kontextmaschine:

So the time I got my first motorcycle i got it built from parts by Barron Gunter at Illuminati Cycles, which was a lot behind El Globo, the Mexican Mafia club at Sunset and Vendome

And part of the deal I was kind of his shop monkey for a while, scrubbing rust off pipes and learning things, and he had somehow become a millionaire during the original dot.com boom and been married to this woman and joined the Navy and had an antique store in Austin and been betrayed by that woman and lost that money and become a 12-stepper, I wasn’t really sure of the chronology there

And I came in 2 or 3 days a week and he only charged like $1400 for a CB350 with the ‘68 2-tone tank (and a scratched cylinder and electrical gremlins) but he was taking forever to put it together, I was coming in all summer while he did “Black Bomber” CB450s for rich Hollywood assholes and I put up with it until the day his credit line guy came by and while he was standing around I picked my moment to curse Barron out about how I gave him this money and he was just sitting on it not doing a goddamn thing and what the fuck that was an actual business deal not palling around

And next week that’s how I got Blue Bitch!

Like at first he hadn’t timed the cylinders right so it just randomly died at stops and he didn’t have a handlebar unit with the starter button so there was a wire hanging around the handlebars with an exposed metal bit I had to touch to the metal of the brake lever to start. I didn’t let him off with that, I enjoyed having a motorcycle for a few days then came back and yelled and then did a few more turns as a shop monkey