“I saw you rolling in on your bike,” said Hugh when I ran into him under the food tent where I was huddled against the ferocious rain.
“Yeah,” I said, “Another sucker.”
“It’s good,” he said. “You gotta to get soggy now and then.”
The block was lined with vintage motorcycles doing exactly that. “I hope my bike starts after this,” said another guy under the tent who was busy slathering mustard and ketchup onto a cheese covered hotdog.
During the worst of it, most people were crowded under the various tents but others continued to up and down the block, some covering their heads with newspapers or plastic bags, a few others carrying umbrellas, and others still resigned to being wet, hair matted, shoes saturated, carefree and soaked to the skin.
A band onstage finished up a song. “How you all doing?” said the singer. “Getting wet?” The sky yawned and the rain crashed down. “Goddammit.”
The band launched into another number despite imminent threat of electrocution. On the street in front of the stage, a group of people held a big blue tarp over their heads and danced.
The food tent was a hotspot — in both senses of the word — and too smoky and crowded to linger, so I headed to where, by far, the biggest crowd stood — inside Works Engineering, the motorcycle garage that was hosting. While eating my burger, I ran into a former garage-mate of mine, Patrick, who I hadn’t seen in over a year, maybe two. Although we haven’t really stayed in touch, we did trade emails a few months back, and so he knew about two my broken-bone motorcycle stories — about how I broke my foot last summer, and broke my arm six months after that. “About six months after breaking my arm,” I said, “I started getting really superstitious that something was going to happen again.”
“Ha, yeah, I don’t blame you. Such a crazy story, man. How are you doing though? Everything okay?”
“Yeah, it’s all good.”
“Your bike’s looking good,” he said. “I saw it when you pulled in.”
“Yeah, thanks. You’d never know it had been hit, right? How about you? Did you come here on your Norton?”
“Yeah,” he said, “it’s parked at the other end of the block.”
Patrick had the insane good fortune of being gifted a Seventies Norton Commando by a fashion photographer h used to assist for. The photographer owned it, but never rode it, and Patrick was always very vocal with his admiration for the thing. One day, on Patrick’s birthday if I’m remembering the story correctly, the photographer surprised him by giving him the keys. Like mine, some crazy stories are a drag, while some crazy stories are too good to be true. But it is, and I’ve seen the bike. It wasn’t his only crazy story, though. He had a new one.
I asked him how the Norton was running.
“It’s been great,” he said. “I’ve been riding it a lot this summer. A funny thing happened to me a few weeks ago. I’d been riding around and was parked the bike on the street and this chick comes up to me and says, ‘Nice bike, is it yours?’ I’m like yeah, it’s mine. ‘Nice’ she says. I look up at her and she is just smokin’ hot, okay? She’s wearing a short little mini skirt, with legs that won’t quit. I’d guess she was maybe 22. And I mean, really, super cute, looks like a fucking model, okay? She asks ‘Will you take me for a ride?’ I hesitate. I couldn’t do it.”
He didn’t say why he couldn’t do it and I didn’t get a chance to ask. Something to do with his girlfriend, maybe? Who knows.
“So she’s all pouty disappointed,” he continued. “She tries to talk me into it. I’m like, give me your number and I’ll call you a call in a few days and I’ll take you for a ride then. Okay, she says, and we trade numbers.”
If some of my other friends had been telling this story, I might’ve tempered my vision of what this girl looked like with a bit of skepticism. But Patrick works as a professional photographer and has also assisted for some of the top fashion photographers in the city. In the world, in fact, having also lived and worked in Paris for a few years. Patrick is no slouch himself. He’s a good looking guy, in his mid-thirties, and it’s totally within the realm of possibilities that a young attractive model would hit on him –or at least ask him for a ride.
“So we go our separate ways, and I kind of forget all about it. A week or two later, I get a text message. It’ this chick. ‘What happened to my ride?’ she asks. Like I said, by this point I’d forgotten all about it, so I call her and say, can you be ready in an hour? Yes, she says, and tells me where to meet her. I get myself ready, get on the bike and head over to her place. She comes out of her apartment and, no lie, she’s even hotter than I remember. She gets on back of the bike and we ride around. I take here and there, just ride around town for an hour. Now, we haven’t said more than three words to each other. She just got on the bike and we rode. After a while we stop for a drink. So we’re sitting at a table, making small talk when I notice she has this tattoo on her arm. I couldn’t really tell what it was, just some kind of design. I’m trying to come up with things to say, so I ask her about it. She tells me it’s in memory of her father. ‘My father dies three months ago.’ Oh man, wow, well I’m sorry to hear about that, I say. What happened? She says, ‘He died in a motorcycle accident.”
“Wow,” I said. “Was she working out some issues or what?”
“I know, totally. So we finish our drinks, I drop her off at home and that was that. I felt kind of like I was operating some kind of door to door motorcycle rides service.”
“I’ve had girls ask me for rides before,” I said. “One time I was on the street just outside my apartment — I used to live across the street from this restaurant and when it was nice out, people would hang out in front of the place. Waitresses and their friends. Shit like that. Anyway, this chick comes over and says, ‘My friend over there wants a ride.’ I look over to where she’s pointing and there’s this beautiful young girl in a sundress sitting on the sidewalk. She waves. I wave back. ‘Will you give her a ride?’ he friend asks. ‘I can’t,” I said. ‘Oh c’mon, just around the block?’ I gave her every excuse I could think of — that I didn’t have a spare helmet, that the girl’s little dress wouldn’t protect her legs from getting burned on my bike’s high pipes. Of course the real reason was that we were standing directly under my apartment window and if my darling wife happened to look outside, well, let’s just say that we would definitely need two helmets.”
The Hot Rod show held under the BQE every year was held the previous day — much nicer weather for that, unfortunately. I mean, the bike show was an open air block party while the car show was under the shelter of the elevated highway. It would’ve been nice if the weather had been the other way around, but so what? The rain was kind of fun and it didn’t keep too many people away — the beer still ran out by mid-afternoon ad the food followed soon after.
