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."
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.
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.