Okay, found the paragraph that should have convinced me he was a "no good boyfriend" right off the bat. I can remember it made me squeamish at the time, but I had this bad habit of wanted to stick around to see what would happen when my ideas clashed with his, and some kind of weird idea that I could be a good influence of some kind. I know I thought stuff like this. I still think like this. It bugs me.

"I guess I'm just getting tired of looking at jail bars and dumb niggers, both of which we've got more than our fair shar (not to mention the crazy Turk that goes around talking to himself and Allah and bugging everybody all day.)

I never get used to the "n" word. I can't remember him ever using that word around me before or even after. There were even a couple of black guys who hung with the bunch and seemed to be accepted. I remember thinking then that the one place these guys ever got to meet more than a couple of African Americans was in prison - black toughs from Milwaukee. Not exactly prime ministers of loving brotherhood. Not integrated brotherhood, at any rate. And the sentiment was returned. Somewhere in here I wrote about getting drunk with a guy who used to belong to the Nazi party. He left it, but he did give me some idea of understanding where the white power thing came from. None of the guys I knew were currently into that bullshit, but they came from backgrounds that fed the movement. Poor white farmers from the backwoods of Wisconsin - the backwoods of anywhere. The backwoods of town. Looking for a way to feel good about themselves, and going about it all bassackwards. Angry because the American dream was not working for them, and not understanding why. Unless it was because of all those "others" - blacks, Indians, Catholics, Jews - because somebody had to be getting all the best pieces of the American Pie and it sure as hell wasn't them.

But I didn't call the ngb on his language. That wasn't my worst sin. My worst sin was that I didn't call him on it because I really didn't care. He was a sociological experiment. I was trying to understand something. He was trying to love somebody.

One thing I remembered last night about my year with the Hellbounders. The first summer I started riding with them as an official "ol' lady", I was also reading Thucydides' "History of the Peloponnesian Wars" - there's one too many of one of those consonants in there I think - or maybe one too little. Anyway, I remember reading it, and comparing it to the bike clubs I knew in Green Bay. Athens. Sparta. Mythology. I thought about those ancient towns, about their comparative populations. I watched every night at Uncle Ray's bar, as ancient stories were reenacted again and again. Love, hate, jealousy, fidelity, infidelity, coming apart, coming together. Because the biker community lived a little more on the surface than did the university community, I felt as if I were learning a lot - about communities old and new. Now it is still December of 1983, and the ngb writes that he hopes my daughter is with me for Christmas. That I won't be so depressed and lonely. I should have learned from that that he was a human being, not just a panhead rider. I should have left it at that.

Three more to go, I believe. Reading these letters now, it is hard to believe it was me he was writing to and me who was accepting the collect calls. As I said, he was not a bad man. The fact that he knocked my head into the ground about 20 times in a drunken fit in no way mitigates the fact that to me he was just a cool bike and entrance to a family. For awhile. Because, in spite of the fact that I had two wonderful children by whom I was not doing as well as I should, I was still searching for family. And that, I think, was the whole point of this little exercise in bikerdom. And it was a good family. I was this skinny blonde chick with a college degree, and they accepted me like a long lost sister. The women as well. And they respected my privacy, my books, my writing. They didn't understand it, but that was okay because to them, I was "good people". Well, for the most part they were all good people to me as well. I was in transition, and I owe them all a lot. They helped me look for and find another family, and finally, to begin to do right by

Well, we do slog to the end of this folder with five more letters from the ngb. It is December of 1983. Ronald Reagan is in the White House. I've got a magna cum laude degree from the University of Wisconsin Green Bay in Intellectual History, and I'm hanging with the Hellbounders. My ol' man is in the Dane County Jail, doing time for old warrants.

I've divorced two perfectly good husbands, and have two perfectly good children living with ex no. 2 in Madison, not really doing right by any of them. I think I'm trying to have an interesting life, but I have absolutely no idea what exactly I'm actually doing.

So here's this letter from a guy in the Dane County Jail who says I mean more to him than his panhead, and even I know that's serious talk. I'm giving his life meaning. He's not doing the same for me. That wasn't the point. For me. For me, obviously, there really is no point.

Getting very close to the bottom of this folder. Wonder what the next one will bring. Yet another letter from the ngb, from jail. This one I think toward the beginning of that relationship. It was like trying on a new outfit, or trying out a new hairdo. Which I rarely do. That time I was trying on "being a biker ol' lady." I had a boyfriend with a chopped '46 panhead, who was already doing time in jail. This jail time, I should reinterate, was all about traffic tickets. About driving without a license. About speeding. About driving infractions piled up to his chin. If he'd had a car, they would have been spilling out of the glove box. As all he had was a motorcycle, they simply spilled out into the wind.

We got pulled over once on the way to a Willie Nelson/Waylon Jennings concert. I called it the Willon and Waylie show. Somehow, he'd landed a job as security on the sound board, and we were getting in the show for free, which was a good thing as we had absolutely no money.

So, now we've been up all night doing I don't even remember what kind of drugs, and we're on our way to the show in the early early morning. It's raining. It's cold. He's riding with a hand-lettered "Licence Applied For" sign on the back of the bike, and a state trooper pulls us over about 20 miles away from the county fair grounds where the show would be. He had warrants out for his arrest. We were cooked. Toast. I started to cry.

When I broke down and started to cry, the ngb and the trooper bonded. They both looked over at me as if I were crazy. The ngb said something like, "Now, don't go crying like that." And looking all embarrassed. He looked at the trooper and the trooper looked back sympathetically. I kept crying. " He gets to work security at the Willon and Waylie show, and we get in free. We only took the bike because we didn't have enough money for gas for the car." I was partly faking it, and partly really crying, because I was cold and hungry and thinking about spending the rest of the day in some small town cop shop, and I didn't have any money and I didn't even bring a book. Very depressing prospects.

Next thing I knew, the trooper was writing him a warning, and telling him to look out for other cops on the road, because they were going to be out in force because of the show. Suddenly we were on our way again. Good show. Weird crowd. Lots of red necks in new cowboy shirts and hats. Lots of whiskey. No pot. Surly bunch. The sun finally came out.

It was all good.

Merry Christmas and A Guid New Year! Love, Mary.

A unicorn in a forest of Christmas ornaments.

Painting by Julie Shearer

Christmas of '79?