The day I Became a Biker

There are a million stories about why this or that person is a biker, and about what it means to be a biker, or what a biker is or is not. The only real difference in this one is that I know the exact day that it happened to me. It was on a Friday, the third week of September when I was in the 9th grade.

Yeah, I know, that's a little young to plug yourself into an identity that you will carry for life, and to be honest, I really didn't know at the time that that was happening. Still, looking back, I have no doubts that that was the day it happened.

I was already a rider. That started on my 8th birthday when my Dad, in his usual drunken haze, decided to cough up thirty bucks to impress his oldest kid with a new Schwinn Stingray. I had been saving my lunch money for a bike, and was eyeballing the cheaper Sears version, but I was only up to seven dollars and was making more progress toward assuring that I would grow up as a skinny little guy than I was toward buying anything. It was one of the biggest shocks of my life to find out that the old guy had any idea what I wanted. It was the one time he actually succeeded in impressing me.

And don't laugh that I call this riding. A kid can learn a lot of valuable skills flying down a dirt road at 35 mph. and my town had some of the best downhill riding trails in the world.

It was a dried up dust bowl of a town nestled up against the rolling hills of the western San Joaquin Valley of Southern California. Don't let the So. Cal. location fool you. If you were to suddenly wake up there you would swear you were in Oklahoma. It was dry, dead, and dusty. It had briefly been an oil town that had drawn workers from Louisiana, Arkansas and Oklahoma and now that the oil was gone there was nothing for our Dads to do but get drunk and argue with each other in their southern accents.

The rolling hills, carved with oil drain ditches and criss-crossed with service roads, would have been heaven for dirt bike riders, but in those days no one that we knew of could afford a dirt bike. That left this downhill playground of winding dirt roads to us alone. There were half a dozen of us on our Stingrays and we spent 5 years riding almost every day.

Anyway, that's how I started to ride, but that had nothing to do with bikers. That started, like I said, at school in the 9th grade. I had gotten out of P.E. class early and was sitting on some old bleachers reading a book in the narrow alley behind the gym. I didn't really have any friends at that time and didn't really care. The kids I had been riding with were led by a self righteous little bastard that I had eventually gotten fed up with. Nowadays I kept to myself and read a lot. I was well on my way to becoming a nerd hermit.

It was a fairly dangerous town as poor towns usually are and there was was always someone looking for a fight. Gangs of older kids roamed the streets at night just looking for someone to beat up. I had avoided most of that by staying under everyone's radar, but of course, that wasn't always possible. On this day there were about 4 or 5 kids scattered out on those old portable bleachers waiting for the bell to signal the next period. I was sitting on the second row near the bottom when someone suddenly slapped my book out of my hand. It was this loudmouthed little weasel of a kid. I had seen him around, but I didn't really know him. He was mouthing off about something and calling me names.

It was clear what he was up to. I wasn't big, but this kid was even smaller and he had four friends huddled up behind him watching his performance. This kid was obviously looking for someone he thought he could push around so that he could impress his friends and show that, even though he was little, he was still tough enough to hang out with them.

I took one look at the situation and new immediately that I was screwed. I pictured myself walking into my house and telling my Grandma that my face was swollen and bloody because I fell down on the way home. I knew exactly what would happen. This kid would not let up and I would eventually have to punch him. I would bash his face in and as soon as he went down his friends would be all over me and I would get the shit totally kicked out of me by these four guys. I was really truly screwed.

I picked up my book and started to continue reading but, just like I knew he would, The Mouth knocked my book away again. I briefly considered letting him punch me and falling down, but even as I thought it, I knew I just couldn't do it. I stood up and stepped of the bleachers to face the kid, keeping my eyes on his friends who were now starting to grin. I kept thinking, I'm screwed, I'm screwed, I'm screwed. The Mouth swung at me and I punched him in the face. He looked cross-eyed for a second, blinked a few times, and then ran at me. I punched him again and his feet flew out from under him. I braced for the next guy and as they stepped forward I heard a voice behind me.

"Hey!"

They stopped.

"You're not going to gang up on my friend are you?"

I kept my eyes on the four of them, but they were looking past me, over my shoulder.

"That would not be nice at all." The voice continued.

I heard the bleachers creek as someone stood up behind me. The kids had stopped grinning and were now moving back a little. They started to look around as if they wished they had something else to do right now. The Mouth stood up wiping his lip, and he stepped back too. The bell rang and The Mouth told me I was just lucky that he didn't have time for this right now. He pointed and told me I had better watch my ass, and he and his friends walked quickly away.

I turned to see who had called me his friend, and saw a boy that I had never seen before. He had long blond hair and was a head taller than the other kids. He wore a denim jacket with the sleeves torn out to show arms bigger than I had seen on anyone our age. I saw immediately why they had backed off. This guy could probably whip a dozen kids and he was dressed like someone right out of those biker movies that had just gotten so popular.

"Thanks", I said.

"No problem", he said. "I hate it when people gang up on someone."

He stepped down and walked off to class. I went to class too, still a little stunned and wondering who the hell this guy could be. Later that day I found out.

As I walked home I saw him walking just ahead of me. It turned out that he had just moved in on my side of town and we had about a two mile walk together to get home. Jimmy had moved here because he had gotten kicked out of school in Bakersfield and they had made it clear that he wasn't welcome at any of the other schools there. Later I heard that he had punched a school counselor, knocking him right over his desk, because the guy had made Jimmy's mother cry.

Jimmy became my best friend and I learned more from him than from anyone else ever. I learned to stand up for what is right no matter what the odds, I learned that your personal honor is more important than what anyone says about you, and I began to have a sense of self worth that pulled me out of the hole I had been digging for myself.

Jimmy didn't teach any of these things. In fact, if he reads this he probably won't even know what I'm talking about. All Jimmy did was to be himself, but the person he was, was the best example that a kid in a run down town of drunks and losers could ever hope to find. Jimmy was strong, confident, self assured, and he hated an uneven fight. I met a person years later who knew Jimmy and asked him how they met. He said that he had been jumped by a bunch of guys in a movie theater and Jimmy had stepped in and saved his ass. That was Jimmy. He never considered the odds, he just considered right and wrong. We didn't have bikes in the 9th grade, but Jimmy had grown up next door to a Gypsy Jokers clubhouse, and he wanted nothing more than to build his first Bike. My love of riding drew me right into his world. We spent the next years planning the bikes we would build and swearing that we would never let anyone else's wrench touch our beloved rides.

I was shipped off to live on a ranch in the middle of nowhere, and then later I escaped to the Army. It never occurred to me that I might lose contact with him all together. Today I ride with a good bunch of friends. I don't think that any of them suspect that I am not the person I am today because of a father or and uncle, but because of a kid I met in school, but that's the truth of it. My best... No, my only example of how a man should act, was from a big 14 year old who wanted to be a biker.