Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
tall tales in the drunken half-light of a smoky reverie. Most tales were of past Smokers, told
and confirmed by liars who were there. Short of road tales, any macho bullshit would do.
I rode casually around seventy-five, but that seemed hurried. Sixty-five felt right. The Ca-
nadians grew up with a dollar discounted to seventy-six cents, often less—and a ninety day
riding season. None went to college. But they'd had no war to dodge, so things evened out,
more or less. They spent money in two columns: liquor and reefer on the one hand, chrome
and cubic inches on the other. Many went to jumbo jugs, a hundred ten cubes to the pair.
Nearly all had chrome pegs or chrome floorboards or chrome floorboard inserts, chrome pas-
senger pegs and pushrod sleeves, chrome grips and header bolt covers. Chrome and muscle
were a motif for the Canadians, and they parked their rides in a casual array of chrome muscle
in any parking lot to take a break and break out the B.C. bud and mix up the cocktails—in
glasses with ice, in a catalogue shot for a lifestyle market—a shot surely censored by Harley
Davidson.
Cocktails in the parking lot were nice at the end of a ride. Most guys wanted to shower
or lie down or check their messages or call the kids. Not these guys—hanging in the parking
lot was like lingering on the road, kind of going that extra mile on a pic a nic for alcoholics.
Drinking, smoking, leaning on their rides, remembering binges and wild pussy, these guys
could hang and shoot the shit for hours. The road bond was bliss with no work today or to-
morrow. It couldn't get much better, except maybe in a few hours when they could get really
fucked up and find some trouble to get into and maybe get laid. Road romance was rare, but
the old stories got dusted and buffed, stretched and swollen. Hope sprung eternal, even in
Canada. Besides, what can you do,
ey
? Go to bed?
They lived at maximum macho, looking down their noses when we agreed to hit a few
bars. We walked; they rode. Around the corner, down a block and down twelve steps to the
bar, they rode. We quit by midnight. They hit every motherfucking stop till the last light went
out, night after night. When a female went along for one ride or another, they would crowd
around, move in, press for new limits in the sexual anarchy universe, as new yarns would spin.
But the women had also aged and in time they too turned in early or died off or laughed out
loud. New honeys replaced the old, but what would any honey want with a gang of drunk and
crusty old guys?
Events occur in threes. A few years prior we'd met Kevin, a likeable, self-possessed guy,
or so it seemed. Kevin had seven earrings on one ear, eleven on the other and tattoos like a
NASCAR racer, with crawlies up the neck and out a bushy eyebrow and Maori patterns across
the chrome dome. His biker duds were sleeveless in leather or denim, and shirtless. Last, but
in no way motherfucking least, the ride: a hardcore Softail in gold-sparkle green with massive
chrome and a double-stack calliope carburetor like a milk bucket with jets on the end to force
feed the power plant down to monster megaphone pipes that could drown out a steel foundry.
