When I was growing up, I always had to walk to school. Elementary, Junior High and High School. The journey to Nathan Hale Elementary and Bennet Junior High was always the same South West direction.
Two blocks Westward would put me at the corner of Spruce And Bissel, which also had a dirty bar called the Golden Spigot. Ma would not let us walk home that way. The reason was there was a seedy element that would hang out there in the afternoon. I usually obeyed Ma, because a Hot Wheels track to the backside was painful and a drunken belt lashing from Pops was even worse.
Every once in a while the route homeward would de detoured in the forbidden direction. Usually the result of after school violence or some other reasonable excuse. Parked at the bar would be an Indian motorcycle with a sidecar. Riding in the sidecar would be a bearskin rug with the bear head still attatched, like you see in the old movies.
This bike belonged to a grizzled biker named Kaiser. He was well known in town and not popular with the the regualr citizens.
I asked Ma about the bear bike and she said bikers were scum and to stay away.
I never met the Kaiser, but we see him riding around here and there over the years. I think he even had a wooden leg.
Time passed until it was 1990 and time for me to get my first apartment. Being a poor tow jockey, I had to rent the top half of a run down two family in Mudville. Parking was tight, but there was a garage included with the place.
Inside the garage there was some junk tacked to the walls that said this was a biker church. At the time my roommate and I rode Interceptors and didn't really get the biker church thing. The former renters had left behind a 69 Cadillac Hearse in the yard. I hauled it away and got us some more parking.
A couple years went by at the Wetherell Street dump and I bought an unused GS850 with a sidecar. The guy selling it told me a long story of how it was one of Kaiser's close buddy's bike and he died.
This Kaiser name kept popping up. The last thing I heard was that the Kaiser moved to Florida and then offed himself over a chick.
Another ten years go by and I get a handicapped motorcycle plate as a consolation prize from my accident. Turns out Kaiser got the DMV to make handicapped plates for motorcyclists.
So now, even though I never met the guy, we have a poster hanging up at the clubhouse. Hacksaw gave us this enlargement of a 1979 Hartford Courant article.
What do you call it? 6 degrees of seperation or chasing a ghost. This Kaiser has been part of my life for quite a while and we never spoke.
Ray in CT
