Edie (57 page)

Speed pills I took very rarely. Just on a Friday or Saturday night. Then we’d watch television, smoke cigarettes, and make speed doodles. Everyone was into that, just getting wired on these speed tablets . . . drawing pictures . . . just intricate nothings.

It was a real circus. They were all very concerned about the moral decay of the ward. “There’s just rampant sex on this floor.” They must have been bored with their daily routines, so this big black staff lady got it into her head that Edie and I were screwing. She reported it, and all hell broke loose. There was this
huge
meeting: the director of the hospital, the head psychiatrist on the floor, all the patients had this big powwow. Terrible. It reduced Edie to tears. Cornball absurdities. It wasn’t based on anything I

I got out before Edie. But I came back to see her. I wanted to get to know her better. We would go up into the mountains, to the hot springs. A couple of times we went up there at night. We looked at the stars and watched an eclipse. We brought up a cake and opened some presents. It was Vietnam Moratorium Day. We were driving by the Draft Board and everyone was out picketing. It was funny, because my own records had been burned up when they’d set fire to the Selective Service Building and the new ones designated me 4-F by mistake, so I never served.

We used to go up in the mountains and sit around and drink wine and beer. We’d sit in the hot springs and then run down to the creek and splash around in the cold creek, then run back up and get in the hot, then the cold. Kind of like shock treatment, I guess.

PREACHER EWING
 One night I took Edie out from the Cottage Hospital. She’d been taking uppers in there and she was really having a bad time . . . shaking and stuff, and saying that she had some kind of allergy. It was a weird trip when she came down off amphetamines, she had to score on downers to help her through. So we trundled on out to Isla Vista, and when we couldn’t score on reds anywhere, she scored a balloon of junk from some guys up in their room . . . that’s a rubber balloon with the bottom of it filled with heroin and then tied up . . . about sixty dollars’ worth she bought. These two junkies shot her up right there on the bed. Then they had some . . . I mean, they’d got it for her, so they deserved some, right? One guy did up a dime, which is ten dollars’ worth, see, and the other guy did a nickel, worth five dollars. That was enough for them. They did edie with a dime and it fazed her for about thirty seconds, right? then they did her up with another nickel and
that
didn’t even faze her. The whole scene . . . really strange. I don’t like being around junkies anyway. I took her home. She had the rest of the balloon in dime papers, one right after another. She snorted one and ate all the rest, right? It was past the time she was supposed to be back to the hospital and she was going through all these trips. She really began freaking out. Her arms flailing, her head knocking back and forth. I held her all night long in a head-lock to keep her from doing herself damage.

Preacher Ewing at T Talley’s funeral

So I got to know her. She decided she didn’t want to go back to the hospital. She wanted to stay with me. Of course, I was living with my club brother T Talley and Sandee, his old lady. Me and T were in the Vikings motorcycle club. The three of us lived in a little shack off Mason Street. It was okay with them. We went to see Edie’s psychiatrist, Dr. Mercer, and it just blew his mind. He had this whole therapeutic program and it didn’t include living with a bunch of outlaws.

SANDEE TALLEY
 The first time I met edie was through preacher up at cruiser’s house on chino street. I wasn’t impressed with her. From what everybody said, I imagined some super-queen. But pretty soon she and preacher were getting it on and she came to live with us. She stI’ll thought she was a movie star or somebody. She’d walk around with no clothes on in front of everybody. She tried to be a biker chick. She used to borrow my clothes, which made me laugh because she had a whole wardrobe. But she wanted to wear my tummy blouses and get a pair of levi’s like mine. She really wanted to ride.

You know why I think you were attracted to her, Preach? Because you and Hank Loible, who worked with you in the Crank Shop, had a thing going about rivalry. Edie was Hank’s girl friend—“Oh, Edie I My superstar” type thing—and so, Preach, you says, “Well, fuck you, I can get her if I want.”

PREACHER EWING
 She was with Hank and she was pretty foxy-looking. Hank was a viking. I met edie at his parents’ house. His folks really dug on her because they liked having a lady in the house.

T TALLEY
 Edie didn’t belong with the bikers. Like, she was a rich hippie. The rich hippies, their mommy buys them a chopper—a four-thousand-dollar chopper—and they drive it until the weather gets cold and they get themselves a nice, warm car. Your true biker takes his bike out whatever the weather because he loves it. When a rich hippie gets in an accident, he sells his bike, what’s left of it. “Oh, I got hurt. I don’t want this.” The good biker fixes his. I’ve been lucky. I’ve been down quite a few times . . . Tasted the pavement quite a bit. You live by a bike; you die by a bike. That’s what I believe.

The bike club we took Edie to was called the Vikings—an old outlaw club. We took Edie to the meetings at this bar called the Spigot—so she could meet the bike people and see how they dressed and acted and what they thought about life in general. She walked around giving
these bikers Hollywood kisses. You can’t go around kissing bikers on both cheeks like she was kissing them. Ordinarily, they’d “turn her out” right on the spot. I guess you know what “turning out” is. Rapin’ her. Edie figured, I guess, it couldn’t happen to her because she was different.

I think Edie saw it as a great new world to enter into. She dug the bike scene. Most people do, you know.

It’s a trip looking at all these old pictures. You can see how I used to look. I’m not working now. I just got out of the hospital. Right now I’ve got a fifty-fifty chance of living. When someone says, “Well, you’re sure taking it good,” I says, “That’s not bad if you’re a biker.”

I got the worst cancer you can have—melanoma. The doctor kept me pretty happy there in the hospital. He said, “Don’t worry, T, if it does go the worst, 111 give you something so you can go out on your bike and do it your way.” He knew that I don’t want to be laid up in a hospital slowly dying. That just wouldn’t be no class at all. I told him, “I want to the on my bike . . . I want to do a role involving nobody else except for myself.” Hell probably give me a big old needle which wI’ll give me enough time to get on my bike and go over a cliff.

I’ve seen death so many times on my bike . . . I’ve been inches from death. Because when you’re on a bike, you have no protection. But the feeling . . . it’s just so beautiful. When you’re on a bike, you get to know every inch; you know when your nuts are going to work loose; you know how much your engine’s going to take; you can smell things you can’t smell in a car; you can see things on a bike which you can’t in a car because you’re all cooped up and boxed in. When a biker goes from one place to another, he’s having a good time every second . . . especially when you have forty or fifty bikes and everybody’s in formation, side by side, and you’re passing the old wine bottle or smoking a joint or whatever you’re doing. You look at each other’s bike, making sure everything’s working good. Usually you have a road captain; hell make sure that everyone’s in formation . . . and it’s really beautiful when fifty bikes are coming up the road. When we’re going around a curvy road, everybody breaks down the formation and we go into a single file around corners because it’s a lot safer. Then we regroup. Those fifty bikes must seem like two hundred. The people just freak.

Back in the old days a hike herd would make the people tremble. They used to chase the cops all over the valley. The cops didn’t have radios then . . . so it was one-to-one. The bikers drove their bikes right through the grocery store and just terrorized the citizens. Two
hundred guys’d go through, picking up the groceries on the fly, and one guy’d pull the telephone wires in the back so the guy couldn’t make a phone call. That’s how the bikers got a bad name. But basically they want to be left alone—go up in the mountains and party for three or four days non-crash, you know, popping pills, drinking, getting women.

There’s the German flag. It’s a strong symbol. It does blow out citizens. Your regular person on the streets, when they see somebody wearing a swastika, relates to the Nazi thing. But it isn’t so much a Nazi thing; if s to blow people out.

Here’s two of my brothers shooting tongue. Otherwise, kissing. That’s quite common with bikers. It’s not because we’re fags. like, if I haven’t seen a brother in a long time, 111 go up there and, instead of shaking hands, 111 go up and shoot some tongue because I love him so much.

PREACHER EWING
 I’m a Universal light Church minister. That’s a mail-order minister, you understand. I wrote my name on the dotted line. I didn’t particularly want to be a minister, but . . . why not? Somebody was signing people up. So after I married one dude and his old lady, they started calling me Preacher.

SANDEE TALLEY
 When T said, “Would you like to have a biker’s wedding?” I said, “Well. . . okay. Why not? You know. Good party. Big. Lots of food at the wedding. We had chicken and potato salad. And venison. Jocko shot a deer and the cops were looking for him because he’d done it out of season. We had three or four cooks. We had a cake, but the tiers fell down.

PREACHER EWING
 When I married Sandee and T, I forgot the Harley Davidson manual which I was going to read from at the wedding. That was going to be my sermon. I was going to substitute Sandee for all the parts, like I was going to read from the General Maintenance section and say, “Oil her regularly,” “Lubricate her annually,” and whatever. When I realized I’d lost the manual, I started looking for a Bible. This other dude, Dick Howell, rode around on a scooter looking for a minister. We finally found this old black Baptist minister that lent me a book with the ceremony in it. So I read the straight ceremony, but when I got to the part, “Do you swear before God and these witnesses?” I looked around at these “witnesses” and I started cracking up.

SANDEE TALLEY
 When I was walking down the aisle everybody was saying, “Don’t do it.”

T TALLEY
 It was on the radio and in the newspapers. This boy was selling papers: “read all about it! At 7:30, the bikers wI’ll be coming down Main Street.” The people were up on the rooftops.

PREACHER EWING
 They had the National Guard out at the intersections outside of town. There were over two hundred bikers in town, many of them one-percenters . . . the outlaw clubs.

SANDEE TALLEY
 T’s mother came to our wedding. She is so beautiful. She doesn’t preach to you, but she is religious—a Seventh Day Adventist. She had told her friends that she was going to a bikers’ wedding. They told her, “Don’t go. Be careful.” So she came and really enjoyed herself. One of the Slaves went up to her—he was pretty stoned—and he said, “You’re a pretty far-out lady. Would you mind if I kissed you?” He did, and she went back and told all those people at the Seventh Day Adventist church that she’d never met such a nice group of young people in her whole life. Well-balanced, nice, young people.

T TALLEY
 See this picture of Sandee at the wedding with her pants laced up to here? We showed it to Edie and she liked the pants so much she wanted some. Edie was trying to be like Sandee.

SANDEE TALLEY
 But she was so skinny that she’d blow away on a bike.

Me and Preacher knew Edie’s problem. We were trying to keep her away from the drugs. It was difficult. We couldn’t very well say, “Look, Edie, we can smoke, but you can’t.”

I feel bad about the way I treated her, because at first I was willing to help. But after a while I didn’t want to be a nursemaid to anybody. That’s what it came to.

PREACHER EWING
 Edie was a little larger than life in her capacity to hit the depths. But she always had a sort of purity that came through. I really felt good around her sometimes. I used to call her Princess, because that’s what she thought she was. That was the role she played. She knew she was in bad shape, as low as any street urchin
can get, but it was part of her underpinnings that she wasn’t really one of them. She’d say her parents were so fantastically upper-class that she wasn’t even allowed to play with any children from Montecito, which is the old-money enclave of Santa Barbara. They didn’t have enough class. They were below her, or she would say that she was too intelligent even to communicate, or that nobody else was capable of feeling on the level that she felt. It was part of her leverage out there in Isla Vista that she wasn’t their kind; she was condescending. It was really ludicrous, because she’d ball half the dudes in town for a snort of junk. That’s how hurting she was. But she was always very ladylike about the whole thing.