July 22, 2002

• The Biker Years — how it began

  Jim Rose had tossed me out and I lost my opportunity to become a bar
  girl in Saigon, but I still had my car and my job opening the Paradise
  Inn, right outside a back gate that led to the Travis AFB flight line,
  at 7 AM for the early drinkers.
  My boss there let me keep clothes in the back room and use his
  facilities to clean up. He said I could sleep there, but I never wanted
  to. He had a cot that he used
  occasionally, among the stacked cases of beer. The room was dank and
  musty. My MGB’s black leather upholstery
  was more inviting.  Out among the vegetable fields around
  Fairfield were many dirt roads bordered by groves of eucalyptus where I
  could park undisturbed for a night.

  Just a little ways down Railroad Avenue from the Paradise was a bigger bar, The
  Shadows, with a dance floor and a couple of pool tables. I got a second
  job there, tending bar and waiting tables at night. For a while, all I
  did was work those two jobs, party from when the Shadows closed down
  until the sun came up, then park somewhere, sometimes not making it out of the parking lot of
  an all-night cafe or one bar or the other, and crash in the car until
  it was time to open the Paradise.

  After I could afford to rent an apartment, I partied too much, or my
  bed was too comfortable, and I opened the Paradise late one too many
  times and got fired. But it wasn’t a hardship by then. I’d gotten a
  raise at the Shadows when the boss decided it was time to put in a
  little round stage and have topless go-go dancers. I was his first. I
  still tended bar and waited tables between sets, so I got great wages,
  tips, and had the fun of dancing for most of my shift, and all that
  ATTENTION!

  The first night was hard, as I overcame the strong nudity taboos I’d
  been taught. After I got used to watching men watch my boobies bounce,
  it was fun. The boss’s ploy worked, too. Business really picked up when
  the word got around that the Shadows had go-go girls… topless.

  Around that same time, when business was slack in the afternoon, the
  bar’s regular customers were teaching me to shoot pool. I learned fast
  and became a pool hustler. There were a few local civilians who
  practically lived in the bar and lived off the airmen who hung out
  there, hustling them at pool or card games. Two of those hustlers honed
  my talents with a cue until I was beating them almost every time. On IQ tests,
  spatial perception is one area where I do extremely well. PK and precog
  didn’t hurt.

  My pool gurus made up for some of the hits their egos took by encouraging
  other guys to play me until all the regulars gave up and quit playing
  against me. Being looked at like a freak, and the animosity and
  antagonism hurt my feelings so badly that I quit shooting pool. Those
  men, basically country boys who’d found their niche on the fringe of
  the military world, couldn’t believe that a woman could do what they had
  taught me to do. It frightened and angered them, much as I had seen
  happen in the craps games, and would see again from time to time. I
  withdrew from the field.

  During this time, I was reading the entire James Bond series and
  taking my MGB out on country roads to try out things I read about, such as 4-wheel
  drifting around turns, and speed-shifting. I started speaking with a
  British accent, like Sean Connery’s movie 007. At first, it wasn’t
  faked, just a natural effect of immersion in the Bond books after
  having seen a few of the movies. When one of the airmen in the bar
  asked me if I was from England, I paused only for a millisecond before
  saying no, I’d had a British nanny and picked up the accent from her.
  This became my life’s most fully-developed fantasy persona.

  That pampered rich girl I pretended to be had been married to a
  soldier, but had no children. She had fallen for a military man her
  parents wouldn’t accept, and he had died in Viet Nam. *sigh* *shakes
  head* I can now see so many flaws in my characterization, so many ways
  the act just doesn’t ring true, that it amazes me no one pulled my
  covers back then.  I’d surely be better able now to carry
  something like that off.  At the time, if anyone saw through it,
  no one
  ever called me on it.

  Two of the Air Force regulars in the bar were a pair of buddies who
  worked as mechanics on some of the big MATS transports (or maybe it was
  still MAC, Military Airlift Command, then). They were often in there
  when I came to work on Friday or Saturday, and we shot the breeze as I
  ate a bar meal of pickled egg, potato chips, and a glass of draft, before
  starting my shift. Usually, they were out of there before the go-go
  started, off to Richmond where they partied with Hells Angels every
  chance they got. Rarely they were both on one bike, and sometimes both
  of their Harleys would be running at the same time, but usually when I saw them
  both bikes were down and they were in the one guy’s Chevy pickup or the
  VW bug that belonged to the other guy.

  I was getting some sassiness into my personality with my new fantasy
  rich-kid persona and the ego boost of all the attention when I danced.
  One night, one of the GIs bet another one twenty dollars that he didn’t
  have the
  balls to walk over and bite my butt as I leaned over a table picking up
  glasses and swabbing down the surface. The poor guy had the balls okay,
  but he heard bells when I came around, startled, and slapped him
  up’side the head with an empty beer pitcher. As he sat on the floor
  apologising and explaining that it was a bet, I demanded that he split
  the winnings with me. I got my $10.00, and for the rest of the night I
  was making more and bigger tips than usual. I guess the customers liked
  the floor show.

  I lasted less than a month in the new apartment. It was a complex built around a swimming pool,
  near where the two Jims lived, and it was high rent. I
  wasn’t too sorry when I got evicted for noise after bringing the bar
  party home with me at closing time one night. The cops were called, and
  the circumstances were such that the landlord didn’t even have to give
  me 30 days’ notice.

  I found a little ramshackle old frame house on a ranch up a canyon
  between Napa and Vallejo, with a fig tree right outside my kitchen
  door, and rolling hills
  all around. Back to having just one job that paid well enough so I
  didn’t need to look for a second one, I took it easy. I caught up on
  some reading, and regained some strength.  I could occasionally
  forget that I’d died for a few moments just months previously. 

  I thought about P-Nut a lot, but figured he was better off with his
  grandma.  I’d have needed a second job to pay for a baby sitter
  while I worked the first job, and then what would I do with him while I
  worked that second job?  My girls, wherever they were, seemed to
  be something I’d dreamed, memories from a past life.  I silently
  sent them my love, and often fell asleep aching to hold my babies.

  Someone on base found an abandoned kitten, solid black shorthaired
  male. The guys kept him in the barracks until the sergeant found out,
  then they gave him to me. He would push open the screen door going out,
  or snag it open and slip in bringing prey back to show me… or feed
  me. I think he was trying to take care of me. We bonded. His name was
  Cat.

  One morning Cat came in with something to tell me, luring me back
  out to look. A bird was caught in a snarl of barbed wire that had come
  loose from the old fence posts. Cat sat back watching as I worked the wire loose
  and extricated the bird, a large blackbird, as black as Cat. It had
  some broken and missing feathers, a gash from the barbed wire along one
  wing and a smaller wound in a leg. I took the bird in, cleaned it up
  and put it in an old ventilated pie safe in the kitchen. It healed
  within a week or two, well enough to fly around in the house, and I let
  it go. It used to sit in the fig tree beside the back door and converse
  with Cat. They bonded.

  I loved that house and the ranch. There were two other bigger, newer houses, a big old falling-down
  barn and other outbuildings scattered along the same lane my house was
  on, and farther out into the hills on that lane, at the highest point
  for miles around, was a ghostly old abandoned two-story house. I liked to drive up there
  and sit in an upper window and look at the valley. I felt from the very
  beginning that I had been there before. I know I have past-life
  connections to that part of California, so it might just be that I was
  there before. I didn’t live there. I lived farther south.

  Dancing was hard work, even though it felt like play while I was up
  there on the little stage. I wasn’t partying any more. I was working my
  shift and going
  home to my little house in the foggy canyon with my library books and
  even a few pieces of furniture of my own, from a second hand store. I
  recall hauling a big, shallow, cedar underbed storage chest out there,
  with it standing
  wedged behind the bucket seats in the MGB.  It became the
  centerpiece in my living room, my “coffee table” surrounded by floor
  pillows.

  This single domesticity was great. I liked the autonomy of
  independence, and the liberty of leisure. Then a convalescent hospital
  in Vallejo, where I’d left an application previously, called, and
  avarice lured me out of my pleasant leisure. I was back working two
  jobs again.

  On my birthday, the patrons in the bar had sung happy birthday to me
  and I
  did my best to dance to it. Later, walking through the crowd with a
  tray of glasses, I was stopped by the biker who drove the VW bug. He
  said
  softly, “Here… Happy birthday,” and slipped me a skinny hand-rolled
  cigarette in yellow wheat straw paper. He said it was Cambodian Red
  that was coming in on the transports with the corpses in body bags. He
  could get it for
  $10 a lid. “Lid?” I asked… “Cambodian Red??” He explained that a lid,
  if fairly weighed, was an ounce, and Cambodian Red was some of the best
  weed on the planet.  I
  expanded my vocabulary.

  I carried my birthday joint around in my wallet for a while as I
  processed this new information. It must have been about three weeks
  later when the airman/biker came in again and asked me how I’d liked
  the joint. I confessed that it was still in my purse. “I don’t smoke,”
  I said. His jaw dropped and he gazed at me as I went and got the doobie
  and gave it back to him.

  I can understand his confusion. I was wearing a sweatshirt with a
  stoney-looking cartoon guy floating on a cloud and the words, “LSD, the
  only way to fly.” I had been trying to find a source for LSD since I’d
  read about Leary’s work at Harvard, at least three years before. I was
  hoping the shirt would help me scare up a source. Earl and I had tracked down
  and studied everything we could find about psychedelic drugs while I
  had been in Japan, and he had chased down a couple of baseless rumors
  of the actual substance.

  I really liked the biker who drove the pickup truck. VW really liked
  me. The one I liked backed away, stopped coming in all the time, and
  never came in alone any more. I learned later it was one of those
  “gentlemen’s agreements” by which some men determine which one of them
  will get a particular woman. I’ve always wondered what VW had said,
  what he might have offered or threatened, to get his buddy to steer
  clear of me. I’d known VW several months and turned him down many times
  before the day he said he was heading out to a biker party on my
  evening off. Curious to learn about Hells Angels, caught up in the
  mystique, I went along.

  His bike was running, after a fashion. He had to kick and kick and
  kick the starter before it fired up. There was no pad on the rear
  fender to sit on, only one peg for my foot, and a broken fender support
  that let the fender scrape the tire and throw fragments of hot rubber
  up to stick on my jeans and leave a blistered burn the size of a
  quarter. It was exhilarating. We passed a bottle of wine back and forth
  with some other couples on bikes and turned heads in the traffic along the
  freeway on our ride to the clubhouse in Richmond.

  Tex Hill, a friend of VW’s, was there. Tex and his righteous ol’lady
  (legally-wedded wife) Mary
  lived in Napa and rode a 3-wheeler when it ran. When his trike was off
  the road Tex drove the crash truck that accompanied just about every
  pack of bikes, to pick up the ones that died on the road
  (Harley-Davidsons suck that way).  When not on a bike run or
  riding his trike, he drove an old green station wagon.  Tex was
  still a prospect, not a full
  member. His cut-off Levi jacket was clean and on the back of it there
  was no flying skull or Hells Angels patch, just the bottom rocker
  saying, “Richmond”.

  This was a weeknight and the party wasn’t much, as I would learn
  later on. It wasn’t even really a party at all, just a weeknight at the
  clubhouse. It was wilder than most parties I’d been to, anyway. The Air
  Force guys I was with were popular because they brought the Cambodian
  Red. Otherwise, all you could get in the Bay Area at the time was seedy
  kilos of Mexican dirt weed for around $100-$150, which was going for
  $5.00 a matchbox on the street. I listened to such talk and felt
  emboldened to inquire about the availability of LSD. The bikers all
  assured me that acid was bad shit (and bad did not yet mean good in
  1966) and I should avoid it.

  “Here, smoke some of this reefer; it’s righteous Red.” After VW
  assured me it wasn’t like tobacco and wouldn’t make me sick, I puffed
  on the joints when they came around, but I didn’t feel any effect from
  it. The wine was starting to get to me, though.

  One of the Angels noticed me, and sat down beside me and asked me if
  I would like to be a mama. I didn’t know what he was talking about. I
  sorta thought he might be suggesting that I bear his children. I
  suppose my confusion showed. “JUDY!” he bellowed.

  A cute, smiling girl came out of the kitchen and he introduced her
  as Mama Judy. He said mamas lived in the club house and the club took
  care of them. If they wanted to work, they could have an outside job.
  Or they could hang around the clubhouse and fuck the Angels and drink
  wine, smoke dope, and eat bennies all day. Judy giggled and traipsed
  back into the kitchen.

  I had heard about bennies from cab drivers when I hung out with
  Statch, but I had never had any. But by that time on that night I’d had
  enough wine that the mama proposition piqued my interest. Then Tex
  noticed what was going on and alerted VW. VW told the Angel that I
  couldn’t be a mama because I was his ol’lady. This being the first I’d
  heard of that and the last thing in the world I wanted to be, I
  demurred.

  The angel stood up and spoke derogatorily and challengingly to VW
  about his inability to handle his ol’lady. VW stood up. Then Tex stood
  up and tried to stand between them. Tex took my hand and pulled me to
  my feet and told VW and me we’d better get out of there. So we left.

  On the way home, VW explained that the initiation ceremony for a
  mama was to “pull a train” and have sex with all the Angels and anyone
  else at her initiation party who wanted her. I guess I agreed with him
  that he’d done a good thing by “ripping me off,” claiming me as his
  ol’lady by right of having been the one who brought me there, and not
  letting me become a mama.

  I don’t know how I felt then, really. I might have been too
  intoxicated to grasp the subtleties at the time, but I’ve often
  wondered wisfully what might have happened if I’d turned myself out
  that night and become a mama for the Richmond Angels. Ah, the roads not
  taken.

  I was so drunk that night that I had a hard time staying on the bike
  all the way home. Never mind keeping my weight off that killer fender
  with the broken strut, and my foot off the hot muffler. The burn on my
  butt got bigger and the sole of my boot melted. I was glad to get home.

  I can still reach back to the back of my thigh and feel that
  puckered burn scar. Scars are good mementos. Each scar I can see on my
  body triggers a vivid memory of how I got it. That one, I can only see
  with a mirror but I don’t need to see it to remember how it got there.

  Continued….

  • 6:11 pm
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