Low seat height and a relatively...
Low seat height and a relatively light 504-pound weight make the Speedmaster a good choice for shorter riders or people who appreciate tight-handling cruisers.
New York's mythic status is taken to new heights when you work in book publishing. The industry orbits around the Big Apple. When I worked at a Midwestern book publisher, we envied, idolized and mythologized NYC book editors, with tales whispered about exorbitant salaries, penthouse suites, and halls teeming with overworked editorial assistants paid three cents an hour who lived packed like rats into roach-infested 10-square-foot apartments underneath creosote factories.
The myth grew exponentially for me, as I didn't visit the city until a four-day business-pleasure brawl in 2006 injected the town into my bloodstream. The food, the energy, the cabbies, the freaks, and the fact that you can walk into a bookstore at midnight and it's packed all convinced me that Leary had it right: New York is a drug.
The road to Bear Mountain...
The road to Bear Mountain State Park.
It’s a great ride, but busy on the weekends.
Late nights at dank bars with nefarious characters. Subway encounters. Thick air scented with peanut satay, pepperoni, and rotting garbage. Jam-packed 4 am parties in tiny apartments wall-to-wall with microbrews, publicists, hash and hipsters. Neighborhood pubs and street-savvy crash-addled bikers.
I came back, again and again. Never drove. Don't drive New York, they said, or the Parking Nazis will throw you in a hole or a drunken bus driver will cheese-grater you into the bottom of a sewer where rats will gnaw your bones.
But the city seduced me to take it for a spin. I craved a careen across the Brooklyn Bridge. A fetid blast through the Lincoln Tunnel. Wheelies on Broadway.
The Speedmaster offers a comfortable...
The Speedmaster offers a comfortable seating position and a light feel well-suited to city riding.
A call was made and promises exchanged. The end result was a black-nasty Triumph tucked into a back corner of a tidy garage in the East Village and a date with a private tour guide who knew the city.
The black nasty was a 2009 Speedmaster, the speed-sleeked version of the British marque's America model. Fed juice through a fuel injection unit, the current Speedmaster is a lean, low custom. But the name has history, as the moniker was used by American distributors to give the T120R some stateside appeal. The original Speedmaster has classic lines and a bad boy image that makes modern Brit bike freaks weep and moan like evangelists experiencing The Rapture.
Naming a new bike the Speedmaster is a ballsy move characteristic of a reinvented company that had to burn down to come out and is headed by a guy who started his career building wheels in the factory to pay for his racing habit.
The 865cc vertical twin-powered bitch kitten was sitting on the sidewalk in the front of Rising Wolf Garage on a Saturday noon, sex appeal and drag bars warming in the morning sun.
Mike Wernick owns the garage with his wife Nuri, and the couple rents out spaces to New York City motorcyclists. I had profiled the Wernicks and their garage for my book Motorcycle Dream Garages, and they had agreed to house the bike over the weekend. A former firefighter, Mike is a fixture in the New York motorcycle community.
"Bitchin' bike," he said, "Some guy's been looking for you."
"Some guy" was my blind date, Alan Fink. Fink wrote a letter to editor Bartels telling him about his experiences riding in New York City. Bartels smelled a story.
"Ride with Alan," Billy said. "I bet he can show you a side of New York you haven't seen."
I called Fink. He was game. Said he knew some great roads. Said he rode a Bat Bike. I was down with it. Hoped he would show up in a caped suit.
Fink sat gassed up and good to go that Saturday. No costume. Batman logos covered his midnight black Star Stratoliner. Wernick took one look and split. Fink and I hit the road.
The Speedmaster dug New York. Seamless torque squirted the bike from stoplight to stoplight. The chassis was taut and crisp, the handling efficient and quick when ducking cabbies and crazies.