Why James Lane should never own a motorcycle…

Ok, on Friday June 2 in 1989 I was invited over to a client’s house to view the wedding photos that I shot at her shin-dig only a few days earlier.

She was all proud of herself because she was going to make a big “vegi-mexican feast” and we were going to go through her contact sheets and I was going to give her my ideas for my personal favorites, I hate weddings…

Anyway the client was paying me $1,200 bucks which at the time was a fortune so I’d pretty much put up with anything she could dish out including her version of a “vegi-mexican feast”.

So I straddled the ‘ol ’81 GPZ 750 and headed East up 108th to Pen in OKC on a thick 5:00 crawl. Just past Greystone it opened up and I was running a little late so I goosed the GPZ up to about 40 and cruised through the Green at Pen and 108th.

17 year old Kelly Smith (not her real name but she never cared enough about me to give me her name but for some reason that is the name I have always given her…) was running a little late for her senior prom because she knew that she wasn’t going to be able to eat at the Prom itself and she could just forget about scoring a meal between the prom and the after party so she’d have to settle for a cheese burger at Mc Death’s on Pen at 108th. She got the burg, a large order of fries and an extra large diet Dr. Caffeine and slammed her shit-brown 1978 Buick Le Sabre into drive. Kelly was wearing a beautiful Pink frilly ball gown and unforgettable (please-fuck-me-from-behind) 5 inch lighting-blue, stiletto-pumps. She threw a hand full of money at the drive through attendant and stomped that right pump to the floor with nothing on her mind but an unforgettable night in her future.

I came through the intersection and saw the blur of a giant brown death machine! I slammed on the brakes laid the GPZ over and surfed it right into the side of Kelly’s car leaving a cartoon-ish fully splayed body in-print in the side of Kelly’s 1974 Buick Le Sabre. The GPZ slid under the car and I somehow ended up just behind it right under the drivers side door, Kelly’s door… I more-or-less came too to the sound of Kelly screaming bloody-murder trying to get her door opened.

The first thing I noticed was the fact that all the oil from the GPZ had emptied onto the hot Oklahoma-summer road and was burning my left shoulder. My legs were somehow jammed up under the car between the GPZ and the Le Sabre’s under-carriage but for some reason that didn’t hurt much. What did hurt (like a mother-fucker) was my right pinky and the two inch hole that I had bitten through the right side of my tongue.

After much effort on her part Kelly managed to get her door opened, while screaming “helpmehelpmehelpme!!!” When she stepped out of the car, she stabbed right in the middle of my chest with one of those (please-fuck-me-from-behind) 5 inch lightning blue stiletto-pumps. At the very instant the car door came open I knew what was next so I tried to let her know where I was but the only things that came out of my mouth were a caveman grunt and a five foot stream of bloody saliva that covered the front of poor Kelly’s ball gown from neck-line to hem. In one beautifully smooth movement Kelly dropped her extra large Dr. Caffeine on my face, jumped back into her defunct 1974 Buick La Le Sabre and quickly locked the door. She wouldn’t come out again until the cops showed up to coax her out.

…Well, I lived and to make a very long and painful convalescence a short (blog-able) story I’ll just give you the run down of the things I in fact lived through. Second degree burns on my left shoulder down to my left shoulder blade, that aforementioned two inch hole in my tongue, a broken pinky, a huge stiletto bruise on my sternum and an impact fracture in my T-7 vertebra.

Kelly’s insurance company paid me $20,000 USD for my troubles and I never once heard from her but I know for a fact that she will never forget that prom night.

…Why he should? (own a Motorcycle.)
To do an over-land tour from Trivandrum, Kerala, India to Croatia and write about it.