I See By My Outfit

Back when I was young and had better reflexes, I owned and rode a number of two-wheeled vehicles.

Just after I got married, going to LSU from our house in downtown Baton Rouge, I had a ten-speed bike. This was in the days when I saw another such beast on the road, I'd wave and the other rider would wave back, since such things were not just uncommon, but rare.
(In those days, if you were a jogger, people would often slow down in their cars and ask if you needed a ride, since you obviously were in a hurry to get some place.)

On the bike, I turned the handlebars upside down and backwards because they were underlooped racing things and I got tired leaning over them.

I had a couple of small Harley-Davidson motorcycles, later a Yamaha, and eventually, a Lambretta and a Vespa motorscooter. (After those, I didn't get another bicycle and ride it seriously for almost twenty years, when I turned forty. I also got some Spandex to go with the bike. Had to stop wearing that -- women kept following me out of stores ...)

The reason I bought the scooters was directly attributable to Peter S. Beagle. Some of you probably know him from his classic novel, The Last Unicorn, and subsequent fantasy novels.
He also wrote movies, including the animated version of The Lord of the Rings. But just after I graduated from high school, when the last of the beatniks had yet to become the first of the hippies, Beagle wrote a book about a cross-country trip on motorscooters with his buddy. Two Jewish boys from New York who hopped on the suckers and rode to California, in 1963.

Kerouac's On the Road had been published less than a decade earlier, but though I spent some time in New Orleans's coffeehouses at the tail end of the beat generation's decline, and had even read Ginsberg's Howl -- bongos and poetry and black T-shirts and all like that, I didn't relate to Kerouac. Beagle's road trip was much more my cup of tea, his tropes, I could get.

I probably read the thing when it came out in paperback, '66? '67? About then.

The book went out of print, and in my arrogance, I thought I was the only guy who had ever read it -- at least I never could find anybody else who admitted to doing so. Later, I found out it was considered quite the classic, with a loyal, Rocky-Horror-Picture-Show kind of following.

Recently, I was thinking about motorscooters and recalling the book fondly, so I got online and saw that it had come back into print. I ordered a copy.

Sometimes going back to revisit old friends in print is a bad idea. Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land doesn't hold up well for me. (In truth, a lot of Bob's later stuff doesn't call to me.
Time Enough for Love, I Will Fear No Evil, and Friday? Nope.)

Zelazny's Lord of Light, on the other hand, still reads fine. I always wanted to write the sequel to that one. Terrific book -- if you came of age when I did and connected to it.

I See by My Outfit holds up, and in its 1963 sensibilities, paints a view of history through which I lived and recall with great fondness.

Mostly fondness, anyhow ...