July 31, 2002

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  Adult content!

  
  

  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….

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