I Want To Be A Bad Bitch On A Motorcycle
Every day on my commute, I walk past a Ducati dealership. Dozens of shiny, beautiful motorcycles are lined up one by one along the sidewalk like a bad girl clique. They beckon me closer, tempting me to throw a leg over a warm and inviting leather seat. I can feel my fingers wrapping around the handlebars even as I shove my hands further into my pockets. Each morning I leer at the same black and silver Triumph Bonneville before scuttling away again, intimidated both by the price tag and the heavily male staff of the shop. I am very aware that I am not supposed to want to ride a motorcycle. Everyone always told me I wasn’t that kind of girl.
It would be easy to dismiss my motorcycle-longing as a revenge fantasy: The thought of pulling up in front of my ex’s house on a roaring bike, removing my helmet and whipping around my hair as his jaw drops — all of this in slow motion, obviously — is a regular daydream. But when I look at that Triumph Bonneville, what I feel isn’t residual breakup bitterness; it’s exhilaration and control.
The truth is I’ve always been a speed demon, long before boys entered the picture. This baffled my parents when I was a polite little kid tearing across a lake on a family friend’s jet ski. Bicycles, rollerblades and skateboards held my attention for a few weeks at most but were often abandoned in the backyard due to my inherent laziness. But jet skis, motorboats and eventually my prized Mini Cooper unlock a rush in me that makes me feel relaxed even as all of my senses are entirely focused. When you’re moving that quickly, you cannot think about anything else: not your Twitter mentions, not your ex and the awkward way you left things, not that presentation at work. You just can’t. It’s a forced unplug, and a rare one for someone who lives and breathes social media like I do.
A motorcycle was always the next logical step in the progression of my need for speed, but none of my friends own bikes. My motorcycle lust has been stymied by how ~uncool~ my social circle is.
“But Ella, motorcycles are dangerous!” I think to myself as I ogle my mechanical crush on yet another Tuesday morning. My uncle had a nearly fatal motorcycle accident in his twenties, and my friends wince as I Google “motorcycle driving schools.” And I get it. I’m a responsible person, almost to a fault — I was the teenager who cried, “Guys, we’re going to get caught” during each anarchistic high school adventure. When I finally dated a jerk as part of my brief rebellious phase, he didn’t know how to drive a car, let alone a motorcycle. But I don’t want to weave through busy lanes of traffic or race across the Brooklyn Bridge (okay, maybe that last one a little). I want to see each yard of the road as it disappears underneath me and hear the wind screaming in my ears. I want to feel the exhilaration of going 70 miles an hour down a dark highway somewhere upstate, totally and utterly alone. A motorcycle is a powerful, demanding, greasy machine, and I want to learn to trust it.
Above all, I want to be the kind of woman who knows how to ride a motorcycle. A woman on a motorcycle has experienced the rare type of independence that comes from being removed from everything but the ride. She is capable and strong and above all, totally in control. She has to be: There is nothing to protect her from her mistakes. It doesn’t matter how good her insurance is, or how expensive her gear is, or what driving course she took. Her survival comes down to skill and luck, and she holds nothing back. At the end of the day, it’s just her and the road.
And she will out-live us all during the zombie apocalypse.
