Biking toward Mexico, jagged mountains framing both sides of Arizona’s Highway 85 are now in my mirror. Wind and heat push me forward to where it is not much of a leap for my Midwestern imagination to place me in a scene from an apocalyptic biker movie on a two-lane road headed into the heart of dust.
At the border wall, problematic for drug mules and Americans with criminal records trying to cross, the guards peer at my shiny wheels.
I’m neither criminal nor mule, but I’m wary of the gun-wielding guards; the mind-meld of television news depicts Mexico as dangerous, and at this wrecking wall I’m heating up like one of Dante’s eighth circle bolgers.
My motorcycle brothers and I cross the wall into Mexico, and our bikes are screaming to hell with America and our jobs, if we still got them, left behind us with our families—fathers, children without fathers, and desperate mothers trying to become younger in their old age. Will I ever cross the border back to America?
So this is Mexico?
There’s a lot of dust.
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.
I kept thinking I was Jack Nicholson, playing the detective in a film he never made; one around the time when he was still in his Blood and Wine prime as a jewel thief. What would fucking Jack do in this cheaply shot biker flick, us bikers as dirty subjects? Grainy video shows Jack and us approaching the wall. Nothing happened. Wasted video.
My body pumps with the rumor of life, and my mind believes in the music of the Sun; its giant scythe of blinding white light waits for us this November riding to the Sea of Cortez, its blue tint a powerful pacifier. Nearby, a peasant labors to ride an old black bicycle. He may be Don Juan from Carlos Castaneda’s writings. His shrunken body leans over the handlebars, and his floppy watermelon hat riffles its brim without flying away—an agent of the apocalypse, or a lonely man cantering among the prickly saguaros? Lord, when he turns his wizened face of the sun towards me, does he know my fate? I ride on and wonder what has happened to the People of Don Juan.
Mile by mile, bare space testifies to failure, and a lot of what I see is not thriving.
My bike explodes through sand and its endless box of a hungry place where time is a mind warp not easily categorized. I lose track of it though, and my Harley-Davidson, desperate for traction, loses it on a sandy one-track road. Six times driving past my turn, but I didn’t see it. None of us did, and we couldn’t figure out what happened. Maybe it was a warp, and the ticking clock of blood and bone that is me— astride my Harley-Davidson—rides closer to a border we have already crossed. I daydream.
Senorita, look at my moving machine as it spits out pinecones, remnants of a once-living tree that will no longer straddle the earth. The revolutions of angst and daydreams of senoritas keep me guessing about time. Forward on the bike, I remind myself to not daydream. It’s dangerous.
Once while motorcycling on a high cliff in Hawaii during fierce winds, I was daydreaming and looking at the Pacific Ocean, my front wheel spinning revolutions and gripping a thin margin of error just inches from the edge and certain death, a Don Juan moment, a voice within my voice telling me not to die.
At the Harley-Davidson Museum in Milwaukee, a CAD drawing orders the sequence of the dirty work happening below my belt: 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’s active and lusty Id. Jack, my brothers, and I ride by faith and trust that the explosions below our belts will not blow up our balls and send us to another kingdom. Trust is necessary and underrated by bikers and actors.
Rolling again, the wheels are shredding cactus in a scene that Nicholson had written himself for his screenplay. Now he drives his black Mercedes around Studio City hoping to find a parking space in front of The Aroma Cafe. His smile, a trickster, combing his hair plugs and grinning into his rearview mirror murmuring, “I am the greatest that ever was.”
The bike I drive, banging its way through the streets on the way to my cheap café, is an agent of attraction and repulsion. Everyone hears the Harley-Davidson song because it’s loud. I rumble along cobblestone streets as my bike’s Big Twin engine belts a song from the chrome pipes and echoes between the worn buildings.
Vendors on this Malecón, tired of filthy rich gringos and gringas, are happy for the taco money, but they don’t want to look. They don’t need to. They have heard every biker’s sad story and see us wounded animals coming south, revving up rubber and spit in the acrid smoke of a burnout pit; loud, testosterone-fired homages to a furious Beowulf, a white man’s epic angst in the motorcycle’s sound and fury. Pfft, better to gather eggs from the chickens. But resistance to my bike’s open-throated rumble is futile…they must, and they do, turn and stare: cops, street vendors, women, and men.
It’s a school day and children are on the playground. A few of them run to the iron gate barring entry from the road. They smile at the leather-clad gringo and wave. He waves back. Washing over him, a tinge of regret thinking back to his school days.
Don Juan is now far behind, and I swerve to avoid a dog chasing its tail like a dust devil. Next to the wispy devil, a boy is holding a watermelon as if a gift for his mouth. He’s in my mirror instantly, of course, and the dust I throw rises like some withering cloud. Mexico, shit, I’m riding inside the belly of the beast, and gone are the McDonald’s with hand sanitizers and drive-through coffee.
The sun above, like a record spinning, keeps playing the same old Amboy Dukes’ tune, “Journey to the Center of my Mind,” and a refrain is stuck in my cochlea like an earworm, “But please realize, you’ll probably be surprised, for it’s the land unknown to man, where fantasy is fact. Come along if you care, come along if you care, come along to the land inside and you’ll see.”
Mexico’s land unknown to man rolls before me a landscape that rises and falls like its Zen Sea, and the brother outlaws accompanying me—as the Amboy Dukes predicted—confuse fantasy and fact; they weave, wander, and dodge past their imaginary animals. The fat one, on the way to the end of the road, looks like Orson Welles’ double leaning over his metal. He burned down his trailer back in Wisconsin for insurance money, and with it bought cocaine and a black poncho. His wife had to crawl through a window to escape because he forgot to tell her. Her hair was singed, her underwear sooty black, but he could have said “slutty black” but never did. He apologized and drove her to the motel where they stayed for the next three weeks B.M. Before Mexico.
The Barbarosa outlaw — close to the front of our pack — we call him Barbarosa for his rusty beard and ponytail and his way of singing old-school country songs, like “Crazy.” He’s the out-of-control coyote here, like Willie Nelson as the notorious Barbarosa in the 1982 film; and our bad boy has come to a stop. We pull a U-turn and lope toward a cholla cactus. “It needs to be watered,” he says, and makes a golden spray. Barbarosa’s mouth is full of happy juice and sorrow pebbles he inserts every time he thinks we aren’t looking. Mile by mile his hot bone angling for an appointment with pavement and gritty sand, where all the disciples of barley and malt end up sooner than they want. A drunken biker means trouble; the Doobie Brothers sang about this twisted end, “Drink Scotch whiskey all night long and die behind the wheel.”
A coyote crosses in the middle of the road, where his chances of survival are not good, and burns a good hard look down the cracked- fingered yellowed pavement. I brake and find myself gazing up into the eyes of a Mexican goddess. She wipes blood and pebbles from my face. I have been laid down like a living zombie on her sofa. I ask her about coyotes, and she laughs.
“Don’t move, you sorry gringo,” her middle-aged gruff voice tells me. “Let me see where you are damaged the most. My son is looking after your Harley, I think he likes it. He told me it was going to be fine. Penelope is my name, like in Homer—and you have been shipwrecked,” she points out.
Blinking sweat from my eyelids, she’s not fat but neither is she slim, just old, I observe from my supine position. A fan’s whirring in time above my head. No air conditioner. Heat billows from top to bottom, ceiling to floor, squelching flies like a sandwich to the man on a sofa; she wraps my mouth up with a towel full of ice.
I have been cleaned up and I guess my coyote brothers have wandered away without me…time warp again…when is it? Roadkill, that’s what they would say hours later, laughing in their beer and wondering if I’d ever escape Penelope or come back home over the wrecking wall.
Mexico’s mangy curs roam the side streets in town, their heads hung low, wary of us and their sharp-toothed coyote cousins that are hanging around just out there, a little way past city limit. Coyotes are smart and hunt in packs, but the curs don’t. They’re hungry, like the Mexican street vendors, singing their praises for porcelain masks, sugar skulls, and Chicklets.
Driven by empty bellies, curs and vendors move in close, looking past bad experiences with humans, ignoring the warning of our loud machines. The biker who killed the dog said it limped from the side of the road and walked right in front of her. “It committed suicide by motorcycle,” she said and wept. “The dog’s last look seemed sad, right up to the moment my front tire ran over its skinny body.”
We’re riding deeper and deeper into a broken territory on a two-wheeled track called risk. It’s as if reality stalls and the motorcycle dances in time with the dazzling sol of Mexico. With eyes to see, anyone would swear Salvador Dali painted the street where bar balconies, groaning under the weight of heavy bikers, are bowed like snow-covered branches. On the third floor of the Iguana Banana, above the balcony facing the blue sea, 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.
Penelope didn’t catch me, but I had a lonely feeling riding toward the wrecking wall that we call a border, and I will miss the fucking Sea of Cortez. Give me shrimp, fiestas, and senoritas, and I could exist forever on sips of Tequila and slices of aguacate. And if Penelope or Mexico’s Zen held me long enough, I’d join a mariachi band or go to a Shakespearean play in Spanish. That would be the shit, all those colores brillantes draped on Puck, revving the throttle of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” in a land unknown to man where fantasy is fact.
Border time again, going north, and I’m on the lookout for Carlos Castaneda on his bicycle. Time shifted when he showed up before—or warped—and my Harley took me down and to another place. I’m not nervous going back over the wrecking wall though, because this time I’m going to do what fucking Jack would do and he’s got heroic powers. We cross the wall and my brothers go north. I bid adios and go east to New Mexico where tricksters enchant the land, and sunsets slip away, spooky, and lovely.
On the sidewalk in Gallup, 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.
HOCKEY—what an idea, thanks Canada.
TEQUILA—what an idea, thanks Mexico.
A big sign over the Coal Street Pub’s door draws me in. I place
a toy monster truck in front of me on the bar and give in to desert thirst, ordering a tap beer. I hadn’t had one in a while, and when the frosty mug with golden liquid landed next to the monster truck, a husky, loud voice from across the bar offered, “Beer’s cold here!” BANDIDOS blared across the front of his red, yellow, and black hat. WWFJD?
What do you think about monster trucks? He raised his middle finger.
Got a biker name? “Chopper,” he said.
You ride with the Bandidos?
“Yep. That’s all I do. I go thousands of miles a month. I love
it.”
In a driving rainstorm one August night at the Sturgis Motorcycle Rally, far from the Coal Street Pub, thirty Bandidos on choppers rumbled into the campground, dismounted, and slogged through puddles to the social building. The owner tightened up. “They’re the worst of the worst,” he said. “I’ve got a shotgun under the bar.”
I was wary of the Bandidos in South Dakota and Mexico, but now, sitting across the bar from me in New Mexico, Chopper and I had connected by a mutual hatred for monster trucks and love for motorcycling. I asked if he’d like to hear a story about the monster truck. Poker-faced, in a flat voice, he said, “I like stories.”
Four months ago, a few friends and I met along the banks of Lake Superior to commemorate a deceased friend who loathed monster trucks, I said. My friend thought they were perfect symbols of aggression, senseless destruction, and waste. Brilliant, he was, with a dark and complex psychology deep inside. Complex psychologies can define a lot of people: Chopper, Barbarosa and Orson (brothers in my biker pack) and me, I suppose.
Chopper was listening. Our friend loved to travel, I said, and at his memorial, the group thought I should take the monster truck and his spirit riding with it on a motorcycle ride and leave him a place where another traveler could pick it up and keep him moving.
Powered by the energy of squeeze, suck, bang, and blow, I imagined my late friend would be singing a wide-eyed and happy tune, and I believed the chthonic power of bike explosions and the dark revolutions of Dunlop Tires would set his spirit free like a boy galloping on a horse, unhinged, and wild. And then I heard myself ask Chopper to take the truck and my deceased friend for a ride. When you are done, just leave him or pass him on.
Chopper looked and nodded. I knew he understood riding in memory of lost friends. Sending my friend away, galloping from Gallup with the Bandidos on a steel horse of smoke and fire had a ring to it, and it felt strangely divine to me. If the monster truck melted in a fiery pile-up of Harley-Davidsons, at least he’d have one last epic adios—like the way he went out of this world, taking a knife to his own heart.
We talked for a few minutes more, and then Chopper took a phone call. “I got to go meet some brothers,” he said, and strutted out the door with an I am the greatest ever strut—as Jack would do—and a toy snuggled in his massive, Muhammad Ali-sized hand.
Part of me walked out the door too with Orson, Barbarosa, Chopper, and my friend’s spirit in the monster truck. For a moment, back to daydreaming, I disappeared, and a screeching sound…a mystical horse with piercing eyes and breath of fire arrived. It drew closer and I heard the drone of dark engine horsepower on Gallup’s bad pavement. I imagine a glorious moment of travel. Chopper twisting his wrist and the engine rumbling on to misdeeds unknown, rider’s spirits unhinged and cutting razor-sharp lines between life and death while holding the edge on a circle thinner than high desert air.
My daydream was only a moment, then my cloudy eyes sharpened, my daydream cleared, and the loud horse redeposited me back to the Coal Street Pub’s barstool and my girlfriend. Under that spell, in a bar on Coal Street, enchantment led me to think of my friend’s spirit on a wild ride where Chopper would be his Beatrice, and both would be spinning on the dark circumference of worn treads.
Chopper didn’t show it, but awe and fear show up somewhere in every biker’s dark night, a soul-place untouched by sonnets for motorcycling, sestinas to Bandidos, iambic pentameters for the Highway to Hell, or haikus to Harley-Davidson. Like Zen, tequila, or coyote, iambic petameter for the Highway to Hell would find a way to reach in and around the dark night and speak to bikers, finding a way past resistance to poems and possibilities in the mysterious.
My wheels are rumbling again, and I have a vision, maybe an enchantment. Jack Nicholson rides in on the Highway to Hell. It’s a parade of decibels, diablos, and anxious cops heading to a Bandidos gathering. Jack’s going to use his famous voice to speak in iambic petameter where every story gyres deeper in the screw and bikers rev their smutty exhaust. He speaks, bikers listen, and coyotes yip and yelp from the wrecking wall to the mystic blue sea.
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