It’s All About Freedom, Baby.
Living with a motorcycle man – a term I later translated to “the biker” – was like living in another world.
A nice living room with furniture and a chandelier over my dining room table became unnecessary luxuries. A warm double bed for one person disappeared and two people slept on a single mattress on the floor now. Smoking cigarettes indoors was not only allowed, but expected.
Leather became a necessity: black leather jackets for our arms, chaps over our jeans. Larry bought these for me immediately. The reason for leather was to avoid “road rash,” meaning if we crashed, we wouldn’t get scraped up. At the time, I thought this was brilliant; I loved leather.
I now realize that if we had crashed, we would have been dead.
Underwear became completely unnecessary. I did away with my bra pretty quickly – biker chicks didn’t wear them – but I’d been pretty enamored with underpants. I’d worn them for my whole life.
But Larry said, “It’s all about freedom, Baby.” He hadn’t worn underwear in years, so now, neither did I. This also made laundry less urgent.
Gone were the days of breakfast cereal and peanut butter sandwiches; we had cigarettes for breakfast and burgers and beer for lunch, which eliminated the need for any kind of dinner. Larry ate beef jerky or pickled eggs at the bar; I ate neither. Sometimes we’d pick up a pizza. Balancing that pizza while roaring down the highway is a skill I mastered proudly.
We drank every, single night. Since our apartment was so tiny, we mostly went out for beers.
My new wave music preferences – the Cure, Violent Femmes and Yaz – were suddenly replaced with Merle Haggard, Hank Williams, Jr., and Willie Nelson. Larry was a country fan his whole life, so I became a country fan, too. The bands at the bars always played country, and we always went to bars with bands.
Movies and malls and concerts – my main forms of entertainment until this point – completely vanished from the world. While we occasionally visited a diner or a convenience store, we didn’t go anywhere else. Just bars. With bands. No cover charge.
We certainly didn’t have a car.
If we left the house without going to a bar, it was because it was “time to work on the bike.” Something always required fixing, and I never, ever knew what it was. But I would stand, beer in hand, while Larry sprawled on the ground next to the Harley, metal debris splayed around him, random jigsaw pieces on the ground. There were nuts, bolts, washers, screws, plates, covers, bowls, grills and racks – all interspersed with old tools on the road.
I referred to everything as “small metal objects.”
On a really big weekend, we might attend a swap meet – a giant room full of small metal objects for purchase. I liked the men’s jewelry: enormous cheap metal skull rings made to knock out someone’s teeth. Larry bought me one, which I adored.
But for me, what mattered most was the freedom to drink and smoke to my heart’s content.
No more hiding from Mom and Dad. I was a grown-up now in a grown-up world where my full-time job was to drink. Get up and drink. Smoke cigarettes and drink. Go to the bar and drink. Stand around Larry’s bike and drink. Listen to a country band and drink. Every, single moment of every single day revolved around drinking beer.
And that was exactly what I’d always wanted. I was “free.”