Motorcycle Madness

Have you seen that crazy video of the motorcycle out in BC going 299 kph? Somehow I missed it when it was first making the rounds. Here it is, if you missed it too. It’s nuts.

Turns out the motorcycle was driven by a 25 year old with no license and a whack of related prior convictions, fines and suspensions. His mother is the registered owner of the uninsured bike.

I can’t stop wondering about both of them, the mother and the son. What was he thinking? Why does he need such a crazy thrill?  What kind of mother supplies a super powerful bike to her crazy, risk-taking, unlicensed, uninsured son? What other insane things have the two of them done?

It reminded me of something that happened when I was 25 and back in high school. A group of us former drop-outs would meet in the cafeteria for coffee every morning. There was a guy named Steve who told us about his fantasy of having sex while driving really fast on his motorcycle. The woman would be half-sitting, half-lying in front of him, facing him. She’d be wearing a skirt and crotchless underwear. He’d be accelerating into her, under a full moon. There was more, but I can’t remember it all. It was a long time ago.

Steve was looking for someone to help him act out this fantasy. He asked me, but I declined (although I did go skydiving with him a few months later). He asked everybody. Everybody declined.

Every day he’d come to school and fill us in on his progress. One night he rode the stretch of highway on which the fantasy would be lived out. Another night he made the crotchless underwear. Another night he modified his own pants. And so on.

And then one day he came in and shocked us all by reporting that he’d found a willing partner! (This was pre-Internet, when you had to do these things the old-fashioned way, like go around asking hundreds of women, one by one, if they’d have high-speed sex with you on a motorcycle under a full moon.)

I’m sure we all gazed up at the moon that Saturday night and wondered how it was going.

Monday morning, bright and early, we gathered in the cafeteria, eager for the juicy details. Steve arrived late. He sat down with his coffee and told us everything.

He said everything had been perfect, just like the fantasy:  the weather, the road conditions, the full moon, the skirt, the crotchless panties, the girl, his mood, her mood, everything. He picked her up and they drove out to the country. Then they stopped so she could get into position,  half-lying in front of him, and they started roaring down the highway, accelerating, faster and faster, and everything was perfect and thrilling and exciting….except for some inexplicable reason he couldn’t get it up.

None of us, including Steve, had even considered the possibility of this happening. It was the epitome of anticlimactic.

I ran into him years later and asked him if he’d ever tried again. He said no, reality had killed the fantasy for him. He’d been forced to get a new fantasy.