Posted: February 26, 2022
Updated: February 27, 2024

The Red Fiasco

This was an awful bike… undoubtedly, the worst purchase I have ever made. I always think of that AC/DC song (bagpipes and all): “Getting had, getting took… I tell you, folks: It’s harder than it looks…”

The chassis was as bent as a politician, but I knew that before hand; what I’m still very sore about is that the guy who sold it to me as a “good bike” had welded—yes! welded!—the flywheel to the crankshaft. Of course I only realized that until I ended up pushing and carrying the thing across the nastiest terrain in the middle of the contrastingly beautiful hills of the great Salvadoran outdoors. When I finally got home, I did some disassembling and made the gruesome discovery. So much for faith in humanity—you know who you are!

Fun Fact: The bent chassis actually made for some very interesting special effects: it left two parallel tracks whenever I rode in a straight line.

 An awful bike, indeed, but it was all I could afford at the time, and I really wanted a dirt bike. I had owned other motorcycles before, of course, but none that were truly dirt-worthy. This one, to make matters worse, was a 125cc motocross bike, and I knew nothing—nothing, at all—about the power band or about fanning the clutch; I just assumed the power delivery would be linear, like all other motorcycles I had owned before.

This was not the right bike for my weight or for what I wanted to do with it, but I guess it was good enough to test the water.

My first rides were very depressing, to say the least. This bike was lacking in everything, especially power. I could not understand why this bike was so weak; I could not even make it up my driveway.

Although I knew I was going to have to do it, sooner than later, I was hesitant about pulling the engine apart because I did not know anything about two-stroke engines.

One day, I decided to venture further away from my house just to see if my Red Fiasco would actually be able to climb a very gentle, but very long slope, not too far away from where I lived. When I got to the slope, I rolled the throttle open all the way and just let the bike slowly start building those revs up. I was thinking the engine would just drown and stall at some point, but the bike just kept going and going and going…

It was very disappointing, of course, but, at least, it looked like the bike was going to make it up the hill.

I had just started assessing where my life was, at that point, when, without any warning at all, the engine just exploded in a screaming rage of power and a wheelie popped out of nowhere. I was startled, first of all, and confused, to say the least; my face remained frozen with a sort of partial nervous smile until I got home and dismounted.

(to be continued)

Those two are my dad and a childhood friend with who I still meet for breakfast, every now and then, at an undisclosed Pizza Hut.

And that old clunker, behind us, was my pick-up truck. Say what you will about it, but it had one mighty engine. So powerful was this truck that it fishtailed whenever I floored it—that is until the engine finally blew up on me. I had removed the back seats to make room for my bike. My friends called it “the sanitary landfill” because I never once washed it. The bed was always full of parts rattling around.

Marisú (at the time my business partner, not my wife) borrowed “The Landfill” once and had it washed for me as gesture of appreciation. I came back to the office that afternoon, after a long dirt bike ride, and saw this pick-up truck parked right in my driveway…

“The nerve of this guy!” I thought, clenching my teeth. “Whose car is that?” I asked with a certain air of indifference. “Yours,” said Marisú.

I did not recognize my own pick-up truck. The hose-down had, literally, unearthed these light-blue stripes on the sides of the truck, I had never noticed before. You don’t see them in the picture either, do you?