Читать книгу The Columns (Volume One) - Tracy Lorenz - Страница 6

By Tracy K. Lorenz

This is what I call the classic “tweener” week. Harley Gras just ended in Muskegon and The Coast Guard Festival starts next week in Grand Haven. In Muskegon you can bring your loved ones out of the basement and in Grand Haven you can put them in.

I actually think “Bike Time” (the WORST event name ever) gets a bad rap. If a bunch of old guys want to walk around dressed like pirates who cares, they live their lives promoting a fantasy, an image, and if a couple days a year they get to hang out with their fellow pirates have at it. It’s no different than a big, noisy, Star Wars convention and I’m sure it brings in upwards of fifteen dollars to aid our local economy.

I spent a lot of time in my younger days in the toughest Motorcycle bar in Muskegon, the “Town Tavern”. There were fights every night, more leather than David Carradine’s hotel room, and a certain camaraderie that comes from everyone being deaf. My days at TT are long gone, I grew up, I moved on, but I have nothing against those who didn’t. I’d just feel weird being over thirty and wearing a piece of clothing with a skull on it (Aunt Jamima head wrap optional). Being an older guy “into” motorcycles certainly isn’t as annoying as older guys who are “into”, say, softball.

And I’ll take the bikers any day over the eunuchs who inhabit Grand Haven.

You aren’t going to believe this next part.

Every Tuesday night they have a little concert in Grand Haven’s Central Park. It used to be a few older people sitting around in folding chairs and maybe a couple hippie kids. Then some Juice Box Mom got tired of laying on a bunch of mattresses with an annoying pea poking her spine and she decided it would be campy to hang out down at the park with her perfect children. Okay, that’s still cool.

But now they started dragging the husbands down too. But that’s not the unbelievable part, they had to step it up a notch…they eat salads. I’m not kidding, Q and I were down there after our bike ride to the beach and there were couples sitting on blankets, a picnic basket beside them, and they were eating salads. Not just one couple, lots. I wanted to hide Q’s eyes, a sight like that could send him spinning in a direction that rarely ends in a football scholarship.

There was one guy sitting there with his wife and we made eye contact. He was sitting on a chair and the chair was on a blanket (thaaaaat’s normal), he had a Tupperware bowl on his lap (knees and ankles together) and he was pouring some home-made dressing on his salad. It wasn’t even manly iceberg lettuce; it was that dark green crap that women pretend to like. If he’d been pouring French dressing from a Kraft bottle onto iceberg I might have cut him a little slack but I felt like saying “Excuse me sir, I think I just saw your left testicle roll over by the bike rack.”

His wife was sitting next to him beaming like “Look, ladies, I’m eating salad in a park with my husband!” while he just looked at me like a beaten dog. I think he may have blinked “Please kill me” in Morse code.

And somewhere between those two worlds, the world of dirty nails, Keystone Light and back hair and the world of company towels, crossover cars, and sun tea lays normalcy. The pendulum swinging between Grand Haven and Muskegon reaches extremes at the end, it’s only when the bob is straight down that normalcy occurs. One side has the bikers, one side has the parade dads, and for two weekends every summer that’s a wide gap to…bridge.