoriously dangerous Highway 17, so I knew well the serpentine Highway 9 that ran through the Santa Cruz mountains from Los Gatos to Santa Cruz, meandering through little towns among the redwoods. But on the other side of town ran Empire Grade, a road I’d never heard of (this was way before I could trace it on Google Maps) but looked inviting. I strapped on my helmet, zipped up my leather jacket and pointed Jasmine up Empire Grade.
We passed the West Entrance to campus and the road swept up and carried us out of sight. As the road climbed parts of it reminded me of the roads around Lake Tahoe where, only a few years before I’d ridden my bicycle with the redwoods giving way to pines as the road traced the ridge between the coast and the inner forests. Where the bike was underpowered on a contemporary freeway, this road with its gentle sweeping curves and undulating rises and falls were a perfect match and I was enjoying the hell out of it. I came over a rise and twisted the throttle to gain a little more momentum for the next rise ahead… and the throttle cable snapped.
I coasted to the side of the road and realized, for the first time in my life, I was stranded. The University lay at least a dozen miles back down the road. There were no cell phones back then, and even now there’s relatively no service up there. I was screwed. I locked my bike and tried hitchhiking – I’d already seen plenty of folks around campus hitchhiking into town and even if the notion scared the crap out of me what choice did I have? But it wasn’t a well-traveled road, and the dozen or so cars that passed didn’t even slow.
I went back to the bike and tried to reassess the problem. The Honda CB360 has a parallel twin engine with two carbs behind the cylinders with a little wheel between them that housed the throttle cable. Twist the grip, the cable gets pulled, the carbs open to let in more gas and air. The motorcycle still ran just fine. It just… idled, and that was it. But maybe I could feather the clutch to get a little motion and even if I had to push uphill, there were enough downhills that maybe I could coast it back – I mean it was Empire Grade after all. So I sat astride the bike, kick started it to life (the optional electric starter had long since died), pulled in the clutch, stepped down into first, and tried feathering the clutch. It… really didn’t work. But… you know… if I could get my hand down under the seat just so… between the carbs and the crankcase… if I could move my fingers in there between the carbs and push that wheel….
Vroom!
Holy crap.
Half bent over the right side of the bike, I manipulated the throttle again and, sure enough, the RPMs went up. I experimentally let the clutch out a little as I hunched over and gave it a little gas and… I was moving again! Yes, I only one hand on the handlebars. And, yes, I had the other arm contorted under my seat, but, goddamnit, I was moving again! I could make it home!
I knew it was crazy dangerous at the time. How do I know I knew? Because at some point as the wan light of the ancient Honda’s halogen headlight split the growing dusk descending on Empire Grade that night, my reptile hind-brain decided it was the appropriate time to start singing the theme to “Indiana Jones And The Raiders Of The Lost Ark.” As I awkwardly steered the bike around curves with one arm I bellowed, “Duh duh duh-duh, duh duh duh! Duh de duh DUH, duh de DUH DUH DUH!” like a wildman.
I made it back through the East entrance and up the panoramic sweeping Coolidge Drive. I managed to turn in to Stevenson College, and pulled into the narrow motorcycle parking below my dorm. Only then did I extricate my arm from mechanical linkage and flipped the engine kill button. The headlight darkened as I turned the key off and I sat there in the twilight listening to the heat ticking of the quiescent engine and what I just did, the insanity of what I just managed to do swept over me like a cold wave of “What the hell were you thinking?!” The adrenaline that fueled my Indiana Jones bellowing body had drained and I was shaking.
I don’t remember dropping my helmet and jacket in my room, but I must have. I do remember making a beeline for the dining hall where Sol was finishing dinner. I walked up to the table and he stopped talking to someone mid-conversation. “Jordy,” he said, “What’s wrong? You look like you’ve seen a ghost!”
“Sol,” I said, “I’m going to have that goddamned cigar tonight.”
I did, too. A Macanudo Portofino. It was divine.
I’ve got myriad Jasmine stories – the time I didn’t take her to the nude beach, the time I took her rear wheel on the bus over the hill to get a replacement tire, the time Owen and I rode it over the aforementioned Highway 17 TOGETHER… yeah… crazy.
A few years later I got a new used bike and Jasmine languished under a tarp until I could find time and money to properly restore her. As these things do, it never happened. Fortunately, my friend Mark was interested in getting into motorcycling and was wondering what a good starter bike might be. Funny, I said, I happen to have one…
