MAGIC         PORK

If you don’t know what the title of this post refers to, consider yourself lucky. There was a movie out years ago - IMDB says 2003 and that sounds about right to me - called Biker Boyz. It’s about these guys that race motorcycles and do tricks with them on the streets of Los Angeles. It was based on an article about some guys that would do that in real life - but I assure you the movie was a work of fiction. My friends and I were given tickets to an advance screening of the movie. We had no desire to see the movie, but hey they were free tickets so we went.

It was horrible. One of those movies that’s just so unintentionally bad that you end up laughing out loud at all the clichés and ridiculous dialogue.

Another movie like that was Dante’s Peak. It was playing at the dollar theater and my friend Greg had seen it already when it was in the main theaters. He told our friend Kash & me all about how great it was and said we should see it. He wanted to go see it again. We’re like “really?!” because it looked silly to us. He said the first fifteen minutes it’s pretty bad but it gets really good after that. Great character development and everything.

So Kash & I went to see the movie and sure enough, it was really bad at the beginning. Two teenagers are making out in a little pool of water and suddenly the water starts boiling and it boils them alive. I looked at Greg and said “this better get better” and he said “oh it does!”.

Well I couldn’t figure out what the heck Greg was thinking because the movie just kept sucking. Then there came the scene where Pierce Brosnan is rowing a boat with these little kids and their grandmother in it. The water has turned to acid and it’s eating away the boat. So to calm everyone down he starts a round of “row row row your boat”. At this point it was quite clear to both Kash and me that there was no way Greg could have thought this was a good movie.

I looked at him like “what the???” and at the same exact time Kash leans over me and says to him “I’m gonna kill you”. Greg had seen the movie, knew it was absolutely horrible, and told us it was great just to play a trick on us. The funniest thing is that I had heard Greg blurt out “oh no!” when that scene started. I didn’t know why at the time, but after the scene, I realized it was because he knew we would see through his ruse at that point and that he wouldn’t be able to contain his laughter any more.

Cruel, cruel trick. But I have to admit, I got a good laugh at that movie.

So back to Biker Boyz… the reason I thought of this movie is that on Sunday, I was driving on 490 and I saw a real life biker boy. Some moron was driving a motorcycle down 490 (which is a 3-lane highway) and popping wheelies. Then he proceeded to not just pop a wheelie but stand up and ride the motorcycle on its back wheel. He had to be going 65-70 mph because I was going about 65, as were the other cars and he was weaving between lanes.

My friend Joe was in the passenger seat. We of course started talking about what a moron this guy was. At least he was wearing a helmet. His mom must be proud.

He was distinguishable from the biker boyz in the movie in a couple of ways though. One was that he didn’t have a crowd of people on the side of the road cheering him on. Another was that while riding on one wheel at 65 mph he crashed the bike into the concrete median, sending his body flipping over the median while the bike skidded onto the left lane of the highway, spilling out gasoline.

The cars in front of me pulled over to the right and slowed way down. Well I thought they were going to slow down but they came to a complete stop. Joe was immediately on the phone with 911 when we saw the crash. Some other idiot in one of the cars in front of me got out of his car, walking out into the highway and putting his hand up in a “stop” motion. I can’t have too much contempt for that guy because he was trying to do an admirable thing - warn other vehicles about the motorcycle in the highway. But come on, I’m pretty sure no handbook would advise someone to stop his car halfway into the right lane while the left lane is blocked by a motorcycle and walk out into the one remaining center lane. You might be better off driving forward a little and pulling off to the side of the highway, do ya think?? That is, if you’re actually going to be of help in some way and not just get in the way and cause more confusion and a greater risk of an accident.

Now amazingly the biker boy stood up on the other side of the median and was walking around a little. Some woman on that side pulled over and was talking to him to see if he was okay. He appeared to be fine, which means he’s one hell of a lucky guy. That’s like something out of the movies. We could see the bike wobbling before he crashed so I think it had slowed down a bit and I’m sure that helped. But even so, it looked like a pretty spectacular fall and I wasn’t expecting to see him standing.

The 911 dispatcher was asking Joe a slew of questions about the state of this guy. Joe had to repeat multiple times that he looked okay to him but we weren’t near the guy, we were in a car. She even asked him if they should send an ambulance. What did she expect him to say to that? “Nah, he looks okay to me.” He did look fine but we sure as hell weren’t going to make that call.

After I saw that these people in front of me weren’t going anywhere, and the guy moved out of the road, I managed to pull around back into the center lane and keep driving before it turned into a madhouse. There was already traffic backing up behind me and horns honking. I considered whether I was supposed to stay as a witness but there were no other vehicles involved. The only point I could think of staying would be to make sure his insurance company heard the real story of what happened. I could see him making up some story to the cops about how he just lost control or someone cut him off. I wanted to make sure it was on record that he was acting like a jackass so that he’d have to sell a kidney to get auto insurance again.

I certainly didn’t want the guy to die, but couldn’t he at least have broken a leg or have a rib poke through his skin or something? I looked online later to try to find any news story about it, but couldn’t find anything. I was hoping it would say A) whether he was ticketed for anything and B) what his injuries were. Call me a horrible person, but it irks me that it’s possible he got away without any repercussions other than the damage to his bike - and even that looked like it was fixable.

This entry was posted on Saturday, November 17th, 2007 at 7:25 pm and is filed under general. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.