[Sidebar] July 3 - 10, 1997

[Features]

Biker nation

Photos by Mark Ostow

Text by Stephen Heuser

[Autumn Blaze]

Autumn Blaze (above) comes from Danvers. She wears a different outfit each day of bike week: Friday, it's a skintight halter dress; Saturday, a pair of white shorts and two Harley-Davidson patches. Every day, she estimates, a thousand men take her picture. I ask her boyfriend, or handler, or whoever he is, if he minds the leers. He just laughs: "Hey, that's what people come for."

[Tattoo Man] They sure do. No single phrase is heard more at a bike rally than "Show us your tits!", which sounds scary and insulting and coercive until you realize that for plenty of women, it's just another part of the day. It's what people come for. To see the lace body suits, the leather vests, the thong bikini bottoms. To see the augmented parts like Autumn's, and also to see the bony shoulder, the hanging white belly, the bit of hair below the navel. If the men seem to be playing a kind of peekaboo, disappearing behind their tattoos and mirror shades, a lot of their old ladies are here showing themselves off to the world.

The Tattoo Man (above right) is here showing himself off, too. The Tattoo Man is like a hallucinatory exaggeration of what we expect of a biker. He has what body-art fans call total coverage, and he also has a menacingly distended gut, a do-rag, and a thick beard. But the Tattoo Man also counters the biker myth: he wears a nerdy little fanny pack around his waist, He's older than my parents, and he stops politely for photographs and interviews.

[Couple with Flag] So that's the big secret: bikers just aren't that scary. Laconia businesses even sponsor events to entice bikers from the Weirs into the center of town. To be sure, some of the Harley diehards are coarse xenophobes with bad teeth and an untamed mammary fixation. But others are college-educated, or young parents, or gym-toned gay guys. On balance, the serious riders, the flagbearers for the culture, seem to be the kind of salty, no-bullshit egalitarians whose alienation from mainstream America may be our loss. In the city, the chest-rattling percussion of a giant V-twin engine is a defiant shout. Here in Laconia, once a year, it's a thrum of welcome to a new country.

| home page | what's new | search | about the phoenix | feedback |
Copyright © 1997 The Phoenix Media/Communications Group. All rights reserved.