MEMOIR

Kick Like Ya Mean It

A woman’s motorcycle odyssey in search of an identity

“I won’t sell it to you.” He said. “There are many other bikes here that are far more suitable for you. Choose something else.”

I argued. Let me try.

He shook his head. “If you get it wrong, that thing can kick back and break your leg.”

But I wanted it. I had the money to pay for it. This is the bike I chose.

Fed up with this tiresome ado, he relented, but only to teach me some humility. He demonstrated the kickstart sequence, and then stood back, arms folded, expectant with derision.

They are all watching me. Prove them wrong.

I mounted. I stood high on the footpegs. I pulled the decompression lever in with my left hand. I pushed the kickstarter down with my right foot, just a bit. I let go of the decompression lever, and I jumped with all my weight on the kickstarter.

Silence. Over and over, only ever, a breathless wheeze.

Eventually they all walked away, attended to other customers, and ignored the silly young woman making a fool of herself on a bike she cannot start.

But I was steadfast.

I had read “The Motorcycle Diaries,” and “On the Road.” I wanted to burn, burn, burn, like one of Kerouac’s roman candles, mad to live, never yawning or saying a commonplace thing. And I was hell-bent on an unconventional life of nomadic motorcycle adventure.

This was the early nineties, and the bike in question was already passé. It was a “thumper”, a 500cc single cylinder motorcycle with a notoriously unforgiving kickstart:

“…these bikes can smell fear when using the kickstarter. Kick like you believe it’ll start, and it’ll start, especially when other people are watching. Kick like ya mean it, and peel out!” - Andy Greaser, Revzilla

So, rise again. Stand tall. Squeeze the lever. Close my eyes. Ease down. Feel the resistance. Release the lever. Breathe deeply.

Now, with my whole body… Now, with all of my being, exhale…

The engine thundered into consciousness. It was a transference of will that reverberated off the showroom walls and startled every faithless head in disbelief.

All you doubting sexist bastards… I am mighty now!

What a fabulous rollicking lark!

I tossed that bike from side to side, I scraped the pegs, and I kept up with the boys through all the bends. Frenetic. Unfettered. Compelled to prove myself to anyone who was watching.

In combat boots and leather jacket, the whole world belonged to me. With a helmet tucked under my arm, I could enter any pub, in any town, without fear of being vulnerable to those who prey on solo women. I had found it at last, a group identity, and an armour to keep me safe.

But a leather jacket, deterrent to many, is a rallying flag for wanderers. I had never experienced such camaraderie before, such belonging. I lived for this spontaneous connection. It was a spiritual communion that sustained me.

And when I wasn’t adventuring, I polished the alloy, buffed the chrome, until it was a flawless, impenetrable mirror of my new empowered reality.

One weekend, after a group ride with local bikers, I was invited to a party. A congregation of bikers had formed around the beer fridge, mostly men, bonding over their own bravado.

Well, heck yeah, I have stories to tell too!

And so I felt I was rightfully a part of something. I had earned my place in the huddle.

But then came a voice from just behind my right ear. A knowing, older woman’s voice, infused with a comfortable self-assurance that needs no proving. It was not directly addressed to anyone, but just loud enough for me:

“Hmm,” she mused. “I think someone is very insecure.”

I was silenced, garrotted by her feminine intuition.

For the rest of the evening, I lingered at the peripheries, listening but not participating. I carefully avoided her gaze, while studying her enviable grace.

Sometimes, the lessons I need to learn take a long, long time in the learning. An episode can sit at the back of my consciousness for years, awaiting more information to form a narrative.

I was dining alone, as was my habit, at a trendy beachside hotel that was a regular drop-in on coastal jaunts. I had only ever had positive encounters there as a biker.

On this particular day, however, I didn’t arrive as a biker. I was in town in a red floral dress, and just beginning on the dessert when a heavy arm slid around my shoulder from behind and I felt an alcoholic hot breath on my cheek. And then a second, boorish breath on the other cheek, as they forced spoonfuls of cheesecake towards my mouth. My public humiliation was their sport.

They sensed the fragility, as such predators do.

Here is the inevitable crux of it: I never was one of the mad ones. I was an imposter.

There is no leather that I can wear, no shiny polished reflective surface, no declarative bellowing of group identity, that can protect me from the unchanged truth within.

Inside, I remained a timid loner, an introvert, desperate to be otherwise. I didn’t belong anywhere. I had no home, not even within my own skin.

This is the problem with romanticising the pure external nature of the experience. It can’t move the story forward. There has to be a reckoning of sorts, and a sparkling revelation.

I haven’t read “On the Road” in decades. It belongs in my past. All that remains is a sense of its frenzied pulse. I wonder, if I read it again now.

I take it from the shelf and open it’s yellowed pages. A bookmark flutters to the floor. It’s a complimentary one from the bookshop, with the ubiquitous inspirational quote:

We are what we think All that we are arises with our thoughts With our thoughts we make the world

For fuck’s sake! Surely, the Buddha mocks me. I snap the book closed and return it to the shelf.

Next to it is another kind of road trip. It’s an internal one, deeply cerebral, meandering and emotionally solitary.

Robert M. Pirsig’s “Zen And The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance” is concerned with the quiet, inner workings of things. It takes patience in the reading of it. The story unfolds in layers of rich introspection, while piecing together the episodic fragments of a life.

These two books sit side by side, in tension, the twin aspects of my own self.

Like all introverts, I require the solitude of my own thoughts. More and more, I escaped on my own, far from the clatter of the group, and often spontaneously, with no planning at all.

“I set off before the sun came up, eerie dawn, blue air, thrum of the exhaust, and unfastened saddle-bags flapping with glee. When I arrived in Grafton for breakfast the cord from my hairdryer was flailing down the road behind me, mad as a cut snake.”

In a box, in a cupboard high out of reach, are notebooks scrawled with strange tales of self-deprecating gaiety, alongside hairy feats of daring, near misses, and gross stupidity.

And there are lists: snapped levers, broken indicators, cracked side covers, the stuff that got bent up in the proving.

There are other lists too: footpegs that just fell off, blown fuses, and a swingarm nut that worked itself clean off the bolt more than once while testing my own discomfort in the vibration zone.

“After lunch, I studied the map and decided to take a winding backroad through a logging forest, but I didn’t figure on about 15kms of treacherous sand drifts and soft gravel at the back of Dorrigo, albeit through spectacular mountain scenery.”

On the inside of a tight hairpin bend, heading uphill, I met a logging truck on its way down, hogging the road. But I was too committed to the corner to change course, and either the trucker didn’t realise it, or else because he figured it served me right, he barged me right off the road and kept going.

My bike landed upside down in a deep ditch, far, far from anywhere, with the fuel leaking out of the tank.

I listened to the sighs of air brakes echo and fade. A blanket of silence settled on the forest, and the only other sound, the regular chiming of the bellbirds.

I never felt so insignificant.

Nobody is my name. Nobody they call me…

What is it about odysseys that I find so compelling? I can answer that, now that I am old: they are all stories about a search for identity. Even the fantastical fabula of that original wanderer, wily Odysseus, is a story about identity.

Odysseus tells “lies like truth.” He habitually obscures his identity while weaving detailed narratives of untruth. Athena routinely casts a glamour over him to disguise his physical appearance as well. His search for his homeland becomes symbolic of the search for self. Coming home to Ithaca means throwing off his disguises and reclaiming his true place in the world.

I am a wanderer too, in search of my Ithaca, my homeland. I told lies like truth to anyone who was watching. And I told them to myself, even when no one was watching.

After several panicky attempts to pull my bike out of the ditch, I plonked myself down on the road and just bawled, thoroughly awash with self-pity and regret.

What is this emptiness inside that drives me to such recklessness? I kick and kick and kick, but I am only kicking against myself.

If you have never found yourself truly alone, not just yearning for company, but the kind of alone that makes you aware of your smallness, have you ever really reckoned with your identity?

Who are you, when you cannot see your reflection in the watchful eyes of others?

Life hardly ever goes the way we imagined it. As it turned out, my greatest adventure was an internal one, certainly not the one I was expecting.

It was only within the last decade that the medical community grasped the mechanisms that lead some autistic girls to adopt a false persona, “camouflaging” their difference with a fake identity.

Through rejection and social reproof, we begin to censor our own instincts, and assume the behaviour of those we admire.

If everything that I am is wrong, then its opposite must be right.

For decades I lived counter to my own nature, lacking the comfort of self-hood. False personas like these are exhaustive to maintain. No one can do it forever. There must be a reckoning day. But not yet, not on a hairpin bend, upside down in a ditch.

On this particular day, I acted as a die-hard, intrepid adventurer would act. I rose again. I heaved and hauled that metal out of the ditch and up onto its wheels. And I went on my way, unaltered, but for some minor damage and a cracking new story to tell.

When the necessary identity crisis came, decades later, it unleashed a personal devastation every bit as terrible as the violence inflicted by Odysseus at his homecoming.

I withdrew. But I discovered that there is a freedom in seclusion, unlike any other. It’s the freedom to live an authentic life, true to your own nature, precisely because no one is watching.

And when I emerged as myself, there was another, much more difficult journey to make, convincing the people I care about that this anxiety-ridden, self-doubting, second-guessing version of me is the real one.

I’m still riding, but it’s different now.

I seek out the quiet roads. I allow myself to feel exposed to the wind, the rain, to note the subtle drop in air temperature that tells me I am passing near a stream, or the clean scent of the mountain air, to feel connected, not conquering, but beatific and rapturous in my insignificance.

It nearly killed me, trying to be one of the mad ones.

Some roman candles burn spectacularly, while the rest of us watch in awe from a safe distance, vicariously illuminated by their brilliance.

Then their light fizzles, and so we return to our chores, we yawn, and we say “how was your day, dear”, and other such commonplace things, and we get on with the quiet business of living, now and then just pausing to wonder… whatever became of that mad person?