It’s always something. You can’t win for losing. The glass is half-empty. It’s sometimes called Murphy’s Law. In poker, it’s called, “drawing dead,” which also happens to be the name of Rick White’s 1979 Shovelhead. A poker player for over thirty years, Rick wanted his bike to reflect his life’s philosophy. “The term ‘drawing dead’ means that you can’t win, no matter which cards you pitch. It’s a hand that’s unwinnable,” he explained.

“Um…that’s pretty uplifting, Rick,” I said.

“I’m pretty pessimistic about things,” he laughed. “My theory is that if it can go wrong it will- multiple times, usually.”

To illustrate, he described the wreck he had in 2010. A woman in a Suburban, doing about 50mph, ran a red light and collided with Rick, who was on a 2006 Dyna. “It messed me up pretty good,” Rick said. “My shoulders are still screwed up and it crushed the knuckles in my right hand.” The woman had state minimum insurance. “Everybody thinks that when you get hit like that, you get a big fat check. I was lucky to get my medical bills paid. Sometimes in life, you just take a hard knock. You just suck it up and go on.”

Despite this setback, there are some things in life that Rick’s positive about, and one of them is the beautiful bike you see pictured here. It was a pawnshop special, and though Rick had been eyeballing it for several years, the owner kept rejecting his offers. “I finally talked the guy into it when I showed up with a roll of hundred dollar bills. He couldn’t stand it anymore and sold it to me.”

“The bike was in really bad shape. The wiring was shot and just about everything about it was rough,” Rick recalled. He pieced it together and rode it for a while, then tore it down to the frame and started over. Longtime friend Sonny White, owner of River City Cycles in Fort Smith, Arkansas, worked with him on the project. “I’d take it down to Sonny’s and we’d tear it apart and put it together over the weekend.”

The biggest challenge was finding parts. “When you’re dealing with a Shovelhead, unless you’re willing to go with aftermarket stuff, it gets tough to deal with locating things,” Rick said.

Drawing Dead is a rigid frame bike with a foot clutch, a jockey shift and a springer front end. “It’s not for the faint of heart,” Rick laughed. “I pretty much just ride it in a fifty-mile radius of here, because you’re not going to jump on that bike and ride to L.A. — or at least I’m not, not in my physical shape. “ Oh yeah. That stupid wreck. Nonetheless, he’s managed to put over 20,000 miles on it so far.

Design-wise, Rick’s always loved the whole World War II/ B-52 bomber look. “That was the look I wanted to go for,” he said. “I just thought the nose art on a B-52 was the coolest thing.”

The hood ornament on the center of the tank, which is from a 1950s Hudson Terraplane, was a gift from his friend Grant Pierson, whose bike was featured here on March 28. Rick’s also partial to the doorknob hand shift, delivered by friend who designs movie sets. “He knew I was looking for a hand shift, and they had just gutted a federal reserve bank in Kansas City,” Rick said. “One day, he walked into my office with a pillowcase full of antique doorknobs from the bank, and said, ‘Pick the one you want.’” Those two items are Rick’s favorite features of the bike because of the people who donated them. “They were given by friends I’ve had for years, so there’s a lot of sentimental value there.”

If there’s anything that Rick is optimistic about, it’s friendship. When it came time to paint Drawing Dead, he called upon Dan Keys to incorporate the black widow and spider web design that’s spun around the bike. It’s a tribute to his decades-long association with a group of Harley enthusiasts called The Black Widows. Rick, nicknamed “Flair” by the group, is one of the original members. “It’s a pretty special thing,” he said, describing the Widows. “The average guy doesn’t have that camaraderie. I could call any of them at two o’clock in the morning, asking for help, and they’d be there. These guys are loyal to the end.”

I’ve become a big fan of The Black Widows over the past few months, not just because they have incredibly keen Harleys, but because of the things Rick described. The bond they have is unbreakable, and they’re what we in this neck of the woods call “good people.” I’ve written about several of them.

“You know,” Rick told me, “if you’d only picked one bike to write about, we’d have been happy. There’s no competition between us. If something good happens to one of us, it happens to all of us.”

Pretty positive sentiments from a self-proclaimed pessimist.