Ever had sex with a supermodel or a true "Perfect 10?"

Me neither.

But imagine for a moment that it's actually happening, that she is really into you and of course you are really, REALLY into her. Maybe you've got her pinned to a mat on your private St. Barts beach, or perhaps she's splayed out on the Lexol-scented backseat of your '59 Eldorado. Nice thought, huh? Now think what it would feel like if right at the point of your life's most explosively delicious climax she says, "Hey, by the way, did I mention that I have syphilis?"

We've kicked it around and have come to the conclusion that this is a pretty good definition for the term "buzzkill." It's also a fitting parallel to what I experienced recently along the Tennessee/North Carolina border.

This is a section of the country where the roads are so lovable they get pet names like "Tail o' the Dragon" and "Hellbender." Impossibly smooth tarmac with consistent grip that rivals the finest European road-courses. A "just right" mix of every type of corner to endlessly challenge your mind and body. Plenty of scenic vistas and roadhouse parking lots filled with fast bikes and cars for when you need to catch your breath, lie to someone about how well you were riding, or go drain the piss you just scared out of yourself. Show up in early spring like I did, when the temperature hovers at 70, and you'll agree that calling this the North American Mecca for sportbike riding is not an overstatement. The trees had not yet filled in, so corners that will have blind entrances or exits because of foliage in a couple months now allow you to see through, and keep the throttle safely set to "on." On this particular sunny day, it had rained lightly for a few days prior, and since these roads are built well, they drain and dry quickly. Where I live in SoCal, it sucks to ride anything other than a dirtbike after a rainstorm because mud and twigs flow down the canyon sides, come to rest on the road surface, and lie there waiting to, well, kill your buzz. Not here in the hills and hollers of Eastern Tennessee and Northwestern North Carolina. No, sir. Here the place was as clean and perfect as that aforementioned supermodel pre-confession, fresh from a day of spa treatments.

Now that you have a sense of the pristine dance floor, let me introduce you to my dance partner. Like the other moto-journalists on this trip, I was invited mostly to ride the modestly revised Triumph Speed Triple. It's a wonderfully spirited and potent machine made better this year with the fitment of stonking-strong monoblock Brembo brakes and the coolest factory wheels I've seen on a sportbike. But it spit rain through most of our day on that bike, and the only envelope I could actually explore was the wet-traction limit of the OEM tires. The second day of the junket was set up to give us access to the other "urban sports" bikes in Triumph's growing line. So they rolled out the Sprints, Tigers, and Daytonas for us to ride. Given the positive weather forecast I chose the Special Edition Daytona 675 — all black and gold and looking very John Player Special. Sure, the bike is attractive in the stock tornado red and downright handsome (if loud) in iridescent neon blue. But back when I was a punky young anglophile living in an East London Squat, I actually smoked Players with my pints of John Courage Bitter. This particular 675 seemed to have my name on it.

We were first graced with this middleweight segment-buster in 2006 and it has been the recipient of all manner of awards and kudos ever since. It even managed to win the vaunted MasterBike competition one year, beating out every other sportbike in the world regardless of displacement. And no wonder — it's a phenomenal package. The super-stiff frame weighs less than 20 pounds. Top-notch suspension and braking bits are fitted and it's all wrapped up in a lithe little package that feels small, taut, and endlessly flickable. Thoughts equal turns — it's that connected.

Die-hard fans of twins and inline fours think Triumph's three-cylinder mills are a marketing ploy that helps supports Triumph's "Go Your Own Way" motto. But more objective riders see the logic of blended attributes. Longer-stroke twin-cylinder engines are great off the bottom, but it's tough to make lots of high-rpm horsepower. Oversquare multi-cylinder mills scream toward 20k, but are often flaccid off idle, with narrow powerbands up top. Triumph isn't the first company to see three as a magic number, but they've done more with it recently than anyone else. The 2008 Daytona grunts out 53 lb-ft of torque and 123 hp as it screams past 12,500 rpm. That's somewhere on the order of 20 percent more torque than the current crop of 600-cc inline-fours can muster, plus you get at least as much top-end peak power as the best of those bikes as well. To the rider, this means less shifting; better off-the-line launches; and, for most, more fun. You might want more motor if you're headed for the dragstrip, or a better backseat if you're dragging your S.O. out for a weekender. But it's hard to fault this bike when it comes to backroad hijinks.

I think you can do the math now. I'm out there with a group of highly skilled professional riders. We have these absolutely dream-perfect roads and I'm on a bike that seems purpose-built to attack them. We have sun and comfortable leathers and a good night's sleep behind us. It's the middle of the week so, except for a smattering of retirees in their Avalons and Lucernes making chicanes out of straightaways, the whole day seems to have been turned over to us by God himself. Or perhaps, more to the point, the devil.

I don't remember how that bible story goes with the serpent and the apple except that somehow Eve got blamed for the whole mess. But I didn't need the decision-clouding effects of a nubile hottie feeding me fruit to lead me down the path to hell. If you envision the road as the serpent and the bike as the apple, I had essentially bitten off a double-mouthful before I ever got out of second gear.

At one point I stopped at the Deal's Gap hangout and let the group roll on ahead with the idea that we'd meet up at the overlook 11 miles up the road. A local rider who claimed to have thousands of miles experience "racin' around in these parts" offered to give me a tow along the infamous Dragon. His hideously torn-up GSX-R seemed cobbled together from crashed parts like the bikes in The Road Warrior, so I figured he must have known a thing or two about which of the 300-plus turns on the Dragon will sneak up and bite you. He was fast. I pushed hard to hang with him, but I wasn't wearing knee pucks and there were trees and rocks instead of runoff. Key thing, though — I went as fast as I wanted and for however long it took to scorch through here, saw exactly ZERO cars — cop or otherwise. The serpent fed me more apple, and it was good.

The viewpoint at the end of the Dragon is a knockout over a giant river. My colleagues were already there in full bench-racing mode. From here we headed along the fast, open sweepers that follow the riverbed to an area known as "the foothills." Where the Deal's Gap road is tight and technical, this 20-plus mile section is fast and open like a two-lane autobahn. Where was everyone? Were all the cops at lunch? At one point I looked way down to where the speedo is, and saw a particularly impressive number, thinking presciently, "This is indescribably fun, but may not be such a good idea." So I started to roll off a bit before some corners in case a radar car was headed my way. But corner after corner, mile after mile, there was no one. I could feel the bike begging for permission to run free, I could see forever through some of these sweepers, and spent very little time in double digits for the next half hour. Mmmm. That was a tasty apple. How about another?

By now my entire being was conditioned to elevated speeds as if they were normal. For important personal reasons, allow me to preface this next session by saying that, until the statute of limitations runs out, any speeds described are not an admission of anything. Think of it as theoretical, or maybe it's in km/h instead of mph. Anyway, in the few remaining tight corners before entering the Smokey Mountains National Park, 60 felt like 30 and 90 felt like 50 and I'm thinking this is easy. Hardcore sports-car guys know this as well as bike guys. It's when the almost magical confluence of machine, ability, and opportunity seduces you into being bolder than you ought. It's what allows the 19-year old trapped inside you to take over the controls. It's when Yee hah wins out over Yes, Mom and speed limit signs seem directed at far lesser mortals who haven't reached your level of vehicular nirvana. Like, for example, the sign marked "35" inside the park.

The inverse of the above speed sensation is that 35 mph feels like 9. It's painfully, impossibly slow. The road through the park is just as wonderful as all the others around here, so if you could close the place down, a mediocre rider on the 675 could average at least 90 without a moment's pucker. But the road wasn't closed, even though we were riding it like it was. We couldn't help it. We were mere mortals, seduced by a force from the underworld, and for hours all we had to do was enjoy ourselves. No one was gonna get hurt today — it was just about fun and freedom until in one awful instant the door of hell opened and I rode through it.

Someone must have dropped a dime on us, because a phalanx of Park Rangers in their white and green cruisers had laid a trap. We'd been trading off on who ran point, and unluckily for me, I was in first position as we crossed the beam. I saw the gumballs, pulled over and climbed off. From there it's a bit of a blur.

I don't know what chemical it is that the body makes in extreme stress, but it hits you hard like a pressurized wave of nausea. The color runs from your face and it becomes hard to focus your eyes. Things sound different because your brain is both having this shitty experience and simultaneously helping you watch yourself suffer in it. Read a good battle account from any war, and the survivors describe this pretty well, like the way everything goes silent just before the shell with your foxhole's address on it goes off.

There was nothing in anything I was doing or had done that should have thrown the "deadly threat" switch for these Rangers, but at least one of them came at me with a gun drawn. I was cuffed and shoved in the back of a squad car the same way they'd handle a wife beater or meth dealer. I was told I'd be receiving three (count 'em!) tickets for various alleged transgressions, and because of that, I wasn't gonna be able to ride back to the hotel with my colleagues. Inexplicably, they got little wrist-slap citations, but I was about to be hit in the mouth with the biggest book in the county.

The Feds have an arrangement with the local jail for people they want to lock up. I was driven to this place and brought inside. I wish I had pictures, but the cop wouldn't give me my camera. So you gotta trust me when I tell you that this shithole makes Dante's 9th Circle look the The Cipriani Hotel in Venice. It's small and crowded with low ceilings and a narrow L-shaped hallway, and for some reason most of the cell doors were open. Prisoners in Charlie Chaplin–esque black-and-white striped outfits were in their doorways screaming at each other in unintelligible southern/drunk dialect, and the guards were yelling back. There was vomit and some other human excreta on the floor. A couple skinny wino types who seemed to be competing in the "facial scab of the year" contest were right in front of me, giving me the "new meat" stinkeye as I was shoved past them toward the intake/frisk 'em wall. The officer next to me quietly said "stand still" while another one 10 feet away yelled at me to turn around. I listened to the yeller and got mashed into the wall again. Get the picture? All my answers were automatically wrong. To be fair, these guys had no idea what I had done — all they knew was that here was a new body for them to deal with, and I "better not be no trouble..."

In the span of 90 minutes I went from completely free to totally fucked. Instant nightmare, just add crackheads and stir. I couldn't imagine surviving the night in this place. The first guard asked me what I did. I told him I was riding a motorcycle quickly through the park. "Did you hit someone?" Nope. "Are you loaded?" No. "Been Drinking?" Nope. "Did you run from the Rangers?" Nope. His last question was the best one of all for you Kafka fans: "Then what the fuck are you doing here?" It was a damn good question and one for which I still don't really have a good answer.

Luckily they wouldn't "accept" me on a technicality, so I was paraded back out to the Ranger's car and driven an hour west to a different county jail where I sat for eight hours waiting to be bailed out. It was nicer there. No one tried to ass-rape me even once, and I got offered a PB&J sandwich. Funny thing, though, I wasn't hungry. One of the jailers was a Harley guy who was especially thoughtful and worked to keep me separated from the rat-like scumbags who were dragged in during the night. One fat little guy literally looked like he was half squirrel, with a hairline that missed conjoining with his eyebrows by maybe 2 millimeters. It'd be funny if it wasn't so completely not funny.

It's more than a month out and this whole ordeal has now cost me a pile of time and money on top of that "worst-ever" evening. But when I think back to all those magic miles and moments before the arrest, I can't help but think, "Maybe it was worth it?" All I know for sure is that I'm never going back there, or if I do, it'll be on a 50-cc scooter or a bicycle. It will not be on a bike as seductive as the 675. I've had my run.