Biker Dudes

Across the street I see a clump of young men smoking outside a very hip bike shop on Gore. If I squint from the distance they look like a scruffy pack of orphans from the Dirty Thirties wearing their dead Daddy’s pants five sizes too big. One of them even has his Dad’s jacket that he wore during the war. The other is wearing his mother’s modest hoop earrings INSIDE his ear lobes. They’re all drinking five dollar coffees, leaning against their five thousand dollar bikes and I’m wondering, “where do they get the money to look so poor?”

They hear my high heels first and look up hopefully and expectantly and then don’t entirely hide their disappointment when they see “Oh, it’s just a Mom,” and I am invisible.

But the guy on the end looks me straight in the cleavage, unabashedly, as though he’s deciding where to eat lunch.

As I pass, now a little self conscious, I overhear them talking about girls. Hoops is dark and broody. He says to the military jacket:

“And then she said: you just wanna be like this total pretentious hipster biker dude, and I’m like, why would I WANT to be pretentious?”

Cleavage gazer looks up just in time to catch my eavesdropper smile and he’s not entirely sure what I find so funny.

Many things run through my mind at once: Remembrance Day, what it actually is to be poor, what true deep hunger tastes like, how it feels to be hopelessly unemployed. I have never known any of this. Not really. And likely either have the biker dudes. For a split second I imagine these young men in 1944. They would be the first to be conscripted. They would be knee deep in mud death and horror.

My second thought is, “thank God these boys are safe”.

I have already passed them by now, but I turn my head, smile and barely resist shouting out, “You’re free! You’re free!”