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My main mission after purchasing my first serious motorcycle, a 1981 Suzuki GS1100, was to show it to the guy who’d first facilitated my two-wheeled addiction. The day before I purchased my first motorcycle, a Kawasaki KZ200, Rich spent an afternoon showing me how to operate his Honda CB200T (the MSF was still somebody’s dream). The Suzuki was one big giant step up from the diminutive Kwacker on which I’d been learning and becoming addicted to motorcycling. At first I was considering moving up to a Honda Hawk (400), but after a conversation with one of the few veteran riders I’d befriended, a 750 seemed to be the “do it all” size I was really looking for. At the time most of the magazines, which I’d recently started reading, said the Suzuki GS750 was the overall best of the current crop. Fortunately for me and the dealership and unfortunately for my wallet, the 1100 was parked next to it on the show room for only $1000 more, and the rest as they say is his story. I know exactly what those twenty-somethings feel when they look at a Gixxer thou.

When I showed up at Rich’s house on the campus of the University of Virginia, he greeted me with enthusiasm and quite bit of C2H5OH on his breath (I was undergraduate Chemical Engineering). After a few stunned comments like “Cool”, “No Way”, “Way” and “I gotta see this, Man”, I proceeded to lead him to my brand new machine while regaling him with salesman parroted tales of twin swirl combustion chambers, 16-valve overhead cams and triple disk brakes. After circling the beast numerous times to take in all the techno-wizardry, my buddy floored me with a request for a ride. My first reaction (very unusual for a college student) was “No way, you’re drunk!” But after my protests, Rich pointed out that I’d be the one operating the machine. Further reflection would have revealed the error of my acquiescence, but at that moment, in my enthusiasm and ignorance, I agreed. At least he had enough brain function to get his helmet before he climbed on.

The next error in judgement came when, after boarding the machine; he failed to grab hold of my waist. Upon questioning him as to his lack of a secure handhold, he quickly grasped the grabrail on the back of the seat and pronounced, in the then popular homophobic posturing, that there was no way he was going to be touching me during this excursion. And we were off.

Now, my new machine only had a few hundred miles on it and I was in the midst of my religiously zealous break-in procedure. Besides this was my first passenger carriage on my new bike, so I was taking it pretty easy. When we pulled up to a traffic light after a few miles, I gave my head the obligatory half turn and asked what he thought so far? “Isn’t this thing an eleven hundred?” was the first his utterance, followed closely by “doesn’t it go any faster?”. Third error.

When the light changed, I left with purpose. Not a clutch slipping, full throttle, high RPM wheelie (as I was incapable at this point in my riding career) but a nice, strong, torque filled get away. Just about the time I grabbed second gear, I noticed in my lower right peripheral vision, a tennis shoe heading towards my right hand. Out of instinct I grabbed the pendulum on it way up and halted the progress, even pushing it back toward the footpeg from whence it had departed. I was immediately greeted with a full wrap around bear hug that made it almost impossible to breath for the rest of the ride.

Since then, Rich has taken up a family and given up motorcycles, but neither of us will ever forget that fall day in 1981 when my Suzuki tried to dump it’s first passenger.

As for the GS1100, I put 17 years and 50K miles on it before I sold it and replaced it with a grandson: a 1997 Suzuki Bandit 1200.

For old time sake, when I visited Rich a few years ago, we posed for this reenactment photo (I know, it’s a GSXR750, not a GS1100):