At eighteen I made pretty good money for a kid, but I'd never bothered establishing any credit — who needs that, right? Then a 1964 Triumph Bonneville came up for sale. Three years old, the most beautiful cobwebbed custom paint job you ever saw. Eighteen hundred dollars, and I had exactly zero saved up.
The bank wanted a co-signer, so I asked my mother. She said she would — if I mowed the lawn first.
I took after that lawn like it owed me money (to be fair, I was the one who'd let it get so bad). Front yard first — small, didn't take long, edged and mowed and vacuumed until it was perfect. Then the back — a third of an acre, orange trees, rose bushes, more shrubs than I could count. This was before weed eaters existed, so anything close to a trunk had to be finished by hand with clippers.
I'd been doing yard work around the neighborhood since I was twelve, so I had good equipment — a California Trimmer front-throw mower with a drive wheel on the back, lifted by a chain hooked to a bracket that clamped tight around it. Working it back and forth around a rose bush, trying to get close to the trunk, I remember thinking to myself that I was going to cut my toe off if I didn't go put some shoes on.
Sure enough, the next pull caught my toe and ran it straight between the wheel and the bracket.
I throttled down to idle, but it didn't stall the way I expected, so I had to reach all the way to the top of the motor and flip the grounding lever on the spark plug. The motor died. My toe was still caught between the wheel and the bracket. Lucky for me it was a rope-start engine — I reached over to where the pull cord winds up and cranked the shaft backward until my toe came free.
Blood everywhere. I made it to the bathtub and ran water over it to see the damage, but couldn't really tell. By then my mom had arrived in a panic, saying we were going to the doctor. I tried to talk her out of it — I wanted that motorcycle.
She took me to our family doctor anyway. He had me lie down on the table and got to work. After a bit, he told me to take a look.
There was my big toe, sticking straight up, with a hypodermic needle run clean through it.
I said something like "funny, Doc," and laid my head back down in total nausea. All he actually did was a thorough cleaning, then wrapped it in gauze tubing and sent me on my way.
Turned out the toe bone had split down the middle. My mom wanted to call off the bike purchase. I said no way, and we got it anyway.
It was the big toe on my right foot — and a Triumph shifts on the right side. Downshifting into first wasn't too bad. Upshifting was a real killer. I had a pair of Hush Puppies with the toe cut clean out. That thing tortured me for six months.