The Bad Motorcycle Boys and How They Grew

Torrington, Connecticut, circa 1974. The Inferno bar was in its heyday, people coming from all over the state to drink cheap beer and jostle against each other as they danced to "Sympathy For the Devil". We crowded the dance floor - wild, sweaty, frenetic; keeping time to the drum's relentless tatoo. Sex and drugs melded with music and alcohol to make The Inferno a dark question of violence barely suppressed and nirvana just a tequila away.
Outside, leaning against the building, watching the paralell line of their motorcycles parked at the curb, were the toughest of the tough, coolest of the cool, poster boys for alienated and disenfranchised young male adulthood - the bad motorcycle boys. Girls loved them, mothers feared them, and the other guys - well, the other guys just stayed out of their way. This was where you'd find Joey, who'd inherited Mick Jagger's looks but none of his savoir faire. Little Tony would be leaning there, assuring all that "I ain't little where it counts, heh, heh." Next to him stood his pal John who could crush a beer can with one hand (and, I suspect, eat it). Mike usually lounged at the end of the line-up. We called him St Michael of the Motorcycles. Impenetrable dark eyes, auburn hair down to his waist, bearded and booted, he looked as if he may have just stepped out from Dante's Inferno instead of the Torrington location. These were the main players, but various and sundry bikers would come and go throughout the night.
I would go to the bar after my 3 - 11 pm shift at the woolen mill. Those were the days before I had grown into my looks and the infamous line outside the door never gave me a second glance. No one would have been more surprised than I to find that I would, in the future, have a long and not always happy relationship with one of them. But that's another story.
I went there to dance. Afterwards, I would go home and dream of roaring motorcycles and licking flames of fire.
The Inferno attracted its crowds of customers in a way that was as inexplicable as it was successful. In that last, blissfully ignorant era before AIDS, one would have been hard-pressed to find out who was going with whom, who was cheating, who was just looking. I recall overhearing a conversation between two men, one of them insisting, "But it's my week to go out with Lisa!" Dialogues and disagreements would ensue between both the frantically searching and the wearily blase. That's the kind of place it was.
One hot, muggy, Friday night, indistinguishable from any other hot, muggy, Friday night, a stranger entered the bar. Alone, and slightly aloof, he stuck out. Aloofness was only allowed if you were one of the motorcycle boys. He ordered a draft beer and idly watched the couple necking in the corner, several fights being broken up, a woman vomiting into her shoe, and a knife being confiscated from a man who was preparing to hurl it at the band. He nursed his beer. When a woman picked up his elbow, mistaking it for her drink, the young man decided it was time to leave. The band struck up a rousing rendition of "Sympathy For the Devil" as he abandoned his stool.
As he walked down the sidewalk toward his car, through the gauntlet of bad motorcycle boys, one of them stuck out a foot and tripped him. The man turned around, looked at the small knot of us huddled in the doorway, at the scattered patrons who'd drifted out onto the sidewalk, and especially at the motorcycle boys. In a soft, clear voice, he asked, "Why don't you all grow up?"
We were surprisingly stunned, as if the concept had never before occurred to us. The young man walked away from an uneasy silence. We returned to the bar to try to forget what he'd suggested; to drown our fears in the dim lighting, the dance and another beer. Several boys roared off on their bikes, perhaps in a futile attempt to outrun the ageing process.
Most of us, in spite of our aversion to it, did grow up, although not that night. I am a freelance writer and a nurse in an obstetrics unit. Mike had 3 children and 2 divorces, none of them with me. Little Tony is working on his college degree in prison. John took over the family business. Joey had a heart attack, married, and settled down to his factory job, not necessarily in that order.
And the young man who walked away? I married him. After all, who better to marry than a grown-up?We have a happy marriage and a well-ordered life with all the adult responsibilities that jobs, mortgages, and raising children entail.
But sometimes, when my husband is not home, I think of those old days and the bad motorcycle boys. I play "Sympathy For the Devil". I dance.