I grumbled into my coffee reflecting on the number of things around the house I needed to get done, things that had been put off till the last minute and beyond.
"Go," she interrupted. "The temperature today is supposed to be in the 80s. It's gonna be a beautiful day and I don't want you slumming around the house, I've got stuff to do. Get out. Get on your bike. And don't come back 'till you're sick of it."
I laughed and told her I appreciated the thought, but there was too much to do and....
"Maybe I wasn't clear," she said, enunciating slowly. "Get...Out!"
So, I went. Central Expressway up to Sherman, then Paris, then Texarkana, up through Arkansas. DeQueen. Stress leaked and fizzled to nothing, and the miles and hours melted away, slow and sweet as soft-serve ice cream in a summertime waffle cone. Soon I was cruising into the late afternoon, the sun and wind blast flaying me, the low roar of the motor and the easy marriage of bike and body sweeping through long, lazy turns, crunching down into short ones, laying back like an indulged prince on the straightaways -- perfect. I ran across a small crew of friends in Broken Bow, and we headed back down toward Texas...
One of the boys knew of a bar on the Red River which none of the rest of us were familiar with and was only about 20 miles out of our way - we rolled into the small gravel parking lot in a cloud of thunder and found the place stocked with cold beer, hot bartenders, sports TV, and a pool table. It was an absolutely perfect little biker bar stuck out in the wilderness, a spectacular way to wind down toward the end of a good day, marred only by three yuppie bike riders who showed up after we'd been there about a half hour.
When they saw the patches on the crew, they immediately began kissing our asses and trying to impress us with the idea that they were really bikers just like us, which was an annoyance.
As the patch says "Fuck You, I've Got Enough Friends."
One of the crew got tired of the lead yuppie yammering on (loudly) about his Hells Angels relatives and his extensive experience on the road, so he pointedly turned his back on the idiot and went over to the juke box to play a bit of music and see if the citizen would take the hint and fuck off.
In fact, most of the crew were trying to be patient with the citizens (yuppies) because they just don't know the rules, usually, and it's easier to just take a breath and try to warn 'em once than to find bail money out in the boonies. But these guys were wearing pretty thin pretty fast; and they'd had by then enough tequila to not notice the rising tensions, which were getting pretty thick. The tattooed brunette babe behind the bar, who'd earlier told me she'd been around bikes and bikers all her life, saw it. She quietly stepped back away from the citizens, shaking her head.
The potentially dangerous situation suddenly crystallized and resolved when the younger yuppie jumped up and collected dollar bills from his friends, and came trotting over to my friend who was still leaning over the juke box, slapped him on the back and said, "Here's some money for the box, bro!"
Exactly 2/10 second later, he was pinned to the wall next to the juke box by the throat, his toes barely touching the floor, my friend fairly vibrating with rage.
"Listen, shithead, I am NOT your fuckin' bro, and if you and your bunch don't LEAVE ME THE FUCK ALONE, I'm gonna KICK THE SHIT OUT OF YOU and if you ever touch me again I'll FUCKIN' KILL your dumb ass!"
The yuppies were suddenly, shockingly sober; extensive, profuse apologies, and respects were paid (turns out they weren't TOTALLY clueless.) The yuppies sat at a table as far away from us as they could get, and after that, we all got along splendidly. The cold beer and hot bartenders continued to cause condensation and sweat in pleasant conjunction, and life was good again.
I can't tell you how much I needed a day like that. To summarize:
In Our Next Episode: I make one more try at educating other citizens so we can all just have a beer without the aggravation.
So why are you guys such dickheads? If I was Mr Yuppy I might have apologized and shit just to show some class, but the only real dumbshit in this story is the idiot friend of yours who got violent for no reason. I'm missing something here, and it is partly deliberate, in that I'm not interested in pretending to buy into some fucked up "biker culture" with obscure little rules that the tough guys enforce for no discernible reason beyond being dickheads.
ReplyDeleteSo now I re-read it and what I picture are three what you call yuppies but what I call frat boys whose entire gig is pumping their candy asses up with false machismo and trying to fit into with the real guys and being real fucking annoying about it. See, if I were younger and upwardly-mobile some people might think I'm a yuppie, especially in some backwoods bar where I'm obviously a tourist, but I FUCKING HATE frat boys and got no problem at all with you and your buds pinning one to the wall so he can slink away dribbling his own urine.
I guess we all got our tribes.
And I've never, ever thumped a stranger on the back and called him bro. I fucking hate people who do that. I hate kiss-asses, that's it. (Partly why my corporate career never went anywhere.)
"...frat boys whose entire gig is pumping their candy asses up with false machismo and trying to fit into with the real guys and being real fucking annoying about it...."
ReplyDeleteExactly. It's not just a matter of following the rules - if you read through the stuff on the link I put in there, it's purely a matter of respect. To be bluntly honest about it, they (bikers) generally just don't notice citizens at all, and probably 99% of the time a "tourist" would have ZERO interaction with them, even if they were in the same small bar.
But they will not tolerate disrespect, and some crew of weekend warriors who show up waggling their tiny little dicks and trying to run with the big dogs are going to get cross-threaded somehow. It's almost inevitable.
Their (bikers') culture is a strange thing, and almost incomprehensible to outsiders, even those who own a Harley.
A patch-holder has been through a probationary period of anything from six months to a couple of years, and that period is nothing short of hell. The level of commitment required to earn that patch is, frankly, unbelievable. That patch is their lifeblood, and they'll kill over it. They are bikers, patch-holder, and club members 24/7.
The reason I was so surprised to find my friend up in Broken Bow is that the last time I'd heard from him (2 days prior,) he was 900 miles away and on his way the other direction taking care of some business.
He puts an AVERAGE of 3500 miles per month on his bike, and he can break it down and rebuild it (literally) blindfolded. They live, breathe, and bleed the club and their bikes. They are highly organized and regimented, extremely dangerous, very unpredictable, and tend toward aggressive, immediate solutions to anything they believe to be a problem. On the other hand, they almost always at least mostly tolerate anyone who's not in another club - they don't have to act like tough guys. They ARE tough guys, and it's a bad mistake to think anything else.
To them, the word "bro" or "brother" is an honorarium, a title and an acknowledgment, restricted to other patches who are part of their "family" who have bled and fought with them and proven themselves to be part of the blood, and an extremely limited number of others who have earned that respect.
The weekend warriors who take their chromed-out garbage wagons into the Harley dealership every time they need an oil change, and who's idea of a bad time is when the TPS reports are overdue, showed up and attempted to use the real deal to feed their macho fantasies and pretend we're all one big ol' outlaw family.
It was - obnoxious, and increasingly disrespectful. See "immediate solutions to...problem(s)" above.
It's not complicated - these guys wear colors and patches. Their symbology is an obscure exercise not dissimilar from the old specialty of reading coats of arms, but one aspect that's almost as important is that, like the in-your-face patterns of a Gila monster or diamondback or coral snake, or cobra, they are displaying a warning to keep away from them, and for many of the same reasons.
Or, as a patch on my friend's cut (colors) says: "Talk Shit - Get Hit".
It ain't brain surgery.