Awful Knawful

A short memoir of my shorter career jumping motorcycles

There’s a football drill where the players run across the field and, when the coach blows the whistle, they hit the ground, roll over, and come back to their feet running forward. Maybe it only exists in movies about football or in NFL films. I’ve only seen it in real life once, and there was no whistle.

The location was North Georgia, the year I was 16 and visited for a while with my dear uncle Jackie and my dearer aunt Wanda. We all went to see “Evel Knievel” with George Hamilton at the drive-in in Calhoun one Friday night, and the next morning Jackie and I were in the backyard building a ramp with some lumber he found under the house. I’m not sure who the patron saint of construction is, but he apparently has a sense of humor, because the thing held when a bike went over it.

Tom and Jackie had Suzuki dirt bikes. One was 90cc and the other 135cc. Each had two gear ranges, one for highway and one for dirt. They experimented, and found that hitting the ramp in second or third, dirt range, worked pretty well. Nobody was jumping the Snake River Canyon, but it was impressive for a backyard in North Georgia. And then I got on the larger bike, and it was for some reason in highway range, for speed instead of maneuverability, and I misunderstood the instruction about goosing the accelerator when the tire hit the ramp. The back tire, they both claimed they’d told me, so when I goosed it one tire early, I got that extra second or so of acceleration.

My hair was long at the time, very long, because the high school had told me to cut it, and I wore a cowboy hat all the time, possibly because the high school had told me not to. We didn’t need helmets because it was just in the back yard. So when I goosed the bike that was fifty percent bigger, in the high gear range, a couple of seconds early, it flew. And so did I, with the bike pulling me along by the death grip on the handlebars that was the only thing connecting me to the bike or to my hopes of surviving the flight.

Wanda was in the house. “I looked up and saw Joey flying past the window. I didn’t even see the motorcycle,” was her commentary on the matter. Other blood relatives present in the backyard, my older brother and my mother’s younger one, said that all they could see was my hair streaming out behind the airborne tableau.

As best I could reconstruct from the various sensations of impact, the front wheel hit first, I came down onto the seat, the back wheel hit, and some combination of kinetic forces separated me from the bike, off the right side, not that it matters. The bike ran over my hat before falling to the ground, but the hat was nowhere near my head by that time.

That’s when the football drill began. The issue behind the run across the yard was not whether they would be in condition for Friday’s game, but rather whether I had suffered mortal or crippling injury. Jackie and Tom would run a few feet, fall to the ground in laughter, without benefit of a whistle, help each other up, and run a few more feet toward my personal impact crater. I think it took them two or three tries to make it to where I was. I like to think they would have ceased laughing if they had found me bleeding or injured when they finally arrived, but they both swear they would not have, and I suppose I should believe them. Indeed Jackie Crouse to this very day, 51 years later, cannot get through the story without several pauses for laughter.

When they arrived, Jackie went straight to the bike and set it upright so it wouldn’t flood, which is apparently bad for the engine, much as a 15- to 20-foot free fall hanging onto a dirt bike might be bad for, just for instance, a nephew, although that concerned him less. Tom may have handed me my hat. Memory is dim in those parts of the story not preserved by constant re-telling at various family events since Nixon’s first term.

I mention this story for the benefit of those who have not been exposed to the various family legends. Jackie brought it up a few years ago on Facebook in relation to my riding an ATV on vacation in Oahu. Indeed, he brings it up in relation to any story that involves me and any vehicle smaller than an SUV. He claims there’s a picture somewhere of me on that bike, but unless he finds it, the picture will be in the retelling. Half the people who were there that day are gone now, so the story my eventually stabilize, not necessarily around the truth of the matter. And until Jackie finds the photo, I’ll have the one I carry around in my head: the one of him and Tom running a football drill in a backyard in North Georgia.