MYTH OF THE MOTORCYCLE HOG

By ROBERT HUGHES

HAS any means of transport ever suffered a worse drubbing than the motorcycle? In the 17 years since Stanley Kramer put Marlon Brando astride a Triumph in The Wild One, big bikes and those who ride them have been made into apocalyptic images of aggression and revolt --Greasy Rider on an iron horse with 74-cu.-in. lungs and ape-hanger bars, booming down the freeway to rape John Doe's daughter behind the white clapboard bank: swastikas, burnt rubber, crab lice and filthy denim. It has long been obvious that the bike was heir to the cowboy's horse in movies; but if Trigger had been loaded with the sado-erotic symbolism that now, after dozens of exploitation flicks about Hell's Angels, clings to any Harley chopper, the poor nag could not have moved for groupies. As an object to provoke linked reactions of desire and outrage, the motorcycle has few equals --provided it is big enough.

When Easy Rider was released, it looked for a time as though public attitudes might soften. A lot of people were on the side of Captain America and his fringed partner Billy, shotgunned off their glittering, raked choppers on a Southern back road. But for every cinemagoer who vicariously rode with Fonda and Hopper in that movie, there were probably ten who went with their redneck killers in the pickup truck. The chorus from press and TV remains pretty well unchanged, resembling the bleat of Orwell's sheep in Animal Farm: "Four wheels good, two wheels bad!" The image of the biker as delinquent will take a long time to eradicate. "You meet the nicest people on a Honda," proclaims the Japanese firm that has cornered nearly 50% of the bike market in the U.S.; but the general belief is that you still meet the nastiest ones on a chopper.

To the public, the names of the outlaw or semi-outlaw motorcycle clubs is a litany of imps in the pit, from the Animals, and Axemen, through the Equalizers and Exterminators, the Marauders and Mongols, the Raiders, and Road Vultures, to the Warlocks and Wheels of Soul. The unsavory names with which these gangs have christened themselves are apt to make the public forget that their collective membership is probably no more than 3,000, the merest fraction of the 3,000,000 people who regularly ride bikes in the U.S. In fact, these "outlaws" on the road are infinitely less of a threat than the driver of a station wagon with two martinis under his seat belt.

The myth goes roaring on. Business, though, may kill it, for bikes are big business today. At the end of World War II there were fewer than 200,000 registered motorcycles in the U.S. Today there are nearly 2,500,000, most of them imports from Japan, Germany and Britain. The majority are small, almost civilized creatures, below 500 cc. in engine capacity. But the popularity of the big snorting monsters, which can go from a standstill to 60 m.p.h. in less than six seconds flat and cruise comfortably on freeways at 90 m.p.h., has also ascended. It has its perversities.

To the four-wheeled culture, there is something inexplicable about the very idea of owning such a bike. A big machine is expensive: a new Honda Four costs nearly as much as a Volkswagen; a big Harley, almost $1,000 more. Choppers, the Faberge Easter eggs of the bike world, are even worse. When all the stripping, chroming, raking, molding, metal flaking and polishing are done, a chopper, righteously gleaming from fishtail exhaust to brakeless front wheel, may have cost its owner $5,000 in materials and labor. Insurance is heavy, since to many companies the fact of owning a bike is prima-facie evidence of irresponsibility. The risk of theft is high, especially in cities, where case-hardened steel chains and medieval-looking padlocks must tether the mount if one so much as stops for a hamburger.

Highway cops dislike bikers and are apt to assume that a Hell's Angel lurks slavering and Benzedrined inside every rider; they take a sour glee in plastering the riders with tickets for the slightest infraction. Worst of all, there are accidents. Big bikes are superb manifestations of engineering skill, but they are utterly vulnerable. There is no body shell, no padding, no safety belt--nothing to cushion the body that wrenched forward over the bars at 50 m.p.h. may be no more than a leaking bag of tissue and bone fragments when the concrete has finished with it. On any long trip, moreover, the biker stands to encounter at least one car-swaddled Milquetoast with blood in his eye whose hope is to run him off the road. Highways are the bullrings of American insecurity and every biker knows it, or ends up in a hospital.

So why ride? There are, of course, impeccable reasons. Bikes are easy to park, they save gas, they pollute the air less than cars. But the impeccable reasons are not always the real ones. Buying a bike, particularly a big motorcycle, is buying an experience that no other form of transport can give: a unique high that like pot has spun its own culture around itself. The name of the game is freedom. A biker, being more mobile, is on a different footing from a driver. The nightmares of traffic afflict him less. Instead of being trapped in a cumbersome padded box, frozen into the glacier of unmoving steel and winking red taillights on the ribboned parking lots that expressways have become, he can slide through the spaces, take off, go ... And the kick is prodigious.

Instead of insulating its owner like a car, a bike extends him into the environment, all senses alert. Everything that happens on the road and in the air, the inflections of road surface, the shuttle and weave of traffic, the opening and squeezing of space, the cold and heat, the stinks, perfumes, noises and silences--the biker flows into it in a state of heightened consciousness that no driver, with his windows and heater and radio, will ever know. It is this total experience, not the fustian cliches about symbolic penises and deficient father figures that every amateur Freudian trots out when motorcycles are mentioned, that creates bikers. Riding across San Francisco's Golden Gate Bridge on his motorcycle, the biker is sensually receptive every yard of the way: to the bridge drumming under the tires, to the immense Pacific wind, to the cliff of icy blue space below.

"Se tu sarai solo," Leonardo da Vinci remarked five hundred years ago, "tu sarai tutto tuo" (If you are alone, you are your own man). Biking, like gliding, is one of the most delightful expressions of this fact. There is nothing secondhand or vicarious about the sense of freedom, which means possessing one's own and unique experiences, that a big bike well ridden confers. Antisocial? Indeed, yes. And being so, a means to sanity. The motorcycle is a charm against the Group Man.

[sb] Robert Hughes

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.