As I headed down to Halsted St. on Saturday, June 14th, 2008 to join my friend Richard for a night on the town, I thought it was going to be a normal evening, if you can call any evening on that strip “normal”.
I don’t suppose the corner of Main and Oak St. in Hooterville, Ohio has nearly as much activity as Chicago’s Boystown. Perhaps, but I somehow doubt it.
Being as how I’d started a new workout program, I refrained from any libations. Not only would it help my program, it would also give me a chance to judge others drinking in my own inimitable way. Richard was always an interesting subject to analyze and compare Darwin’s theory to, once he got going on the alcohol. He’d usually piss off so many people walking down the street with his comments you’d half expect someone like Jane Fonda in 9 to 5 to come after him with a shotgun.
At one club we only stayed for about half an hour, but in that time I once again managed to make an ass out of myself. An acquaintance I knew named Denny, was hauling out his latest stash of gay porn while sitting on his normal corner stool. He burned more DVDs each week than Microsoft.
“Got this one yesterday,” he proudly exclaimed, handing me a burned disc with felt marker writing on it. I don’t remember what the title was, probably Soldier Boys on Furlough or Zookeepers Holiday, something like that.
Just then one of the strippers who regularly performed at this bar walked to the center station and ordered a drink. Denny pointed him out.
“See that guy over there?” he asked.
“Yeah,” I replied, looking at the tattoo covered muscle man just a few feet away.
“He’s in that DVD I just handed you.”
“Really,” I said.
“You should go over and ask him to autograph it for me.”
Thinking I was being oh, so polite, I agreed to do it. Probably make the guy feel good to have someone recognize him. Thinking he was just some stripper and that he’d only made the one film, I assumed it was probably a pretty obscure, cheaply made porn, one of thousands that filled the shelves of Boystown video stores these days.
I marched right up to him and said, “Hi, would you mind signing this?”
How kind of me, I thought.
Fully expecting the guy to blush and excitedly say thanks for actually noticing his work, he simply raised one eyebrow and looked at me like this type of thing happened all the time. He actually made me feel I was being a bit of an inconvenience.
For God’s sake, I thought, it’s not like you’re Elvis…
Borrowing a marker from Adam, the bartender, he signed it, smiled, handed it back and moved on like he was leaving the stage door of Carnegie Hall.
A little put off, I walked over to Denny and handed his DVD back.
“Well, here you go. Since when did small time strippers get so uppity around here?” I commented.
Adam, knowing a good opportunity to twist a knife really deep, sauntered over about ten minutes later, realizing I had no idea what I had just done.
“You really endeared yourself to him, you know that?” he said.
“Whaddaya mean? He should be thankful somebody was interested in his little movie.”
“His name is Ronnie and that movie is his tenth porn. He has an exclusive contract with one of the biggest studios around. He told me, ‘Gee, I really love it when fans ask me to sign bootleg versions of my movies…’”
Dumbfounded, I almost smacked Denny upside the head, realizing he asked me to do it on purpose, just so I’d look like an idiot.
Adam continued, “Yeah, I told him you’re a writer, so he’s gonna Xerox your book, bring it in and ask for your autograph.”
I was about ready to crawl under a rock. So much for me and my high horse.
Now, in Chicago’s Boystown, on a Saturday night, the sidewalks are packed with people, but we didn’t get half a block when we noticed a huge commotion that seemed to be traveling towards us. People suddenly stopped in their tracks and were staring down the street. Off in the distance I noticed the southbound cars braking, horns honking, screams building and what appeared to be acres of skin coming towards us in a group.
“What the hell is that?” Richard asked.
“I have no idea,” some stranger next to us answered, just as mystified as we.
As it got closer, the shapes came into focus and my hand to God, over a thousand naked cyclists began streaming by, one after another, not a stitch of clothing on most of them. Men and women, boobs and crotches swinging to the left and right for everyone and their mother to see, people whooping and hollering as they rode by.
I have never seen the entire street of Halsted on a Saturday night stand still with their jaws on the pavement. Where the hell did this come from? Did somebody collectively slip every one of us bystanders acid?
It took a good ten minutes for 1700 nude bikers to ride by us. A few had jockstraps, some had bras, many were only wearing a helmet. I laughed at that one. They aren’t too concerned about the family jewels hitting the pavement, but by God, some of them are wearing a helmet?!
“What the hell is this?!” I asked another man next to me.
“They do this every year,” he answered. “They’re protesting oil dependency by gathering together in a park, taking their clothes off just as they start the ride and biking around Chicago.”
I didn’t quite know what to say and Richard, of all people, was speechless for the very first time since I’d met him.
As the last biker rode by and waved at us, a little short man in his sixties with horn rimmed glasses and a beanie on his head, I remarked, “The jury is in…I have now seen it all…”
The hundreds of people now lining the street were pretty much thinking the same, and after everyone got their bearings, things slowly returned to normal, all of us advancing just a little bit slower than before, laughing and bug-eyed.
Finally Richard managed to say something. “Maybe next next year we should do it?”
“You gotta be out of your mind! I ain’t baring my fat ass to half of Boystown!”
“I heard you already had…” he answered.
“Bitch…yeah, I can just see it, Richard and Terry come pedaling down the strip on a bicycle built for two wearing big turn of the century Molly Brown hats and nothing else.”
“Hey, at least if I was doing it, we’d have an extra kickstand…”
“More like a flat tire…” I dryly replied.
He wrote, “The route covered fourteen plus miles and we surprised a lot of people, but the biggest turnout were the throng of fans watching us at Belmont and Halsted! The crowd seemed to be exceedingly massive and we arrived there fashionably late. For some reason they seemed to be the most enthusiastic of any group we passed?”
How the hell had I missed hearing about this? I’d lived in Chicago for fourteen years, surely someone would have mentioned 1700 naked bikers traveling through the gay section of town on a Saturday night?!
“Get me a drink!” I told Richard.
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