I have been riding quite often nowadays, and every time I come home, the house and everything in it breathes a sigh of relief. Its dangerous business, these motorcycles, and I know it and there is a chance every time I leave that I may not return. I am willing to take that on, at least for now, because I know when I am riding I give it all of my attention. I am not sure I have ever done this with anything else before. Even when I have performed standup comedy on national television, my mind wandered a bit. I drifted off during a couple of my routines during my brief stint on Dancing with the Stars, shaking a leg in front of 23 million viewers, all the while thinking about something else, most likely bagels.

Motorcycles are the one thing that have all of me, and as ADD and OCD as I am, that is no small statement. Today the challenge was to test drive the magnificent Harley-Davidson Sportster Low, a big bike that has truly captured my heart. This is the second time I have gone to the Glendale Harley-Davidson seeking out this 2 wheeled wonder. I just love the thing. The weight of it is rather shocking compared to the Honda Dream, but its substantial engine makes me feel like I could get out of danger quickly, and that might be a life saver.

They warn against buying too big a motorcycle to start with, and my little Honda Dream with its 305cc engine is proof that I have taken that sentiment to heart, but I think that there’s also the matter of needing to accelerate quickly out of harm’s way. I think that in most of the near misses I have had in my car, they didn’t become accidents firstly because of my ability to swerve, and just behind that, my ability to accelerate. Braking figures in about 3rd or 4^th.

I have only been in one car accident in many years of driving everything from my beloved Mini Coopers to passenger vans filled to bursting with burlesque dancers and their heavy costumes, trying to see through their big hairdos, maneuvering gracefully on black ice and through hailstorms. It was only a fender bender, but it was my own fault. I was drunk, as this was nearly twenty years ago, and I ran into a gangbangers car. They were all pretty much skinny teenage boys, younger than me even then, and they spilled out of the vehicle one after the other like clowns. There were lots of them, and I was dangerously outnumbered on the isolated street, but I was so fucked up I screamed at them until they shook their heads and got back into their car and left me there. I was just too crazy to deal with.  Since then, I have never ever and will never ever do anything like this again. Driving drunk is a deadly pastime and I see it in all its evil manifestations coming home from gigs every night. I am ashamed of my youthful foolishness and amazed at my luck in surviving my 20s.

This ice blue Sportster is powerful as a car, and I couldn’t ever imagine handling a machine as powerful as this under the influence of anything more than the wind. I couldn’t even ride a bicycle after a glass of wine. My balance and vision is affected enough to make me feel unsafe. The term ‘biker bar’ is odd to me because how could a motorcyclist drink anything stronger than coffee and expect to live? Riding the bike is a high in itself, and cutting anything into the pure drug of adrenaline and speed seems like a cheat.

At one point I traded bikes with Freddy, my awesomely knowledgeable and friendly Harley-Davidson sales rep who is helping me with my ever important motorcycle decision. He was riding the other bike I had requested – The Forty Eight. Aesthetically, the Forty-Eight is my dream machine. It’s simply gorgeous. The matte black of it makes me literally weak in the knees. My butt can’t help itself but be drawn to the seat. My legs part instantly when I see one. It’s crude I know, but this bike – it’s made to spread me. There’s tremendous power in the engine but somehow it feels more compact. Dynamite comes in small packages. The footpegs are far in front, so my legs extend forward uncomfortably and completely straight, and you know me – no matter what I do, I will never be straight!

I have to point my toe to slam on the rear brake. I am a rear braker, or an equal opportunity braker, and there’s something balletic and incongruous about braking en pointe. This bike is for a lanky man with legs and arms several inches longer than mine. I would need to go to china and have that weird surgery where they break the bones in your legs and put plates in so they’ll gradually grow together, lengthening the limbs and adding height along with immeasurable pain. The recovery period is estimated not in weeks but years. I am not sure I could get that much time off work.

There’s a chemistry though – something undeniable that is happening between me and the Forty-Eight, and even though I did have to make Freddy pull over and switch bikes with me, as I panicked about my leg position so much that I couldn’t concentrate on all the other things I need to focus on while riding, I feel like the Forty-Eight might be the one for me. Some adjustment with the footpegs and maybe a slight tinkering of handlebars and this may be my hog. Yes. Maybe. I need to stop writing now and look at pictures of the Forty-Eight online. If you own one please comment here and tell me how you like it. I think I may be in love.

My beautiful old 1966 Honda 305 dream came to me as if in a dream, earning its name rightfully and I parked it outside of my house on its sturdily steadfast center stand. It refused to start and I called my motorcycle expert/mentor and also stellar tattooist Craig for help. He gathered up the dream with great assistance from his motorcycle friend Sean – motorcyclists have lots of friends, this I noticed. They took my dream away in a big truck to their garage. I waved goodbye and enshrouded the bike in a halo of white healing light as I watched it leave my driveway. If I love you, I will do this, project onto you a luminous aura of protective energy. It’s a witch thing. It’s a wish for you and yours all the good I know. All my love in a blazing beam. I love this bike.

Later that afternoon, and much sooner than I expected, Craig called and said cheerily, “you’ve got a running bike here!” and held up the phone to the Dream’s engine as it growled sweet and angelic for me to hear, like a baby vocalizing semi-words or some other joyous noise that sounds both reassuring and exhilarating to the listener. An ancient engine finally turning over after hours of attempts with electric starter and kick is music to any vintage bike owner’s ears. In this case, a dream come true and a pun utterly intended.

I raced over with Ian and Felon – my motorcycle friends – and plucked my bike from the impressive array of vintage 2 wheel wonders at Craig and Sean’s and pulled it out onto the street. I put on Sean’s daughter’s copper sparkle Bell helmet and rode slowly up the hill and back down it, traveling mere inches per hour, unsteady and in tremendous fear, the kind I have been getting to know more intimately with all my motorcycle adventures and misadventures thus far. The bike wanted to move faster but it was content on humoring me with its constant cooing and fine old engine, 46 years after its mass production and insane popularity and still going strong.

The bike came home and sat on a trickle charger for an hour, as I put on every piece of my gear and even pepto bismol pink chaps, the exact color of the infamous stomach medicine or maybe shade lighter than a linty wad of bubblegum stuck eternally underneath a 5^thgrader’s desk.  I fantasized briefly that if I ever competed in the Isle of Man TT that Pepto Bismol would sponsor me, my signature pink racing leathers embossed with the marigold bubble font that just screams of intestinal distress. That would be such an excellent endorsement. “Here she comes around this corner and she is about to shit her pants. Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa-nd she just shit her pants.”

With my bright lemon yellow vintage Volvo mechanic shirt and white whipped cream body armor fitted racing jacket I looked like a sherbet sundae with a black cherry of a helmet on top.  I need you to see me when I am riding, so my protective gear is all pastel and white like an easter egg getting tossed at you. I am going to fill my saddlebags with hollow chocolate bunnies and PEEPS. Craig thoughtfully took the baffles off the bike so you can hear me coming for you from miles away. I am here to burn your eyes and ears with my presence and then I will give you candy.

I sat on the bike on the top of my driveway with all my womanchild gear and my fantasies and my dream and I couldn’t go down it. I was suddenly paralyzed by fear. The sun blazed hot on my head and I was sweating panicked rivers down my back beneath layers of leather and foam padding. I held the bike there between my shaky legs for several minutes, wondering whether I should or could just go. I was freezing cold and boiling hot at the same time.

It occurred to me that I hadn’t ridden alone at all. There had always been witnesses, multiple witnesses. Now there were none. Until that moment, this hobby and new fixation had been a tremendously social one, and part of the pleasure of it was the intense brotherly bonding, distinctly male and appealing to the side of me that enjoys boy things like fishing and gay sex.

For the first time, I was alone, and things can go terribly bad very quickly in isolation. This I know from vast experience as a loner in my fairly long life so far. As if by magic, likely the witch in me summoning someone for help, my go-to guy ian called, and I held the iphone near the front of my visor and yelled into it.  Ian came over and rolled the bike easily down the driveway and down the street. I got on it, engine revving and thirstily chugging down on its now full belly of premium gas, I put it into first gear and rode an inspiring 50 feet and stalled out.

I couldn’t get the Dream going again, although even in times of doubt and trouble, the bike never lost its ability to attract. A man came out of his house to help me, and then another stopped his car in the middle of the street and left it there as he got out  to watch me up close kick and fiddle and clutch and repeat, opening and closing the choke as if I knew what I was doing. The men breathed in the fumes of nostalgia coming off the dream and peered at me through the gasoline blurred lens of their memory. They had a bike like this they said. They remembered these bikes well. They hadn’t even thought of one in ages and the sight of it brought them immediate and unprepared to their youth. I could see them as they were, once young and excited. their eyes pointed not at me but deep into the past. This bike is making the years reverse. Two wheels running counterclockwise. If it would only just do what I asked. If it would only listen to my hands and feet. It could take strangers back in time, but it could not take me around the block.

Craig rolled up to revive the Dream in his 1930s era Harley-Davidson, with the gear shift on the gas tank and a foot operated clutch, a mysterious configuration between bike and car, an old school hybrid. Its v-twin engine looked like double d breasts dissolving into a tiny waist, a voluptuous wonder, Jessica Rabbit as motorcycle if such were so. He pulled out tools from saddlebags and we ran our fingers on the ground looking for infinitesimal screws dropped from the grips. He diagnosed the Dream’s problem deft as a psychic surgeon and the bike was soon humming and running and stayed up all day with me as I traversed the barren asphalt length of a nearby parking lot, too slow even for second gear as I passed Ian and Felon time and time again, standing in the shade like two proud dads, encouraging me with each completed circle to go faster on the next.

I think the trick to riding these motorcycles is really finding a way to manage my terror. Today it’s tough. The bike is a growly beast of a Kawasaki, the KZ 1000, a retired police bike with a reassuringly steady engine. I love the police bikes, they make me feel like I am in that bowie hit “blue jean”. I have a police bike and a turned up nose so I am 2 for 2 in that song. Motorcycle cops are amazing riders and their bikes are a reflection of that. This one is no exception.

The Kawasaki has a gorgeous retro look and white police paint and a lot of horsepower and it seems like it wants to go fast, as far as I can tell. I don’t know bikes at all, but I can feel it pulling between my legs as I ease out the clutch like there’s a situation – there’s an urgency there, a need to be what it is and just fucking be let go. It’s late for something and I am holding it up. Other police bikes are calling for backup and mine is trying to answer the call, but my fingers are clutching – I am serious – CLUTCHING – and the thing ain’t going nowhere. I am controlling this great machine and it is making the inside of my helmet hot and humid like my head is in the rainforest, with the exception of my mouth which is bone dry, tongue rolling onto itself and sticky, in absolute animal-style fear.

My fancy silk scarf is soaked with flop sweat and French perfume and the adrenaline pumps through my system like the gasoline pumping through the engine and the symmetry is not lost on me. In my squeaky new gear, I feel like Elizabeth Taylor trying to keep up with Malcolm Forbes in her stiff purple designer chaps. I wonder if she wore her diamonds on her bike and I don’t think would do this. I make a note to get a bandanna. I am both proud of myself and my ability to learn new things and sick and afraid of the bike and my hands lock up in fear and leather and I have to change gloves because I can’t feel the controls through my vice grip and protective padding.

This motorcycle is much bigger than the Buell Blast I learned on and got (somewhat) comfortable with, and the height is a concern. I can’t put both feet completely on the ground, or if I can, it’s just on my toes, and so the already present fear of tipping over becomes a reality every time I try to stop. Fortunately the bike never leans over far enough to fall. There’s a magic there that’s keeping me up. the miracle of the motorcycle, when the wheels are in motion, it works.

The parking lot is strewn with broken palm fronds and branches blown about by the Santa Anas and glittering tarry asphalt that looks like it will hurt to go down on, so I stay up, my bike groaning and complaining and stamping its feet that I am keeping it in first gear the whole time. I’m learning how to go around in a circle, mostly imperfect ones, sometimes ovals, sometimes full on squares. I don’t how to do this, but I don’t judge myself, and I take to new hobbies and interests and pick up abilities quickly because I don’t care about doing things badly. I allow myself to get better, and then I do, gradually, painfully, slowly – I do. but motorcycling is different. There’s not a lot of margin for error. Mistakes are costly. It’s better to just not make them.

Going in circle is really hard. It might not be as challenging in a car, but on a bike, you have to go fast enough that you are not falling down but slow enough to control the bike in the tight space. There are many factors at play, and there’s no space to let in the fear, because you let the fear in, it takes over and everything you learned in your head that you are trying to teach your hands and feet to do gets forgotten in the fear. Fear is too big to let into the school. Fear is not a good student.

I think of the police, when they are circling slow, turning tightly and returning, their glossy helmeted and empowered heads whipping around to face the direction they are going. Your head is part of the steering, and I keep looking at the ground because I am so scared of the ground and when you do that you go right down and what you were scared of happening happens. I think of the police and I turn my head and the whole bike turns and then I am making smooth circles 30 feet around and I’m doing well and suddenly I am scared again and overbrake and almost fall. When I think of the police it helps me stay upright. When I think of the police I am less afraid.

I am exhausted after my motorcycle lessons and I am driving home in my Mini Cooper with my hair completely wet with sweat and sticking to my face. I am hot but I leave my jacket on because I am proud to have my shiny but damp inside Arai helmet in the seat next to me like a passenger and I am listening to Aimee Mann’s wonderful song, “Save Me” and there’s no traffic on the freeway because it’s still technically the holidays and I see motorcycles whiz past me and I feel good because I know a little bit of what they know and I am going to learn more soon and the downtown LA skyline looks magnificent and familiar and safe and homey to me as I drive into it yet once again and I think about how maybe someday I will get that as a tattoo as well as my first motorcycle and everything is nice and better than alright and it’s not yet 1 and I have already had a spectacular day and then I fucking get pulled over by a motorcycle cop who gives me a fix it ticket for having tinted windows.

On the rented bike, a magnificent and majestic Harley-Davidson Sportster Low, with only three miles on it so far and the brand new shiny chrome catching the sunlight and beaming it back into the world in hard, blindingly brilliant rays, my emotions and opinions about motorcycling vary wildly from second to second.

When I am up in third gear, flying down an industrial street with few cars or pedestrians, just two other riders, one, the adept and skillfully sensitive teacher Luis, the other, the avid and keenly aware student Ryan, I scan my field of vision and I think 3 things -

1) What is happening in the street 12 to 1 seconds in front of me?

2) This is the best thing I have ever done.

3) I love the heads in the helmets in front and behind my gaze.

Whenever I have to stop, downshift and clutch and brake and put my boots, left then right on the ground and wait at the intersection, holding the heavy bike between my skinny legs, I think -

1) My hands and feet are inadequate.

2) This is the worst thing I have ever done.

3) I still love these hot bikers I am riding with and their straight backs and faces held high and looking where they are going – their bodies and bikes as one perfect and very fast being – and I love all motorcyclists I have seen and met thus far, and rejoice saying hi to them as we pass in the street and will gladly talk to any one person in possession of 2 or 3 wheels and an engine for hours about nothing else – yes I love all y’all, but I am never doing this again.

It gets even more extreme in the hills, cornering and leaning into the black diamond turns and curves that make up Griffith park, which reminds me ever of James Dean, Sal Mineo and Natalie Wood in “Rebel Without a Cause”. They shot that film up there, can you believe it? Right up on the top at the observatory. Yeah I know. Amazing. I think about how incredible they all are and also how dead they all are even though they should be alive right now and getting lifetime achievement awards and Kennedy Center honors and presenting at the Oscars, maybe even doing one arm pushups, being the face of what to look forward to with age and legend that lives on. Sadly they are not any of these. They each disappeared way too early in a hot flare of mystery and tragedy. But the bike didn’t claim them. It was respectively – car, knife and water. I’m gonna try to stay away from those three. I am gonna stay up, on this bike. No, I am not. At the next horse crossing, I am going to park this hog and hijack an old circus mare and clop home.

When I ride, I am in my body, which is rare. I am never in my body, having been chased out at an early age, but here, as part of this glorious mechanism and gyroscopic wonder, I am the proverbial ghost in the machine, and if I don’t stay in my body I will be separated from it, seriously. so I stay. I have to stay. I have to lean into this turn. I have to pull my not inconsiderable weight over to the side like a real racer, like steve mcqueen – who rode the best, who is also dead, however again, not by the bike, but from cancer.

I have to apply all the knowledge that I have in me and trust that its real and good and lives in my brain and my hands and feet and I don’t even need to think about it, I will just do it. The wisdom is there to catch me as sure as the wind is on my back. I am part of this thing, a big part, and I daresay I am not sure if I have ever been a part of anything this urgent, this important. I am this ride, and I have to be this ride only. No going nowhere. I am used to giving up, but here I can’t give up the ghost because if I do then I will be a ghost literally, so I stay here. I am here. I think this is the solution to a lifetime of ignoring the moment and what is in front of me. I think this is what I will do forever. Then I think there is no such thing as forever. There is only right now. I am riding right now. And now. And now. It’s always now on the bike. It has to be. Or else, you will become a then. How zen.  It even rhymes.

What I noticed most about riding in the street is how many people who are driving cars actually aren’t there.

I look into their darkly tinted windows and I can see them texting, or possibly sexting, as they seem super involved in the tiny type of their conversation. If they aren’t texting/sexting, they are looking for deeply buried songs that aren’t in any particular playlist on their ipods or googling the name of a movie/medicine/shoe/diet that someone said was good.

They stare unbelieving at their GPS and look for addresses that seemingly don’t exist and not looking at you, who is existing leathery, loud and glinting in front of them.

There are weary moms turning around from the steering wheels of their fearsome SUVs and I see the backs of their heads yelling at children and they are holding the steering wheel with an elbow while the other hand goes in back presumably to break up a fight between siblings or to give a crying child something to really cry about.

There are people talking on the phone, laughing and negotiating and sharing good news and bad news and they are with their friend on the other end of the line probably in another car somewhere and neither are nowhere near where you are right now, in their path of travel. There are people applying makeup (even mascara!!) and emptying big coffee cups into their mouths and eating fast food, balancing fries and burgers on dashboards.

I have seen motherfuckers flossing. Their fucking back teeth. Molars and shit.

There are drivers doing infinite combinations of these activities and might be engaged in all of them at once, I have no idea. People are limitless in their ability to multitask and I can only give them each a fraction of a second because my eyes have to continue their search for dangers assessing everyone out here with me and I can’t dwell on just one.

Even if they are guilty of none of these crimes against automotive awareness, there are many just kind of dully and blankly staring forward with no life in their eyes. They are looking right at me as I am trying to assess whether they will turn left suddenly without signaling or not fully stop at the stop sign and they don’t see me at all. I am used to being invisible, which I have always fought, and so I am used to making myself seen and heard, sometimes forcing it, and this is essential when you are on the road on two wheels trying to navigate amongst four wheel vehicles which are exponentially larger than you and no one is paying attention.

I get scared because I feel like on the bike I am present and no one else is. I feel alone and without my tiny motorcycle club here with me I would actually be alone. Thank goodness for them.

All my gratitude to the Rider’s Edge and Harley-Davidson and Luis ‘tico’ Chacon, my fantastic teacher. you save lives. Mine and everyone else’s. Also great thanks to my fellow student and rider Ryan Kwanten. You look right handsome on that bike. Be careful everyone. Stay up.

The second I swung my leg over the bike I knew it was right. Maybe it’s what people mean when they say they fell in love at first sight. I am not so sure if that has happened to me ever. Maybe it has and in cynical retrospect my memory has merely adjusted to match the outcome of the at-first-sighted-and-believed-then-it-was-love-but-now-i-know-it-was-actually-hate-relationship. my memory can’t help but be colored by the big box of crayons called the truth.

But the motorcycle hasn’t disappointed me yet. Those beautiful two wheels haven’t lied or hurt me purposefully or tried to shame me or control me. They’ve only propelled me forward, cooling my hot neck with the joyous feeling of flight, wind rushing through my DOT approved Arai helmet (yes that’s an endorsement – the arais are expensive but really, how much is your head worth?).

Of course there was a lot of lurching forward abruptly when I released the clutch too quickly, and I was thrown off a lot, and then that sickening feeling of not being able to balance the bike, 500 lbs of metal and rubber and plastic and glass and gas giving way to gravity underneath your ass as it falls over and crashes to the ground, bending back the handlebars into a beginner’s grotesque, marking up the neon yellow paint job with the evidence of your inexperience. but it’s all ok.

I spent the last 5 days in class and on the range with 8 other prospective bikers in the fantastic Rider’s Edge program, which is about 25 hours of intense education on how to ride safely, and this morning, after a night of fitful pre-test tossing and turning, I went to the downtown LA DMV and got my M1 license, which gives me the right and privilege to operate a two-wheeled vehicle. The motorcycle license never expires in California, and so I have the whole of my life to learn.

I haven’t been to the good old DMV in about 20 years. I am happy to say it’s exactly the same as I remembered it. I was there before 8am, and there was a line snaking around the block of people breathing thick clouds of mist into the cold air as they held different configurations of partial and complete filled out forms in their hands.

The cold in Los Angeles is unbearable to me, most of all in the morning, and especially when I have to pee really bad. We stamped our feet and shook and some suckled dunkin donuts coffee sippy cups as others looked on with blank midmorning stranger faces.

Finally at 8:01, a security guard opened the inoperative automatic doors in a painfully slow reveal, like he was Gypsy Rose Lee, first slipping one coy leg out of the doors, then the other, then his whole body – a government office seduction, his arms spreading the edges of the fingerprinty glass doors like he was singlehandedly holding back the inner sanctum of desks and partial barricades and tired underpaid and underlaid workers – a fluorescent light tsunami of boredom and endless queues and jaded and frustrated people who wield a seemingly small yet actually pretty significant amount of power over the general population – to tantalize and tease us, the horny would be drivers with paper in our fingers.

I was concerned about the eye test (I don’t know why, I have excellent vision, but it’s a trial whenever your body is tested), but that didn’t turn out to be a problem. I had to take the written motorcycle test twice, along with an extra driver’s test thrown in for good measure. I failed both and thought momentarily I would get my driver’s license revoked as well, but then there was another chance thrown at me, and I suddenly passed and before I could say “unflattering picture” I had an M1 license in my still freezing cold hands.

When I tell people I am going to ride a motorcycle, I get squints of concern. It’s a fearsome and dangerous hobby I know, but I am so Mary Poppins/Miss Jane Hathaway about the whole thing. I don’t know why anyone imagines that I would ever go faster than 8 or 10 mph in an abandoned parking lot. Frankly I could just do that and it would be enough. I am no daredevil by any means, but there are certain things that are thrilling. Tattoos, guitars and motorcycles – they seem to all make sense together. You rarely see one without the other and then the third creates a harmony that makes everything music. The sum is worth more than its parts. The sum is a life well lived.

Me with my motorcycle certificate and hot instructors!!