July 23, 2002

• Biker Broad, Part 2

  Stop right there, boys and girls.  This one is for the grownups.

  This is the second installment on my biker years.  If you missed part one, it’s HERE.

  The night that I had been a mama prospect for the Richmond chapter of the Hells Angels for about two minutes, VW took me home and then rode back to his barracks at Travis. I didn’t see him again for about a week. I was relaxing at home on my day off when I heard a car pull up and stop by my house. It was VW, with some friend of his driving. The other guy stayed in the car and VW came in and told me to get ready to go to the City.

  I had given a lot of thought to the bikers and their lifestyle and I had decided that my sociological research was better done in the library. I told VW I didn’t want to go out with him any more. He grabbed me by the throat and slammed me against my living room wall a few times. I know that some yelling went on, both ways, but I don’t recall what words were yelled. There was more of the battering about, and I capitulated. Intimate violence was nothing new to me and I fell right back into old patterns. Duck, cover, placate.

  Out on the freeway in the backseat of that car, VW started kissing and fondling me, turning me on. When I reached out to grope him, he moved his ass back along the seat, pulled down my pants and started giving me head. He paused once and commented that he wished I was on the rag, so he could earn his red wings. I got off and was well on my way to Stockholm Syndrome. Occasional beatings interspersed with orgasms and reinforced with various drugs would keep me a reasonably contented captive for a couple of years.

  He’d been providing me with orgasms for two or three weeks and had avoided nudity or genital contact with me the whole time, when curiosity got the better of me and I asked him what was up. “Nothing,” he answered. He said he had been impotent since he was a teenager, when his mother caught him fucking his cousin. I said, “let me try,” and he reluctantly allowed me to give him head. I stroked his arms, chest and shoulders, too, and he relaxed. It wasn’t long before he grew hard; wasn’t very long after he grew hard, either.  Ah, well, it was longer than my first husband’s anyhow.

  It took three or four tries before he was able to keep an erection through to orgasm, and was a month or two after that before his erections and orgasms were as frequent and reliable as most anyone’s. Add another line to my resumé: sex therapist.

  This time of my life was eventful. There is much of it I don’t like remembering, and much of the detail of it that I don’t recall. Of the things I do remember, there are some that I dare not publish because of possible repercussions. Greyfox reminded me of that the other night (though the reminder was superfluous) when I was reminiscing about some of the illegal activities I witnessed or abetted.

  VW invited his biker friends to the ranch for a party, and it got me evicted. At that party, one of the guests got into my dresser in the bedroom and stole the only two mementos I had of my father: a locket he had given me one Christmas, and a heart he cut from an abalone shell and polished.

  We found a beautiful duplex studio apartment on a grassy corner in Vallejo. In order to be able to spend nights off base, VW had to have a marriage certificate. To get it, we went to Carson City, Nevada, and I used my dead sister’s name and birth certificate. Our new place was a lovely stone house with a Murphy bed and no other furniture… except for a phantom floor lamp in the main room and a table that wasn’t there in the kitchen.

  That is really the only way I can describe these phenomena. From what I subsequently read, I suppose they would fit in the category of psychic imprints. Both VW and I, at various times, had walked over to turn on the lamp that wasn’t there. Each of us also had tried to set things on the phantom table. A friend carried in a bag of groceries for me once, and when he tried to set it on the table things rolled across the floor.

  Cat moved to Vallejo with us, and during that winter came home one morning with one eye a gaping wound. I nursed him and we bonded even closer than before. Also that winter, he played in the house with a white cat that wasn’t there. Four different people saw the cat, and Cat would chase and be chased through the house by it, but there was no actual physical cat. I’d see it out of the corner of an eye streaking across the floor in pursuit of or pursued by Cat, but when I’d focus on it–nothing. Next time your cat is zipping around as if something’s after it, don’t look closely, just check it with your peripheral vision.

  We hung out at the Kit Kat Club in Vallejo, a biker bar. There was some turf conflict with a teen gang in town, and I witnessed a street fight outside the Kit Kat one night. I saw fist fights, kicking, bottles used as weapons, knives, motorcycle drive chains… and a shotgun. Tex went to his truck and pulled a shotgun out from behind the seat and broke it to pieces clubbing someone over the head with it. Nobody died.

  It was at the Kit Kat that I got my first amphetamines. Amphetamines were my drug of choice before I ever tried any. I had made up my mind I wanted some methamphetamine as I read the PDR in the nurse’s station at the convalescent hospital. Big fat white crosses, beans, bennies were available in the biker community, were ubiquitous and cheap. I was never disappointed with the subjective effects of any of the speed I’ve ever had in my life, and no other drug has ever made me feel so good when I’m up or so bad when I come down.

  When I decided to quit, it was easy, a piece of cake compared to my numerous attempts to kick the caffeine habit. I made the right choice when I picked speed, based only on book-smarts. In the drug and alcohol treatment community, they say everyone has a drug of choice. When I say meth was my DOC, it’s half tongue-in-cheek. Speed does feel good, and is especially good because it’s relatively easy to kick if one has the will, but for me that’s beside the point. In all truth, I didn’t choose my true DOC, it chose me. Sex has always been my drug of choice, even while I was running on speed.

  Bill Moran was president of the Black Ravens, the one-percenter club in Vallejo. He rode an Ariel Square Four. That was my all-time favorite bike. I got to ride it once, but that’s for another blog. I think my favorite biker in that group of Black Ravens and their close friends was Hard Luck. He drove a big delivery truck for a living, could fix anything mechanical, invented and fabricated all sorts of parts. He was cool.

  Buzzard was another neat biker, and his wife Marin, and his dog. Sorry, dog, forgot your name. The dog was a german shepherd, and he had been trained with German commands. To get from the back gate to Buzzard’s back door, you had to be able to tell the dog no, or sit or down in German. Platz, boy… good boy… Nein!

  Among the bikers, I was not aware of any of the casual infidelity to be found in the swinging ‘sixties in the mainstream culture. If it happened, it happened covertly. Even serial monogamy, which is the norm in today’s culture, was problematic with the bikers. A woman might be traded or sold to a brother for a bike or a beer, or if her ol’ man was righteously pissed off at her she might be turned out, gang raped on a run or at a party. But if she developed a case of the hots for one of her ol’ man’s bros, she’d be wise to keep it to herself. There was no civilized way, in that culture, to leave one man for another one. Just plain leaving was more than most of us could manage.

  I quit the Shadows because VW didn’t like me showing my tits to other men. I got fired from the convalescent hospital after he got me to steal drugs for him. I went to work cooking burgers in an A&W root beer stand, and one day on my way to work in the MGB, someone we always assumed to be connected with that rival street gang, took a shot at me, which left a neat little hole in my windshield. I don’t know where the slug ended up. I started carrying a .25 cal. automatic.

  One of VW’s beatings was severe enough that he later decided he’d better take me to the ER, but I didn’t have enough guts to tell the truth about my injuries. I said I fell. I got a prescription for painkillers (Darvon) and one for something to help me sleep. The sedatives were taken by the men, but I got to keep the Darvon. I washed them down with wine and forgot how many I had taken and took too many and was unconscious I don’t know how long. Nobody noticed, I guess. Parties with that crowd were like that. I woke up from that very sick, and the whole business: beating, hospital, drugs and wine, triggered another hellatious fibromyalgic flareup.

  They had this saying, “crash and burn”. It applied to the men, who were supposed to be able to “hold their mud.” If someone passed out at a party, he would be “burned” by being pissed on, having food, drink and condiments such as hot sauce and mustard poured all over him, and sometimes even, if he was a deserving asshole, doused with lighter fluid and set on fire and then have the flames extinguished by everyone else standing around urinating on him.

  I was glad that women didn’t have enough status to rate that treatment. But, “you snooze, you lose” applied to everyone. Fall asleep or lose consciousness in that crowd and you could lose your clothes, your hair, your car… whatever.

  VW finally got to earn his red wings with me, on Feb. 3, 1967.  (I know the date because I found this poster for sale online.) We went to that Hells Angels benefit concert at California Hall in San Francisco. The bands were Blue Cheer and Big Brother & the Holding Company.

  As they were setting up before the show, I walked down front and engaged the girl singer from Big Brother in conversation. I complimented her on her baggy vintage  silk dress, and after she understood that I wasn’t heckling her but liked her style, we laughed and joked together until the stage was set up.  Her style was extraordinary.  Her dress had been classy and expensive thirty years or so before.  It was a beautiful pastel with small floral print, several sizes too big for her.  It draped and enhanced her curves attractively.

  Some guys did try to heckle her during the show, but she came back with some quick and biting responses and other bikers shushed the hecklers. Janis Joplin wasn’t nearly as well known then as she would be before long, but the Angels considered Big Brother and Janis to be their own pet band.

  During an intermission, VW and I headed up the narrow staircase to the balcony, with him following me. His nose cued him and he asked if I was on the rag. “Yeah,” I barely had time to answer, when he grabbed me by the hips, turned me around, pushed me down on the stairs, ripped my new black levis down, and started eating my crotch.

  People gawked as they stepped over and around us, but they didn’t slow down much. He wouldn’t quit until I got off, so I didn’t waste any time. The stairs were steep, and hard against my spine. Afterward, stuck for a way to keep my pants up with the zipper ripped out, I borrowed a knife and made lacing holes up both sides of the front, and talked some biker out of one of his bootlaces to lace up my pants. I wore those laced-up levis a lot. They and I became semi-legendary.

  Another of my claims to fame among the outlaws was my ability to do things on the back of a moving bike that were uncommon to unprecedented. Rolling joints was a popular one with the crowd. Sleeping was one of my personal favorites. The road can be long.

  Some rumors got around that I even gave head on the back of a bike on the freeway, but they were exaggerated. I told the story anyway, for years, as if it was true. I even started, for a while, to believe it myself. But in the end, it was the impossible logistics of it that convinced me it never happened. At least I can say with certainty that if I ever did it, it had to have been in an alcohol blackout…. I think. Memory is a tricky thing.

  For males and females alike in that culture where the genders have such disparate status and roles, showing class was a way to gain status. A woman could, with guts and imagination, earn some respect if not deference. I earned very high praise for the way I conducted myself one night when I’d been recruited to help out at one of the biker bars after the usual help fled out the back door as the party got rowdy.

  I was serving the beer and the bartender said it was time to cut some of the drunker patrons off. One of them objected to being eighty-sixed and I stood up to him. I almost got creamed by him, but Big Red, the sergeant at arms, intervened as is his duty, to maintain order. When he had me firmly in one hand and was holding the feisty little drunk off with the other, he called out, “Whose ol’lady is this?” When VW hesitantly owned up to me, Red said, “Come get her, Man, and take good care of her. She’s got more balls than most men I know.” Yessh! Even now I recall that as one of this life’s shining moments. Bragging rights, indeed.

  There was another occasion on which I showed more than the usual level of class and blew a few minds. A bunch of us, ten or a dozen or so, on seven or eight bikes, were hanging around in the front yard of a house in Oakland, waiting for someone to get home for some reason. Probably a dope deal, weapons purchase, bike parts, the usual business. It was getting late, and we were getting hungry and cold.

  From the time the sun was gone, I had been noticing someone in an upper window of a house a block away on the opposite side of the street. They were flashing a flashlight at us. Some of the guys were grumbling about it, speculating on what might be the significance. Someone thought it might be cops up there, but that idea didn’t get much respect.

  I asked one of the other ol’ladies to come with me, and I walked up there, climbed the stairs and knocked. The idiot inside opened the door. It was an eight year old girl flashing the light, and it was her sixteen year old babysitter who opened the door, not knowing that the kid had been attracting the attention of the bikers down the street.

  I told the girls to make us some food. They fixed peanut butter sandwiches, used all the bread in the house, and packed the sandwiches back in the bread bag for me to take with me. Then I asked for a couple of blankets and left the girls to explain the losses to the mother when she got home. The kid kept flashing the light at us, and some of the guys wanted to go up there and mess with them, but I gave them sandwiches and a blanket and told them the kids had had enough trouble for one night.

  

  • 12:31 pm
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