Hey,
This is a test with Sam’s Picks of the Week as a backdrop. I’ve been bugged about a book about my life. But my life is checkered with ups and down and violent does and don’ts. So, this is sort of an attempt at an outline or rough story line. There won’t be a lot of description, just brief reflections on events.
I’ve bobbed and weaved and been damn lucky in so many respects. It’s like riding a fast motorcycle. Some guys can’t ride around a city-block without ending in a bone-jarring accident. A buddy of mine called today and talked about a biker’s walk. It’s an interesting gate or wobble with all the broken bones and a painful history of asphalt torn ligaments.
Some guys can’t get drunk without being beat to death by some gang behind a bar. Somehow, I survived a handful of such encounters even when I wasn’t drunk.
George Christie wrote a book and pissed off everyone. Then he switched it to fiction and some guys are trying to make a biker series about it in Spain. The Covid held up the shoot schedule, but they built a cast, and after Sturgis proved Freedom and motorcycles are better than masks, they set a shooting schedule starting in October.
I know George was sorta pissed at the club after being a member for 35 years he thought he could retire but got kicked to the curb, so his sizzling attitude guided his book effort. Survival was also a factor. There is no Hells Angel pension plan.
I strolled into a Chinese restaurant in the late ‘70s and opened a fortune cookie. The crumpled fortune cookie unraveled to declare, “You Will Be Lucky for Life!” I carried that glorious puppy in various leather wallets for 40 some years. Okay, fuck it. Let’s get started:
I grew up with violent parents who didn’t allow disrespect in any form and swatted and whipped my brother and I until we escaped. At five I started to run away. At 16 I tried it again. At 18 I succeeded and escaped to Vietnam for three tours aboard the 1st fleet flag ship, the St. Paul, a heavy cruiser. My brother did the same a year later. He ended up a captain of a river boat in Cambodia. Neither one of us wanted to have children, although I had a girlfriend who surprised me with my only son Frank. I wasn’t much of a father, mostly gone, being a biker.
My brother and I didn’t want to have kids, because in no way would we ever put a kid through what we went through. My brother responded to the violence differently than I did. That’s one of those massive lessons in life. No matter how I look at something, nobody else has the same slanted view of what happened. Nobody reacts the same way.
My dad was tough as nails and worked running a machine shop in the oil fields. Nobody fucked with him. He was a Seabee, WWII, Guadalcanal veteran. He liked to say, “If we fight, we fight to the death.” At about four my stepbrother was electrocuted flying model airplanes in Bakersfield, and that made me the oldest. A couple of years later my uncle and his son were assassinated in their sporting goods store in downtown Long Beach. My dad made them lead sinkers to sell as they struggled to make a go of it in the ‘50s.
Most of our violence came from threats, smacks, belts and punches from our parents. As teenagers my brother and I fought constantly, perhaps to relieve the tension. We had a cabin in Trabuco canyon, just down for Cook’s corner. One weekend I almost beat my brother to death in that cabin. He had a strange defeatist notion in violent situations and refused fight. “I’m not going to fight you, but fuck you anyway,” he’d tell someone. That got him into a couple of jams. Now that I think about it, that’s what my parents taught us, when it came to interactions with them. We could never speak up or defend ourselves. That’s maybe why I’m terrified of public speaking.
Once David did his thing in a black neighborhood where we were making up for bad algebra grades, during a sizzling summer school class. I had to escort him to classes for the rest of the semester.
I didn’t like fighting, but there was a violent edge to my surroundings, and I wouldn’t duck out, as much as I wanted to. I was in a High School fraternity for a short spell and we were fucked with by another club. I’ll never forget sitting in a lowered car in one of the first Mac Donald’s waiting for the gang to arrive.
We ended up face to face is a parking lot somewhere outside a school, in 1964, with tire irons and clubs. Our leader chose-off the leader of the other group and he backed down. We probably looked sorta tough, even if we didn’t feel it. I left the fraternity and bought my first motorcycle, a Honda 55 super cub and immediately wanted to customize it. Maybe I wanted to escape, and motorcycles became the path.
There weren’t many bike guys at our high school. My dad would not help with my used purchase, in fact he hated bikers and told me a story about a biker. Dad was a John Wayne time, neat and clean shaven. He drove the same way to work daily for 40 years, and a biker showed up one day on a new Triumph. As the months passed the kid’s hair grew, he grew facial hair and modified his motorcycle. One day he went down in some oil in front of my dad. He pulled over and confronted the kid on the concrete scrambling to get out from under his bike. “Are you alright?” My dad asked.
“Yes sir,” the kid said.
“Well, it serves you right,” my dad said, “you son of a bitch.”
I started to understand that I wasn’t a joiner, or I was constantly disappointed in groups of folks. They turned on each other. Like cops you call for help. They’re not going to go fuck with your neighbor, but if you have a joint in your ashtray you could go to jail.
I joined the navy, went to electronics schools on Treasure Island in Oakland, then to Vietnam where we bombed the shit out of the coast for three years. Sailors got drunk and into fights on the busses back and forth to whatever base we were docked at in Japan or Bangkok. Drinking wasn’t my thing, but girls were. I would rather find solace with a young prostitute that sit with a bunch of guys and get shit-faced.
I started to work out with weights, and I boxed some. I started training with some guys in the helicopter hanger in the stern of the heavy cruiser. It was mostly fun and good for us until they announced the smoker competition. Then shit got sorta serious. There was a giant black guy with monster arms who taunted me constantly, then the bastard didn’t sign up for the heavyweight bout. Again, I was scared shitless, but ready to go three rounds with the big guy.
Again, that notion of perception seemed to loom. I didn’t know it, but I was on a search for something. My first tour was short but like war. We went to general-quarters a couple of times a day and raced toward the coast. We could hear the artillery firing back at us as we swung to the port and unleashed nine 8-inch gun salvos at the coast. We were hit once, a hole the size of a Toyota compact in the side of the bow. During the second 7-month tour, I was determined to buy a new 1969 Sportster, which I did at Long Beach Harley when we returned.
This time the captain had a mission to shower Vietnam with more shells than anyone had ever dropped on this little sweaty, lush green country. Must have been a competition to become Admiral. I fucked up over sound powered phones, while in the command center. The Captain called me to the bridge, and I was forced to stand at his side for a few hours, while he told me how hard he worked. I was wearing a dungaree shirt with a peace sign drawn with a felt pen over my chevron. It didn’t go well and on my next report they used impunity in my description.
A few brothers started to get together to smoke a joint and listen to In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida and the wild toons from the era. We huddled in the back of an 8-inch gun turret. When another turret fired our record needle jumped across the vinyl. We had to find another stash for our weights and went back to training in confined spaces.
In a gadda da vida, honey
Don’t you know that I’m lovin’ you
In a gadda da vida, baby
Don’t you know that I’ll always be true
Oh, won’t you come with me
And take my hand
Oh, won’t you come with me
And walk this land
Please take my hand
In a gadda da vida, honey
Don’t you know that I’m lovin’ you
In a gadda da vida, baby
Don’t…
Oh, won’t you come with me
And take my hand
Oh, won’t you come with me
And walk this land
Please take my hand
During one of our many stops in Subic Bay the town of 300 nightclub/brothels and three restaurants, I had to rescue some of my shipmates from a wild riot in the dirty streets.
I got a sense of some notorious situations and sometimes found myself lucky to know when to turn the flame down or pull back. We ultimately dropped 87,000 rounds on the Coast of Vietnam in 1968.
When I returned, I hit Long Beach Harley, quick, on a Monday. They were closed. I also went to Bank of America for a loan. “We won’t give you a loan for two reasons: You’re in the service and it’s for a motorcycle.” I never did business with BOA again and my dad pulled all his accounts after 30 years of business.
I started to see a girl and fell in love. She was soft as satin with a heart of gold. We were stationed in San Diego and I rode that Sportster back and forth to Long Beach at the drop of a hat. I rode in the fog and almost fell asleep. I rode in the rain. I rode in the cold and I rode every path I could come up with to get to her side for even a few hours. One path led off a short cliff into scattered underbrush.
I didn’t know shit about Harleys, but I knew the oil fields, a machine shop, welding and wrenching. I started to learn motorcycles, quick. It was a kick-only XLCH and I didn’t get the Tillotsen carb. I flooded it every time and sometimes kicked for an hour, until it warmed up.
I got married for the first time to this delightful woman, Laurie and headed out to Vietnam again. My mother wasn’t happy. Laurie’s father was a salesman and her mother was fooling around on him. The whole family went to hell.
After my third tour I couldn’t wait to ride. Laurie, who would come out on the porch and start to cry anytime I peeled out with a group of riders. She took my photo on the Sportster, which I had painted while I was gone. I had the forks extended and my dad and I extended the risers. There was a transformation in our society. Dad, who believed the government could do no wrong shifted as we neared the late ‘60s.
I looked like a monkey fucking a football and immediately sold the Sportster and bought a 1966 Long Beach Cop bike, a Shovelhead. I immediately started to tear it down. I had a burning desire to do everything myself and tried. When brothers were scrambling to make it to the next Grateful Dead concert, I worked on bikes for friends and myself.
I was still searching for something bigger than myself. It was in most part, right at my fingertips, two-wheeled creativity. As a kid my folks forced my brother and myself to attend church. “We don’t care what church you go to, just get up and go to church!”
We begrudgingly hauled our scrawny asses to one church after another. The Catholic church intimidated us; other churches didn’t feel real. We kept looking until we found a little Lutheran church a few blocks away. I settled in and studied the bible, became a choir boy and was ultimately baptized. Laurie was a born-again Christian and I started to question organized religion.
I questioned a lot of shit through my life. I question the notion of Climate Change and started to study the facts. It seemed correct but had holes and was ultimately all about control and they used lies to support it. Two things stood tall for long run, Freedom and motorcycles.
Finally, when the St. Paul announced a fourth tour to Vietnam, I had to escape that big gray bastard. The company kiss-ass was offered a new assignment on a small destroyer, the USS Maddox, purportedly headed back to the dying conflict even sooner.
[photo 1014013]
I researched it and discovered its new assignment as a reserve training tin can. I took the orders and held my mud until the day I loaded my seabag and hit the road. For the rest of my naval stretch, I was stationed in my hometown, Long Beach.
Okay, what do you think so far? This is a fascinating exercise. It’s a search for the meaning of life. I’m constantly studying writing and I ran across a lecture series by James Scott Bell. This guy is sharp and I’m trying to follow his code of the west, which brings up a larger topic: my fucking life and everyone’s life.
–Bandit
