Heck’s Angels... or The Blue Hairs Are Coming, The Blue Hairs Are Coming!

by Jack Select
(Blackhawk, SD)

I used to think it was a real bummer getting old. The rewards include arthritis, thinning hair and smart mouthed "kids" (anyone under 40) bugging me about my white shoes. Ha! Now that I've arrived, I'm so tired from all this fun I may have to get a job just so I can take a vacation.

My epiphany happened about 7 years ago when I discovered the first inklings of a new breed of scooters, born no doubt of soaring gas prices. You see, I'd spent 50 years riding 600 pound plus motorcycles. For all of the fun, my most lasting memory has been all the decades of sitting on wet concrete, growing hemorrhoids while cleaning all that $@#% chrome.

These new machines are really cool. The only chrome on my 2008 Yamaha Morphous worth mentioning is my capped bicuspid. My clothes actually stay clean and my scoot even has an automatic transmission perfectly attuned to my attitude (shiftless). The 250cc motor may be smaller than my beer mug but it really moves this scoot.

My only burden is that I live in the Black Hills of South Dakota. Naturally I've been to the Sturgis Motorcycle Hoopla many times, so when I showed up on a "Scooter" it took a week for my biker friends to stop laughing.

They really stopped laughing the first time we shot up Iron Mountain Road which has far more switch backs, hair pins and corkscrew turns than straightaways. Did I mention the occasional 2,000 lb buffalo in the middle of the road? Not many "Hawgs" can grind metal through these curves, especially at $100.00 a pound.

As for me, I'm 67 years old, single and still invulnerable. I also plan on dying either on my scooter at 70 mph screaming through the Black Hills or crawling out of a bedroom window, SO THERE!!!