LuckyStars:  You said it as well as I could–”I don’t like to stroll through that part of my life.”  I’m not doing it for fun.  What I do in the comments I make on your blogs is fun.  This is Work over here.  And this Work is paying off, it is.

compassion, you asked about whether at that time I was feeling like a free spirit or like a worm, I think.  The way I had it rationalized was that I was a cultural anthropologist doing research.  I’d never heard of Stockholm Syndrome, but as an empath I was vulnerable to identifying with my oppressors.  I identify with LOTS of people.  I was very much like an anthropologist gone native.  I added my own little twist to it by being my ingenious, competitive self.  I learned that in the “Man’s World” of the One-Percenter clubs, a woman could gain status and respect through outrageous and courageous behavior, and through mechanical and or riding/driving skills.  I had all of the above. 

I tried to keep my reality tunnel “positive”, to look on the bright side of things, do my best to get by, and leave the world a better place than I found it.  I had fun along the way, along with the terror and pain.  Curses mixed with blessings is the story of my life.

Getting 20 comments to a single blog is, I think, unprecedented before this.  Maybe I should leave a couple of days betwen blogs more often… naah, just kidding.  Things happened, and I was AFK.  I’m back.  Did you miss me?  During almost all my waking hours for the last couple of days Doug has been at the keyboard.  What follows was created on Schpeedy Trackbawl, my trusty but alcoholic old laptop.

I had a little mishap. Monday night when I was done for the night, bleary-eyed and all written out of memoirs: wrung dry, so to speak, I screwed up. I was editing and proofing the blog that got posted on Tuesday, when I noticed that I’d gone on for about a page beyond a natural stopping place, so I cut that extra page and stuck it on my clipboard and…*sigh* …didn’t save it. That wasn’t supposed to happen, but it did. Today, I tried to pick up the thread again, and I couldn’t. I forgot what I was saying. I fiddled and fussed and played minesweeper and solitaire.

Then I noticed what I was doing, got disgusted with myself, and decided to deal with it. I opened the thriller folder and started in on a scene that’s been under construction in my imagination for months. It just hadn’t jelled for me yet. But now it has, I think. It feels as if my little slip-up a couple of nights ago has broken the writer’s block that has crushed me for months. (If anyone doubts that I’ve been experiencing writer’s block, let me assure you that for me journaling and writing memoirs are not the same as writing fiction.)

Now that I have this crucial scene mapped out, I want to get on with the thriller. I don’t know if I’m switching over from non fiction to fiction mode, but something tells me I should finish the biker saga first. Actually, I feel I should finish the entire memoir first, now that I’m on a roll with it, but that roll seems to have rolled to a halt. I’m at war with myself here. And all the time those two voices in my head are arguing over whether I should go on blogging about the distant past or get back to sweating blood to make a fantasy come real in words, a third party to the argument knows that my first priority is to keep a journal, to record, expose and analyse the personal events of the present, for the sake of my mental health and personal growth.

It is Thursday, the second rainy day in a row for us. Greyfox is at the computer since he can’t be out at his stand when it is precipitating. He and I are slowly getting up to speed this morning as we recover from yesterday’s trip to town. He went to see his dentist, I to get the usual supplies and a few important extras such as a computer desk and materials to fix our roof before winter comes. Doug has just gone to bed (at 10 AM) after being up about 40 hours with only two brief naps.

The computer desk is needed because we now have a scanner and no place to put it. A card table wedged between the back of the sofa (Couch Potato Heaven facing the PS2) and the dining room table (my jewelry work table) has served thus far, but will stretch no further. Before the new desk can be set up, there will be a great moving of furniture, tearing of hair and gnashing of teeth. But that is something for another day.

Yesterday, after dropping the old fart at the dentist and filling a cart at Wal-Mart with everything from pig noses for Koji (the snack that smells you back) to a new game for Doug’s birthday (which he can’t play because our video card is inadequate) in addition to the aforementioned essential items, I hurt myself, overdid.

Even minimal activity around the house causes muscle spasms, discomfort and discoordination as a result of this fibromyalgia and chronic fatigue I live with. Yesterday, I spent about half an hour in a big parking lot, loading moderately heavy objects on the roof rack, tarping and securing the load with bungees, and today I’m overdone, sluggish and sore.

I have a story to tell about a little family moment here, which occurred yesterday as we were preparing to leave for town. Greyfox had cleaned out the cooler and Doug was putting the ice packs in it preparatory to loading the ice chest in the back of the station wagon. An ice chest goes with us on these grocery expeditions to keep perishables from perishing on the way home. Making that hundred-mile round trip through miles and miles of construction detours and hordes of Arvees from out of state, and returning home with sour goat milk, would be a bummer. Anyhow, our little mismatched group of individuals only marginally qualifies as a family, and such moments as these are rare and beautiful.

Doug opened the freezer, snorted derisively, and asked, “Who put the cheddar in the freezer?” The natural presumption was that it had been his evil step-father the old fart, that being the sort of thing he often does. Doug often gets a charge out of twitting him about his absentmindedness. But this time, as we discussed our respective recent kitchen activities, I had to accept the responsibility for freezing the cheese. I had made grilled cheese sandwiches a day or two before. So I said, “It was probably me, I guess.”

Greyfox came back with, “Yeah, I usually put it in the microwave,” and Doug answered, “…and I put it in the bread drawer.” That broke me up and then they started laughing and there were the usual self-congratulatory “gotchas” with which we generally acknowledge our better witticisms. We do love making each other laugh. Then Greyfox commented on its having been a nice little family moment.

With that, Doug turned away and said casually, “Well, it’s time for me to get back to being aloof and isolated.” Greyfox came back with, “…and I, to being morose and sarcastic.”  Then they both looked to me for the capper. I asked, “Can I get back on the computer now?” Gotcha!

So, Xangans, it’s time for me to put some effort into my health-and-addiction journal and/or that long-postponed thriller, while I avoid thinking about some of the more traumatic moments of my life with the outlaw bikers. Geez, the way that came out, it looks like I’m trying to challenge myself to do three things at once. Ain’t it great that I have the power to multi-task? But, seriously folks, I don’t know what’s going to show up in my blog next. I have several unfinished files to work on, and I do feel an urge to wind up the biker story and get it over with before I dive into the fantasy-world of my thriller, plus I realize that I must not neglect my healing journal.

The final episode (or two) of the biker thing is going to be a series of highlights and low points, just some vignettes and anecdotes of the more memorable times that I’ve not yet mentioned. On the ride home yesterday, I discussed some of them briefly with Greyfox and he cautioned me to be sure I prefaced it with some warnings to the sensitive potential readers. High voltage, indeed, not hard to remember but impossible to forget no matter how hard I’ve tried. Extremely hard to relive as I write it down, this upcoming installment is a challenge. But for now, I’ll share with you that scene from the thriller that I finally wrote down the other night. Let me know what you think.

ooogah, fiction alert. This is NOT A MEMOIR! I made it up, and it’s a highly unusual (for me) G-rated, family friendly blog.

No setup.

The snow had drifted in windrows across the curving parts of the road, and in mounds and streaks that concealed ruts and rocks. The narrow mountain track had seen too much traffic and too little maintenance in this season when all their equipment was busy maintaining roads and driveways for customers. On some of the straightaways, the surface was wind-polished ice covered with a dusting of granular snow like tiny ball bearings.

The bus was fishtailing on every curve, and J.’s hand was light on the wheel, to sense which way the massive beast wanted to go, and so as not to oversteer and spin out. Cheez, in a moment’s flash of imagination, felt the weightless sensation of free flight and saw them soaring off the road. She erased the image and then let her mind channel white light. A bag slid off the overhead rack, and Celeste reached for it, grabbing it just as it was about to bounce into the well inside the front door.

In the moment when the bus regained traction, Celeste straightened back into her seat with the bag on her lap and Cheez leaned forward to get a better view of the road and to murmur her approval and appreciation of J.’s driving.

Then, as they were easing into the next curve, a left front wheel hit a rock in the road and they lost some forward momentum. The two women, one in the seat behind the driver’s, and the other across the aisle in the other front seat, reached for each other’s hands as the bus lurched and the rear end slid left. The bag slipped off Celeste’s lap as she slid off the seat. She closed her eyes, grasped her mother’s hand, and thrust the other hand out in instinctive defense. Her feet hit the floor and she swayed, knees bent, straining to keep from pitching headlong into the driver’s lap.

J. slid the steering wheel ever so gently left and the momentum slammed Cheez against the wall and forward into the back of J.’s seat as Celeste came to rest with one hand on his leg and the other firmly gripping her mother’s.

The bus was floating, gliding, sideways and still forward, and ever so gently, slowly, gradually, down. “Do buses have this sweet a glide path?” J. wondered, as Cheez got a chill of deja vu. Weightless for a moment, Celeste straightened and swayed back and plopped on her seat as the bus came to rest, on the road, and one switchback down from where they had just flown off. The springs creaked, it rocked a little, and J. smoothly shifted to granny gear and started making slow tracks back up the grade. Not even for a moment did he consider trying to turn around to go on down the mountain.

Everyone was silent until they reached their skid marks. J. took a quick glance over the edge and the two women stared at the tracks as they rode by. Then Celeste started to ask, “Did that really…?” as J. shook his head and said, “We didn’t….” Cheez took a deep breath and said, “We will talk about this later. Just get us back up there. We’ll send a plow down ahead of us next time.”

She sat back, told J. he was doing fine, “Just drive.” She got comcenter on the phone to have someone get a snowplow and sand truck warmed up, and to relay a message to the airstip that their ETA was delayed… maybe as much as an hour or two.

Well, gang, how does it grab you?  Oh, BTW, thanks to www.hooleon.com, I got a set of nifty keyboard stickers for Greyfox.  The entire home row and most of the other letters had worn off our keyboard.  I took a pic of how it looks after I stuck all those stickers.  It’s at www.xanga.com/ArmsMerchant.  Greyfox has a new quiz, inspired by those of us who took his other quizzes and scored quite poorly.  In this one, the lower your score the better off you are.  Are you as deranged as he is?  I took the quiz and scored 9 out of 10, could have sworn that he hated kids, to judge by his speech and behavior.  Go figure!

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.