I’ve been friends with the man pictured above for more than half a decade. It all started with a Craigslist search for my first motorcycle. 

I ran across an ad titled, “Faster than a raped ape, faster than a cheetah on cocaine.” I called him up and it spiraled from there…

Todd Kiergen is a rare man. He’s got a beard down to the middle of his chest that’s raggedy at the bottom because he keeps catching it in his drill press. He measures time in cigarettes. He’s got a stereo that hits stadium rock volume levels and I’ve seen some of his bikes fire three-foot flames out of their tail pipes. He can talk about compression ratios, valve clearance and various bike models until I’m totally lost, and then follow it up with a joke about racing an ugly woman to the light switch. I’ve never met anyone like him before. 

This originally appeared in Accent Magazine along with an essay that I wrote and some photographs.