Installment #09 – Easyriders Blues

It was 1973 and I’d been working part-time for the magazine for about a year, making $50 a week while going to college. I was learning to write in the classroom and Frank Harding, the managing editor and recluse, was unlearning my college education and teaching me the art of writing for a magazine. Big difference.

The magazine was taking off and Lou Kimzey, the founder, decided that living in an apartment on the coast wasn’t cutting it. He discovered a paradise called Point Dume. The point was a cool little residential district that at the time still didn’t have the heavy property values of some of the Malibu areas and he got in cheap. It was located at the north end of Malibu heading toward Oxnard.

Lou had the garage remodeled into the editorial offices. He asked me if I would come on board full-time and move from Long Beach to somewhere along the coast north of Los Angeles. All I wanted was a big garage to house my bike and tools, so I bought a little tract home in Oxnard, 30 miles north. I also ran off on my first wife, who was religious, and hooked up with a 19-year-old who punished me for my sins by getting pregnant immediately, then demanding that we get married. At first I left her in Long Beach and escaped north.

At the time, Easyriders had a handful of contributors and me, one artist and Lou, who did some of everything. If you looked at the mag you would have thought a gang of mangy freaks worked around the clock when actually is was three of us. I rode 30 miles to work everyday on my rat bike, and 30 home.

I didn’t know a soul in Oxnard or Ventura. I worked hard and sometimes rode to Long Beach to party. I had the Easyriders blues — no babes, no bros and just a few bucks. Gradually I was introduced to a couple of biker bars in Ventura. One in particular was called Oil Can Charlie’s on Thompson. Well, one lonely night I rode up to Oil Can. It was about 10 p.m. on a weeknight and the place was deserted. No bikes parked out front and no trucks in the parking lot.

I’ll never forget the first time I went to Oil Can. I had a massive chain wrapped around my downtubes with an Abus lock. My bike was a ’68 Shovel with a Knuckle rigid section spliced to the rear and the downtubes stretched 4 inches. It had an 18-over Durfee Girder and it was the only stretched long bike in Ventura. This was a town of stock rigid Pans and Knuckleheads with highbars and quirky oddities bolted here and there, like crystal doorknob jockey shifts. The bikes were classic. I stuck out like a sore thumb, and when I unwrapped that chain and locked up the Shovel, one of the riders at the bar said to me, “You must be from L.A. People don’t steal motorcycles around here.” I’ll never forget that.

Anyway, I stroll into this empty saloon and ask for a beer. The bartender was a blonde with a tight body, scraggly hair and a face to match. She had on a tank top cut off at her midriff and her bell bottoms clung to her hips. Her boobs weren’t gigantic, but they weren’t bad, and she was braless under the top. As they swayed, her nipples hardened. We spoke a few niceties then she said to me, “Wanna go for a ride?”

I had the blues, and although I was horny as hell, I was disconnected. My girlfriend was pregnant in Long Beach and her parents were praying that I would hit a wall on the freeway. They hated bikers. I was feeling sorta down when she said, “It’s dead in here, let’s get the hell out.”

I woke up somewhat and raised an eyebrow. “What was that?” I said.

“Finish your beer,” she said wiping down the long bar and shutting the lights off over the pool tables.

I fired up the Shovel and we rode to a liquor store for a bottle of wine then up a small canyon on the outskirts of Ventura where she pointed to a small dirt side road. We pulled off and down a gully to where a small pond was surrounded by oak trees and grass. I always had an Army blanket wrapped around my sissy bar and I unfolded it and laid it in the dirt and grass on the edge of the pond. We smoked a joint, drank some wine and I pulled off my boots.

It was pitch black but I will never forget her lilly-white skin as she stripped and waded into the pool of freezing water. Somehow we fucked in the water, then on my blanket, then lay side by side as mosquitoes attacked us from every direction. I looked in her blue eyes as we finished the wine and said, “This was cool, but one more mosquito bite and I’ll need a transfusion.”

Actually, sex is addicting to some of us, especially when we haven’t had any in a while. We rode back to my place and did it again. I’ll never forget the morning, when I took her back to her car and she said something about me liking sex. “You really like it, don’t you?”