Magazin - Dice - No. 46

When I was 5 years old I remember seeing a motorcycle for the first time ever and it had a huge impact on me! I will never forget it! I was in the front garden of my house playing with my toy trains and being a little loser bitch. That’s when I heard a very loud noise coming down the street and it kept getting louder! I excitedly ran to the gate and saw a guy wearing a black leather jacket fly past on bike that had flames painted on the tank and lots of chrome and super high handlebars. Even though I was very young and extremely stupid, I still knew the guy must have been a total kook. Well now I'm that kook and I have learned that its great to have a chopper...If, 1.) You want to attract the attention of old guys who always tell you they had the same bike back in 1926…even though it’s a fucking 1957. 2.) You like dying or getting smashed under a truck or losing your face on the tarmac of a freeway at 90mph. 3.) You need to prove to your friends just how awesome you are by buying old Chopper parts on eBay for 8 times what they are worth just to have the rarest part around. 4.) You never want to meet an attractive human being of the female gender ever again. I suppose if you don’t care about any of that, then fuck it…buy a Panhead and be a legend at your local man bar where you can only wear leather and chains and show your penis a lot to other men dressed in leather and chains. 

"I'd always see those 'Loud Pipes Save Lives' stickers on bikers helmets outside the bar, and I never really thought twice about them. The stickers would just kind of blend into the banal biker aesthetic that we're all too familiar with, just another platitudinous saying amidst a garden of 'American boys ride American Toys' and 'Helmet Laws Suck'. But when you spend those late nights at the shop wearing torn up knuckles like wedding rings because the wrench slipped...when you're so frustrated that you stopped caring to use a rag to wipe the sweat off your nose so you just use your black, gritty hands and when you're knee is sore and swollen from the kicker slipping, what about those nights? Those nights aren't spent alone. Two dozen beers and a half dozen friends are all invested with you. The collective interest of the group understands that this is what we do to stay sane and to keep our heads above water. We each know that outside of the thin tin walls of the shop we're worried about paying next month's rent and paying for last night's bad decisions. We all struggle with the mundane problems of life that stretch us to the breaking point together. But a cluster of flickering headlights speeding down Old Montgomery Highway at 1am on a hot Alabama Night always outruns problems. The girlfriends and the bills and the jobs get washed away in a cloud of smoke. The problems can never scream hard enough to be heard over the rumbling exhaust. Maybe there's more to that sticker than I thought. Maybe loud pipes really do save lives???"                                                                    

David Clyburn, Birmingham, Alabama - USA.