From Mouseketeer to Easyrider

Memoir

From Mouseketeer to Easyrider

A tale of batshit motorcycle craziness; being one of the most famous kids on earth; meeting Buster Keaton; and finally, blessedly, becoming a hack

Lonely men of the road will inseminate anything with a vagina

‘We’re Americans. Fuck you, deal with it.’

By J.J. Solari

I sat in the Easyriders editor/owner’s “office,” where a sign hanging from the ceiling proclaimed, “THIS IS NOT A SANCTUARY.” A lone employee, Izzy Petty, dressed nice with short coiffed hair and business-like glasses, had met me at the “office” door, the office being a sparse space at the end of a marooned strip mall that had a 7-11 and two abandoned adjoining offices. The third and last door opened to the Easyriders office, which was unidentified. All of this anemic industry on a short dirt road off the main highway that went through Agoura Hills, California, on the other side of a range of hills that separates Agoura and points oceanward from the populated glut of the San Fernando Valley. I immediately knew why Izzy had been hired as we ambled along together: So that “normal” visitors entering the Easyriders den would not be frightened. There was a Harley in the hallway. That was the decor. It was clean. There were no people in the lobby. No pets. No decorations. Izzy smilingly …

Essay

Pug's Orchard

When business was good, they were generous with their apples

A legacy of giving includes sharing land with neighbors

A woman needs land just like a man does

By Farahn Morgan

Already, there are things I know I would change if I could. So much of it is just time. Then, there’s the weather. For the better part of April and almost all of May, it rained. The trees swayed under cloudbursts like women washing their hair, tossing their heads back in the rinse. Pollen gathered in little pools and then dried yellow in halos on the blacktop. For weeks, I worried over the borrowed plot of land in the field across the road, but there was nothing to do about it — nothing to do but wait. “It’s ok,” Mike Shell reassured me, “it’s still early.” May was nearly spent by the time I got my vegetables in the ground. Mike and his wife Sheila are my friends, the first I made when — a few years ago — I moved from my studio apartment in the northwest quadrant of Washington, DC, to a three-bedroom row home in Wise, the deep southwest Virginia town where I was raised. On a whim, I stopped into the general store Mike and Sheila run together in the old wooden apple house on Coeburn …

From Mouseketeer to Easyrider

A Lone Figure

Pug's Orchard