Just Another Face In A Rearview Mirror

There he sits at his power console: the American motorist. Adjustable steering wheel, accelerator set at cruise, pushbutton everything. His head is on the headrest, his arm is on the armrest. As the season dictates he is defrosted or air-conditioned. The stereo tape is wailing. Within complacent reach, cradled on foam rubber and boulevard suspension, sits the girl: the built-in option of every automobile ad.

But then this all-American winner on wheels looks into his rearview mirror and the scene gets ever so slightly ruined. Down the pike thumps and rolls a motorist's apparition. First the helmet and the goggles vibrate into view, then the leather jacket and cowboy boots—half space traveler, half Daniel Boone and all alien, alien. Last of all, the machine itself: a blur of chrome and noise beneath that aboriginal mask of a face.

The bike blows by—an internal-combustion jeer—leaving a wake of smog and discontent. To the American motorist—a success story not quite at peace with himself—the cartoon character in the rearview mirror is both enemy and alter ego. Crudely—boy, how crudely!—he spells out in block letters the American ideal: bracing hardship, random adventure in the great outdoors, risk. He is the stuff of which Walter Mitty dreams—and lynching parties—are made.

Or so goes the legend of the bikie. The truth, as usual, is less flamboyant and far more interesting. Meet Colin Newell, as they say at all the best bike shops from Boston to L.A.

Colin is one of the faces in the rearview mirror—a lot of rearview mirrors. Colin has been riding almost half a century, ever since his father's best friend let him buck a Harley in an upstate New York pasture at the age of 13. Colin can still smell the hay in his nostrils from the time he took his first spill. By a kind of Pavlovian association every spill since has smelled like hay.

The first ride did it all. Colin recalls those original sensations rather like a womanizer describing how he lost his virginity. The physical details are sharp. The size and sheer bulk of the machine beneath him. The gas-oil-hot metal (and hay) smell. The slap-slap of valves and the smoker's cough of an old muffler.

Colin is pretty clear, too, on the exhilaration of power and speed—the lovely, frightening blur of the familiar world about him. But then he goes mystical. He talks of freedom—of a breakout or breakthrough. The mystique of a secret brotherhood comes over him.

In a rearview mirror or out of it Colin doesn't look 59 years old or mystical. He wears his hair short, the last of the crew cuts, and though iron-gray it is bristly and un-receding. His face is weatherbeaten, but the skin seems casually tooled rather than lined. His eyes are a surprised blue: they seem childlike if not outright childish. When he smiles he looks like an aging choirboy.

Off his bike Colin aspires to respectability. One year of college (on a football scholarship) has left him with a pretentious rather than a precise vocabulary, which he uses, all stops open, in the letters he writes to motorcycle magazines deploring the Bad Name that outlaw gangs like Hell's Angels give to a Family Sport.

Almost defiantly Colin wears a necktie, knotted a bit off-center to the collar of a sports shirt never intended for a tie in the first place. His favorite ties are weirdly flowered—Hawaiian tourist souvenirs, subtle sight gags. Only Colin isn't joking. He voted for Nixon. He is dead against nudity in the movies. "The motorcyclist," Colin insists in his Average Man disguise, "is just an ordinary American who prefers two wheels to four."