Every once in a while life, with a waggling finger, leads you down an unexpected path toward a totally different world. It doesn’t happen that often, but when it does it sure stands out. I took a surprising detour recently that brought back the memorable time when a few of us stoned college students wandered down a country road and straight into a massive bikers’ party.
There we were, an alien troop of obvious escapees from the local and locally resented snob college, standing at the edge of a sea of roaring, tattooed, hog-gunning guys with a few burly women mixed in. For a dazed moment we wondered if we were about to get the shit kicked out of us, but we must have given off a kindred smoky-boozy vibe from our afternoon of partying at a local watering hole because the big dawgs merrily waved us on in.
Figuring, I guess, to make the most of new meat, they even herded a few girls from our group into the wet T-shirt contest they had set up and which was just about to start. The next thing I knew I was standing on a stage in front of a bunch of cheering men having a bucket of water heaved at my chest, giving me the distinct feeling I’d been dropped into a world a few planets over from the carefully gender-neutral one of campus.
To my surprise, the sensation of being reduced to my soaked bosom was a refreshing change of pace from squirreling around in my student head. A second bucket of water was hurled at us, and as it hit I felt a buzzing animal surge of being female first, before my age, my race, my student status, or even my species. Cold water on your tits will do that to you.
In one of my proudest moments, I was voted second runner-up, a not-too-shabby accomplishment considering the two biker women who won ahead of me had virtual honeydews for breasts. I may be the only girl from Vassar College to have ever placed at a bikers’ wet T-shirt contest, although I won’t be checking with the school historian anytime soon.
That sea of biker men came back to me the other day while I was out with my son and some of his friends. We were far from our usual stomping grounds, heading down Eastway Drive from the go-kart track on North Tryon, when we saw a sign in front of a shopping center announcing “Car Show.”
Since my son and his friends are total car freaks even though they’re not yet old enough to drive, we had to pull in, but it wasn’t until we were parked and walking toward the crowd that I realized what an exotic scene we’d slid into.
The vehicles on display were authentic street-racing cars, something none of us had seen except in the Fast and Furious movies, and were decked out in various jaw-dropping ways. These babies had cannon-sized mufflers and massive stereos, something you have to have or your car isn’t considered fully “made,” my son explained. The entire interior of one car was covered in long blue shag, prompting his friend to dub it “the pimp-mobile.”
It dawned on me as we reached the main mass of people that they were all men. It was like a big swimming pool of males of every stripe, strutting and displaying their dazzling cars that were peacock-tail extensions of themselves.
For a minute I had that sensation again of being an alien dropped into a foreign world that may not be friendly. There were guys swaggering around in matching black leather jackets with something stitched on them that I couldn’t quite make out, and was almost afraid to. There were guys, wearing the barest of T-shirts and sporting massive ropes of metal wound around their necks, who sucked violently on their cigarettes, no doubt unfiltered, and called to each other in staccato tongues.
I tried to stroll casually along while suspecting that a big arrow was pointing to my head that read “South Charlotte Matron,” but as I looked at the cars and the men, and the men looked steadily back at me, the strange feeling started to fade. Both the men and the cars looked good, I must say, the details of one complementing the other, with every- thing just shouting out manliness, from the silver stick shift sculpted like an erect cobra to the spinning rims and tattooed biceps.
I was in another pulsating sea of maleness, and while nobody was cheering at me or heaving a bucket of water toward my breasts, that sensation rose to the surface of my skin of being a female animal first, before age, race, coming from a certain part of town, or being specifically human. Although it wasn’t caused by cold water this time, the response left me feeling refreshed as the boys and I pulled away from exotic-world and headed back toward our familiar planet.
This article appears in Nov 12-18, 2003.
