My Motorcycle Christmas, or The Practiced Grimace That Is Fatherhood

My Motorcycle Christmas, or The Practiced Grimace That Is Fatherhood

Looking back, it was a mistake to allow the boy to spend a chunk of his college funds on the motorcycle. It was never intended to go that way of course.

The idea was to set up the purchase so he’d get the bike, pay on time, and in the process he’d establish credit. That was the plan. It was never the plan to use the college funds to pay off the balance owed on the bike after it was wrecked and totaled by his idiot roommate less than a month after Cam drove it back to his house for the first time. My thinking was that we pay off the balance from the college fund, collect from the roommate, replace the funds and la la life goes on. It was not to happen that way.

First off, the roommate tried to claim he shouldn’t be liable for it. After all, my son let him ride it; he should be partly to blame. He thought we should just file an insurance claim and let our company take care of it. That could only have happened if the insurance company recognized the binder that we called for on the day of purchase however. As it turns out, Nationwide said that they never issued a binder. Hmm, I guess they must have had a breakin on the day the dealer called the information in to them. (Whoever answered the phone at Nationwide must have been convincing enough, because Honda of Winston let my son drive off the lot with it).

As the plot sickened, several months passed between us, with me writing Brian about the progress I was making securing parts for the bike from eBay and various discount warehouses and Brian emailing me back that I could go to a warmer climate. A letter from my attorney was ignored, and after a little detective work on my son’s part we learned that Brian, who had previous legal encounters of the vehicular kind, was already in deep to his own parents until about his mid thirties.

I finished the repairs, and did a damn good job of it. The time came for the issuance of ultimatums. Knowing I’d probably never get penny one, I advanced the principle that I had spent a good deal of my own money to repair his mistake, and I would not charge Brian for the time I spent educating myself on motorcycle repair, internet parts locator services , bidding on eBay, purchasing a motorcycle –specific tool to remove the front wheel, or the labor I put in on the bike in my basement. I made a detailed list of the parts themselves and what I actually paid for them, and sent Brian and his Dad a nice letter in explanation. Wonder of wonders, within a couple of weeks, I received a check in the exact amount I had requested.

I actually enjoyed driving that bike in the months that followed, mainly to work and back occasionally, or around the neighborhood to keep a charge on the battery. I listed it in the paper and put out flyers, put ads on my club’s website and the like, all with an eye toward replenishing the college fund. All was for naught. Not a single party in our neck of the woods was interested in any bike with a displacement of less than 750cc’s. And the other sad fact was that it didn’t say Harley Davidson on the tank or anywhere else.

Many months later Cam came home and got to use it for primary transport for a time. It was dropped by Cam and damaged three more times. Each time it went back in the basement until the replacement parts came in and I could roll it out freshly repaired once again. I even managed to drop it once myself, kinda. I left it running at the curb as the battery charged, for about a minute, when the vibration caused it to tip over on its own. That right rear taillight assembly got replaced four times before Cam finally traded the bike for a car and five hundred bucks.

My mother had a saying that she relied on with some frequency during my youth. “Grin and bear it.”