Outside the Lines
by Titus Gee
I took my friend to get her nose pierced a while back, and got another earring in solidarity.
We rode the Nighthawk because it was the first weekend of Fall, and the cool breeze called to us during lunch.
Soledad Canyon snaked us north and east with just enough curve to keep it interesting and just enough straight to really open her up. The wind hit my chest in a steady, breathtaking rush.
I wasn’t exactly planning on more voluntary puncture wounds, but then, I did know exactly what I wanted.
After the nice lady with the steel spikes finished her small, decorative acts of violence on us, we stopped at a Vallarta market and waded through the Sunday afternoon families buying Mexican sweet bread or coconut candy.
I told my friend she looked tough in her borrowed leather. She grinned and her eyes shone above the new sparkle adding punctuation to the lines of her face, her cheeks all flushed with adventure and wind cold.
“They treat you differently, don’t they?” she said. “Nobody gets in your way.”
Yeah, I suppose they do.
Guess I stopped seeing it after a while.
When I first traded my seatbelt for 25 lbs of leather, everyone noticed.
Three people I’d never met started talking to me at work.
Little boys waved at me from the sidewalk. (I’m not kidding)
City officials and school board members still glance at the leather jacket every time and say the same line every time, like some kind of password:
“You take the bike today?”
and I give the other half of the code:
“Every day and everywhere.”
But then, after a while, I started to see another expression lingering behind the smiles — at least of the grownups — a subtle squint like I’d said something maybe everyone was thinking but had too much tact to voice aloud. The eyes scan my face like they’re wondering just what type of person would go around on two wheels every day and everywhere.
Maybe it’s the perception of danger. People like to tell me stories about motorcycle crashes. Like maybe I just don’t know any better. (I’m a newspaper reporter. I see the CHP reports.) As I walk away, I imagine them ruefully shaking their heads as if to say, “Gotta love his guts, but someday he’ll know better . . . like me.”
Or maybe it’s not even the risk so much as the disregard for social uniformity. Motorcycles and piercings have that in common, though both have taken strides toward the mainstream. A silent unease still lingers around those who dare to decorate their bodies in uncommon ways, or to ride a motorcycles all the time.
We live outside the lines.
That is, we live outside a set of lines.
I saw a short film once about a spaceship captain, a Robin Hood type condemned as both pirate and do-gooder. One scene stands out to me.
The crew member says to her companion, “We’re all in the woods, even the captain. The only difference is, he prefers it that way.”
Just then the captain appears at the door and says, “That’s the only place I can see a clear path.”
Maybe he’s got something there.
I will not say it is easier to press back against strictures born of habit and prejudice more than genuine morality. But I fear the borders of conformity can obscure the visceral nature of the actual world.
Read the cops reports. The security of four wheels is largely an illusion. And if the car won’t make me safe, would unmarked skin make me more diligent? Would unadorned earlobes leave me more likely to be kind to my neighbor?
Maybe by stepping past the arbitrary lines, we can actually let the real ones come more clearly into focus.
Perhaps there is something to be gained by taking a stroll on the Outside.
