graynation: Twenty-four months

I just received a summary of my Social Security Earnings Record, and its first entry is for 1955, in the amount of $109. I was 12 years old. That summer, I worked for Abilene Reproduction Co. They printed blueprints, and other schematic documents, in a room filled with big machines that reeked of ink and ammonia.

It was my job to deliver the tightly-rolled-up documents to offices around town, mostly downtown, either on foot or on my bicycle. The secretaries gave me a lot of attention, which I enjoyed but was too young to fully appreciate. I liked the routine of being outside in the heat, then inside the cool office buildings, then outside again. It was a good job.

Since I was a delivery boy, I lobbied my mother for a motorbike. No, in 1955, that was not an unusual thing for a 12-year-old to do. Several of my friends had motorbikes or scooters. Gerald Williamson, my icon, had one. He let me ride it, or tried to. I couldn't get a grip on the clutch. I sat there on the sidewalk, engine screaming, Gerald screaming, "Let out the clutch!" I did, finally, and got under way, sort of.

Frank and Bruce Teagarden had Cushman Eagles. Many graynation men remember the Cushman Eagle as their last most desirable thing in the 12-year-old male world before the puberty tsunami swept through and replaced all male thought with the image of a leg protruding from a skirt. Frank, who was my age, had a black Eagle. Bruce, a year younger, had a pink one. They were the epitome of cool.

Johnny Richardson, who lived in the very next block from me, had a Vespa. This is the machine I lobbied for. There was no way, I knew, that my mother was going to put me, a mild-mannered church-going boy, on a Cushman Eagle. The Vespa was very cool, too – hell, anything with a motor on it was cool – but compared to the Eagle, it looked downright conservative.

Eventually, my mother caved, and she put me on a kind of motorbike – motorbikes had spoked wheels – called a Simplex. It was belt-driven, for Pete's sake. It had some kind of automatic transmission, or maybe because it was so slow it only needed one gear. I just turned the throttle, and down below a drivetrain slowly meshed, in a stately sort of way, and motion was achieved. YouTube being what it is, you can see an actual 1955 Simplex in action. As soon as I saw it, I remembered the centrifugal clutch, whirring away inches from my right thigh.

I rode it for about two months, without incident. Then seventh grade started, and I parked the Simplex in the school lot, and that afternoon it wouldn't start. Somebody had put sugar in my gas tank.

I haven't owned a motorbike since. On my SSN Earnings Report, it shows I didn't earn anything in 1956. I think that is the summer I went to camp. Then, 1957 shows a contribution of $92. That would be from Lucile Gerber, owner of Lucile's Flowers. In two years, I went from a bicycle-riding, secretary-delighting 12-year-old, to a hormone-besotted delivery boy for Lucile's Flowers, careening around Abilene in a green 1957 Chevrolet panel truck in which I could get rubber in all three gears. At the time, I don't believe I appreciated the rate of change. Looking at it now, it stuns me.