This is my '91 Suzuki VX 800. Bought it in the late fall of ’91, right before that marriage fell apart. Unfortunately, I owned it only long enough to ride it about 1,250 miles before the Big D (and I don't mean "Dallas") took it from me. Call it unrequited love, but I intend to acquire another one just like it... someday.

For most of 1993, after I had wrecked my car, this was my only form of transportation. Another trusty GS850G, this one an '80 model. Although not as nice as the ’82 I had owned before, it still carried my son and I wherever we needed to go, and brought home the groceries as well. Biggest problem was the old fashioned breaker points ignition - if you tried to run the revs up, it would get all discombobulated and start to stagger, but as long as you rode it normally, it ran fine.

Just before Labor Day of '93 I was out near Greer’s Ferry Lake, and as I came around a curve at about 50 mph, I hit a small dog. The dog split in half, the front tire lost traction, and I went up and over the bars. Landed on the left side of my head and left shoulder. Rolled and tumbled a bit, and came to rest in the middle of the road with a badly bruised left hip, a broken left clavicle and scapula, and about half a dozen broken ribs. Some pretty good road rash on my forearms and one knee. And a collapsed lung. The bike simply slid past me down the road and stopped at the ditch, where it ran until the carbs sucked air. I spent nine days in the hospital and took the better part of a year to recuperate, but I did recuperate fully. Well, if you don’t count having one hip about 2 inches fatter than the other, and a knob on my collarbone that catches the muscle when I reach across my body, and some minor aching in the shoulder from time-to-time…

The bike wasn't hurt nearly as badly as I was. The old Vetter fairing was scraped on the edge, the left crash bar was bent a bit, and the left Samsonite bag was a mite scuffed. The bike itself never touched the ground - it wasn’t mechanically hurt at all.

The dog was DRT.