I wrote already about YN Sissom who was my motorcycling buddy on Okinawa. He came to the mine shop fresh out of yeoman A-School. So of course he was the youngest. And he also had very clean-cut looks, the kind which any father would be glad for his only daughter to date. In the navy, though, these otherwise laudable characteristics are considered no great advantage. So Sissom was at pains to make up for it. And he fairly well succeeded in that goal. Within a few months he was towing me into clubs that make Hotel Street in Honolulu look tame. Not quite so much so as other legendary clubs in the Philippines and Thailand, but very much along those same lines. You get the idea. Well, he did not really need to tow me. I was all too glad to go, just too timid to go alone.
But more than this, on the island there was a kind of rag-tag motorcycle gang, which in the face of circumstance, called themselves the Rice Angels. It was about half Japanese and half US military. Mostly they had larger bikes, 750's and up. One even had a Motogoro, very 40's Harleyesque. Motogoro was the tiny motorcycle company which some major ship-building conglomerate by the name of Kawasaki went and gobbled up. The leader was an Okinawan by the name of Jun, who had a US Air Force WAC sweetie who's name I forget.
It was an all-around motley crew. They even had club colors just like the real Hell's Angels. Sissom joined them, and invited me to do likewise. Who can refuse such a gracious offer? So of course I did. And it was great! I saw even more of the island than before.
Once we camped up at Heido Point. On the way there, "The Kid" (our 2nd in command just after Jun) dumped his bike. It was pretty awful but could have been worse. Like idiots we were riding closed ranks, two by two, through all the twists and turns. A major pile-up waiting to happen.
I saw the Kid's bike take a little hop. It skitted and took a bigger hop. Then it appeared the front wheel had come off his bike. Then he and the bike parted company, ten feet or so in front of me at 60 mph with a curve ahead. The fellow to the right of me hit the brakes and veered to the curb, which wasn't much. The Kids bike was in front of me and slowing fast, edging curb-ward. So I edged out over the line into the on-coming lane and stood on the brakes so as to avoid running down the Kid who was tumbling rotisserie-fashion on the coral pavement, sans helmet, almost right under my front wheel. He was guarding his face and head with nothing but his bare hands and elbows.
At about 30 mph the Kid halts his roll by pressing both arms out to the side and sliding the rest of the way on his back. No vehicles round the curve in our direction, which is fortunate since we are both in on-coming lane still. You can't maneuver well with brakes engaged and sliding onto the gas tank from inertia. But I manage to both not run over the Kid and also not lay my own bike down.
We get to a stop and the Kid lay still, eyes open, not quite believing what has just happened. Then he manages to stumble up. His arms, and more yet his hands, look like freshly ground hamburger. And he has some nasty scrapes on his forehead too. But no broken bones.
His bike is not even so very bad. It too had slid to a halt with only a very minor tumble and not fetched up against anything solid. Nor had the front wheel come off as it had seemed. Rather it was some other wheel which he had run over. A wheel from a moped that two other guys had leaned up carelessly while changing a flat. It had rolled down the hill and did the spinning-coin circle thing in the road ahead of the Kid just as we were coming to the bend. The Kid couldn't brake suddenly because it would have caused a pile-up. He'd tried to zig, but the wheel had zagged. And that was that.
Pain takes a while to settle in. And the Kid insisted that he was going to be fine. We tied his headlight back on with some of the now extra wires he wasn't going to use anytime soon. And we continued on our journey, stopping briefly at Japanese pharmacy come the next village to get the Kid a quick fix-me-up. They had some wonderful spray-on antiseptic bandage that came in can. Must have had pain killer in it too. You can buy stuff off the shelf in Japan that takes a doctor's script in the USA. It must have worked, because we all the rest of the way north and spent the night at Heido Point, camping out under the stars.
Next day we rode back. The Air Force guys saw the Kid to the base dispensary, where I was later told, the medics did not at all approve of the spray-on bandage. I heard they insisted on scrubbing all of it out with a brush and alcohol.