Call me Steve

(Yeah, ok, this happened 30 years ago, I don't actually recall all the details in this story. Consider it semi-fictional. Most of it is true, kinda)

I knew in an instant I could no longer live without it: metal-flecked dark blue paint and a very tall sissy bar. It had a sports car-like gear-shift lever mounted on the bar going between the banana seat and the ape-hanger handle bars. It had 6 gears, at least one more than any of my friends' bicycles. The front fork, complete with fake suspension springs, was raked just like Peter Fonda's "Captain America" chopper. Well, not really, but enough to make it clear that it wasn’t just a bicycle, it was a bike. The twin mirrors and huge headlight added to the chopper look. The heavily chromed wheels and bobbed fenders were hypnotically resplendent in the sunlight. My God, how was it possible to make something so beautiful, so utterly, completely, absolutely cool? There are moments in a person’s life when the path of their life lies before them, clear, obvious, unambiguous. My destiny laid in owning that bike.

I clearly foresaw the lustful, jealous looks in my friends' eyes, the ease with which those gears would propel me around the neighborhood, through the woods, to and from school, or to the pool. No one would ever be able to catch me in races. When my mom sent me to the store for milk, I would easily set some kind of land-speed record in my age division. My Dad would certainly get it for me, I saw in his eyes how he missed his '55 Triumph Bonneville and the coolness it automatically bestowed upon him, how we bonded over the uniquely male fascination with two-wheeled things, how even he was seduced by the nearly sexual appeal of this bike. Parents are so easy.

I imagined myself in a white tucked-in T-shirt, cuffed jeans and boots, a leather jacket. Marlon Brando, Steve McQueen, eat your hearts out. Certainly then the girls in their skin-tight jeans, about whom I was still somewhat ambivalent, less so by the day, would swoon and fawn over me. I wasn't yet quite old enough for a moped license, but who cares, every 15 year old had a moped, no one had a bike like this.

Some things change. Others don't.
Just call me "Steve".