Maybe She's Born With It

May 10, 2011

"Where's the third bike? Where's the third bike?" was all I kept hearing at 6 in the morning on Saturday.

My motorcycle had a modeling gig over the weekend. The call time was 6 AM outside an East Village bar.

"Ah, the East Village at dawn," I said when I first rolled up. "Just like the old days."

"Except in the old days, you'd be heading home to bed about now."

"Exactly," I said. "And from the looks of some of the characters I passed on the way over here, that particular schedule hasn't got out of style."

When Donald from Creative Film Cars first called me for the job and described a 1967 Bonneville TT Special that was also being used in the shoot, I knew immediately who it belonged to.

"Wait," I said. "Is that Wade's bike?"

"Yeah, you know Wade?"

"Sure, I know Wade. Will he be at the shoot?"

"Yes,"

I've been on enough production sets to know how deathly boring they can be, so I was happy to hear Wade would be there to hang with. Not to mention that there's strength in numbers, and if things turned ugly, there'd be someone else on my side. Ugly? What could turn ugly on the set of a make-up commercial? Well, only that Donald had somehow convinced us to allow our bikes to be ridden by stunt riders.

"Stunt riders?" I said when he first floated the idea."That's just a term, right? I mean, my bike is 43 years old, I hope no one is expecting to ride loop-de-loops at the push of a button."

"No, no, nothing like that," Donald reassured me. "And it was made very clear that the riders need to be experienced, and preferably familiar with the quirks of vintage British bikes in particular. If it looks like the riders don't know what they are doing, no one is going to ride anything."

Easy enough to say, but when the giant machine of a commercial production starts, churning and rolling in the direction it wants to move, it can be pretty hard to stop.

Wade arrived just a minute before I did -- which is to say about two minutes before the French accents started barking: "Where's the third bike, where's the third bike?"

"It's coming," Donald said, while quietly calling the third member of our group, Julia, who was supposed to be there with a black 1969 Bonneville, but who had lost track of the early hours.

"Oh shit! I'm on my way," she said, and I have to admit that once she's in gear, the girl moves fast. Ten minutes later, she was there.

With the bikes all lined up and ready to roll, we were ready to wait. And wait some more.

I don't recall signing a confidentiality agreement, so I suppose I'm free to talk about the shoot. However, I still can't make heads or tails of the concept, so there isn’t much to reveal. All I know is that whatever "story" there might have been, it involved wigs, angel wings, falling air conditioners, pinball machines, ridiculously long eyelashes, and motorcycles. Not necessarily in that order.

"Are you familiar with vintage British bikes?" Donald asked the first stunt rider to arrive.

"I ride bikes," she said dismissively, adjusting the chinstrap of her helmet, which barely fit over her wig.

Not exactly the most encouraging response, but the production blob was already on the move. Once it was decided who was riding what, we each gave the rider of our respective bikes a briefing. I went over the starting ritual with my rider, pointed out the reversed foot controls, warned her that she'd probably need to grab hold of more brake than she was used to, and let her have a go at kicking it over. She had a unique jabbing technique with the kickstart that wasn't getting the job done at first, but eventually, she was able to get it going. Once it started, she revved it so hard I thought the whole thing would explode. But no, only the tachometer did. "It's better if you don't rev it so hard," I said, but I guess she didn't hear me over all the revving.

"Okay, let's go," said one of the twenty people standing around.

"Wait," a woman asked me. "Can we borrow your jacket?"

The stylist had enough sense to realize my beat-up old leather was better than the silly thing one of the girls was wearing, which looked like it had been purchased in the junior department of TJ MAXX but was probably worth a few grand.

"Super," said the director. "Sew-PAIR"

We tagged along in a people mover, while the girls rode from the East Village to the Queensboro Bridge, followed by a Mini Cooper convertible with a camera mounted to its hood, and a cameraman standing on the passenger seat. A police escort did little to calm our nerves as the girls weaved in and out of sight. "Bike down, bike down," we heard over the radio.

Two of us in the people mover said, "Shit," while the other said, "Fuck."

But "Bike down" only meant one of the bikes had stalled. It was Wade's, and once he got it started, we were on our way again. Back and forth over the Queensboro Bridge several times, and we could all breathe a sigh of relief.

Wade, Julia, and I rode our bikes back to the first location in the East Village, riding a little more aggressively than we otherwise might in an attempt to regain some of the mojo that had been rubbed off by the French film crew.

We hung around the set doing nothing as the entire production dragged into overtime. It wasn't until the sun began to set that we were told of a third location on the banks of the East River in Williamsburg.

I missed the exact hour that it happened, but at some point, the overtime caused my bike to officially pay for itself. That is, the gig had covered the bike's initial purchase price -- not including the myriad bits that have been fixed or replaced over the years.

Hurry up and wait, as the cliché goes. We stood around, taking pictures of our bikes while waiting for thirty or more crew members to hose down the parking lot, set up a variety of reflectors, wheel a bunch of sandbags around, and lengthen the model's eyelashes.

Around eight o'clock, I was the first to be released. "Okay, you can go. Did you get the call time for tomorrow?"

"No, what is it?" I asked, foolishly thinking that the 12-hour turnaround rule didn't just apply to the crew members, but to us non-union schlubs as well.

"Five AM."

"I'll be there."

The next day was another long one, and we spent most of it sitting on a variety of stoops, shooting the shit, while passing tourists interrupted our conversation with things like, "What are they shooting here anyway?"

"A makeup commercial."

"A commercial, meh. I thought I was going to get to see George Clooney or something."

We weren't called into action until the afternoon when they wanted to shoot one of the stunt girls pulling away from the curb. They wanted Julia's bike, the most badass of the lot, but when they began shooting from the low curbside angle, directly in front of the motorcycle's exhaust pipes, it was too much for the director's delicate sensibilities, and they requested my bike instead, decidedly tamer.

My bike can take a little time to get warmed up, but there was no time for that. "Come on, come on, let's go."

"What's wrong, the bike doesn't work? Will it go?"

"It'll go," I said, while trying to kick it over, while at the same time trying to move it into position. But it didn't go.

"What's wrong with it?"

"What's wrong with it is that fifty people are crowded around me saying, 'Let's go, let's go.'"

When I finally had it running, I handed it over to the stunt rider who, dressed in a tiny black leather miniskirt, proceeded to immediately burn her leg on the high exhaust pipes.

"Oh shit," I said. "Are you okay? I really should've warned you about that."

"It's okay," she grimaced. "There's a reason people don't ride motorcycles in miniskirts."

True enough.

"Okay, we use the other bike."

By the time I saw the stunt rider again, the burn on her leg had formed a nice, juicy blister.

"These people," she said, "They want the look of the old bikes, but they don't want everything that goes along with it."