#2. Sportriding

The Central Park Loop

I don’t have any pictures of my number two road, and it’s closed to cars now, so you’re just going to have to trust me.

I had a love/hate relationship with that bike. My father found it in Connecticut, and I bought it for $400. It had issues, the worst of which was a faulty wire under the fender that the rear tire would rub against and drain the battery. The “T” didnt have a kickstarter, and I was continually getting stranded, but I learned to push start a motorcycle.

I wasn’t much of a mechanic—a truth today, too—and I spent a lot of money getting it repaired. One winter Spencer and I lugged it into the elevator of my apartment building, and I took it all apart in my bedroom and painted the gas tank blue with a spray can. I got it back together in February and pushed it the twenty-odd blocks to Camrod Cycles on 57th so they would make it run again.

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I went everywhere on that bike. To high school every morning, to casting calls in the afternoon, and throughout New England on the weekends. I was a motorcycle messenger in the summer.

But the best ride—my secret circuit in New York City—was the Central Park Loop, a 6.1 mile oval in the center of Manhattan.

I’d enter the park at 77th Street and head south, slip through the yellow cab traffic at the bottom end, and then fly northward, up the east side straightaway past the reservoir to the long Upper Loop—a long continuous turn from 96th street to 110th in the wild-feeling northern end of the park.

From there it was another straightaway, uphill—“Cat Hill’s evil twin”—headed south, paralleling Central Park West. Going up hill I would crouch down like a racer and open that throttle as wide as I could so I could crest the hill at 86th going fast.

It became the long way home after school. I wasn’t the only one who rode it. I still remember being passed on the inside in the Upper Loop by a big Ninja 900. But the magic happened at night. There were always people in the park, riding scooters or motorcycles, walking, biking, loners. Riding through that strange  community was like tapping into some alternate New York—less mapped, more alive.

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The summer of my junior year I took the money I made from commercials and bought a brand new Kawasaki KZ750E3 from Camrod.

The bike was way too big for me, and I was continually falling over or sliding into low speed crashes when I couldn’t hold it up, but I rode that one even further, to Canada and to South Carolina.

One truth of motorcycles is that even if you love them, you end up avoiding riding a bike that doesn’t fit, and that’s what happened to me and the KZ750: It didn’t fit. I didn’t ride it. We parted aways during college.

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The Central Park Loop is one of the best roads I’ve ridden. It introduced me to the idea of riding around-and-around on the same road for the sheer thrill of getting better and better at it, and it taught me that there were other people out there who were doing the same thing.