Easy Rider

Kendra Frorup. Three Score and Ten. 2009. Mixed media. 60 × 60 inches.

Photo by J. M. Lennon.

When our daughter Chloe was born, my wife, Rebecca, and I bought a scooter. We needed a second vehicle, something reliable, and we had been burned by too many used cars to buy another. Above all, we needed something cheap. At the time, Rebecca was a preschool teacher at an area Head Start. I worked as a stay-at-home dad and graduate student during the day and, at night, taught as an adjunct at a community college. With Chloe, we became a family of three, with four college degrees between us, on a yearly budget less than twenty-five thousand dollars. A scooter seemed the perfect option. It was cheaper than a motorcycle and, at over a hundred miles-per-gallon, got twice the gas mileage. Its small size also made it easier to handle, so Rebecca wouldn’t need to wrestle something several times her weight when she rode.

We decided on a Honda Metropolitan, a gun-metal grey one with black trim and a plastic trunk for my books. It came with a 49cc engine that rumbled between my legs …

… Okay, there’s little rumbling, and it’s more like under my ass, since I don’t straddle the thing. But the innuendos for having something powerful “between my legs” versus “under my ass” are very different. Either way, those ponies max out around forty miles per hour. Downhill. With the wind at my back. Uphill, the speed tops anywhere from twenty miles per hour to the-speed-of-my-feet-pushing, depending on how steep the incline.

Rebecca and I decided that whichever one of us had Chloe would drive the car, and the other would take the scooter. But the plan had a problem: after we bought the thing, Rebecca refused to ride it. She tried once, though, shortly after we brought it home. She climbed on behind me, her arms around my waist, to get a feel for the bike—which, I must admit, made me feel pretty manly. But as we drove off, she buried her face between my shoulder blades and squeezed her eyes shut. “Stop,” she said. “Stop the scooter.”

“We haven’t even left the parking lot.”

“Just pull over,” she said.

“We’re only going ten miles-per-hour.”

“I want to get off!”

She did and has never gotten back on. Now, she takes the car, and I drive the scooter. Unless I have Chloe, in which case I drop Rebecca off and pick her up, as if we have only one vehicle. Our plan vanished, and in its place, I gained the inexplicable stigma that comes with being a scooterist.

Based solely on appearance, I could be a biker, like the kind of guy who might’ve starred opposite Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper in Easy Rider, except without all the leather. I’m broad-shouldered. I have a full beard that I could grow at the age of twelve, and my chest has resembled a shag carpet since the beard’s debut. I’m also quiet. That, combined with my size, I’m told, makes me seem intimidating.

But I’m no Peter Fonda. My silence comes from social awkwardness more than anything else. Plus, I enjoy Taylor Swift. I’ve read Twilight more than once (Team Guy-who-almost-hit-Bella-with-a-van). And I’ve seen Titanic several times, sometimes even without a woman in the room. My glasses and affinity for schoolwork always helped me fill the role of nerdy intellectual better than countercultural biker.

In that way, it makes sense I would drive the most emasculating option for a single-person transportation device, even now, in the strange land of Texas. A state where you can drive for hours without seeing another human being. Where the heat feels like a hair dryer blowing in your face as you scoot down the road. And where you can pass a truck on the street, a shotgun in its back glass and a ridiculous...