Read an Excerpt
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Part One - How Sid Got Big
Chapter One - Flat Out
Chapter Two - Last Train to London
Chapter Three - A Score to Settle
Part Two - Sid’s Kid
Chapter Four - Why God Made Sunday
Chapter Five - Near Miss
Chapter Six - Another Jewish Faulkner
Chapter Seven - Getting Back On
Part Three - The Build
Chapter Eight - Sid’s Return
Chapter Nine - The Land of the Righteous
Chapter Ten - The Last Piece
Chapter Eleven - The Mechanic and the Professor
Chapter Twelve - Lucy’s Bike
Part Four - The Road
Chapter Thirteen - Last Rides
Chapter Fourteen - Locked Up
Chapter Fifteen - First Start
Chapter Sixteen - Sid’s Gift
Chapter Seventeen - Strange Beach
Epilogue: Every Day
Notes
Acknowledgements
Inspired by Sid Biberman’s Vincent, a young artist made this sketch during a drag meet back in the late 1950s. Ever since, this logo has served as the calling card of Big Sid, a master mechanic whose work has earned him the love and respect of motorcyclists the world over.
HUDSON STREET PRESS
Published by the Penguin Group
Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U.S.A. •
Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario, Canada
M4P 2Y3 (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.) • Penguin Books Ltd., 80 Strand,
London WC2R 0RL, England • Penguin Ireland, 25 St. Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland
(a division of Penguin Books Ltd.) • Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road,
Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty. Ltd.) •
Penguin Books India Pvt. Ltd., 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi -
110 017, India • Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, North Shore 0632,
New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd.) • Penguin Books (South Africa)
(Pty.) Ltd., 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa
Penguin Books Ltd., Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England
First published by Hudson Street Press, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.
First Printing, May 2009
Copyright © Matthew Biberman, 2009
REGISTERED TRADEMARK—MARCA REGISTRADA
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Biberman, Matthew, 1966 -
Big Sid’s Vincati : the story of a father, a son, and the motorcycle of a lifetime / Matthew Biberman.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references.
eISBN : 978-1-101-02926-8
1. Biberman, Matthew, 1966 - 2. Biberman, Sid, 1930- 3. Fathers and sons—United
States. 4. Mechanics (Persons)—United States—Biography. 5. Motorcyclists—United
States—Biography. 6. Home-built motorcycles—United States. 7. Motorcycles—
Customizing—United States. 8. Norfolk (Va.)—Biography. 9. Louisville (Ky.)—
Biography. I. Title.
CT275.B56734A3 2009
975.5’521043092—dc22
[B] 2008051162
Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be eproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.
PUBLISHER’S NOTE
The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated.
This book is printed on acid-free paper. ∞
FOR LUCY
Who insists that this book be called:
Big Sid’s Vincati: The Story of a Grandfather, a Father,
and the Daughter of a Lifetime
Oh, we all like motorcycles to some degree
—Bob Dylan
Fuelie heads and a Hurst on the floor
She’s waiting down in the parking lot
Outside the 7-11 store
—Bruce Springsteen
Said Red Molly to James that’s a fine motorbike
—Richard Thompson
Prologue: In the Hospital
I sit with my father in the emergency room while the doctors tell him what he has already guessed—he has had a heart attack. The admitting physician says that the extent of the damage is still unknown, and we will need to see a specialist. After they do the paperwork to transfer him from the ER to cardiac, I’m asked if I have a preference for a heart man.
I don’t know any doctors in Louisville. I say, “It’s in God’s hands.” The physician nods and assigns my dad, Sid, to the next available surgeon in the rotation. I am told that he will have his bypass surgery the next morning.
Alone at home that night, I can’t help but feel weighted down by guilt. For the past twenty years, my father has barely been a part of my life. I fall asleep, fully expecting him to die.
But the next morning, five hours after they wheel him away, the surgeon tells me Sid is now in stable condition and should regain consciousness. He may be unconscious for a while, though, and I can go home until they call me. Still I ask to see him.
While listening to the wheeze of the ventilator, I reach down and squeeze Sid’s hand. His unconscious, immobile body lies there draped in a sea green gown that is woefully inadequate in size. When I was tying it up in the ER, I examined the vast expanse of his back, slashed and pockmarked from past surgeries. The soft flesh was a mottle of different shades of brown, each splotch the result of some crash or accident. Sleeping, he looks at peace and grandly indifferent to the world. His last look at me before they rolled him away had been far different: terror mixed with acceptance.
Now I watch his eyes calmly move under his lids, and the sight calms me. His feet hang off the bed. He needs a haircut. His salt-and-pepper crown of hair stands up crazily. As I linger, the smell of industrial antiseptic solvents mixed with sweat grows stronger. After squeezing Sid’s hand once more, I leave.
Time passes. Back at school, my lectures on Shakespeare roll out of my mouth in a robotic monotone. I forget to hang my parking card, and the campus police tow my car. I tell no one the reason for my distraction. And then the call comes: Sid is awake and off the ventilator.
Soon after, I sit beside him again and the first thing he says is, “Why didn’t they just let me die?”
I know he means it, and for the first time, I realize why he didn’t call me after suffering his heart attack. When I climbed those stairs that day and let myself into his ramshackle apartment, I found him waiting to die. The previous night we had watched a movie. I had promised that I would stop by in the morning, but instead slept in. Not wanting to apologize (after all, I was no kid and in no mood to be kept on a short leash), I hadn’t called. Instead I had simply pulled up unannounced and hours late, expecting to take him to lunch. It was a beautiful Sunday afternoon in September. I opened the door and saw him, sunk in his one good chair, grasping a pillow, pressing it tight to his chest.
There wasn’t time to think as I raced him to the ER. But now there was. What to say? How do you comfort a man disappointed at still being alive? That’s when I began to put it all together. A few months earlier, when Sid moved from Norfolk, Virginia, to Louisville, it had not been to start a new life but to end, on his own terms, the only life God gives you.
As we talk, his eyes transfix me: endless black pools. It looks like he wants to sink into the bed to be covered over in the soft earth. You’d never know that the man lying there was a legend, one of the best motorcycle tuners in the country, if not the world. From all over, riders came with their bikes in tow. I would wake to find strange men, often from foreign lands who spoke little English, wanting to know if this house was where Big Sid lived. Sometimes they wanted to stay and just watch my father fix motorcycles, but Sid never liked to work with the spotlight on him. Like any good magician, he had earned the right to his own secrets.
When Sid was young, riding his red Vincent Rapide, he liked to play a game with guys who thought they were fast on their motorcycles. He would pull alongside, bolt upright, catching his prey. The other rider was feeling full of himself, the spark of life shining in his eyes as he hugged the tank of his Harley, or Triumph. And then suddenly there sat Big Sid, six feet five, three hundred pounds, as comfortable as can be on top of his Vincent. Sid would lean over and yell, “Have ya got it all on?” Then the game would commence, and it had only one ending: Sid would shift into fourth gear, wind it out, and vanish up the road. Sometimes as he pulled away he’d glance over to see their expression: that same shattered face I saw there in the hospital.
When Sid has his heart attack, I am three years into my job as an English professor. I had thought I was on a secure career path, but now, with little to show for it in the way of publications, I am facing the very real possibility that soon I might not be granted tenure. And no tenure means no job. My wife, Martha, and I are also trying to start a family, and she has just told me she thinks she might be pregnant. Suddenly, the prospect of taking care of her, plus two other family members—one old, one new—strikes me, there in that hospital room, as almost too unbearable to contemplate.
My mother had predicted it all. With Sid in Louisville, she said, I was about to get engulfed in my father’s physical collapse: the knees were going; the back was shot; and, of course, the heart. The looming financial burden reminds me why I had been so adamant about running away from Sid’s world. Someone once said that motorcycles are the best way to take a large fortune and turn it into a small one. In my father’s case, his youthful joyriding had given way to the endless grind of running a motorcycle shop. The fame he had inadvertently accrued was of the purest sort, coming always with honor and never with money; his old racing wins were nothing but talk and a collection of half-broken trophies, most stashed in boxes in the attic. The comedian Jay Leno put it well when he told me that in a perfect world guys like my dad would be the ones living in the big houses. No surprise, then, that from age eighteen on I was terrified that I’d end up like Sid: broke and at the mercy of life.
And Sid knows what I feared. In his bed, he looks up at me almost as if to say, “It’s okay to say good-bye, son.” With no clue what to do, I mouth back empty words neither of us believe. Then I tell him to get some sleep and I slip out of the room. Convinced I need to do better next time I visit, I drive over to his apartment and rummage around, looking for pictures and magazines, anything that might help him find the will to live.
The following night I am back in the hospital, sitting next to his bed, holding up the pictures I had grabbed so that Sid can examine each one closely in the dim, off-white hospital light. I progress through the stack until I am faced with a motorcycle I can’t identify. “What’s that?” I ask.
He peers at it. “It’s a Vincati. A Vincent motor in a Ducati frame. I saw one years ago at a rally.”
I look at the picture again while making sense of this new word: Vincati. It’s a recent shot, taken during bike week at the Isle of Man in 1999. One of Sid’s British biker buddies had sent it to him, just one snapshot in a big stack, mostly of interesting machines spied here and there around the island. Exactly the sort of package Sid and his pen pals have been sharing with each other for over half a century.
