Papa Pete's Place

Live free or die!!!

How to be a biker, then vs now

Because I'm a grouchy old fart, I look at the world through my cynical middle aged eyes and don't like what I see. I fall into the old cliche' where I'll see something dumb and I'll go off on a rant about how it was "back in my day". The motorcycle world is not immune from my curmudgeon-ness, so here goes:

Back in MY day, if you wanted to be a biker you got a bike, learned how to ride it, hung around with other bikers, learned how to fix it and keep the old piece of shit running (motorcycles needed tinkering and adjusting back in MY day, just like cars did...who remembers setting your point gap using a matchbook cover?), and dressed howeverthehell you wanted because a big part of being a biker then was FREEDOM.

Yeah, people tended to wear jeans, boots and leather jackets but it was for good reason. That is what safety gear was back then. A leather jacket is required to keep the wind off and retain body heat when you are riding and it is cold or wet out. It also keeps big chunks of skin from being ground off if you wipe out and slide along the highway.

You bike didn't have to be a cookie cutter Harley either, although it was certainly everyone's dream to have one. Riding was a blue collar thing back then. I don't think I knew anyone that bought a new bike. Look at the old school choppers...not those retarded things with giant fat rear tires they build on lame TV shows, I mean REAL old school choppers. They aren't all built out of Harleys...you'll see them built out of British and Japanese bikes too. You built and rode what you could afford. In those days you could buy a "basket case" Sportster for $500, but $500 was a lot of money when minimum wage was less than $3 an hour.

People were different too. They were real. They were often dirty, in stained, patched clothes but it wasn't a fashion statement; it was because they worked at blue collar jobs and were usually just trying to make ends meet. Most of the bikers I knew in the old days were mechanics, painters, construction laborers etc. They had missing teeth from either bar brawls or bad dental care, or often both. The smoked cigarettes, cigars and weed. They had filthy mouths (and often filthy bodies too), but were gentlemen who would hold a door for a woman and call her Ma'am. They would get out of the bed at 3AM to go help a friend, a friend of a friend, or even a stranger that a friend of a friend bumped into who needed a ride because their car broke down.

They didn't judge. I mean, we ALL judge, but the biker morals of the day were such that you'd treat people well unless you had a reason not to. I grew up in one of those blue collar Catholic neighborhoods where everyone goes to work at a shit job every day, then comes home to drink to forget about how much their lives suck. My family was well below the poverty level, basically everyone but me was crippled. It was handy for the people in my neighborhood because even those bottom-of-the socioeconomic-level people needed someone to look down on and we were it. They treated us like lepers, openly mocking us, then would get dressed up in their goin'-to-church clothes from Sears or KMart (Walmart hadn't been invented yet) and go to St Margaret's to make believe they were all holy and shit. My family was not welcome at St Margaret's Church because my parents were divorced and in those days divorce meant excommunication. It was better to suffer abuse than it was to be an embarrassment to the church, right? Oddly enough, later on the priest was caught buggering little boys and he had to wear an ankle bracelet. Somehow that wasn't an embarrassment to them. It is important to note that none of the people I describe in this paragraph were bikers. They looked down on bikers too.

I started working full time when I was 11 years old. That is where I first met the biker crowd. They didn't judge us or belittle us for being poor or for being a family of cripples with a deadbeat, divorced father. They treated us like equals. They treated us with respect. Why? Because respect was reciprocal and we never gave them a reason NOT to treat us well. There are too many things that are bad about a boy growing up without a father that I can't list them here, but there are hidden advantages too. One of them is that you get to pick your role models, and my role models were all "lowlife" bikers and colorful WW2 vets that hung around the general store where I worked. These people helped to make me who I am today.

I got an old Honda CB350 when was 18. It was red, faded to pink on top. Later I got a Suzuki GS850, then a Honda CB750, then another GS850. The only people that gave me any shit about having Japanese bikes were people who didn't have bikes of their own. One guy stands out as particularly pathetic. This was in a country-western bar in Chelmsford, MA. I'm not a country fan, I chose to marry outside of the family. I was there to meet a friend. This guy was all dressed up in his officially licensed HD t-shirt, HD suspenders, HD hat etc. and saw my Laconia t-shirt, so he came over to talk to me and asked what I rode. "Suzuki GS" I replied. He scoffed...and said that he'd rather walk than ride a Jap bike. Since my machine was the only bike in the parking lot, I pointed out that I noticed he must have gotten there in a car, so why didn't he ride his Harley? He wasn't expecting this, so he yammered "Ummm...uhhh...it's in storage". It was the middle of summer, when exactly did he plan on getting it OUT of storage? Maybe it was in storage at the dealers. He can pick it up as soon as he actually buys it right? "Storage" is a buzzword of the bullshitters, it means "I don't actually have a bike, I just like to pretend I do".

Then in the 1990's, something weird happened. Yuppies decided that motorcycles make a great fashion statement. You started to see a new phenomenon: the Rich Urban Biker, dis-affectionately known as RUBs. Instabikers. They bought "mystique" and Harley-Davidson was certainly willing to sell it to them. The prices of motorcycles shot up. To buy a new bike meant getting on a waiting list, sometimes a couple of years long for some models. An $8 HD t-shirt was suddenly $50.

This changed a few things. The Loudon Classic motorcycle weekend started to look like the Loudon Classic trailer weekend as expensive customized-by-the-dealer-with-bolt-on-chrome-shit motorcycles were trailered up for the weekend behind expensive 4wd pickups (which were also trendy with the Yuppies, this is before they invented SUVs). They wore "colors" and everything because buying a HD entitles you to join H.O.G., the Harley Owners Group.

More Yuppies meant more bitching to the police about stuff, so there was a big crackdown on "unseemly" behavior at Loudon. I'll take a moment here to explain that Laconia Bike Week used to be a one weekend gig that was centered around the races at the Loudon racetrack, now known as New Hampshire International Speedway, a stop on the NASCAR circuit. It wasn't long after this that a non-profit organization was formed to run "Laconia Motorcycle Week". Once it became sort of a business instead of the traditional "let's go party at Loudon" mindset, it started to look like a folk music festival with giant vendor tents lining everywhere you look so visitors shop there instead of at local business and at roadside stands set up by local entrepreneurs. The upside is that the current version of Laconia has clean portajohns. My wife is still a little traumatized from her first experience in an old-style Laconia portajohn. It's a little too graphic to describe, so I'll leave it up to your imagination. Let's just say that it is possible to fit 120 gallons of shit into the 100-gallon tank of a portajohn if you pile it up high enough above the seat.

In short, the Yuppies wanted to look like bikers, but they didn't want to be around bikers.

Flash forward to today. Here's what you do if you want to be a biker:

Go to the dealer and finance a new HD. It must be a Road King or a Softtail. Have them install apehangers on it. It is very trendy to have giant-ass apehangers sticking up above your half fairing on your otherwise stock bike. Be sure to get lots of officially licensed HD clothing while you are there, since half of the showroom is a clothing store anyway.

Then get all dressed up to go stand around and look cool at bike week. Here is the checklist.