Biker fraternity converges on riverside town

Scott Dickensheets

Saturday, May 3, 1997 | 11:59 a.m.

OATMAN, Ariz. -- The barbarians are, if not at the gates, certainly in the nut store, pottery shop and Italian restaurant. They're in the trading post, saloons and leaning from the windows of the Oatman Hotel. They're everywhere!

"Welcome, bikers!" reads a sign in one window. It's a hot, dry Saturday, and you can't hear yourself ogling the half-naked women over the throaty, flatulent bbbrrraaappp! as bikers goose their Harley-Davidsons. The exhaust from thousands of motorcycles mingles with the tangy aroma from piles left by the burros that wander Oatman's streets with the impunity of sacred cows or tourist attractions.

Welcome bikers, indeed. This is the Oatman portion of the annual Laughlin River Run, when tens of thousands of riders representing every aspect of the biker fraternity converge on the braced-for-trouble but thankful-for-the-business riverside town.

Oatman, 60 miles into Arizona, is sidebar action to the four-day get-together, and, today anyway, this tiny burg has become the state capital of motorcycles and halter tops. Throngs of bikes, bikers and biker babes clog Oatman's short main street, many more lean on the sidewalk railings or tool back and forth on their big Harleys.

And they're smashing ... nothing. They're harassing ... no one. However much the notion of a biker gathering brings to mind the phrase open-cage day at the monkey house!, on this day, on this run, in this little town of burros and old people, they exhibit conduct unbecoming a marauding gang of misfits: They are rather well-behaved. "It's much better this year," says a local woman.

If you had found yourself in Oatman as a resident, accidental tourist or, God forbid, a feature writer on assignment, you may have felt a shiver of menace at first, there among the whooping crowd and rumbling bikes. You may have expected to wind up with Harley tracks across your spine or crushed like a beer can against the forehead of a large shirtless dude with much facial hair.

Not at all. Because, as everyone knows, a growing number of bikers are actually the less scary strain of motorcycle enthusiasts. Or, in pseudo-demographic parlance, RUBs -- rich urban bikers. Some are regular fellas who happen to ride, others are boomer professionals embracing the chance to wear leather chaps, German army helmets and bad-mutha expressions. But they don't mean it. They are friendly. Unlike the burros, they use the porta-potties instead of the ground. They don't litter. They are Heck's Angels.

Here, then, straight from the pen of Easy Writer, scenes from a benign invasion:

Overheard, one biker to another, in downtown Oatman: "The thing that really blows my mind is that this is a real town. People live here!"

The Harley-borne body comes in a tremendous variety of shapes and sizes: lean and whiplike; mushed and lumpy; pear-shaped; bear-shaped; with bellies avalanching south or breasts cantilevered north; prodigiously muscled; many are tattooed, often more than once. The bikes themselves exhibit just as much range in paint jobs, handlebar design and bolted-on curlicues.

The crumbling patio in front of the New Digg'ns gift shop at the lower end of town may be the best place to watch this heathen pageantry wheel by. The bikes are mostly Harleys, of course, the All-America machine, the one true bike, although there are a few gate-crashing Hondas, Yamahas and BMWs. Occasionally, a carload of tourists eases down the street, their expressions either stricken or curious, in a vaguely anthropological sense.

A rider named Tom has been eyeballing the proceedings from his solitary position by New Digg'ns for a while now. He's ponytailed, he's tattooed, he's from Bakersfield. "I'm here for all the bikes, the events ... the girls," he says, grinning through his beard. "I used to ride in San Francisco, so maybe I'll see a few familiar faces." That's a needle-in-a-haystack proposition, he admits, but with the run drawing riders from all over the country -- he's seen plates from as far away as Michigan, he says -- you never know.

"This is my fourth year in a row," he yells. "It gets bigger every year." Given the event's Yuppie-fattened popularity in the last few years, Tom predicts it eventually will rival the legendary Sturgis, S.D., and Daytona Beach, Fla., runs.

Despite his back-off demeanor, Tom is perfectly willing to nutshell the goings-on for Easy Writer. "Some of these riders buy $16,000, $20,000 bikes," he says, gesturing toward one of many rows of cycles parked in the roadside dirt, "then tear 'em down and completely redo 'em. Some of these bikes are $50,000, $60,000 motorcycles."

He points up the street. "Up there, where the people are thick, that's where the real show is," he says. "It's all guys standing along there telling women to show their (boobs)." Every now and then, despite a sign on the edge of town prohibiting nudity, a woman complies. The crowd lets out an appreciative hoot.

Perhaps New Digg'ns isn't the best vantage point after all.

A tallish woman bends over a row of Harleys outside the Oatman Mining Co. Italian restaurant, appraising them carefully. "Store-bought," she snorts, like a haughty sommelier waving off an inferior vintage.

"They all are," her companion, a lanky longhair, agrees, clearly disgusted. They walk away as a burro strolls past. A woman feeds it a carrot from her mouth.

She is hog heavenly, a biker beauty queen with souped-up blond hair and the body fat of a gnat, poured into skintight black. And when the crowd's shouts of Show your (preferred body part) become too insistent, the exhibitionist in her comes out, she drops her pants and, whoa, nice rear axle. Biker dudes, this butt's for you!

Alas, Easy Writer was interviewing fully dressed senior ladies somewhere else and didn't see a thing.

Not long after that, inside a nearby bar, the singer fronting a country band asks the audience, "Anybody here from out of town?" That just slays 'em! The band breaks into -- you guessed it -- "Born to Be Wild."

Barbara Stevenson is digging the crazy scene! "I think it's great," she shouts over the roar of the bikes, waving a small camera. "They're very nice, very nice."

It hasn't always been that way, of course. Stevenson and her husband own the Gray Eagle Trading Post, down by New Digg'ns, and although she likes the way the bikers keep the town's cash registers jingling, it doesn't mean she's not concerned about things getting out of hand. Like they have in the past.

"We were the first ones to find the bodies," she says, indicating her friend, Marian Murphy, visiting from L.A. This would be a couple of years ago, she says, when a drunken cyclist plowed into a family on a pair of motorcycles (who weren't part of the run), killing a woman and her child.

"We were going out to eat," Stevenson continues, "when we came along and saw a motorcycle on its side." It was a man and his daughter, both alive. Nearby was his wife and other daughter, who weren't. "(The culprit) came right across the road and killed her. Took her head right off! He was killed, too. There's no white cross down there for him, I'll tell you."

She pauses here to snap a photo of a young man with a full-size bikini-clad woman airbrushed onto his T-shirt, then allows that "a few" of the town's 150 or so residents "would like to never see (the bikers) again," but insists the majority are in favor of it, especially since it's going so well this year.

Says Murphy: "Last year, the sides of the streets were covered with beer cans! There were so many you could make a fortune turning them in."

"You know, Marian," Stevenson says, laying a hand on her friend's shoulder, "that's what I'm not seeing this year!"

The reason: the Mohave County Sheriff's Department, which has a highly visible contingent of gendarmes patrolling town. Their presence seems to be regarded with an air of resigned chagrin: We're glad they're keeping the peace, Easy Writer is told, but they seem to be putting a lid on the fun. For one thing, they're keeping a lot of halter tops in place.

"I understand why they're here," says a rider who calls himself Tom Terrific. "But it just grinds me that there's so much law present. With all the people I've met since Thursday" -- the day the run began -- "I haven't seen or heard anything bad."

Overheard, one teenage girl to another, in downtown Oatman: "I don't care what anybody says, I'm not showing my boobs."

Overheard, a teenage boy to his father, downtown Oatman: "Hey, Dad, show us your boobs!"

"Scooters and boobs."

Yes, Tom Terrific knows exactly why he's here, exactly what got him on his Harley-Davidson and drove him from La Grange, Calif., where he lives, down the cracked and winding remnants of Route 66 to this little nowhere desert town.

"I'm here to ride, watch people and look at bikes," he says. "I knew this goes on every year. I had the time and the money so I made the effort."

He's 75 cents ahead at the casino back in Laughlin, so he's in an up mood this afternoon. "Here," he says, handing over his camera, "take my picture while I stand by those bikes."

Parked in the shade of the fire station, Karen Naiker chuckles deeply at one biker's homemade helmetcam -- a video camera bolted to his helmet.

"I love this," she says expansively. "It's good for the town. It's been a pretty good run this year." Sure, residents of a religious bent have raised an eyebrow or two. "They don't like the bikers, they don't like the vulgarity or loudness. They don't like the boob shots or the girls who show the cheeks of their whatever.

"But any time you get bikers together, you're going to have that," she says. "If you get 10,000 Baptist ministers together, you're gonna have problems."

Naiker, she doesn't mind, even if, as the wife of the fire battalion chief, she occupies a certain position in town. "This," she says, pointing at a woman bulging out of what appears to a denim thong, "this doesn't bother me. I love watching the bikes, the different colors, the designs, everything.

"All in all, it's been great. And I have to say one thing -- they have not littered the streets this year like they did last year."

It must be an assumed-name prank bikers play on reporters, Easy Writer decides as he talks to yet another biker named Tom. This one is shading himself beside the row of porta-potties blocking the entrance to the Community Hall.

"I'm here for the camradity," says this Tom, sitting on the Harley trike he first built in 1969 and has rebuilt twice since. It's got 118,000 miles on it, including the several hundred he's put on since leaving L.A. for the weekend. "It's a nice ride, you run into a lot of people. ..."

Like the others, he talks for a while about his love for bikes, tries to counteract the prevailing image of bikers as goons. Did you know L.A. motorcycle enthusiasts raised more than a million dollars for muscular dystrophy a while back? They're darn good people, which is why this Tom goes on five or six runs a year.

And, in Oatman, at least they prove Tom right: According to a spokesman for the Mohave County Sheriff's Department, there is a single arrest in Oatman during the four-day run, a DUI bust on Friday. Other than a few minor accidents, there are no other incidents.

They really cut loose in Laughlin, however: There are 86 arrests for a variety of DUI, drug and weapons violations during the same period.

There is, as far as Easy Writer can tell, something deeply contradictory about a biker run. Much of the appeal of motorcycles lies in their outlaw solitariness. Much of the appeal of a run lies in the pack behavior. Is there, somewhere between those poles, a larger point waiting to be made? That perhaps even self-marginalized bikers need community as much as 10,000 Baptist ministers?

Of course, every Tom, Tom and Tom could tell you that that sort of thinking is best left to guys on Japanese bikes. They haven't come to Oatman to be reflective, to ponder the sociological implications of their lifestyles or, rather, their motorcycle-related recreational choices. They're here to have fun, bask in the desert sun and burro aroma, talk bikes, appreciate the gals, and, perhaps, at some level, to hear in that distinctive Harley-Davidson rumble some affirmation that, hardcore or RUB, they really were born to be wild.

Then again, maybe it's just scooters and boobs.

In the days that follow, groups of motorcyclists are a common sight on U.S. 95, returning from Laughlin to their far-flung homes. Monday, Easy Writer observes a trio of them stop for lunch in Boulder City's Jack in the Box restaurant, two men and a woman. They have a certain road-blown look about them and the requisite Harley clothing -- one guy's shirt boasts "Ride to Live, Live to Ride." They leave in a truck, towing their bikes behind them.

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