Except for rally week, the little town of Sturgis, Mississippi is uninhabited. The restaurant is closed. The school is boarded up. The houses are all empty. The gas stations are gone. ***** of tumbleweed drift lazily down Main Street. Sheila Jameson turns the Biker’s Depot into a wolf breeding preserve.

The day before this year’s rally the weather was hot. Hot and muggy with a forty percent chance of Biblical Rain. I drove my Manly Minivan to Sturgis with a big box of books for Saturday’s book signing. I was sporting a brand new goatee.

Miz Roo said I looked scraggly and disreputable. But she said that if I wanted to walk around looking homeless… well, that would be MY decision and she trusted me to do whatever I thought was right and proper.

Cool! I could keep the goatee!

I dropped off the books and then ventured out into a hot, midmorning drizzle that threatened to break open into a full-blown rainstorm. Vendors were crowding the street, putting up tents and arranging t-shirts. A few bikers eased through town looking for action, but it was still too early. We turned the Manly Minivan around and headed home.

“That was strange,” Miz Roo said. “I expected more.”

“You’ll get more tomorrow. We’ll bike up here for the first day of Sturgis,” I promised.

“Yeah, if the weather looks good,” she agreed.

“Weather be damned! We have rain suits! We’re bikers… REAL bikers, and not some plastic imitation bikers from China!”

“You’re right, of course, dear. But in your memoirs, perhaps you might want to leave out the part where you drove up here in the Manly Minivan.”

“Of course!” I answered. “Our little secret.”



Thursday, August 19th

Thursday was the first official day of Sturgis South 2010. It rained. Miz Roo and myself packed the bikes with spare clothes and rain suits, checked the radar, and went back to bed.



Friday, August 20th

This was the second official day of Sturgis South 2010. Our bikes’ bags were still packed from the previous day. It was 8:30 AM when Lambchop pulled up and honked. “HEY! LET’S GO!”

I was busy putting the finishing touches on Stray Dog’s latest modification – twin 142dB air horns. These little tympanic puncturizers are sixteen times louder than the pain threshold. When I hit the horn button, my headlights go dim, trains slow down, windows rattle and people drop whatever they’re holding.

“Hey, Lambchop,” I called out from the garage. “C’mon over here and listen to this…”

Miz Roo was inside the house, putting on lipstick. Let me tell you, that stuff is hard to get out of the carpet.

We made our plans quickly. Miz Roo needed to get her Sporty dyno’d, buy a denim vest, acquire some T-shirts, eat barbeque, and check out every vendor tent. Lambchop needed to return a DVD to Blockbuster, try another funnel cake, and make the dinner ride at three o’clock.

But first…eye candy! Half a VW mated to a long set of chopper forks. Girls on Sporties. A sidecar with a kid in it. Three custom choppers up for auction. A Goldwing with loud pipes! I think they were loud pipes. The gentleman to my left remarked, “That’s the first time I’ve ever heard a Goldwing.” Then he asked, “Do you think he’s just playing a recording of loud pipes over his Honda sound system?”

I laughed lightheartedly. Then the clouds parted and the sun came out. Within seconds, I was sweating. Not "farm hand" sweating, but more like "kidney failure" sweating. By ten fifteen in the morning, my body had been beaten up from the inside out.

Everywhere I looked there was stuff to drink… one dollar water, buck-and-a-half water, three dollar sodas, and five dollar lemonades. I didn't have any money on me, but Miz Roo did. So I followed her from vendor to vendor as she picked through their t-shirts, turning them this way, then that way, then carefully reading the witty messages on each one.

Meanwhile, I was sweating into my socks. My boots squished. Rivulets of mineral-rich water cascaded down my back. I dutifully followed Miz Roo from vendor to vendor while my life fluids oozed and drained onto the sidewalk, mingling with the runoff from a hundred other slowly dying husbands.

I didn’t even notice that the custom chopper across the street was powered by a large chainsaw engine. Or that its frame and forks were made of two-by-fours! I was too busy trying to convince my wife to quit shopping and accompany me into the Main Street Grill for some iced tea. She said “Sure,” and suddenly we couldn’t find Lambchop. I found him and talked him into going to get a giant, icy, bottomless tumbler of tea, but by then Miz Roo had wandered off.

I found her, lost him. Found him, lost her. Finally, I found both of them looking at a display of Harley-Davidson Zippo lighters. I told them in a firm voice that I was crossing the street… this street right here… and that I was going into the Main Street Grill to get something to drink… and that our friendship, and marriage, would no longer delay my quest for sustenance… and that I was in imminent danger of dying from dehydration, and my death would be on their heads… and that I had no money on me, so could I please borrow five dollars.

They pretended not to hear. “I want to go over to the Dyno trailer,” Miz Roo whined in a self-absorbed, nasally voice that showed how little she cared about my problems. I mopped my brow and squeezed another quart of sweat from my shirt. Trembling from dehydration, I asked, “Why?”

“I want to see if they can do the dyno today,” she said, hiking energetically toward the Road Hogs Dyno van. From a block away, I could see that they had no customers waiting. I recommended (in a calm and reasoned voice) that we should go back to the opposite end of town and get our bikes. We could park in the shade of a lush oak directly across from Road Hog’s.

She objected. “No. I’m going down there right now. Now quit whining and follow me. And do something about that awful dripping. It's disgusting.”

“Wait,” I pleaded, “that means walking four blocks out of our way, because we’ll have to go back and get the bikes eventually.”

“OK, we’ll go get the bikes first," she agreed, turning on her heels and heading back to the bikes. We walked past the Main Street Grill without even slowing down. Through their closed doors I could hear the tinkling of ice in a glass.

“Where’re we going?” Lambchop asked. I answered with my customary witty repartee… something about a hand basket.

On the way back to our bikes, I was suddenly so hungry I would’ve eaten a horsefly tamale if it was good and crunchy. Instead, we climbed the hill to the Firehouse Barbeque trailer and ate lunch. That was some GREAT barbeque. I had energy again.

The three of us moved our bikes down to Road Hog’s and waited patiently as Robert Acqa ran Miz Roo’s Sportster through its paces. He swapped out her modified stock air filter and mounted an older Screamin’ Eagle kit. The dyno showed that the SE backplate ran better without the venturi ring. When he gave her the bike back, it ran cleaner and pumped out 75 horses!

Testing the newfound power would have to wait. We only had a short time before the dinner ride and Miz Roo wanted to see everything on the side alleys. I noticed a lemonade stand near the entrance to the campground and made a beeline for its window.

“One lemonade, please!”

The nice lady inside sloshed the full plastic collector’s cup on the counter. “That’ll be five bucks, hon,” she announced. I fished around for my wallet, but it was empty.

“Oops,” I apologized. “Can I owe you?”

The nice lady pulled the full cup back inside and dumped the delicious-looking, cold, sweet lemonade into the trash. “NEXT!”

“You threw it away?” I was incredulous. “You threw it AWAY?"

“Ain’t got time for bums,” she told me. “NEXT!”

I stood on my tiptoes and looked around for Miz Roo, hoping that she’d have five bucks for me so I wouldn’t have to give up my position in line. The man behind me told me to quit dripping on his shoes. “I’ve lost my wife,” I told him. I was too tired to object when he used his elbow to help get around me.

My tongue was so dry that it kept sticking to the roof of my mouth. A “Sturgis Security” golf cart pulled up. The woman driving had a name tag that said “MEDIC”, and asked whether I needed any help. The man who had elbowed me told her that I had lost my wife.

“Oh, I’m so sorry,” she offered. “Recently?”

“Huh? No,” I said, but my drymouth made it sound like “dough”. I ignored her and kept looking in the crowd for Miz Roo. I caught a glimpse of Lambchop’s red denim vest and told the golf cart medic, “Dat’s my friend. Dere!”

“You see somebody you know?”

“Where’s my wife?”

“She’s gone, sir,” said the medic, patting my arm reassuringly. Her grip tightened slightly as she keyed the mike on her portable radio. “Two-eight has a ten ninety-six at the campground gate.”

Her radio crackled with static, then, “Ten-four two-eight. Backup dispatched. State the nature of the problem.”

She replied, “Appears to be a confused homeless man…”

“Whad? I’m dot home-dess. I’m a wri-der.” I pointed in the general direction of the Biker’s Depot and immediately forgot the name of the place. “I’m sigh-ding books up dere somewhere tomorrow mor-ding.”

The depth of understanding and empathy in the medic’s eyes was heart wrenching. I tried to tell her the whole story, starting with the minivan, and the dyno, and the sweating, and the lemonade. Mixed in with all this was the sub-plot of losing Miz Roo and my friend…

I saw Mark wandering around the edge of a nearby vendor tent. “LAMB-Chop!” I shouted. He looked up at me and took a couple of steps in my direction. Out of the corner of his eye, he caught sight of Miz Roo turning away to enter a different tent. Having appointed himself as her guardian, he quickly backpedaled and followed her into the tent.

The medic saw him look at me, spin around and hide in the nearest vendor tent. She had seen the fear in a family's face when a stalker violates a restraining order. Her grip tightened. “We’re going to get you some help, sir.”

“I dow’t deed help,” I told her. “I deed demodade.”

“Why? Are you diabetic?”

“Do, jus' dirsty. My wife has all de mo-dey.”

She slid one eyebrow into a high arch. “You said you lost your wife.”

“Yeah, but dsen I saw her again over dere…LAMBCHOP!” I spotted him again, walking in my direction with Miz Roo by his side. Something shiny caught her eye and she peeled off to see what it was. “Get over here!” I yelled at him. Reluctantly, he came over, abandoning Miz Roo to the imagined indignities of a horde hot blooded biker trash with bad teeth.

“Hey, Roo,” he said.

The medic regarded him with suspicion. “Sir, do you know this man?”

Lambchop thought on the question for a long second. “I’m… not sure. What has he done? Did he implicate me?”

Miz Roo poked her head in to see why I was at the center of a serious-looking three-way conversation. “Whuzzup?” she asked.

“You got five bucks?” I asked. “I want a demodade.” The medic finally let go of my arm, but the lady in the food trailer wouldn’t take my order. I settled for a Gatorade from the medic's golf cart.

Three-fifteen in the afternoon. The heat index kept going in the wrong direction. Lambchop saddled up his Shadow for the evening Dinner Ride. Miz Roo and myself had chores back at the farm, so we headed west, out of town. The breeze was a welcome change.


Saturday, August 21st

Saturday was my first official book signing. The whole Evil Biker Gang gathered at the Philadelphia Colliseum at nine AM to drive into Sturgis together. Friends had invited friends, and soon we had twenty bikes headed north on Highway 15. More bikes joined us on the road. By the time we reached the halfway point, our number had doubled.

If you can only spend one day at Sturgis South, Saturday would be a good choice. Bikes of every description clog the main street. Of course, you can’t expect to get great parking spots. Miz Roo shoehorned her Sporty between a couple of black bettys that had carelessly left a teensy weensy bit of extra room between them. She carefully set the jiffy stand down and dismounted her bike by climbing onto the saddle and spinning off onto the sidewalk with a round off half layout (without the half twist… no point being showy).

I parked in the mud. I know this because several bystanders loudly commented, “Yer in the mud.” The only reason I can find that might explain why several people were watching a mud puddle late on a Saturday morning would be The Heat. It was worse than the previous day. Indeed, the mud puddle should have boiled off long before I got there. It was obviously being replenished by a natural spring of human sweat.

It was only ten thirty, but I insisted on eating a barbeque sandwich before sitting down for four hours of signing books. It was a good sandwich, I told myself over and over. It must be the heat that’s causing the nausea. I needed to sit down.

Fortunately, I only had to chase a couple of people away from the book signing table in the Biker’s Depot. “Air conditioning… air conditioning,” I grunted eagerly. I sat in the office chair and kicked back. The chair was broken and I got stuck when it snapped back, leaving me with my head dangling below my feet.

“What air conditioning?” Miz Roo asked.

One large window unit was set into a hole in the wall on the back of the store. A fan set up high on an upper shelf redirected all the hot air that had risen to that point and blasted it toward the front of the store. My table sat in the fan’s flow, and was brightly lit by the sun shining down through the front store window. Every two seconds, someone opened the door and walked in, pulling with them a wave of hot air that had been cooled a bit by an evaporating mud puddle.

And then the power died and it got hotter.

Lambchop showed up with a large bag of Krystal hamburgers. “Ray called and said he’d be here in an hour. They’re parked just outside of town and the ladies want to look at everything in all the vendor tents,” he told us. “I figgered you’d be hungry so I brought you some food.”

I didn’t want to hurt Lambchop’s feelings. I’m a nice guy. I ate one burger. Miz Roo is twice as nice as me. Lambchop is my unofficial publicist and rescue dog. He told everyone he met at Sturgis that I wrote a book. He brought food. He went out and got us cold water to drink. All day long. That’s why he’s the Evil Biker Gang’s Official Wielder of the Tire Iron.

Saturday was a voyage of self-discovery. I discovered that I really don’t get along with people all that well. One customer after another came up to the clearly marked book signing table, looked at all the signs, and asked “What’s this?”

“I wrote a book. I’m signing ‘em.”

"I wrote a book. I'm signin' 'em."

“I wrote a book. I’m selling ‘em so I can retire to Bermuda.”

"I'm famous. I'll autograph body parts...OW!" (Forgot Miz Roo was sitting there)

It was a good book signing, I guess. I sold four books. I read that if you sell only one book, it's a successful signing. It's not the money you make, it's the friends. Letting people get to know you for the person you are is more important than selling books. Anyway, that's what the magazine article said. What a load of hooey.

Nobody came up to me with a contract for the movie rights. Nobody wanted to produce "RoosterBoots - The Musical". Nobody asked me to sign their *****. I’m not complaining. Signing ***** is hard work. Oh, sure, you laugh. That's because you're expecting a brand new dry erase board, and not soggy papyrus.