We settled in the last chapter that you probably belong in a coffee house, but you’ve got a wild hair, so you’re living dangerously, willing to slum it for a chapter or two. So be it. I’ll put up with you for a few more pages if you ask nicely.
It would be so easy to say, “the hedonists inhabit the biker bars and the idealists are in the coffee houses,” and this is not entirely wrong; it conveys the kind of truth that other sorts of hackneyed generalizations have—they became hackneyed for a reason. In this case, it is sort of like saying “there are animals in the zoo and fish at the aquarium.” Generally speaking, yes. It’s not very informative, and indeed, it’s far more fun to go to the zoo and the aquarium than to give a taxonomy from a distance of their likely contents, especially at the abstract level of sub-kingdom. In philosophy, hedonists and idealists are like sub-kingdoms (about equally plentiful, but with little intersection of habitat). Of course there are idealists in coffee houses and hedonists in biker bars, but why? What kinds? Why can I become a coffee house hero with my Marxist invective when the same speech will only get my ass kicked in a biker bar?
Let’s begin by noting: no Marxist would be unwelcome in a biker bar just for being a Marxist; there are some socialists and even a few Marxists to be found in biker bars. Che Guevara rode a bike. But biker revolutionaries know to keep that sort of thing to themselves, as does most everyone else in the biker bar. The trouble with your coffee-house revolutionary is that he is usually a dweeb without common sense enough to realize that a part of “live and let live” is “think and let think,” which means don’t shoot off your mouth unless you intend to do something about it, you pencil-neck. . . . Sorry. I am way ahead of myself.
What follows is mainly for the coffee house dweller who has always wanted to grasp something about bikers and the bikes they ride, but who has been too far on the outside of that culture to learn much about it. You can’t actually get this down without experiencing it all first-hand, but assuming it is not practical for you to hop a Harley and ride as a way of life, perhaps the figurative ride we take in this chapter will serve as a substitute, albeit a pale and wordy one. Those who already know the culture of bikes and bikers may not learn as much from what I have to say, but I suspect there are some things written here that they may have understood vaguely for many years without ever bringing them into expressed form. If there is value in this chapter for bikers themselves, it will be in the pleasure of recognition, or perhaps in the pleasure of disagreement with my generalizations and conclusions. I hope none of you will be disappointed, but in any case strap your hands across my engines while we get out of town (with or without the bones from our backs).
This beast starts. Some will ask “where are we going?” Those inquirers need to stay at home. It would be ridiculous to suppose we need a destination before we hit the road. There are no Aristotelians in the biker bars and precious few in coffee houses (where they are disliked, but they do order the more expensive concoctions, the double full nelson latte mocha with sprinkles and whipped cream—keeps the place in business, you know). Aristotelians believe the journey does not mean anything unless the purpose and end is already present in the beginning. Those sorts of people need to serve their bureaucracies and then die their meaningless deaths. They never want to admit that the one universal end and destination for all life is death. I would rather “do lunch” with a BMW-driving Heideggerian. These Aristotelians who fill our cities find death uncomfortable, and instead say that things like flourishing and health and happiness are the prescribed ends of human life. They conveniently explain away the observation that flourishing and happiness are at best transient conditions of a process that marches inexorably towards the grave, and they vote for Republicans and Democrats, convincing themselves there is some sort of difference between the two. Those who will take this ride with us are untroubled about the fact of dying and do not expect happiness or flourishing. For us the question is how well shall we live and how well shall we die. When this question is understood deeply, we stop competing with the Joneses and find our churches beyond the walls of Aristotelian acceptability. Heaven becomes for us not a destination but a relation between what is, what has been, and what will be. The Kingdom of Heaven is within, I think Springsteen once said. Or was it Kerouac? Anyway, it was right.
I know a place called the Iron Post just a few hours away from town where we can stop. We can worry about the rest later, or maybe not.
In many hours spent in conversation with bikers, I have come to think that their genuine variety is often underestimated by the conservative middle class. I am not interested in trying to rid the suburbanites of their ignorance or in reorganizing their prejudices. But I do think that one thing I’ve never seen attempted is a sketch of the philosophical schools into which bikers most often fall. In spite of my own preference for Hondas, I spent a lot of time in biker bars as a musician—bikers love music, all kinds—and I was privileged to befriend many fine philosophers there who would not have darkened the door of a college. The band gets a privileged look inside the world of biker culture, basically because of that soft spot for music. No matter how geeky you may be, if you can wail on a Strat or thump a bass or pound those skins, you are welcome at the biker bar. Indeed, unlike other folks, musicians actually get the benefit of the doubt and not only are well-treated, but protected from the usual rough and tumble. It is part of a complicated unspoken web of mores, or social rules, that I can more easily illustrate than explain. The illustration comes later in this trip. But suffice to say, like many other musicians, I learned what I learned about bikers from the vantage of the bandstand; recall that the band is the first to arrive and the last to leave.
Before we get to the Iron Post, there are a few basics we need to be clear about so that we don’t cause any trouble. Our steed is up and running but remember, it may be a Harley-sized question we asked in the last chapter, but it’s really a big Gold Wing touring bike. The fellows who ride the Harleys don’t put much stock in such questions. So we are riding a Honda over to the other side. We don’t actually fit in very well at the bar, but we will be welcome enough as long as we don’t behave like the coffee-house jerks we actually are.
Rule number one is reserve your judgment about the choices and lifestyles of others until you have walked a mile in their shoes, no, ten miles, or better yet, just reserve your judgment indefinitely. You will never fully understand why they are the way they are, even after spending years getting to know them, so save your high-handed judgments for another time and place, or if you want to get yourself on the path to true wisdom, let this experience be the beginning of a therapy that will enable you to let all that judgment leave your troubled mind for keeps. There is enough to worry about in this world without adding your uninformed opinions about how other people live to that pile.
Second, I especially need you to bite your tongue regarding what you will see as the misogyny of this lifestyle. That issue is very complicated. Our opinions will not change the facts and our judgments will not affect the practices. Is this a patriarchal subculture built upon the logic of domination and the objectification of women, consumed with self-absorbed machismo? Perhaps. Get used to it. No one forces anyone into this kind of life. Spare us your crypto-paternalism regarding how some young girls might be seduced by false promises. If you start talking this way when we are at the Iron Post, I may just leave you there.
A third thing to grasp is that philosophy is more enacted than propounded in the biker bar. In the coffee house, it is the reverse, of course. Plenty of the good folks we find at the Iron Post could talk a coffee-house dweeb in circles, if they wanted to, but they don’t. The best course of action is to buy a beer, sit back, observe without obtruding, and talk to whomever decides to talk to us. If we sit with an obvious open spot at the table and comfortable, nonjudgmental countenances, plenty of interesting people might talk to us. Bikers are generally both gregarious and curious, close observers and generous spirits.
Finally, you must understand that you will accept whatever hospitality is offered, no matter how peculiar the offer may be. It is not uncommon for the first approach to our sort (and they will know what sort we are) to be calculated to determine whether we are . . . well, I’ll use Heidegger’s terms . . . persons given over to the shallow and inauthentic form of self-experience. If you are offered something to drink, drink it. If you are offered something to smoke, smoke it. It can get stranger than that, but you get the idea. Our future friends will ask for an expression of both trust and openness before any exchange will occur. You will not be harmed simply for being uncool and ill at ease, and if you want to be trusted, you have to trust. Alright, here we are, at the Iron Post. Let us go inside and order something to drink.
It occurred to me, years after I traded in my electric bass for an acoustic guitar, that there really is something in the history of philosophy that would serve as a fair scheme of classifying the philosophers I have known who ride Harleys (and belong on them). The scheme follows almost precisely the standard schools of Hellenistic Platonism. Don’t ask me why. I think there is probably a real connection between bikers and pagans, but whether I could actually trace the genealogy that way I don’t know. Let the analogy suffice for now and you can get historical if you need to on your own time. Here, roughly, then, are the four philosophies I have seen developed and expounded over beers.
If you’re comfortable enough, leave a space there at the end of our table nearest to the bar, and turn the chair part-way out. The fellow who owns this place goes by the name of Cowboy. He picked that name up in Nam, where he was a chopper pilot, U.S. Army Cavalry. He has a master’s degree in mechanical engineering. Some bikers have fancy educations, some do not, but none regards the degree as designating anything of great importance. That’s just a piece of paper. What it means in concrete terms, if it means anything at all, is that not only can Cowboy fix just about anything, he can create all sorts of contraptions to do just about anything he wants done. He opened this place about twenty years ago with his old lady Rose (they have been together since before the war). They have a good business sense and know how to keep things light. Cowboy is an Epicurean, which is just about my favorite sort of biker.
Epicurus1 lived from 341 to 270 B.C.E. and came from a beautiful island called Samos (more bicycles than bikes there). In about 307 he established a little community called The Garden. It was a place where his friends could gather, enjoy wine, cheese, conversation, and music. He believed that the best way to live was to pursue the kinds of worldly pleasures that are most sustainable and that lead to the least trouble and pain. Moderation is not an absolute requirement, but it is wise advice. Epicurus did not think the gods were sufficiently interested in human affairs to bother to intervene or even take note of our distress or joy. It is up to us to make for ourselves the best of our human lot. Chance is something very real in the universe, but we can minimize its negative impact on us by shielding ourselves from the aspects of life in which chance runs roughshod over people’s aspirations to happiness, such as politics, business deals, and deep involvement in the outcome of struggles for power. A certain willingness to withdraw from that sort of stuff will give a person the best possible shot at a good life.
For Cowboy and Rose, the Iron Post is not a money-making establishment, it is not an investment; it is a space where life can happen. Striving to keep it open and hospitable, protected from overzealous law enforcement or the world of jerks, is what Cowboy and Rose want. They create an atmosphere in which people look out for each other, in which friends will prevent friends from saying words that damage the honor and dignity of others such that only violence can restore the balance. By years of selfless service to this community they nurture, Cowboy and Rose have cultivated a deep, deep loyalty among both the regulars and the infrequent visitors to their place. They used to stay out back in a very livable trailer, but now they have a little land just down the valley from here.
I wish I could make this less cryptic for you, but the only way to understand why Cowboy is an Epicurean is to tell you what decisions he has made in his life, and the most significant decisions are really summed up in, well, his bikes. Cowboy has two bikes. He has a vintage 49E Hydra-Glide, 61ci, V-twin, medium compression, four-speed, restored to the original peacock blue. His father bought it new in ’49. His workhorse is a 73FX Super Glide, 74ci, V-twin four-speed. He has rebuilt that bike so many times we all lost count. For a while it seemed like he was rebuilding it every winter, but I think it finally hit the perfect balance about 1990. Cowboy bought that bike when he was discharged from the service in ’73, made the down payment with his last paycheck from Uncle Sam. Cowboy usually takes the ’49 to Sturgis, and not in an RV and not on a trailer, if you get my drift. I hear he blesses the four directions with tobacco and says some words for his old man the day he arrives. In earlier years Cowboy would always go on a bender the first night in Sturgis, and that is the only time you could get him to talk about Nam, but not so much any more. He has owned a few other bikes as projects over the years, but he never had any serious intention of keeping them. He sent them to good homes with guys he liked, probably at a loss, but he hadn’t bothered to keep track of the time or money he had into them. One bike that Cowboy rebuilt was an especially sweet Shovelhead, about a 1980 I think (anyway, it was one of the last Big Twins), that he gave to Gary, who still bounces for him at the Iron Post. I will tell you about Gary later, but they knew each other in the Army. Gary and Cowboy rebuilt that bike together and Gary had no idea Cowboy was going to give it to him. It was a surprise on Gary’s anniversary of ten years sober.
I hope I don’t have to paint a picture for you. If you cannot see from what I have said that Cowboy is an Epicurean, you need to just stop here and ask yourself what sort of man makes the decisions Cowboy has made and why. He isn’t going to spell it out for you and neither am I. What I will say is that I have known a fair number of bikers like Cowboy, and the world isn’t big enough to contain my respect for them. You will see that everyone else around here feels the same way. If a disrespectful word about Cowboy ever leaves your lips, there will be a long line of people waiting to kick your ass, but the irony is, Cowboy wouldn’t let us. He would remind us after you leave that you were hardly worth the effort, even if it would have been fun. Then we’ll party.
The big fellow over there at the bar is called Bear. I think his real name is Charles but no one calls him that, and I don’t advise you to call him either Bear or Charles unless someone he knows introduces you. He won’t be joining us at our table. Cowboy almost certainly will, if he comes in, and so will Gary, but not Bear. Don’t worry, he neither likes you nor dislikes you; in fact he doesn’t give a tinker’s damn about you one way or the other. He has no reason to, does he? The teat that provides the milk of human kindness dried up some time in the Sixties as far as he is concerned, so you are on your own, and so is everybody else. Don’t expect any help from Bear; he certainly won’t be asking for your help. Bear has a whole lifetime of lessons learned from first-hand experience that he won’t be sharing with you or anyone else. Whatever path you think you might want to try, he probably already tried it and knows just where it leads. One thing he has learned is that nearly all people think they know more than they do. Bear is a skeptic.
Skepticism is a Hellenistic school of thought that came to be divided into two main kinds, the Academic Skeptics, sometimes called “Carneadean” after their most influential spokesman, Carneades (around 213–128 B.C.E.),2 and the followers of Sextus Empiricus (approximately 275–350 C.E., I mean, these are skeptics, so who knows?).3 Sextus claimed to be following Pyrrho of Elis (around 360–270 B.C.E.),4 and so he and his gang were called “Pyrrhonian Skeptics.”
The difference is important. I do not believe there are any followers of Carneades in the biker bar, and I don’t think there are any followers of Pyrrho in the coffee houses. Similarly, no Pyrrhonian would ride a Honda, and if a Carneadean rides a Harley, he does so as a fool (probably hauls it in an RV). What, then, is this crucial difference? I don’t want to oversimplify it, but I also don’t want to belabor it, so I will make a sweeping generalization that captures the essence of the difference: Carneadeans do not doubt the value of knowledge, only the possibility of obtaining it; while Pyrrhonians do not focus on the possibility of knowledge so much as whether the human possession of knowledge, even if it were possible, would make us any better off. If we ask a Pyrrhonian “can humans possess true knowledge?” the answer would be “probably not, but what makes you assume it would even be a good thing to have?” On balance, what we humans have been wont to call “knowledge” does at least as much harm as good, and it never has lived up to its billing as the key to virtue, according to the Pyrrhonians.
The coffee house Carneadean likes to bait the lovers of knowledge into endless controversy about how they know what they claim to know and is able to do so because everyone in the coffee house wants knowledge and freely assumes everyone is better off with knowledge than without it. The Pyrrhonians have thought further than this, recognizing that if all claims to know are shipwrecked on the jagged rocks off the coast of Being, then maybe the best life for mortals is not a life that requires “knowledge.” Perhaps the lesson is that we mortals should cultivate a suspension of judgment or epoche (but don’t use that word here, save it for the coffee house), by which we can stifle our own pointless curiosity. How much does a person need to know to live well? Not much, if history is any teacher, but the principal item of knowledge that does seem relevant to happiness is the mindfulness of limitations on judgments of both what is known and what is good.
Bear is not going to argue with you about whether you know what you are talking about. It isn’t worth his time. That doesn’t mean he has no opinion. It means he is generally content to let you crash your own bike. He does not celebrate when you do, but he doesn’t feel sorry for you either. The one subject he will become verbal about is the discussion of various bikes. Bear has ridden a lot of different bikes over the years and he complains about every one of them. He has never had a bike that suited him. He can tell you in detail the about design flaws in every Harley model since about 1970, and he has a special, almost transcendent contempt for the twin cam engine.
In about ’98 he showed up at the Iron Post on a BSA. I don’t even know what model it is, but he still rides it when it is running. That bike gives him more trouble than any Hog he ever had, but he makes a point of praising its design when he has had a few beers. I suspect it is pure contrariness on his part, but I’m certainly not going to argue with him. What do I care? It’s not like he is impressed by my bike, and he won’t exactly welcome a lifelong Honda devotee’s opinion of the Harleys he is so fond of criticizing. Bear has been through nearly as many women as bikes, and he can tell you all of their design flaws too. He swore off women about the same time he bought that BSA, but he was a little late, since, from what I have heard, women had sworn him off a few months earlier. Bear is not happy, but at least he doesn’t expect to be. Stay clear of him when he starts drinking Jack straight. He is a very mean drunk, but fortunately it doesn’t happen all that often. Bear is a great companion for a long ride, especially if you aren’t looking for conversation. He doesn’t know much, but neither do you, frankly.
Bear is untroubled by convention and lives just a little bit beyond good and evil, having a tendency to shift his standards as needed to fit the situation. He is not actually self-centered or stubborn but he sometimes seems like it. You should give him wide berth. Even his peers have gotten to know him only over many years, and they will be the first to say they don’t really know what makes him tick. You will never get to know him or understand what makes him tick. Stop trying to figure it out. He isn’t dangerous unless you do something stupid. He thinks Dylan should have died in that crash since he hasn’t given the world anything worth having since about ’66, and he isn’t too sure about before that either. Bear doesn’t want to live long enough to become his own biographer like Dylan did.
I want to tell you about my friend Happy Jack, well, he really isn’t my friend except when he wants something, but anyway, he is a cynic—I don’t see him here at the Iron Post right now, but he may turn up later—my point is that before I tell you about Jack, I have to explain something. Let me approach this indirectly: One of my favorite lines from the days of true Rock and Roll (the vicinity of 1968) was in the chorus of “Born to Be Wild”:
Like a true nature’s child, we were born, born to be wild
In the coffee house the first thing likely to be noticed is that there seems to be a grammatical issue with pronoun number, but that shows how little they know in the coffee house. John Kay (née Joachim Krauledat, a weird name even in German), who wrote that song, may have been reading his Heidegger and Jung—but he was certainly reading his Hermann Hesse, and if you do not know why I say so, perhaps you should look him up before you start correcting his grammar. If there is one thing that bugs me about coffee house philosophers it is their habit of thinking they understand something before they really do, always rushing to appear knowledgeable to others and prizing not quite highly enough the difficult process by which genuine knowledge is obtained, a process called empiria in one dead language they revere more than study. The nature’s child is an imaginative universal, an archetype, and our participation in it is collective. The grammar is exact. Not only is the nature’s child the most pervasive embodied philosophy in the biker bar, it is the most easily misunderstood. If images of sprites and druids and wood nymphs are leaping to your mind when you hear the phrase “nature’s child,” that is understandable but somewhat jarring when considering the population of the Iron Post. Not one wood nymph here to be seen. But there is more than one way to understand “nature’s child,” and the applicable path in this case is by way of Cynicism.
There are all kinds of cynics in the biker bar, as many shades and degrees as there are breeds of dogs. The word “cynic” even comes from the Greek word for dog, kuon, and it was the nickname given to one Diogenes of Sinope (fourth century B.C.E.), who not only questioned the conventional values of the Hellenistic world but also lived in public defiance of those values. Our actual information about him is very sketchy, anecdotal, shrouded in the mists of legend, but somehow that seems quite right.
Diogenes pronounced himself a “citizen of the universe,” which was easier than pronouncing his name, professing loyalty to no state (it is not surprising perhaps that he was exiled from his native Sinope, and constantly in trouble in Athens and Corinth). Diogenes was said to carry around a lantern even during the day. When asked why, he replied he was looking for an honest man amid the depraved cities. It is said that when Alexander the Great sought out Diogenes, having heard of his wisdom, Diogenes asked Alexander to get out of his lantern light, with the evident implication that Alexander was certainly not the honest man Diogenes sought. Diogenes lived to tell the tale, and apparently Alexander left at least one world unconquered, viz., the inner world (he might still have wept at the prospect, since the territory is so vast). Other anecdotes about Diogenes defecating publicly in the marketplace, or pleasuring himself whenever and wherever the urge struck, or wearing a barrel because he rejected the conventions associated with clothing, and the like, may or may not be factual. What is important is that convention had no hold over Diogenes and he believed that human beings were essentially animals whose happiness lay in learning how to live self-sufficiently as animals. Conventions and “high culture” simply filled the human head with nothing but lies and trash of a sort that leads an animal to grief, or to take pleasure in depravities, or to desire power and wealth with which to control others.
This is where we must proceed carefully. There is a certain sense in which cynics seem hedonistic—by conventional standards, that is—and a different sense in which they seem ascetic. For example, cynics are likely to eschew luxuries, delicacies, and debaucheries that emerge from human power games, from the moneychase that is corporate capitalism, and the like. But these voluntary deprivations are more than compensated for by the pleasures appropriate to the natural animal. Biker cynics are likely to take a dim view of convention as surely as convention takes a dim view of them, but where the cynical biker is willing to leave convention to the conventional people, the conventional people seem often to want to judge the cynical biker and tell him how to live. This is where the dominant culture and the “counterculture” (if such it can be called) come toe to toe. The ordinary sense of the term “cynic,” a person who takes a contrarian view towards any constructive suggestion with no higher purpose in mind, does apply fairly well to the way the nature’s child sees the conventional values that the self-anointed “decent people” like to crow about. But a healthy distaste for the hypocrisy of these suburban roosters is not the same thing as nihilism. Where the people of the suburbs like to inhabit the cages of dogma and opinion they made for themselves, it doesn’t take a philosopher to recognize that if those people were really comfortable with the values they like to talk about, they wouldn’t see it as a challenge when someone else lives by different ones. Those who feel threatened when their way of life fails to be universally embraced by every single person in the world are working on a kind of psychosis that, in its logical end, becomes totalitarian. Happy Jack, in the rare moments when he isn’t happy, is quite willing to shock the middle class and then laugh at how easily they are offended. They might say he is a “cynic” in the common sense of that term, and that isn’t altogether wrong, but it is such a small part of the story.
It’s not easy to know how to explain this to you, but before I do, I want you to understand that there are as many ways to embody the nature’s child as there are ways to follow the calls of nature itself. Happy Jack is not the only sort. He is a common variation on a recognizable theme. Jack does not always respect his body, but he thoroughly inhabits it, and it is all that he is, and he does pretty much with it what he damn well pleases. One thing that pleases him is a powerful bike between his legs. There are two things that he looks for in a bike: the most important of the two is how it feels under him, and the second is how it looks (make no mistake, he wants everyone to look at it, although for fun he may tell you not to look). He chooses his women the same way, and the women do like Happy Jack. Jack gets a new bike and a new woman about every two years or so. All his women are just as tricked out as his rides. I am only going to talk about the bikes, but he modifies both in about the same ways. The last one I saw him on started out as an FXSTDI Softail Deuce, 88ci, fuel injected, and built for speed, but you wouldn’t recognize it now. By the time he finished boring out the stock V-twin, it would probably take an extra piston. I’ve never seen anything quite like it. He has some home videos of the work as he did it in stages with some of his buddies. But he is probably bored with that Softail by now and has moved on. Maybe it will find a home with someone who wants to keep it, but Happy Jack wouldn’t care. There are a lot of bikes in the world.
Be aware that if Happy Jack joins us at the table, he will bum a cigarette and then try to sell you something. Please don’t be offended, but you look like a pretty easy mark. The best way to handle him is agree to buy it later, arrange a vague meeting place, be vague about the time, and then don’t show up. He will probably forget about it too, and even if he is there, just wait two weeks and tell him you thought it was Wednesday, not Tuesday. He will try to sell you the same thing again, or something else. If that happens offer to trade him something he doesn’t want. Jack isn’t full of big dreams or plans, and he never does anything for more than about six months. He will work for a while, in a shop, even on a factory line, but he has serious problems with authority and always ends up quitting or getting fired or both, finding something else when he eventually has to.
Jack goes to Daytona every year, as you might have guessed. It requires a certain stamina to keep up with Jack on that ride, and it’s a gut check too, because he always rides a little faster than even a good rider can safely negotiate. As his reaction time slows in the next few years he will probably go down, unless his habits change (and I seriously doubt they will). The beauty of it is that he is all right with that kind of end and he honestly doesn’t have any desire to grow old. Don’t waste your sympathy on him when it happens. I remember when he got the news that his own mother died, he just raised a glass to the old crone and skipped the funeral. I’m sure it was a drag anyway. Jack has lots of enemies and he has lots of friends, and some of his bitterest enemies are his own former friends.
Where Cowboy and Gary and Bear all live by their honor, Jack does not always keep his word, and he has been known to step over some dangerous lines from time to time. If he doesn’t go down on the road, you may read in the paper someday that he is missing. Don’t be upset. That is just the way things are. He is doing what he wants to do and he understands the risks.
Gary is damaged. In his case it came from his tours in Nam, but the details are not so important. Sometimes things happen to good bikers that just can’t be set right. Plenty of bad things happened to Cowboy and Bear and Jack, but I think Gary’s heart was a little softer, a little more open, maybe he was a little less jaded about life when he went to Nam. He was pretty young—Gary isn’t the luckiest guy I’ve ever known; his lottery number was five. That’s pretty much the way it has gone for him ever since. Chance is so much a part of what has happened to him, but he can only see it as fate, and he cannot bring himself to embrace it fully by any effort of heart or mind. He used to tell his stories to anyone who would listen, back before he got sober, but now he is a little more reserved. I wouldn’t say he has found apatheia, as the stoics call it, that peace of mind that comes from rising above the more violent emotions, but Gary goes one day at a time, some days are better, some are worse.
Natural stoics do not become bikers; natural stoics often become ruthless corporate types or politicians or lawyers or even cops. But sometimes bikers do become stoics. Strong passions are universal among bikers, but time and bad luck can make a biker into a functional sort of stoic. Such bikers are pretty well consumed by their own demons and what they want more than anything else is rest from all the inner turmoil. So the stoicism that we associate with the dominant Hellenistic current of thought is not exactly the same as the stoicism we find in the biker bar. Hellenistic stoicism started around 300 B.C.E. with Zeno of Citium and prospered up through the fourth century C.E. Perhaps its most illustrious voices were Seneca (around 4 B.C.E.–65 C.E.), a minister of Nero and a playwright; Epictetus (50–138 C.E.), a freed slave and bodyguard of Nero, and the Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius (121–180 C.E.). The appeal of this philosophy was that it saw all events in the universe as being sufficiently caused and fully explained by the laws of nature. The key to human happiness, therefore, was to adjust the human world, both the inner life and the social, political, and economic life to these laws. The laws of nature were the key to knowledge, virtue, prosperity, truth, and happiness. Unhappiness was maladjustment of human things to the very source of justice, which is the cosmos and its law. The cosmos was morally indifferent to human aspirations, but it was possible for human beings to adjust themselves to the way things are, to learn to embrace the inevitable, and to achieve an inward calm about it. Learn to “love your fate,” they said, or call it amor fati when we get back to the coffee house, if we ever do.
One major difference between natural stoics and bikers who have become stoic is that natural stoics very often see embracing convention as a wise course towards inner calm. Stoic bikers are no more at home within conventional values than they are living beyond them. This is because the stoic biker is not at home with himself. There is a contradiction embedded in the heart of stoicism that the bikers exhibit more obviously than the natural stoics. The contradiction can be phrased in general terms like this: if the cosmos is so all-fired orderly, how can humans ever succeed in being out of adjustment with it? Without turning this issue towards psychoanalysis, one can suspect that the entire stoic philosophy is an act of projected wish fulfillment made desirable by the inescapable disorderliness of the inner life. The difference between the “natural” stoic and the damaged biker is that the natural stoic has so many layers of compensation that he or she has become cut off from that inner life. In short, natural stoics are unfamiliar with their own passions, and have chosen to be, and have safe-guarded their chosen self-ignorance with a veritable Department of Homeland Security that could turn away even the best efforts of Socrates. The damaged biker is unlikely to succeed in being this dishonest with himself and the world. Periodic bouts of decompensation during which the press to self-honesty is too keenly experienced to be ignored can lead to erratic behavior on the part of bikers like Gary.
Gary has done some things he is not proud of. He did some time at Marion, and some at Bellevue, and he has been in and out of the VA’s rehab programs many times. There is nothing you can think of that Gary hasn’t been addicted to, at one time or another, and he looks a lot older than he is. He has a grown son he has never met, and two other kids in Colorado, but their mother Gina won’t let Gary see them. The courts have agreed. Gary is still in love with Gina, but he has given up on getting that back, since she eventually gave up on him. I think she still loves him, too. It is tragic. But for all that, he is a loyal friend. He means well and for the last six or eight years he has done all right. Cowboy and Rose look after him to the extent he needs it, and he looks after them in his own way. Gary is fearless. I remember one night when my band was playing over on that stage, I saw Gary head purposefully over to that far corner in the dark there, and about a minute later, I saw Cowboy head the same way with a baseball bat. I couldn’t see what happened on account of the lights, but I found out later that an idiot had pulled a gun and that Gary was standing between that dude and his intended target daring him to pull the trigger when Cowboy broke the dude’s arm into tiny pieces. The county sheriff hauled the idiot away. I am happy to say that those sorts of incidents are really pretty rare here, but when you bring this many strong individuals together, sometimes there is trouble.
I mentioned that Gary rides that Shovelhead Cowboy gave him. In his wilder days it wasn’t unusual for Gary to go for the drastically modified custom jobs. He worked for a famous customizer in LA for a while. Recently Gary took up with a gal named Patty. She seems to understand him and he treats her well, appreciates her. She has her own baggage. I guess it would be closer to the truth to say that they are genuinely fond of each other than to call it love, since love is too dangerous a passion for either of them at this point. We all hope that Gary has finally found equilibrium, but it is unwise to get invested in that hope. If his luck is better from here on out, Gary might be able to stay sober, but all that depends on keeping his demons quiet, which is the extent of his stoicism.
In a certain sense, it’s pointless to try to classify bikers philosophically. If there is one thing they have in common, it is their individualism. But unlike the coffee-house Emersonians who long for an original relation to the universe, the bikers I know find that original relation a pretty easy thing to accomplish. All a fellow has to do is live free and the original relation will take care of itself. The key to living free is knowing who you are, and the path to learning who you are is your own responsibility. Respect the people who respect themselves, guard your own honor, and follow your own daimon, the voice that comes in through the back of your mind in the quiet moments, and you can probably learn what you need to know. Another important commonality among all these types of free spirits is an intuitive awareness that happiness is fleeting, uncommon, not to be expected, and always to be celebrated wherever it alights for a time. You might call this pagan fatalism, but I don’t see that naming it something so ominous gets you any closer to understanding it, especially since it is really all about freedom. Courage is also indispensable for a life that strives to be free, which involves a willingness to face and accept the consequences of your choices, even the consequences that are yours by bad luck.
With this much said, it might now be safe to say that, predominantly, bikers are pagans (Bikers for Jesus being ex-pagans). But by “pagan” I do not mean heathen, or anti-Christian, or nature-worshippers. Paganism in the sense I intend is something that exists and thrives in high civilization, and it really rests on a willingness to put embodied practice and action ahead of reflection and hypothesizing. These are really postindustrial, postmodern pagans, making of our world whatever remains to them to make of it. It is difficult to look upon what we have done and not be moved to complete silence. And there is a very great silence that surrounds the culture of the postmodern pagans. This silence speaks volumes, however, saying to the whole world of, well, their technical term is assholes: “if I fight your wars, I do it for my own honor, not for your gain; if I obey your laws, I do it because I choose them for myself; if I break your laws, I accept my punishment not at your hand but as the consequence of my own decision to live as I chose; and above all, do not ask me to believe your bullshit.”
Life on a Harley. It is a kind of philosophical practicalism that refuses to divorce body from spirit. This is an alternative way of taking the Platonic insights, alternative, that is, to Christian Platonism that does divorce body and spirit. One of the great advantages of Biker Platonism, in its various forms, is that it employs honor and freedom rather than guilt as its primary spring to moral living. But to what end? Pretty much the same end as Christianity, summed up well in the John Kay’s lines “Here and God are gonna make it happen, take the world in a love embrace, fire all of your guns at once and explode into space.” Perhaps readers will recall the scene of Jesus’s ascension. There is a certain sense of striving to love the world that informs this deep-seated quest for freedom and self-identity.
Plenty of suburbanites or conformists may be able to find this experience of being at home in the world without leaving the comfort of their living rooms, but as Bruce puts it, his love is bigger than a Honda, bigger than a Subaru. For people who have and need Big Love, the Big Bike recommends itself. So, returning to our theme of the previous chapter, we see that Bruce wouldn’t ride a Honda not just because it isn’t a suicide machine, but because there just isn’t enough love in it. How can you really love a Honda? Does anyone want to die on a Honda? The Honda conserves itself, and those who ride them do not give themselves to the world in a reckless quest to love life and be loved in the midst of it. Hondas bespeak good sense, but Harleys are for people who can understand that he who would save his life must be willing to lose it. That is where the free love is, which is to say, free love isn’t free. I suppose Jesus was really the first true pagan, or maybe it was Socrates.
I don’t think anyone is going to talk to us at the Iron Post today. That may be just as well. Finish your beer and we can head back towards town. Maybe you will come here again some time on your own, now that you know where the place is.5
__________
1 Pronounce the first part like “hepatitis” and the second part like what we want the doctor to do to everyone who has it.
2 Pronounced like some sort of gum disease endured by the transient workers at the local Midway, “carni-a-deez.”
3 A forerunner of Professor Alfred C. Kinsey.
4 Pronunciation hint: imagine a trip to the famous Pier 39 in San Francisco, hang a right at the sea lions and walk past 38 more. The next pier on the left, if there were any, would be your skeptical guy.
5 I would like to thank, apart from all the guys I have known who make up Cowboy, Bear, Happy Jack, and Gary, two sociologists who listened to this as it was being written and offered helpful observations, namely Chuck Peek of the University of Florida and Charlie Peek of Texas Tech University. I think Charlie was the sort of dad who probably took Chuck to the Harley dealership rather than waiting for Chuck to ask. I also want to thank my novelist friend Richard Lawrence Cohen for his generous reading and observations.