I Love Being a Biker
Posted: Saturday, January 29, 2011
by Gregory Potter
Leather Biker Accessories
Back in the day when I actually believed a biker had to look the part, I was inclined to wear a chain on my wallet, which added to the nature of being a bad ass, or so I thought. I was young and still afraid of what people thought of me, a misconception that soon turned into an obsession when I met a guy by the name of Al, short for Alan. He was a biker in all the means except for the fact that he didn’t actually own a motorcycle. Now a days, that’s called a ‘wanna be biker’, but we didn’t know the slang for it back then. Al wore biker boots, a square nosed leather boot with metal rings on either side strapped on with leather straps, 8" or 10" high with a 2" heal. He was 6’1" tall, which already, at that age, scared most high school students away from his presence, and I was impressed with that, so we started hanging out together.
When I fled Al’s house, I built a trailer out of scraps I had found scouring Watertown, Wisconsin. I found people who were willing to sell me or give me items that were lying around their yards or in the back barn for many years. The axle and frame, cut off 4 feet in front of the axle came from an old GMC truck that was sitting in an old man’s back forty for years. I picked it and a whole lot of steel stock up for $100.00 and picked up the wood plywood for the sides of the trailer, from Home Depot. I brought my welder with me from California, so I fabricated a trailer large enough to tow 360 cubic feet of junk I had accumulated over the years. I towed that enormous trailer behind a small but mighty Isuzu quarter ton pickup from Wisconsin back to California with only one breakdown. Of course, the truck only lasted another month after the trip, with the transmission slipping in first and second, so I traded it for a Ford 4x4 truck and payments of two years.
I was a ‘biker’ for many years before finding out about Al. I owned my first Harley Davidson motorcycle at the great young age of sixteen, a 1974 Harley Davidson 1000cc Sportster that my uncle helped me buy from the local Harley shop. I had received my driver’s license only six months earlier and in my eyes, I knew how to drive, and I rode motorcycles off road for years prior to that. I was well on my way to being a real ‘biker’. The local motorcycle club was the Seven Sons MC out of Chippewa Fall, Wisconsin and I wanted to be part of them at the age of seventeen. That in itself wasn’t possible, due to my age, but they allowed me to hang around with them and go to functions around the area with them, I just wasn’t allowed in the pack, so I rode behind them. Bikers were telling their bros that I was their ‘future prospect’. In my mind, I was a bad ass biker, prospecting for an outlaw motorcycle club and most people in that area knew who the Sons were, so I seldom ever got into a fight or was told to leave a party for fear that it would come back on them later. This soon changed when I was caught stealing a car and the judge decided that I should spend some time away from the havoc I was getting myself into, thus the USMC was my next stop for the next three years. I thanked my uncle for that little move after he told me what he’d done in the courts for me, but that took a year after I was discharged from the corps with a general discharge, under honorable conditions for punching an officer out and going AWOL for six months.
I think I was destined to becoming a biker, long before I actually became one, even though I thought I was one at sixteen, with a chain attached to my wallet. I was always the rebellious type, even in school; I would refuse to do homework and barely graduated high school. The Corps taught me how to fight and defend myself, so I proved it and got kicked out. The law was always messing with me, no matter what I did and it was usually my fault, but I was rebellious and no one was going to tell me I couldn’t drink all night and then ride myself home after the party. I hung with the ‘gutter’ people, the outlaw biker crowd and the undesirables. I went to jail many times and yet it took me years to figure out that I was the problem.
A biker doesn’t have to ride a motorcycle in an outlaw motorcycle gang and perform outrages deeds for the club to be a righteous biker. A true biker is a person, usually a man, because lady bikers are usually women acting like men that ride a motorcycle more than he drives an automobile. A biker loves the wind in his face, the sun on his back and straddling a powerful engine with two wheels instead of four. He is usually a man that doesn’t adhere to societies rules; he naturally goes against this type of thing. He may be tied down to a job, an ol’ lady and a few kids, but when the time is right and the open road is call him out for a put, he doesn’t hesitate, he rides. A biker is an attitude, a way of life, a desire to be what he wants to be, not what everyone else wants him to be. The bike doesn’t sit in the garage for more than a week collecting dust, while the enthusiast waits for the weather to clear, no a biker rides it even in the craziest weather.
I’ve been a biker with all the bells and whistles for over 35 years now and I wouldn’t change a thing. The path was mapped out for me long before I was 16 and now I’m 53 years of age and I’ve been through two divorces and three marriages. I’ve run with some of the worst and some of the best. I’ve flown several different sets of colors and lost many brothers and sisters over the years and still, I love being a biker.
This Article has been viewed 440 times. (Not updated in real-time.)
No comments yet.We want your comments! If you can read this, you don't have javascript enabled, so you can't use this comment system. Please enable javascript.