Like the Guy Next Door
The important thing was what to wear.
My wardrobe consists primarily of sensitive plaid jackets and pastel-toned slacks. I favor the colors of spring. It’s an ethnic trait.
“You’re going to a biker’s rally looking like that ?” my wife said as I came down the stairs. “They’ll think you’re a hibiscus.”
“What am I supposed to wear? I don’t have any black leather.”
“Cords and your Buttonwillow T-shirt would be better than lavender and Copenhagen blue. They don’t even match.”
“Bikers don’t care about color-coordination,” I said. “Bikers care about beer, sex and their Harley-Davidsons, in reverse order.”
“Trust me, Martinez,” she said, “go with the cords.”
As it turned out, she was right.
The 10,000 bikers who attended the weekend motorcycle show in the Santa Monica Mountains would not have understood lavender.
That isn’t to say, however, they were the drooling, slouching, inarticulate primates I have made them out to be in the past.
Well, yes, a few had sloping foreheads with heavy brow ridges, and one or two did communicate in grunts.
But for the most part, those who attended the convention were just ordinary large, tattooed guys with an obsessive interest in motorcycles.
One of them was exceptionally large. His name was Chuck and he identified the woman with him as his chick. Chuck and his chick.
He was a big-bellied man with forearms as thick as my thighs.
When I told Chuck I was a journalist, he said be sure to tell everyone bikers are not animals.
Then he added in an effort to humanize his subculture, “We’re the guys next door.”
Oh, my God.
Those who follow the migration habits of bikers and other instinctive bipeds are no doubt aware of their inclination to gather occasionally for purposes having nothing to do with food or procreation.
In the case of bikers, social scientists see their infrequent tendency to cluster as a primitive effort to convince others that they can, indeed, meet in large herds without the dominating bulls killing each other.
They proved that over the weekend.
Despite fears to the contrary, there was not even a hint of trouble among those who roared into rural Calamigos Ranch to socialize and to view 200 customized motorcycles.
As a deputy sheriff put it, “They didn’t even spit on the ground.”
The migration, sponsored by Easyriders magazine, was to have been held at the Los Angeles Convention Center downtown. Permission was denied at the last minute, however, when police reminded skittish city officials there had been a stabbing at last year’s rally in Long Beach.
Organizers of the show argued that the stabbing was an isolated incident that could have occurred anywhere. Kiwanians and art docents, for example, are known to have vicious knife fights whenever they gather. But the Convention Center people held firm.
Calamigos, which has hosted bikers in the past, welcomed them with open arms and with a sign at the front entrance that read: “No cans, bottles, weapons or pets.”
A spectator in a “Chosen Few” T-shirt wandered around wearing a live snake around his neck. But I wasn’t going to be the one to tell him pets weren’t allowed.
Bikers sometimes form very close relationships with their snakes.
The show, held in two large tents, featured customized motorcycles in rows of gleaming chrome and metallic hues. One was the color of the shirt I almost wore.
My favorite was a 1980 Harley called Mid-life Crisis. It was a streamlined, candy-appled, ghost-flamed, duo-glide, fish-tailed baby with a diamond primary. Malcolm Forbes no doubt rides one in heaven.
Hats and T-shirts were big sellers in booths that surrounded the displays of bikes. I bought a black hat adorned with roses, lizards and a skull-faced figure with a scythe. Its lettering said, “Live Hard, Ride Fast.”
If I told you what the T-shirts said, I’d end up playing double solitaire with Andy Rooney for the next three months.
The hit of the day was a biker named Maverick, who hustled Harley seats covered with the skins of exotic animals, including elephants and ostriches.
Animal activists who delight in ripping fur coats off old ladies in shopping malls were nowhere to be seen picketing. How odd.
Maverick said the skins were gathered prior to laws that forbade members of the Hells Angels from killing elephants by leaping on their backs in the Masai Mara and biting them behind the ears.
A pity.
It was an interesting day. No one was hostile or threatening. As I left, one biker smiled and waved. He was wearing a Viking hat with steer horns.
Just like the guy next door.
