Harley and Me

Opportunity dances with those on the dance floor.

—ANONYMOUS

As a teenager, the names Fonzie, the Fonz, Arthur Fonzarelli, and Henry Winkler could all rocket me to a fourth dimension. I was a tomboy, a girl who competed and was ranked nationally in skateboarding slalom, a young lady more comfortable in a pair of Vans slip-ons and corduroy OP shorts than kitten heels and skirts. I liked to hang with the guys at empty, abandoned swimming pools getting “vert” rather than go to the mall with girlfriends to shop. But when it came to having a celebrity crush, I was about as girly as you can get.

I bought fan magazines, went to every movie Henry Winkler made, read his biographies, toyed with acting because that would put me in the same mental territory as this man/character/dream figure. Though the Fonzie character was my favorite, Winkler didn’t have to be Arthur Fonzarelli to make me swoon. He played a Vietnam vet in the 1977 film Heroes that I practically memorized. I bought a sweater and shirt just like he wore in the movie. I had a sense that I knew him, and that he understood me. If we were to sit down and talk, I believed, we’d pick up a conversation that had already been in progress.

Perhaps I was searching for male approval. My father was a wonderful, loving man. But he was preoccupied caring for my mother, traveling for business, watching out for my youngest brother who was fast becoming a juvenile delinquent, trying to tend the five basically motherless kids in our family. All this while he strived to keep food in the kitchen cabinets and making sure we went to Mass on Sundays. I’m sure, in some way, my father would have given me that approval if I’d known how to ask, but I didn’t. I was afraid and uncertain, convinced that the disappointment of not receiving his approval would be worse than never asking.

When I couldn’t get the approval I was looking for at home, I sought it with my skateboard and the grudging respect I earned from the boys. Male approval was male approval, after all. But soon, even that power faded and I looked where young girls turn next for that anointing: my own sexual power. Only, in adolescence, I didn’t really know that’s what I was reaching for.

• • •

The desk of Alex, the chrome and pipe specialist at Harley-Davidson of Glendale, features a picture of Fonzie sitting on a Triumph motorcycle with a girl wearing a skirt sitting on the back, holding on to him fetchingly. The photo surfaced from the auction catalog when the actual motorcycle was found in someone’s garage after years of storage and neglect. I was hanging out with Alex while my bike was being serviced. I hadn’t thought about my Fonzie obsession in decades.

“I always wanted to be Fonzie,” Alex said of the TV character whose last official appearance dates back nearly thirty years. Alex is almost ten years younger than me and must have gotten in on the tail end of the Happy Days era. “He was just so cool.”

I nodded. “I always wanted to date Fonzie,” I replied, plunking myself into the proper gender-specific role. As a girl who’d grown up in the ’70s, I couldn’t rightly wish for more than that. Yet I couldn’t explain to Alex that my yearning was deeper, more visceral. I wanted to consume Fonzie—just like the Holy Communion I took each week at Mass—and by ingesting him, to engender in myself the qualities I so admired.

The conversation went on to other motorcycle-related subjects, but something was amiss. I’d just lied to Alex and, more important, to myself.

“Actually, I take that back,” I clarified, knowing the truth didn’t matter to Alex but it did to me. “I wanted to be Fonzie, too.”

After that conversation, I decided to look deeper into my Fonzie obsession. Certainly, the Fonz has been an important role model, demonstrating what it meant to be immune from peer pressure and true to one’s self. That made perfect sense at an age when my identity was forming. But now I was in midlife with established demographic markers—professor, author, homeowner, mother of three—when coolness seemed radically beside the point. Yet the more I thought about my long-forgotten Fonzie fascination, the more I found the qualities he’d embodied as important as ever. I was grappling once again with issues of identity.

Alone for the first time in my life, I now make my home in a one-room apartment settled above a garage, just like Fonzie. Riding my motorcycle, I wear boots and a black leather jacket, just like Fonzie—though to be fair, I wear spring dresses and lace blouses when not on the bike. I am learning to make my way through life as a solo person, no longer tied by traditional family bonds, but a loner like Fonzie. I feel myself channeling some of the energy, the chutzpah, the generosity of spirit I found in the character. In short, I find myself needing to emulate Fonzie in order to survive.

My phone rings one evening while cooking dinner.

“Hello,” a gentle male voice speaks. “This is Henry Winkler.”

I almost drop the phone. “You just made my night,” I say.

Weeks ago, I’d told a writing colleague, who coauthors his Hank Zipzer series of children’s books, that I’d love to chat. I never thought he’d actually call. He graciously agreed to schedule a phone interview. I try not to gush.

• • •

By the end of my sixteenth year, I gave up my skateboard and Levi’s 501s for high-heeled Candie’s sandals, makeup, and giggles. I wore Calvin Klein must-lie-prone-on-the-bed-to-zip-them jeans. I learned to toss my hair and came to understand that boys didn’t want to hang with girls at empty swimming pools if they could make out with them in cars.

If that’s what it took to have male energy in my life, I was game.

That first boyfriend, who seemed like the only person in the world who knew the details of my home life and who was concerned about me, pressured me into having sex when I’d been just as happy to cuddle. And just like that, my life changed permanently. Ugly notes were left on my high school locker, cruelties whispered by former friends within earshot. That was the surface damage. More injurious was the cloud of shame surrounding my sexuality that would shadow me for the next thirty years.

I finished my education and was married upon graduation to the most Richie Cunningham–type man I could find. No more bad boys for me! I never lived away from home, didn’t date widely, and chose as soon as possible what seemed the only safe role available. In short order I became a mother and settled in. Long gone were both extremes: the tomboy in torn Levi’s, as well as the girl surprised by her budding sexuality, unsure what the sensual realm entailed other than trouble.

My life choices after high school were exactly what my father would have wanted. Traditional Irish Catholic to the core, he prized the virtue of motherhood above all else and was most pleased with me when I fulfilled that role. I wanted his approval more than anything. On the other hand, he disapproved of my writing. When my first book was published, I’d included just a few sentences about my mother’s mental illness and the quality of silence that had filled our home in the narrative about knitting. He was so angered by those words that he didn’t speak to me for two years. I tried through my writing to get him to see the “real” me, asking him to acknowledge who I was. But he preferred the construct he’d already created: the good wife and mother to his grandchildren, the docile and obedient woman he’d hoped I’d become.

• • •

But the motorcycle changed everything. The minute I got the machine to skim smoothly over the blacktop, I was hooked. The genie was out of the bottle and not about to go back in. As I began to master the bike, a more complete version of myself fused. Weaving through orange cones on the training range, I sensed the two parts of me work in tandem for perhaps the first time in my life. I felt as weightless and graceful as a dancer, executing moves of precision and elegance, as feminine as possible, while also aware of the brawn and boldness required to get that machine to do what I wanted.

When I interview Henry Winkler, I ask him about his experience with the motorcycle. I’d heard he was terrified of it.

“Not terrified,” he explains. “But I almost never rode the motorcycle. I think I rode it for, like, twelve feet. But I was intimidated. I did not think that I could ride it with the internal confidence of not spilling it. I did not think I could figure out the hand, and the hand, and foot, and the hand, and the gear, and the speed, and the brake.”

I am ashamed of the hint of smugness I feel, hearing this. No wonder getting my motorcycle endorsement at the DMV felt so great. I had mastered a skill even he had shied away from.

So what was the draw of the motorcycle for the Fonzie character—the outlaw persona, the macho element, the beauty of the mechanics?

He laughs. “All of it! He rode a motorcycle, loved it, loved just sitting on it.”

I know the feeling. Not overnight, but fast enough to draw strange looks in my suburban world, leather boots and a jacket appeared, followed by a matte-black machine. The approval I’d craved from my father, my husband, and men in general was now rising up from within me. For the first time in my life, I didn’t simply want to be the Fonz. I had, on some psychic level, become him.

• • •

For me, perhaps the motorcycle is a metaphor. To be clear, it isn’t an act and the clothes aren’t a costume, but simply protective gear, not unlike the padded shorts I wore as a skateboarder. And because I have never again since high school actively sought to appear overtly sexual in my manner of dress, I can wear my black leather gear with no self-consciousness.

At least, that’s what I thought.

I was dressed in my leathers one day at Rebecca’s shop, looking at helmets and chatting with the guys. Quentin introduced me to one of his biker friends.

“You ride?” the friend asked, probably wondering if I just sat on the back of some guy’s bike.

I nodded.

“She also runs marathons,” Quentin added, as if that explained the motorcycle thing.

The friend did what no one had done to me in decades—the slow up and down with the approving nod. Every inch of my thighs felt lit in neon.

“I can tell,” he said. “With legs like that, you could cut diamonds.”

I was so embarrassed I fumbled my words and dropped my helmet. (Dropping a helmet can compromise its integrity and is a huge no-no.) I scrambled to leave as quickly as possible.

That moment of male attention, after years of actively avoiding it with mom-type jumpers and loose-fitting clothing, felt unfamiliar and unpleasant, tinged with something akin to disgrace.

I was able to identify the source of my shame, and within a day or two to let it go. The sexual vibe given by the leathers, I decided, was a vibe others were adding, an identity I did not have to be categorized by. The safety equipment I wear is not meant to be someone’s sexual fantasy. If there were a female Fonzie, I reflected, she would totally blow off this guy’s sexualized read of my manner of dress.

And so I did, reclaiming a sense of my own sexuality and attractiveness. A few weeks later I allowed my daughter to pick out jeans for me a full size smaller than I usually wore. Thanks to the years of running, I could comfortably downsize. At first, I felt silly, like I was trying to be younger than my years, a “cougar” in the making. But compliments followed, and others encouraged me to play up the figure and features I’d worked hard to preserve. Soon, I was able to recapture a bit of the teen girl I’d left behind, the hybrid tomboy and sex kitten, but who could still own both parts of herself.

• • •

When Neil, away at college, called to ask about the separation between his father and me, he asked a question. “Mom, did the motorcycle have anything to do with it?”

“Of course not,” I replied, which was the truth. But not the whole truth. The motorcycle had allowed me to reconnect with the part of me that had lain dormant all those years. I had found myself again—a self my father did not want to meet, a self that hadn’t fit with my husband for at least a decade.

I am alone on most days, now. After two decades raising three kids, the sound of backpacks hitting the kitchen table after school and the sight of dirty socks on the living room floor are no longer part of my life. A motorcycle doesn’t keep me warm in bed and isn’t a lot of fun to confide in. But like Fonzie, I feel okay being on my own now and whole again for the first time in a very long time. Beloved. Anointed, finally, if only by myself.

Alas, it’s a fleeting sensation. Six months later, a setback will come out of the blue and challenge all the advances I have gained.