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.’
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 …
A Lone Figure
Alone in a black hoodie on the sparse and sometimes-deadly Mesa
Butch Tarko is a bad driver
Snoopy, Come Home
We were on the Mesa driving home when we saw a lone figure, dressed in black, walking up the road. From town to our house is about 20 miles — five miles over the mountain — on the only road that leads out here.
You pass the Continental Divide Trail on the left, but the road continues. The road is one and a half lanes. Off to one side is the edge of the canyon, dropping maybe two thousand feet; on the other side the cliff, also two thousand feet — only up.
The vegetation is a mix of juniper, prickly pear, cactus — anything with needles, points, or knife-edged blades for leaves, stickers, and sharp branches at eye level. Any plant is welcome as long as it can grow in nothing but rocky sand, with hardly any rain, at high altitude, and cause pain.
In other words, this is a region of the United States that is out to get you. Apart from the few Continental Divide hikers, there never appears to be …
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
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 …
