Dust eats away at my skin. The leather I wear makes every minute an inferno on the motorcycle. Heat explodes up my ass, creeping past crack and sack to pillage my spine and overburden my shoulders. But I am an adult, I am in Mexico, I have documents and a clean record; I can drink, buy drugs, or pay to make fantasies come true. I can also do none of that, or get a ticket to take the pirate ship and sail into the mystic with tourists, eating as much shrimp and drinking as much Dos Equis XX lager as I can handle while daydreaming in the Zen of a blue sea.
Deeper and deeper in a broken territory I’m riding a two-wheeled track called risk. It’s as if reality stalls and the motorcycle dances in time with the dazzling sun of Mexico. With eyes to see, anyone looking around would swear Salvador Dali painted the street where bar balconies, groaning under the weight of heavy bikers, bows like snow-covered branches. On the third floor of the Iguana Banana, above the balcony facing the Malecon, a band is kicking out a version of Bowie’s “Five Years.” Inside the Iguana, I sing along with them, “A cop knelt and kissed the feet of a priest, and a queer threw up at the sight of that.”
In tune or out of tune, nobody cared, as the thump-thump of Evolutions announced
the schedules be damned ‘cause the party’s on, and ripe are the two-legged coyotes primed for this biker party happening everywhere. One, in fringed buckskin and patches, says he’s from the land of Geronimo. More coyotes arrive to join the sons of Geronimo, and then the risk multipliers show up. They roll in on wavelengths of noise – the Bandidos – adding cock to the cocktail, courting madness and mayhem. They’re the mangy cousins of the Apache, and like Geronimo, impossible for the man to catch.
My coyote brothers go north. I bid adios and turn east toward New Mexico where tricksters enchant the land and the sunsets are spooky and lovely. On the sidewalk, a guy stops, leans against the building, and waits with a woman and dog for the walk signal. He’s wearing a black jacket and a beret. His jacket is adorned with a large patch on the back and the word HOCKEY picturing two stilettoes. Hockey on stilettos, what an idea.
Our biology still pumps with the stuff of life, and our minds have us believe that indeed, we are still alive, and yet here we are, lost somehow where the dirty work happening below every rider’s belt is summarized: squeeze, suck, bang, and blow; a puree of gas and oxygen firing the wily explosions in the dark interstices of a Big Twin engine just like Jack Nicholson’s active and lusty ID.
Bikers ride by faith and trust that the explosions below our belts will not blow us up and send us to another kingdom. This trust is underrated by bikers and actors – or bikers as actors in our chrome parades – in these parades, every story smells of leather, and the truth of our biology gyres deeper in the screw as we ride on, rattling sugar skulls from the wrecking wall to a mystic blue sea of tequila and time.
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