Meat Loaf's album Bat Out of Hell had a lot to do with this, initially. The motorcycle as a mighty means of escape has been lauded in many a story and song, but Bat Out of Hell is on the short list of things that got me through the tumultuous teenage years, and so had the most impact. Life and love gone wrong, the Gods and odds stacked against me, I felt I had every reason to be skipping town in a hyperbolic (and egomaniacal) flourish back then, very much in the market for a 'silver black phantom bike' to propel me to a better world, and the over-wrought nature of the music on that album aptly mirrored the denseness of my restlessness (and egomania). Yes, for better or worse, Bat Out of Hell was the official soundtrack of my teenage years, inspiring videos (of homage), short stories (revolving around a similarly tortured soul) and my own stab at composing a rock opera (one part hubris, two parts acne). I even grew my hair long, just like the big singer. I got to admit, I had one gorgeous flowing mane of red hair my junior year, though I looked a lot more like Jim Steinman than Meat Loaf.
I still think Bat Out of Hell is a great album musically and vocally, a standard bearer for rock opera, a true original, and to this day Heaven Can Wait scores pretty high on my Top 10 list of all-time loveliest ballads, but I've outgrown Meat Loaf for the most part, long moved on to other musical heroes. Enough time goes by, things stop being overwrought, the peaks and valleys thin out, and most of us find a place in the ancient mountain range that's left to build our estate.
But my interest in motorcycles outlasted Bat Out of Hell. I never actually got around to acquiring my license to ride, but a buddy taught me how on some back roads one summer, I grew comfortable with it, and in a move that may or may not have been related, wore a leather biker jacket for many years. I don't know how or why this happened, exactly. It did not matter that I absolutely was not a 'biker' by any conceivable interpretation of the word, I saw that sucker at a Wilsons in a Des Moines, Iowa shopping mall and, for reasons I could hardly explain then, much less now, had to have it. The person I was with told me it made me look 'like a bad ass', and I bought it, and bought the jacket, and thus, there was a period in my early twenties when I - a red-blooded, heterosexual male, whose geographic and socio-economic background should have discovered him swilling Zema in his zubaz at that age - would leave the house for a night out dressed in skin tight black jeans, a green button-down silk shirt, black steel-toed boots and this jacket, and wonder why men hit on me at bars. I blame all my friends at the time, and my parents too, for failing to recognize someone in desperate, desperate need of a little straight eye for the straight guy.
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JUST PLAIN WRONG - For the likes of me anyway, daring to step out of the house in this 'biker' jacket, having never owned a motorcycle, nor reflected even marginally the slightest portion of the lifestyle it's intended to represent. (Er, no, actually, I don't know why I still have it...)
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You don't have to be an actual biker to ride, of course, you just need to know how, but you also have to really love it, and the truth is, what once intrigued me about riding holds little or no appeal these days. Being out in the open as you cruise along, your senses alive and tuned in to your surroundings, doesn't hold water the way it used to. It just looks uncomfortable, and my life is all about comfort from here on out. Whenever I'm driving on the highway and someone on a motorcycle passes in a one-second explosion of engine noise, I think of the wind ripping their hair out, bugs slamming into their face like comets into planets, blistering heat setting off sweat storms, their burnt skin, their sore back, sore ass, and cannot imagine how this translates into something invigorating. 1/48/50 is a 14,000 mile road trip, during which I'm simply not going to want to have to tap all that deeply into skill sets. I will not want to have to sit up straight and keep my balance and concentrate on the road unduly for four or five hours at a time, put on sun screen, wear a helmet.
That's not living nebulously.
I could get a Can-Am Spyder, I guess, if I'm worried about balance: the Zema of motorcycles. But then I might as well just don the old biker jacket, silk shirt and skin tight jeans, light up an e-cig, take a swig of a wine cooler and be done with it.
What do I mean, exactly, by living nebulously...?
