A buddy of mine who I met while trying out for our high school baseball team used to live near a former major league ballplayer and he had access to the guy's indoor batting cage. I used to meet up at his house to hit a couple of times a week. Eventually, I used to also trek over to my buddy's house because his mom did a great job of making sure that their refrigerator was stocked with bagel dogs. There was always a fresh can of Strawberry Quik in the pantry. During our senior year, I discovered the nice stock of pilsner beer...you get the point. My buddy had an older brother who I started looking up to because he had a nice collection of punk rock albums. He had everything from The Addicts, early Bad Religion, The Damned, to the Wild Samoans. The guy was always a jerk to me, but I still respected him for some reason. The one thing that sticks out is that he was always in the garage, working on something. That something turned out to be Vespa repair.
During the one or two minutes that he would pay any attention to us, usually by dishing out a barrage of insults, I would try to get a look at the materials that he had around him. He had these dirty white scooter body shells strewn about the floor, along with small tires and engine parts. By this time, my dad had introduced me to motorcycling, so I thought that these scooters were the equivalent of a go-kart compared to a real race car. One day, he had a repaired Vespa scooter parked in the driveway. Out of the blue, the hero-jerk asked if we wanted to take it for a spin. I was used to a normal motorcycle clutch and gear system and was blown away by the strange technique used to shift the Vespa gears. I believe that while pulling in the clutch lever with your left hand, you would simultaneously turn the left handle to shift gears. It was also awkward to feel like you were sitting in a regular chair attached to two wheels rather than straddling a motorcycle seat with the emphasis of keeping your thighs as close to the chassis as possible. It definitely took a bit of time to get used to, but it was fun as hell. It turns out that my buddy's brother was into Vespa repair because he was a member of a club that raced these machines.
Although I started listening to some of the hero-jerk's music from that point on, I wasn't hip enough to catch onto the Vespa buzz. Now that the advantages of riding a scooter in today's world are evident and practical, I'm thinking about looking up my buddy's brother to see if he can cut me a deal on one of them Vespas, jerk or no jerk!
