Motorcycle Rallies: Annual Reminders of a Road Not Taken

There’s a pen and ink self-portrait I did in one of my earliest journals, the summer after my freshman year, at age 18. In it, I have a long mane of hair, swept back (by the wind, I suppose), a bushy beard, and there’s a cigarette hanging out of my mouth. I’m wearing a leather jacket, and there’s a helmet under my arm. The helmet has lightning bolts on either side.

Now in reality I can count on one hand the times I’ve even been on a motorcycle. There was the time Russ Fiducia, our neighbor, gave me a ride on the back of his enormous Honda – the bike on which he would be killed in a crash on the Hutchinson River Parkway not much later. And I also have a foggy recollection of a mini bike to which my brother and I had some passing access – in Michigan maybe? I can’t recall.

And that’s it.

Yet there is still this call of the road that hits me when the Republic of Texas (RoT) Rally rolls into town in June. (The Central Texas HOG rally is this weekend -- a much smaller version, it's what got me thinking along these lines.) This call is not even real, in that it could ever be answered. My mother, even in death, brings out the newspaper clippings of horrible deaths suffered by motorcyclists, at no fault of their own. And those who know me well know I’m a coward at heart. That many cc’s of horsepower (or whatever – I don’t know much about internal combustion engines, either) would scare the shit out of me, I’m sure.

So where does this “call of the wild” come from? I can certainly point to two early influences right off the bat: Evel Knievel and Arthur Fonzarelli, on the wildly popular sitcom, Happy Days. In my youth, both captured my imagination. Every so often ABC’s Wide World of Sports would feature one of Knievel’s stunts. He became larger than life by virtue of how many cars he could jump over and how many bones he broke. My friends and I routinely set up ramps and jumps for our bikes, emulating him.

And then there was the Fonz. Any boy living in 1970’s America was enamored of the Fonz, unless they were raised in a Skinner box or something. He was the personification of cool – possessing the power to magically turn on both juke boxes and bobby-soxers, with a snap of his fingers or a flick of his wrist. Like 1950’s icons Marlon Brando and James Dean, the Fonz rode a motorcycle. During the opening credits, you could see Henry Winkler, the actor playing Fonzie, pull up unsteadily on a motorcycle.

I’m not sure if it was because of Winkler’s reticence, but they didn’t really play up the biker angle, initially. But then came Season Four and an episode called “Fonzie Loves Pinky,” in which the Fonz meets his match in a tough-talking, pink-wearing, pink-motorcycle-riding mama by the name of Pinky Tuscadero.

I fell immediately, helplessly, head-over-heels in love with her. I wonder now if this hadn’t been a brilliant move on the part of the producers of the show – as their core demographic reached puberty, they provided us with a heterosexual surrogate for the one we’d been in love with since the beginning.

There was a moment, in my late 30’s when I went through a brief crisis. My father had just died, leaving me an orphan. I was single and not sure I’d ever find the Love of My Life, with whom I’d eventually settle down and have kids. Visiting a friend in DC, we walked down Constitution Avenue and suddenly the largest parade of motorcycles I’d ever seen – Rolling Thunder, as it turned out – rolled past, deafening us.

“Sometimes I think I’d like to just buy a motorcycle and leave everything behind,” I said.

“Why don’t you?” she asked.

“I should.” I smiled, and we went back to watching the bikers, their shiny machines glimmering loudly in the late May sunlight. I think we both knew it would never happen, but I enjoyed thinking back on my pen and ink caricature and imagining what that life might have been like.