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Back to the biker years–

Episode #4

But first a little background: while my father was alive, my mother worked part-time and did all the cooking at home, except for rare occasions when my father would prepare one of his specialties. After he died, within weeks, she was in an OJT program for nutritionists in public schools, working full time in a big institutional kitchen. In the evening, she felt like sitting down and doing just about anything but cooking.

So I was seven when she started teaching me to cook. The first thing I ever did was canned soup. Then I graduated to box mixes for mac and cheese or spaghetti.

When I was twelve, I used the Blue Chip Stamps we had collected to get The Joy of Cooking. The first weekend I had it, I made pot roast on Saturday and Boston baked beans on Sunday. I liked to cook, and I liked to eat my own cooking because I am and always have been a skilled chemist in the kitchen, careful and precise, good at following recipes.

My mother taught me how to make the simple things, such as steak and potatoes with gravy. I do gravy so well that one of my ex-husbands still raves to his friends about my gravy, learned the technique from me, and teaches it to anyone interested. During my first marriage, I added Larousse Gastronomique to my library and European haute cuisine to my repertoire. I became a sauce diva, a goddess of pastry, and winner of cooking contests.

In my blog about the trip to Japan in ’65, I alluded briefly to Japanese cuisine being important to me. Done right, it is inevitably a crowd-pleaser. It is one of the simplest, and can be one of the cheapest ways to feed large bunches of people. Preparation is impressive to watch, and the aromas that arise as a stir-fry is cooking never fail to stimulate appetites. VW liked being able to invite friends over, serve them a beer and then let me entertain them by cooking and serving a meal. Usually, in that crowd, such an invitation was to a spaghetti feed. Novelty made yakimeshi a hit.

I was reasonably comfortable in that life, most of the time. VW was crazy about me, proud to show off my skills and “class” to his bros, and firmly attached to me by sexual bonds, convinced that he couldn’t get it up with any other woman. I had security in that relationship, in terms of fidelity and duration. But I also had occasional sudden violence if I talked back or stepped “out of line.”

Other aspects of it were also quite sucky. He wasn’t nearly enough to satisfy me sexually, so I was masturbating even more than I did when living alone. It’s always easier to get by without sex if there are no men around, just as it’s tempting to eat when you’re in the bake shop or to drink if you’re in a bar, I suppose. The atmosphere I was living in was thick with testosterone and male pheromones.

On late nights in the Black Ravens’ club garage, I was usually the only female present. It was made clear that nobody needed to mind his fucking mouth or his fucking manners around me because I could fucking-well handle my own fucking mouth and manners… manners?! What fucking manners? I laid it on thick, for laughs, and they laughed.

Usually, the air was also thick with acetone and toluene fumes as we used fillers, “body putty”, to take the rough edges and awkward shapes out of bike frames, and spray-painted coat after coat of lacquers and metalflake paint on teardrop gas tanks.

The fashion at the time was for small gas tanks. Lots of gas stops. The whole pack stops, or at least the customers’ own chapter or gang or clique. Maximum psycho-social impact, minimal expense. A little extra time, extending the pleasure of a run. Big July 4th or Labor Day runs involved packs of up to three or four hundred bikes. Each freeway onramp the pack passed on the way to the run’s destination would disgorge more Harley riders in beards and black leather. Sexy.

There was more than enough adrenaline in my life, too. Outlaw bikers are, by definition, thrill seekers. I’d had a taste for cheap thrills all my life, too. My father used to monitor police and fire radio traffic and go gawk at the scenes. I recall sitting on his shoulders when I was two or three years old, watching a three-story downtown hotel burn down, people screaming, jumping from windows, emergency personnel… I wanted to be a fireman. One of my first lessons in gender bias.

But I digress. My father never passed by the scene of a car wreck without stopping. A trucker most of his working life, he always carried safety flares, tools and emergency stuff. He’d get involved if it was called for. Me, too, from day one. I got very involved with the Angels.

More than I wanted to, but not fatally.

The first big Angel party I went to, one of the freakier young guys, who rode a spotless, well-maintained new Sportster and always wore leather, no jeans, sat down beside me. I was sitting on a concrete step at the edge of the lawn at Tex’s house in Napa. VW was beside me, showing me how to toke deep and hold the smoke in. He kept complaining that he was wasting tons of dope on me, and I just wasn’t getting high. I recognized some euphoria and heightened senses, but nothing that carried me away. Nothing, really, to make me want to sear my lungs and cough, but he insisted, and he assured me that if I just toked carefully and got enough air with it, I could keep it in long enough to get a rush, to get “off”. Hmmmm. Oookay, man, I’ll try it again…

And then this skinny, darkly and dangerously handsome man who smells heavenly sits down on my other side. He pulls out a nickel-plated short-barreled six-shot revolver, and gestures with it on his upturned palm. He swung the cylinder out to show me that there was one round in it. He asked me, “You want to play?” Then he grasped the gun’s grip in one hand and spun the cylinder with the other. He raised his eyebrows and repeated, “Want to play?”

I said, “No.”

He sighed, swung to his feet, grumbled, “Nobody will play with me,” spun the cylinder again, held the muzzle to his temple, pulled the trigger and the hammer fell on an empty chamber. He shrugged and walked on to a small knot of people passing a joint by the hedge. I didn’t hear any shots, so either someone took his revolver away, or his luck held.

A few times, out on the freeway, we rode right past the Richmond and Oakland exits and into the City. Once was a glorious sunset over dinner on Fisherman’s Wharf followed by a carnival in Ghirardelli Square. Most fun of all, it was the carney’s closing night, and we got paid to stay behind, take a few super-fast long rides after closing time, then take the rides apart and load the trucks.

Another time was in response to a call from Dusty, VW’s ex-ol’lady. Her name was really something like Mary Jones, and the only dust on her had to have been fairy dust. She had been a mama. I think she became a mama when she split from VW. Maybe she’d been a mama before she was his ol’lady. Anyway, when I first got to know her, as I drove and she hunched crosswise in the behind-the-seat slot of my red MGB, she was a speed freak. Neither anyone’s ol’lady, nor anybody’s momma, she was a free agent, “selling [her] ass in the Tenderloin,” as she put it.

She didn’t have a pimp or work out of a house. But she did have a wholesale speed dealer who looked out for her and fronted her crank to sell so she could pay for what she used. She explained all this and a lot more about the drug rivalries and the SF acid rock scene,in a rapid-fire speed rap as we zipped along the elevated freeways taking her somewhere for some reason. Dusty and I clicked at first meeting. She referred to herself, and her friends in the house where we finally took her, as speed freaks–first time I heard the phrase.

I had friendly, cordial relations with the other women I came into contact with around the bikers, and with a few of them I formed instant rapport. One of the latter was a six-foot-tall, lewd, loud, skinny redhead named Mardy, Loose Lew’s ol’lady. Mardy was no speed freak. Downers were her thing. She and Lew both liked to get loose. When I met her, she was in a leg cast from a fall she took into the basement of a house where she had just kicked out the window she fell through. Somebody pissed her off somehow, and she really had a redhead’s temper. We bonded.

VW was looking forward to his Air Force discharge late in the summer of ’67. It meant he would be able to wear club colors. Tex had been initiated as a full-fledged Hells Angel, got his patch and went through the disgusting initiation of his pants when they were smeared with every sort of filth imaginable, which was to be scraped off and those “originals” would not be washed ever again.

As a member, Tex offered to sponsor VW as a prospect for the Angels, but since the Black Ravens had become a “one-percenter” affiliate club, VW decided to join the Vallejo Black Ravens. It’s where most of his close bros were, and the club garage was just a few blocks from home. Not that it would be home after he got out of the military. We were planning to move to Oregon, where VW’s family lived. One of the Black Ravens, Grace, and his ol’lady Linda, were going to move up there with us, and three of VW’s old school chums had bikes and were ready to join and form the Oregon chapter of the one-percenter Black Ravens.

TO BE CONTINUED….

The old Harleys ridden by the outlaws needed constant maintenance and repairs, and it didn’t take VW very long to discover that my slender fingers did a better job on the nuts and bolts than those fat stubby things dangling from his hands. An ol’lady who could use a wrench was an asset. One who understood concepts such as torque and spark gap was a wonder and a marvel.

He was pleased to go along when I decided to build a trike of my own. My preference would have been to ride a fast, lightweight bike such as a Honda or Triumph, but VW wouldn’t allow it. For him and his bros, if it wasn’t a Harley, it had to be one of the acceptable antiques such as a Vincent or Ariel. Rice burners and all of the great European bikes such as Ducatis, BMWs and Triumphs, were out.

The old Vincent Black Shadow was a great-looking bike. Hard Luck had one. They were tricky to handle, especially at high speed, because the frame was jointed in the middle, and the front and rear wheels could tilt in opposite directions on a turn. Any high-speed wobble out on the freeway could be disastrous. Handling one of them took more upper-body strength than the average bike. Besides all that, they were rare and extremely expensive. An Ariel would have been more within my range for operating, but was even farther out of range in money terms.

Briefly, I considered building my own two-wheel Harley chopper, but although I could handle one just fine once it was in motion, the damn things were so heavy that I had trouble getting one up to vertical off the kick stand. If it took more than a few kicks to start it, I was worn out before I got on the road.

My goal was mobility, not embarrassment. The natural choice then was a 3-wheeler. I rode around on Tex Hill’s trike and decided that would do for me. I started drawing plans for what I intended to build. I’d seen a trike with a 55-gallon steel drum welded across the back, with a seat nestled in its cut-out side. Mine would include a sound system with internal speakers for the highway and external speakers for party time.

Hard Luck told us about someone who had a “basket case” trike for sale cheap. When I first saw it, there was a frame in the corner of an old garage, surrounded by several wheels and tires, and some dusty boxes of grimy engine parts. One of the dusty old boxes on the floor contained a rust-spotted collection of gears and a cracked tranny case, but none of the guys who were there with me was even sure that the case could be fixed or that all the gears were there. Tucked away on a high shelf in a box of its own, was a clean, fully-functioning transmission. To clench the deal, the seller threw in the good tranny for a few extra bucks.

The bike VW had been riding was a “panhead” model from the ‘fifties. The only customizing that had been done on it was some stripping-down, the removal of fenders and decoration that qualified a bike as a bob-job or chopper. I helped him keep it running and we fixed the broken fender strut, but neither of us wanted to put much energy or money into that bike. We had been to a custom bike show and looked at the work of the masters including Big Daddy Roth. We wanted a show bike.

My trike would be our first project, and after it was on the road we planned to build a bike with molded frame, metalflake paintjob and extended front forks. We already had a transmission for it, because I’d gotten that box of gears cleaned up, had someone with a Heli-arc welder repair the case crack, and reassembled the “basket” tranny using the good one as a guide for how it went together.

The trike went together fairly easily in its basic form. The old pistons had been badly pitted, and we replaced them with a pair of high-dome, high-compression pistons we got cheap because they were a design that never made it into production. That was understandable once we got it all assembled and fired the trike up. First run around the block blew the head gasket. It was a well-known phenomenon. Whenever one tried to up the performance of a hog by increasing compression, whether by doming the pistons or lengthening the stroke with a different cam, the weak spot was the head gasket. The solution was to replace the standard gaskets with an aftermarket high-pressure copper gasket.

I had already blown a couple of copper gaskets and was experimenting with using an additional goopy gasket sealing compound, torquing them down harder… whatever might fix the thing without having to find a new pair of pistons and losing my pickup and extra speed.

That was where things stood when the weekend rolled around for the Magic Mountain Music Festival on Mt. Tamalpais in Marin County. VW’s panhead wasn’t running, but my trike was. We went to our favorite parts shop and bought their last 3 copper head gaskets, so we’d have spares just in case. I could change one in 15 or 20 minutes on the roadside if necessary.

It was a weekend for breakdowns. We were only halfway up the mountain and I was down to my last gasket. Several bikes had quit and their riders were either riding in the crash truck with the broken choppers, or were doubled up behind other riders. A red-haired Angel called *something* Red, either Dirty Red, Wild Red or Righteous Red or Little Red or something, but certainly not Big Red because that was someone else, had caught a lift with VW and me on my trike when his bike was loaded onto the crash truck, filling its bed to capacity.

His extra weight probably contributed to the demise of my last gasket. We chained the trike to a pole off the side of the road and caught rides behind some of the other riders in the pack. Up the road a bit, we noticed some guys gazing helplessly at the smoking engine of their old white van. They were members of a band, The James Gang, I think. The bikers ended up hauling them and their instruments and amps to the top of Mt. Tam and that act of kindness resulted in some good press for the Angels. Some arrangement with the promoters had already gotten most of us free admission to the festival.

The crowd was big and though I wanted to move down front nearer the music, VW kept me back on the hillside facing the stage where most of the bikers had settled down to party. I wasn’t close enough to see faces, but there was enough amplification that I could hear the music. I recall hearing The Fifth Dimension and The Doors that day. “Up, up and awaaay in my beautiful, my beautiful balloon…” “…break on through to the other side…” I knew it was about consciousness, about acid, and I still wondered what that “other side” of the mind was all about. For the bikers, the music wasn’t the main attraction there. The ride, the pack, the impression we made en masse, was what brought that pack of bikes up that mountain.

I popped whites and drank a little bit of wine before switching to pop so I could stay conscious. When it got close to sunset, and someone showed up with another truck, we started down the mountain to load up my trike. I was riding behind Bill Moran, the prez of the Richmond Hells Angels. When we got to where I had chained the trike, it was gone. The chain, cut with bolt cutters, was still there. We would hear later through the grapevine that some Gypsy Jokers from San Jose had turned up with a trike like mine. I never saw it again.

Even with all the hassles of the ride up the mountain, the frustration of not being allowed out of my ol’ man’s sight all day, and the loss of my trike, that ride down the mountain is one of my best memories of the years I was with the bikers. Bill Moran’s Ariel Square Four was the quietest, smoothest running bike I’ve ever had the pleasure to ride. Bill was a good rider, too, and I knew how to “pack”, how to melt into the back of the rider and become one with the bike on the curves.

Mt. Tam is a beautiful place, and the road winds through dense woods, then suddenly out into the sun and over some open grassy areas before diving into the forest again. The Ariel was more maneuverable than any of the Harleys, and we were soon out ahead of the pack, running quietly alone through some of the most beautiful terrain on the planet. I suppose the bennies made their contribution to the euphoria I felt, but I know that wasn’t all there was to it. It was motor love, machine infatuation–that Ariel won my heart forever. Long after I’ve outgrown any fondness I ever had for combing wind-snarls from my hair, I am still in awe of that bike.

Family history: I now have three separate sources for stories about Grandpa Cyrus’s experiences. I have the booklet created by my cousin Karen who recorded her father’s remembrances of the stories his grandfather told. I have my cousin Adele’s stories. She’s eleven years older than I am, and has lived there not far from the land Cyrus homesteaded. I also have the stories my father told me. All I have to do is recall them to memory.

I know he told stories. I know he told more than two or three stories. He had a million of ‘em. He told stories as he drove, as he worked with wrench, hammer, plane, lathe, calipers or shovel. He told stories as he played the fiddle. I remember hearing him tell the story of the song as he played Orange Blossom Special. Never heard him sing, as far as I can recall. He probably had the same affliction Doug and I have. In fact, now that I think of it, I recall him saying he couldn’t carry a tune in a bucket.

I only remember him telling the story, not the words of the story. I’m going to have to do a lot of altered-state work to recover Daddy’s stories. I’ve not gone deeply down that rabbit hole for several years now. I’m taking a deep breath here, getting my ducks in a row and issuing the proper warnings. I’ll be around, but it’s hard telling what shape I’ll be in. Recovering my adolescence was a challenge, and going back over the ground I’ve covered over the last few weeks has been a trial. When I relive my early childhood it might get interesting. My childhood was like a wild rollercoaster ride.

That’s for another day. I’m not blogging about my childhood today. I’m blogging about Cyrus and the Civil war. More accurately, about my thoughts as I reflected on the stories from Adele and Karen about Cyrus’s experiences in the Civil War. He was wounded at the Battle of Wilson Creek, in Missouri. His wounds were severe and he was left for dead.

In the aftermath of battle, townspeople cleaned up the battlefield and buried the dead. The person who found Cyrus alive on the field took him home and this black family in their little cabin cared for him, saved his life and assured his posterity: Adele, Karen, my father, and me. What they did, that family for whom the War Between the States was so personal and vital an issue, really grabbed my attention.

What those villagers did, cleaning up that battlefield, hit me, right in the gut. Soldiers had been firing rifles and pistols and artillery on their roads and in their fields. Then one side yielded and the other side advanced, or both withdrew to regroup. The battle grew still or moved on, and they went out in the dusk of the evening to clean up the battlefield.

War sucks. Soldiers who’ve done battle know that war sucks. Most people believe that war sucks because that’s what they’ve been told. Maybe the ones who know better than anyone else just how thoroughly war sucks are the civilians who have had a war breeze through their town or camp on their doorstep.

Those Missouri farmers and laborers who were picking up dismembered limbs along with the bodies and booty on Wilson Creek got no pay but whatever they found on the field, no glory, nothing but trouble and nightmares when the war came through.

That’s all I have to say right now. It was just a thought, a reflection on how it is in war that, when all is said and done, some poor civilian sucker who has just managed to survive the mayhem then ends up getting stuck cleaning up the mess.