Easywriter, The Flawed Memories of an Easyriders Editor (eBook)

Kai M. Raecke (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2023 | 1. Auflage
96 Seiten
Bookbaby (Verlag)
978-1-6678-6265-1 (ISBN)

Infos

Kai Michael Raecke was a journalist for Easyriders Magazine for 32 years, a motorcycle enthusiast, world traveler, and a passionate philanthropist. He was born in Austria, and raised in the town of Freilassing in southern Bavaria by his maternal grandmother. It was here where Kai was introduced to his first motorcycle experience at the age of five by his neighbor who took him for a ride around their neighborhood. This moment sparked Kai's fascination with motorcycles --- an interest that would transform from a hobby to a lifelong career. In this book you will find a bittersweet recollection of the beauty, triumph, adventure, sorrow and heartbreak that constitutes a life well-lived. Kai Raecke's dry humor is perfectly paired with an ornate prose that speaks to the adventurer in us all. Though his adoration for motorcycles is present throughout the book, his lust for life, ultimate freedom, and adventure shines bright on every page.

Textauszug

CHAPTER I

Must be fluent in German and like motorcycles

“Must be fluent in German and like motorcycles,” the ad in the job section of the Los Angeles Times said. I don’t remember much of the rest of it because it didn’t seem that important to me. Those two words, “German” and “motorcycles” were all I needed to make me want to respond and apply; it was as if the ad spoke to me personally, seemed to single me out, and was visible to no one else. I definitely had a good feeling about it.

That was in late 1987, and I was looking for a new challenge. I had been getting my editorial feet wet at a publication called Poker Player (owned by Gambling Times) in Hollywood for almost year after graduating with an AA in journalism and a BA in history. The current job entailed mostly proofreading and editing other people’s copy and required virtually no original copy or anything other than editing skills from me, so right off the bat it was a fairly boring affair had it not been for the fact that I learned everything I never knew or really wanted to know about how to play poker on a professional level. But that, as they say, is “a whole ‘nother story,” although a fairly good one, so I’ll quickly revisit it just for the fun of it.

Toward the end of my career at Poker Player / Gambling Times, our staff of professional card sharps (also known as columnists), along with some other professional and celebrity players, got invited to a charity poker tournament at one of the local casinos, the Bicycle Casino in Bell Gardens, a suburb east of Los Angeles. After the dust had settled and only two players were left, I was facing Gabe Kaplan from the old TV show “Welcome Back Kotter” at the final table. Just the two of us, playing for the entire jackpot.

All my colleagues, from the publications’ owner on down, were stunned that I was the only one of two players left at the table. Beginner’s luck, they said. They were even more amazed seeing me face such a formidable opponent as Kaplan. It turned out he was a well-known (not to me, obviously) high stakes gambler and a familiar face in Las Vegas casinos. I was so nervous at that point, with everyone standing around me, I promptly let him bluff me out of the game.

Anyway, I was ready to move on professionally for a number of reasons, one of which was that I was a slight “late bloomer” in terms of starting my career. I didn’t start college until I was 23, plus I was a working dad and married man, which is why it took me five years to finally graduate at the age of 28. I was eager to get on into a job with more room to move up and, if at all possible, more opportunity to spread my creative wings. Other factors contributed to that “delay” as well, so maybe I need to make a little detour and talk about myself a bit first.

Born in Austria, I grew up in Germany and was raised by my maternal grandmother. My father, whom I barely knew, died when I was 9, and my mother had married an American GI several years earlier and left for the US when I was maybe 4 or 5. I don’t have many memories of either of my progenitors. In fact, as a therapist would put it many years later (after my first divorce), I had been a “functional orphan” all my life. That always made me laugh.

My first motorcycle experience came when I was 4 or 5 after our 18-year-old upstairs neighbor, Martin Kroiss, had bought himself a brand-new Zündapp. Back then in Germany, most people didn’t have cars and either rode bicycles or mopeds around town. I was fascinated by the Zündapp because it seemed like a big machine to me, with an engine that actually made some noise, especially compared to the cardboard my friends and I attached to our bicycle forks so they would hit the front wheels’ spokes and make an engine-like noise.

And so one day, Martin offered to take me on a ride around the neighborhood on his Zündapp. I remember the thrill to this day, especially leaning into sharp turns. It was scary at first going into them, but exhilarating right away coming out of them, in general unforgettable, and something I knew I had to do myself as soon as I was old enough to get a motorcycle on my own. In other words, I was hooked.

I didn’t have to wait too long. When I was 13, a friend of mine, Tommi Nietsche and I pooled our meager allowances and invested in an old (I don’t remember what year), decrepit DKW RT 125W that was in need of a lot of TLC. We didn’t care, we just wanted to have a motorcycle. Of course we were also way too young to ride legally, but since we lived in a rural area at the foot the Bavarian Alps, there were plenty of lonesome dirt trails along farmers’ fields and through forests, and Tommi and I alternated bouncing around on those trails, frequently crashing the old and venerable DKW along the way. It smoked and made a lot of noise and didn’t go very fast, but we didn’t care. We were just so stoked to have motorized wheels.

But in early 1970, the one thing that fascinated me and lots of kids my age and older was the movie Easy Rider. It had come out in ‘69 stateside but had to be translated into German and other languages first. Either way, in early 1970 it was playing in my hometown’s only movie theater, and my friends and I were glued to the screen from the opening scene until the credits. Like for most Americans it was spellbinding and eye opening, and maybe even more so for us because it featured such exotic vistas and incredibly stupendous backdrops that we could only dream of.

By the time I was 13, I had also started to get into trouble in general, first by starting to smoke cigarettes at 11, followed by getting seriously into alcohol at 12, and finally smoking hash when I was 13. I was totally out of control as far as my grandmother was concerned, and in her desperation, she was trying her best to ship me to America to have my mother take over the responsibility of raising me. But it took four more years before that would happen, and I finally left Germany at the age of 17 for California, exactly one week after my grandmother had passed away. That was in July of 1974.

I spent the first 7 months with my mother and her American family that by then included 3 half-brothers and a new husband. I really didn’t know any of them. I can’t say it was easy for me to get comfortable in this new environment, and as soon as I spoke enough English, I decided to strike out on my own. I basically spent the next 4 years hitchhiking around the country and living in different places like San Francisco, New Orleans, or Tampa for short periods of time.

Life was a constant adventure on the road, and not just in the US. Five years after getting here I had ended up in Los Angeles and from there traveled back home to Europe for the first time and on to parts south and east, through Turkey from where I continued on to revolution-torn Iran (it was July of 1979 and the Shah had just recently gotten kicked out), through Pakistan and into India where I lived for a short time on a houseboat on Kashmir’s Dal Lake - with all the food and hashish included in the dollar a day I paid for rent.

I mention the relatively short time because, although I would have loved to keep on traveling around the world, meanwhile back in Los Angeles, my girlfriend was very pregnant with our first child. That weighed heavily on my mind.

In October I got back to LA, our daughter was born two months later, on New Year’s Eve. Faced with having to support a young family and really having no serious prospects – I had left Germany long before finishing any kind of school – I was faced with some hard choices. I opted for what actually seemed to me the most difficult one in retrospect: getting a menial job as a taxi driver, being a family man, and going back to school, all at once. I had taken a cheap camera with me on my way to India and kept a diary along the way, and the idea of becoming a travel writer or journalist in general suddenly seemed very appealing to me. I wanted to continue the traveling life if at all possible.

Meanwhile, leading a suddenly very different and settled life compared to the previous five years – I was married before long and a second daughter was born two years after the first one – I started thinking about motorcycles and how much I wanted to ride again. Once bitten by the bug, I guess you can never really shake it, can you? But my wife hated the idea of motorcycles; she was afraid of them. Fortunately for me, you could say, we got divorced about a year after I graduated college, and the first thing I did to “celebrate” the occasion was to buy myself an almost brand-new 1986 750cc Honda Shadow. Yes, I realize it’s not a Harley-Davidson or even an Indian, but I had no mechanical skills to speak of and, more importantly, very little money. For the time being, the Honda Shadow was the perfect vehicle for my needs: it was reliable and cheap.

So that’s where I was at the time I answered the LA Times ad: a newly divorced father of two young daughters with a low-paying, dead-end and boring job, riding a Honda Shadow. It took a couple of days, maybe even a week or two, but I finally did get a call from someone at that office asking me if I could come in and take a test....

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 2.8.2023
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Literatur ► Biografien / Erfahrungsberichte
• ISBN-10: 1-6678-6265-0 / 1667862650
• ISBN-13: 978-1-6678-6265-1 / 9781667862651