Pee Pee

  

September 15, 1971

So, this is a picture of me from 1971 riding a bike at the local “pit” down the street from where I grew up.  I had borrowed the bike from my friend, Gary Cook.  Take note of all of the responsible behaviors that I was modeling.  Helmets were not required so I was clearly following the law.  Skin coverings were a good idea but not required by law.  I didn’t care.  I was wearing my favorite jeans, weighing in at 155 pounds dripping wet, skinny as hell with the closest thing I would ever have resembling a “six-pack”.  But, this is where things start to unravel.  

Rock Critic Lester Bangs once said: “The only true currency in this bankrupt world is what you share with someone else when you're uncool.”  So, it’s time for me to fess up but you gotta promise not to mock me too much as I'm still scarred and sensitive.  

 

I rode everything I could beg, borrow or rent.  Nifty, thrifty Honda 50's, Honda Trail 90’s, Honda 160 Scramblers, Honda 305 Dreams and 305 Scramblers, Suzuki 120’s and 250 X6 Hustlers, some Yamaha dirt bikes in the 250~ish size, Triumph Bonneville, BSA 440 Victor, Norton.  Hell, I rode whatever I could in order to avoid the reality of what I actually owned and had to ride day-to-day.  Reality can be a harsh toke when you have to face some of the things you accommodated and soldiered through in order to survive in a culture where your choices were ill-conceived, didn’t fit norms and were in no way, shape or form cool.  Basically, they were bad choices that everyone recognized before you came to grips with it. 

Pee Pee 

We all try to fit in and during the late ‘60’s riding a scooter was not the way to do it.  You can spin it by saying that in Great Britain they were hip because the Mods rode them or that people who were self-confident rode them because they didn’t care about opinion or that they made sense or any other drivel.  All fine and good for someone who didn’t have to do it or for someone who actually was hip, self-confident or didn’t care about the opinion of others but none of those things described me.  

Consider that people I rode with called my Lambretta “Pee Pee”.  I mean, I tried my best to blow it all off and when I couldn’t ride someone else’s bike I rode “Pee Pee”.  But, OMG!  It was awful.  Try to imagine this.  I was THE_ONLY_PERSON riding a scooter in the local set and there were only a few of us in the whole city who rode them at all.  None of us rode them with pride.  I got run out of Seward Park by Banditos Motor Cycle Gang once for just showing up on a scooter. 

So, I rode dirt as well as I could.  Since the impact of landing jumps and riding ragged terrain would create a horrible rattle and eject the side panels from the scooter I would take them off when I showed up to signal that I was stripping down to fighting weight and that “Pee Pee” had arrived to kick ass and take names.  No side panels.  No helmet.  No shirt. As my late friend and fellow rider, Mel Kossen, would say, “No brains. No headaches”.  In reality it was just a move to reduce the humiliation of having people witness my scooter falling apart or of me surviving and having to go find the missing parts and pieces at the end of the session.  

Enough for now.  While this confession of my struggles with the “Pee Pee Experience” and attendant notoriety is somehow cathartic it has followed me for more than ¾ of my life and if Lester Bangs was correct I was and remain a very rich man.