Going Anywhere Is Tough.
Having a motorcycle as sole transportation could make things challenging.
For example, talking on a motorcycle is hard; it’s way too loud to hear each other. The passenger can yell in the driver’s ear, but it’s pretty hard for the passenger to hear what the driver yells over the engine. I learned to wait until we got to a red light – which sometimes didn’t happen for a long, long time – before saying, “Hey, I gotta pee.”
Polite lingo goes right out the window when transferring into biker lifestyle. The words “fuck” and “shit” are used as nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs, as well as both pronouns and proper nouns.
So no one says, “Could you stop at a restroom, please?”
Going to the local convenience store to buy smokes, which should be quick and easy and is done a million times per week, requires long pants, a leather jacket, black gloves, a wallet with a chain, a securely fastened helmet, and big, clunky boots. You can’t just jump in the car in your bare feet with five bucks in your hand.
And lighting a cigarette on the back of a motorcycle – or even on the front when the bike is stopped – can take anywhere from two minutes to two hours depending on the weather. I had it down to an art form but sometimes, on very windy days especially, I would have my head inside my jacket, my lighter singeing my hair, and my thumbs both blistered trying to light a cigarette, and I’d still be sucking on the filtered end, soaked wet with my saliva.
At that point, it was more of a mission than a need to get that cigarette lit.
Going anywhere is tough, but going to the laundromat is a major ordeal. With one person, the bag of laundry needs to be bungee-corded down somehow to get it safely to the laundromat. With two people, someone’s got to hang onto that bag for dear life all the way to the nearest washer.
And having accessible garbage bags for transporting laundry? Well that’s a convenience I took for granted for way too long.
Groceries can be transported in smaller bags, so you can put some groceries in the saddlebags, but not bananas. You can’t ever buy a lot of groceries! But a 12-pack of Miller Lite? That has to be held because shaking the cans – which happens whenever the bike moves – makes the beer get all foamy.
I learned to hold those beers still.
Larry’s saddle bags were ultra-small until he got the ’80 FLH. Then we had bigger saddlebags and a tour pack, too, which holds a whole case of beer and two leather jackets.
As a suburbanite growing up with food on the table three times daily, a washer and dryer right in my house, and a bedroom bigger than my new apartment, none of these challenges ever occurred to me until they happened.
And whether we were driving two miles or a hundred, the process of hopping on and taking off rarely changed. It was never, ever easy.
And yet, throwing my leg over that seat and clicking my boot into place on the foot rest was heavenly. I’d shift briefly in the seat while buckling my helmet, light my cigarette and tuck my lighter into my leather jacket pocket, and pat Larry’s shoulder as a signal.
“Ya ready, Baby?” he’d ask in that gravelly voice.
“Oh yeah,” I’d say, and take a hard drag on my cigarette.
I finally believed, to the core of my being, that I’d reached the epitome of cool.