Motorcycle Diaries: Hot Times on Two Wheels
All names have been changed to protect the stupid (except mine, because fully I admit how stupid I was.) I recently sold what I think will probably be my last motorcycle [It wasn't, of course - ed.]. I can’t tell yet. Every few years, a tremendous, lusty feeling will grip me, and it ends up with me buying a motorcycle. Last time, I found myself compulsively buying body armor on eBay. I told myself I was buying it to participate in Occupy Wall Street riots, but then I ended up buying a gorgeous black Ducati Monster 695, named Donna by her previous owner.
But there is a saying in motorcycle land: it is not a question of IF you will get into a horrible accident, it is a question of WHEN. I knew scores of people who had had terrible, life-altering motorcycle wrecks, including two guys that were left as quadriplegics, controlling their wheelchairs with their mouths, and one guy who sustained massive brain damage and changed his name to Thomas. And I felt, having been on motorcycles pretty much my entire life, that I had finally run out of the physical luck that kept me intact all this time. I did some incredibly stupid things on motorcycles over the years, and since I moved back to the Bay Area, for some reason I felt strongly that the motorcycle fairies were no longer on my side. I had tested them too often, and it felt like the inevitable accident was waiting around the corner.
Some of the dumbest things I did, I wasn’t the one driving. One of my earliest memories — I was no older than 3 — is being on the front of my father’s Bultaco dirt bike (no helmet - this was before helmet laws) and him doing a wheelie the entire length of our block, in the late afternoon. I was terrified, of course, but I didn’t cry because it was supposed to be fun. I decided it was fun.
There was a particularly steep hill somewhere over Dolores Park that we were intrigued with. It was a virtual cliff. It looked like a 90 degree angle. So, (again without helmets), we decided to jump it. Harry revved up the engine at the top of the hill, and we went off the edge…and something we did’t anticipate happened. The back end of the bike was much heavier than the front end, so we launched into the air tipping heavily backwards. I was looking at the sky. When the back tire finally hit the pavement, it was only through some kind of superhuman adrenalin strength that Harry was able to guide the front of the bike down from its vertical position and actually land it, with a couple of harrowing bounces.
We were both white as sheets afterward. We never spoke of it again.
All of my boyfriends had motorcycles for a long time. I worked in bars, and most of that network of bar people had bikes. One time I was with my boyfriend Dolph, a strapping ex-high school football player who had done some work as a model. For some reason, Dolph was the kind of guy other men really wanted to sucker punch. His face made other dudes angry. We were riding around on Dolph’s bike somewhere in downtown San Francisco, and a tattooed guy with sunken cheeks who looked like an ex-con, driving a convertible Bronco, suddenly took exception to Dolph and started angrily following us. Dolph tried to bust all kinds of moves to lose him, including getting on the freeway, but the psycho kept pursuing us for miles, getting more and more pissed off, acting like he was going to ram us from behind. While driving, Dolph started to remove his motorcycle gloves, because he figured he would have to pull over and fight the guy.
On a stretch of road just beyond a tunnel, the Bronco guy made his move. There was a steep concrete embankment around the road, in sort of a funnel shape. With a wild engine roar, the maniac in the Bronco drove up the embankment like he was going to drive ahead sideways and land on top of us, but thankfully, his car exploded, first. His car pivoted and dropped back down into the middle of the road pointing the wrong direction; his hood flew up and black smoke began pouring out. That’s how we left him in the rearview mirror.
Naturally, being an idiot, I liked it, but I did feel like it was pushing my luck.
I finally started riding my own bikes around age 21. Being a fairly small person, it was always hard to stand up when the bike was fully stopped, so I dropped my bikes a lot - especially in front of cafes, where there were a lot of people to laugh at me. One time, I had just gotten out of a weepy therapy session after a bad breakup. I was just getting on my bike when my recently exed boyfriend rode by on his motorcycle with a gorgeous Asian girl on the back. It felt like a blow to the stomach that took the wind out of me. On my way home on another hill, I stalled out and my bike fell on me. I was crying and ridiculous. An old lady in the crosswalk came and helped pick it up off me. I was so mortified.
Donna was finally stolen out of my driveway recently, after sitting there for a few years. I still loved her. I still yearned for her, but I wasn’t riding her. She was just too dangerous. So she was neglected.
Anyway, she was stolen, and my friend who works as a cop actually found her up the street from me (proving that cop skills are often useful, even if the cops of my neighborhood don’t use them). Some idiots tried to cut all her wires and take her to the top of the nearest hill, and tried to roll start her. Donna’s ignition was gored out. Her front headlight was missing. She was in bad shape.
I sold her that same night to a friend of the cop, who ran his own Ducati/Moto-Guzzi operation out of a warehouse. He was able to fix her up and flip her to another young woman who was stoked to have it in short time, and I got a small stack of hundreds. Thus my biking days have apparently ended.
But I never say never again. What I really want is a sidecar, but with a bike that actually runs.
I Crashed My Vespa
The first thing I happened to notice in Crown Heights is that the local cops are allowed to have tattooed necks, hands, and faces. “They’re all in different gangs!” My great friend and neighbor Mo told me, gleefully.
“Cop gangs are everywhere!” All the cops at the precinct near my new apartment looked like they’d spent time in prison. I don’t know what kind of edge this gives them with criminals, but it certainly looks like it gives the cops a certain kind of parity.
And so, your writing girl commenced full-time labor at a wine bar/bookstore in deepest Brooklyn.
It turns out it’s a great fucking gig.
I didn’t know if I was going to be able to physically withstand the fulltime bartending job, I’ve been so inert the last few years. Apart from frantic bouts of middle-aged flamenco dancing, I’d largely said “fuck it” to being in shape - I was actively avoiding men, so it was working out fine. I started practicing nonviolence on my body, and the gym started to feel stupid and masochistic — I felt like a gerbil on the treadmill that was starting to question its life choices and the values of its world in general.
In short, I didn’t care about fitness — nonetheless, I have gotten through the last couple of weeks of frantic wine pouring and bar maintenance quite well, despite years of defiant physical weakness.
I am the age of most people’s moms, at the bar. I serve wine to the literary and publishing children of today, and nobody knows I am a writer; I am merely the bartender, and this is strangely befitting and fine. I packed the yellowing interviews and reviews of my writing career into Banker boxes and shoved them under the couch. Only one of my books was available to order — the rest are out of print, and only available used.
The real estate agents told me I was living in prime Crown Heights, but when I got the apartment I asked three different residents where we were, and got 3 different answers: Prospect Lefferts Gardens, “The Cusp” of Crown Heights and PLG, and East Flatbush. I tell people I live in East Flatbush, because prime Crown Heights is in a neighborhood it costs me $17 an Uber ride (including tip) to get to and from —- which is one of the reasons I bought a Vespa in the first place.
The other reason was the West Indian Day Parade, which was like some kind of French comedy. I knew that Eastern Parkway, the main boulevard separating my neighborhood from my job, was going to be closed in honor of West Indian Day, so I decided to try to take the subway. (My neighborhood is pretty much exclusively Hasidic Jews and West Indians — there are schmata shops, nail salons and hair-braiding boutiques. My branch of Chase has bulletproof windows for all the tellers.) When I exited the subway, I discovered that I was on Eastern Parkway, dead center of the parade. Suddenly I was a lone white speck in a sea of black bodies, mostly half-nude, some splattered with paint. The tattooed cops wouldn’t let me across the street. “We have to stop the parade, ma’am,” the tattooed face of the cop told me. Shiny golden parade floats were barreling down the parkway to deafeningly thumpy music.
I was shoulder to shoulder with a sudden breakaway bunch of people that managed to escape to the other side of the street through a hole in the blockade, and miraculously made it to work on time.
I felt completely confident about riding it with no experience since it was an automatic, and I am used to motorcycles. How tough could a Vespa be without a clutch?
I felt so suave parking it outside of the wine bar, that one day.
Then, the first evening I tried to drive it home, I tried to turn it around on the sidewalk, and I gave the throttle the slightest of rolls…and the thing completely zoomed out of control with me on it and splatted me hard against the side of a parked car.
I have no insurance for the Vespa yet - I didn’t even have license plates, and the car was majorly dented and scraped. My front fender was shattered. The chef from my wine bar had to help me pick the Vespa out of the gutter. “Oh fuck! I am so freaked out!” I kept yammering, drinking cold water. I slammed into it so hard my teeth crashed against each other. I have a bruise that goes from my right forearm almost to my armpit, and my thumbs were somewhat sprained from the impact, but by and large, all I kept thinking was, “I fucking crashed my Vespa and walked away!” That, in some way, felt rather baller. Showing off the bruises at work felt quite macha as well.
I had never been in an accident before on any of my motorcycles.
“Vespas are very quirky,” said Punkrock Joe. “They’re Italian. They have personalities. You have to get to know their idiosyncrasies.”
The accelerator, I decided, was fucked. The Vespa is at the scooter hospital now, and will get a thorough spanking by the mechanic.
The night of the crash, I was considering turning around and selling the thing again, after fixing the fender. Now I think I should give the Vespa another shot. It just looks too cool, and besides, Brooklyn is absolutely lousy with scooters these days; it’s like Djakarta or Morocco in the nineties. Cars are accustomed to watching out for them; they’re everywhere. Now I just need art nails and hair braids.