[Jeff in Kentucky]

I am guessing this guy started on small dirt bikes, even though this part of an article written for Cycle World Magazine many years ago mentions a 650 BSA as his first street bike- he was a wildman, and his first book was about living with the Hells Angels in Oakland, California:

from a longer article by Hunter S. Thompson:

Everybody has fast motorcycles these days. Some people go 150
miles an hour on two-lane blacktop roads, but not often. There are too
many oncoming trucks and too many radar cops and too many stupid
animals in the way. You have to be a little crazy to ride these
super-torque high-speed crotch rockets anywhere except a racetrack –
and even there, they will scare the whimpering shit out of you….

The Cafe Racer is a different breed, and we have our own situations.
Pure speed in sixth gear on a 5,000-foot straightaway is one thing, but
pure speed in third gear on a gravel-strewn downhill ess turn is quite
another.

But we like it. A thoroughbred Cafe Racer will ride all night through
a fog storm in freeway traffic to put himself into what somebody told him
was the ugliest and tightest decreasing-radius turn since Genghis Khan
invented the corkscrew.

Cafe Racing is mainly a matter of taste. It is an atavistic mentality,
a peculiar mix of low style, high speed, pure dumbness, and overweening
commitment to the Cafe Life and all its dangerous pleasures…. I am a
Cafe Racer myself, on some days — and many nights for that matter — and
it is one of my finest addictions….

I am not without scars on my brain and my body, but I can live with
them. I still feel a shudder in my spine every time I see a Vincent Black
Shadow, or when I walk into a public restroom and hear crippled men
whispering about the terrifying Kawasaki Triple…. I have visions of
compound femur-fractures and large black men in white hospital suits
holding me down on a gurney while a nurse called “Bess” sews the
flaps of my scalp together with a stitching drill.

I have been a connoisseur of fast motorcycles all my
life. I bought a brand-new 650 BSA Lightning when it was billed as “the
fastest motorcycle ever tested by Hot Rod magazine.” I have ridden a
500-pound Vincent through traffic on the Ventura Freeway with burning
oil on my legs and run the Kawa 750 triple through Beverly Hills at night
with a head full of acid…. I have ridden with Sonny Barger and smoked
weed in biker bars with Jack Nicholson, Grace Slick, and
my infamous old friend, Ken Kesey, a legendary Cafe Racer.

I had no sense of speed until I was going 90 and coming up fast on a
bunch of pickup trucks going into a wet curve along the river. I went for
both brakes, but only the front one worked, and I almost went end over
end. I was out of control staring at the tailpipe of a U.S. Mail truck,
still stabbing frantically at my rear brake pedal, which I just couldn’t
find…. I am too tall for these New Age roadracers; they are not built
for any rider taller than five-nine, and the rearset brake pedal was not
where I thought it would be. Midsize Italian pimps who like to race
from one cafe to another on the boulevards of Rome in a flat-line
prone position might like this, but I do not.

I was hunched over the tank like a person diving into a pool that
got emptied yesterday. Whacko! Bashed into the concrete bottom,
flesh ripped off, a Sausage Creature with no teeth, f-cked-up for the
rest of its life.

We all love Torque, and some of us have taken it straight over the
high side from time to time — and there is always Pain in that…. But
there is also Fun, in the deadly element, and Fun is what you get when
you screw this monster on. BOOM! Instant takeoff, no screeching or
squawking around like a fool with your teeth clamping down on your
tongue and your mind completely empty of everything but fear.

I never got into sixth, and I didn’t get deep into fifth. This is a
shameful admission for a full-bore Cafe Racer, but let me tell you
something, old sport: This motorcycle is simply too goddamn fast to
ride at speed in any kind of normal road traffic unless you’re ready to
go straight down the centerline with your nuts on fire and a silent
scream in your throat.

When aimed in the right direciton at high speed, though, it has
unnatural capabilities. This I unwittingly discovered as I made my
approach to a sharp turn across some railroad tracks, saw that
I was going way too fast and that my only chance was to veer right
and screw it on totally, in a desperate attempt to leapfrog the curve
by going airborne.

It was a bold and reckless move, but it was necessary. And it
worked: I felt like Evil Knievel as I soared across the tracks with
the rain in my eyes and my jaws clamped together in fear. I tried
to spit down on the tracks as I passed them, but my mouth was too
dry…. I landed hard on the edge of the road and lost my grip for
a moment as the Ducati began fishtailing crazily into oncoming
traffic. For two or three seconds I came face to face with the
Sausage Creature….

But somehow the brute straightened out. I passed a school bus
on the right and then got the bike under control long enough to gear
down and pull off into an abandoned gravel driveway where I stopped
and turned off the engine. My hands had seized up like claws and
the rest of my body was numb. I felt nauseous and I cried for my
mama, but nobody heard, then I went into a trance for 30 or 40
seconds until I was finally able to light a cigarette and calm down
enough to ride home. I was too hysterical to shift gears, so I went
the whole way in first at 40 miles an hour.

When we ride very fast motorcycles, we ride with immaculate
sanity. We might abuse a substance here and there, but only when
it’s right. The final measure of any rider’s skill is the inverse ratio
of his preferred Traveling Speed to the number of bad scars on his
body. It is that simple: If you ride fast and crash, you are a bad rider.
If you go slow and crash, you are a bad rider. And if you are a bad
rider, you should not ride motorcycles.

The Ducati 900 is so finely engineered and
balanced and torqued that you can do 90 mph in fifth through a
35-mph zone and get away with it. The bike is not just fast — it is
extremely quick and responsive, and it will do amazing things….
It is a little like riding the original Vincent Black Shadow, which would
outrun an F-86 jet fighter on the takeoff runway, but at the end, the
F-86 would go airborne and the Vincent would not, and there was
no point in trying to turn it. WHAMO! The Sausage Creature strikes
again.

There is a fundamental difference, however, between the old
Vincents and the new breed of superbikes. If you rode the Black
Shadow at top speed for any length of time, you would almost
certainly die. That is why there are not many life members of the
Vincent Black Shadow Society. The Vincent was like a bullet that
went straight; the Ducati is like the magic bullet that went sideways
and hit JFK and the Governor of Texas at the same time. It was
impossible. But so was my terrifying sideways leap across railroad
tracks on the 900SP. The bike did it easily with the grace of a
fleeing tomcat. The landing was so easy I remember thinking,
goddamnit, if I had screwed it on a little more I could have gone
a lot further.

Maybe this is the new Cafe Racer macho. My bike is so much
faster than yours that I dare you to ride it, you lame little turd. Do you
have the balls to ride this BOTTOMLESS PIT OF TORQUE?

That is the attitude of the New Age superbike freak, and I am one
of them. On some days they are about the most fun you can have
with your clothes on. The Vincent just killed you a lot faster than
a superbike will. A fool couldn’t ride the Vincent Black Shadow
more than once, but a fool can ride a Ducati 900 many times, and
it will always be a bloodcurdling kind of fun. That is the Curse of Speed
which has plagued me all my life. I am a slave to it. On my tombstone
they will carve, “IT NEVER GOT FAST ENOUGH FOR ME.”

[Author]

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