San Anselmo 4

Rom Molina was liaison between NNY and Moto-D from the very beginning. I like him like a brother. He's drives a killer Ducati GP bike that I swear is not street-legal. I still remember the first time I met him. Sensei sent me to Cal Tech to help him develop some new CAD software. Rom started by trying to show me how to have Apache warrior visions in cyberspace. I swore he was on something. He could look into a monitor and see the Arizona desert or the buttes in New Mexico when I couldn't see shit. But when I called Sensei to complain about the guy, he just said I'd been eating too much Taco Bell and FedExed me fifty pounds of modeling clay. "All your designs have to begin here," he said, "with your hands in clay and your empty mind in space, just like judo." And I remember thinking that both the Japanese and the Apaches are all fucking weird. But this design began as he'd said it should -- slowly, with an axis in blue-green cyberspace and a lump of wet gray clay in my hands.