A 50-Year-Old Biker Showed Up With Pink Hello Kitty Ears On His Helmet And His Daughter In The Sidecar — Six Months Later, Every Helmet In His Club Looked Just Like His
Part 2
To understand those ears, you have to understand what happened at Blythe Elementary in February.
I didn’t know any of this at the time. Clay’s wife, Tasha, told me later. She’s a night-shift nurse at Tennova. Small, tough, doesn’t take any of my nonsense. She told me the whole thing standing in her driveway with her arms crossed, and she didn’t make it easy.
Junie started second grade last fall. Bright kid. Loud kid. Loves cats, loves glitter, loves her daddy’s motorcycle more than anything in the world.
Clay took her to school every morning in the sidecar. He’d bought it used off a retired preacher in Athens and spent a winter restoring it. Tasha said it was the happiest she’d ever seen him. He’d ride slow down Keith Street with Junie waving at everybody like the Queen of England.
Then, in February, she came home crying.
A boy named Brayden had told her at recess that her dad was a bad guy. A criminal. A gang member. That his mom said so. That his mom said nobody should go to Junie’s birthday party because her dad was scary.
Three other moms agreed, apparently.
Junie’s party was in May. Already, two families had quietly said they had other plans.
Tasha said Junie cried in the bathtub for an hour. She kept asking the same thing.
“Why do they think Daddy’s scary?”
Tasha didn’t have an answer.
Clay did. He just didn’t say it out loud.
Two days later, Junie went to the Dollar General on 25th Street with Tasha. She had three dollars of tooth-fairy money in a ziplock bag. Both front teeth, a dollar fifty each.
She walked straight to the party aisle. She found a pair of pink plastic Hello Kitty ears on a stick-on headband, with a little red bow.
She paid for them herself. Counted out the coins on the counter.
That night, she sat at the kitchen table with the ears, a tube of craft glue, and her daddy’s black helmet. She glued them on. Crooked. Way too much glue.
Then she took a piece of notebook paper and wrote something in purple crayon, and folded it four times, and tucked it behind the foam liner.
Clay found it the next morning.
Tasha said he read it standing in the garage, and then he went out to the end of the driveway and stood there by himself for a while.
Then he put the helmet on. Ears and all.
And he rode Junie to school.
That’s the part the club saw. The ears. The jokes.
Here’s what we didn’t see.
Within two weeks, kids in the car-rider line were waving at him. Then shouting. “KITTY BIKER!” Teachers started coming out to the curb just to watch Junie arrive.
The school crossing guard, an old woman named Miss Pearl, asked him if she could try on the helmet. He let her. She wore it for a picture on the sidewalk with her stop sign.
Brayden’s little sister asked if she could sit in the sidecar.
Brayden’s mom said yes.
By the end of March, Junie’s birthday party RSVP list had nineteen names on it.
Clay never said a word about it at the clubhouse. Not one. He just kept wearing the ears while we kept leaving bowls of milk on his seat.
Part 3
The meeting was April 14th. Tuesday night. The clubhouse on Old Tasso Road.
Forty-one members. Thirty-four showed up. More than usual. Everybody knew what it was about.
Our president, Boss Rollins, ran it. Sixty-eight years old. Vietnam. Rode with the club since 1979. He sat at the head of the pool table with a gavel made from a piston rod.
I stood up and made the motion.
I’ll tell you exactly what I said, because I’ve had to live with it.
“This club has a name. People see these colors coming, they know who we are. We earned that. I’m not riding through Ducktown behind a man with cartoon cat ears. Not with our patch on his back. Wear them at school if you want. Not on a club ride.”
Somebody whistled. Somebody else said “Damn right.”
Boss called the vote.
Twenty-eight hands.
Clay had been standing at the back of the room the whole time, arms crossed, by the door. He hadn’t moved.
Now he did.
He walked to the front. Slow. The floor creaked under his boots. Everybody got out of his way.
He stopped in front of me. He looked at me for a long time with that one squinted eye.
Then he started unbuttoning his vest.
The room went dead quiet.
He took it off. Eight years of patches. His Iraq rocker. His memorial patch for a brother named Dobbs who went down on the Dragon in 2019.
He folded it once. Carefully. The way you fold a flag.
And he laid it on the pool table in front of Boss.
“I’ll keep the ears,” he said.
That was all.
Then he walked out. We heard the Ultra start in the lot. We heard it pull away.
Nobody said a word for a long time.
Then I said, “Good riddance,” and somebody laughed, and the meeting went on.
I’m telling you all of it. Even that.
I thought that was the end. A man who chose a toy over his brothers. A man who went soft.
I thought we’d won.
Eleven days later was our Spring Ride for Kids.
Every April, the Ocoee River Riders ride down I-75 to the children’s hospital in Chattanooga with a trailer full of stuffed animals and coloring books and video games. We’ve done it for twenty-two years. It’s the one day a year the papers say something nice about us.
Thirty-eight bikes. All black. All of us in our cuts.
We pulled into the parking lot in front of the hospital, engines roaring, and lined up below the windows where the kids always watch.
The kids were there. Faces against the glass. Second floor. Third floor.
And one by one, I watched them back away from the windows.
A little boy in a bald cap started crying. A nurse picked him up and carried him out of sight. A girl with a feeding tube in her nose put her hands over her eyes.
Thirty-eight men in black leather with skulls on their helmets.
Of course they were scared.
We’d been riding here twenty-two years. I had never once looked up at those windows long enough to notice.
Part 4
Then I heard it.
Coming up from the Bailey Avenue side. One engine. A deep, slow V-twin, nice and easy.
An Ultra Limited with a sidecar rolled into the lot.
Pink pinstripe down the side.
Junie in the sidecar, in her purple helmet, holding a bag of stuffed cats so big she could barely see over it.
And Clay. No vest. Just a black t-shirt.
Pink ears on his helmet.
He didn’t park with us. He rode right past the line of black bikes and stopped at the curb in front of the main entrance, directly under the windows.
He took his helmet off. Held it up. Ears facing the glass.
And I watched it happen.
The faces came back.
First one. Then three. Then a dozen. Kids pressed flat to the glass, on every floor. Pointing. Laughing. The little boy in the bald cap was back in his nurse’s arms, both hands slapping the window.
Junie climbed out of the sidecar and waved up at them with both arms.
The kids waved back.
A nurse came running out the front doors in purple scrubs. She was crying.
“Are you Kitty Biker?” she said. “From Blythe? My niece goes there. She won’t stop talking about you.”
Clay just nodded.
“The kids on four want to know if they can see the ears up close,” she said. “Please. Some of them haven’t laughed in weeks.”
Clay looked over at us.
Thirty-eight men in black leather, standing by our bikes, looking like we’d been caught at something.
He didn’t say anything.
He just picked up Junie, tucked the helmet under his arm, and walked inside.
We stood in that parking lot for a long time.
Then Boss Rollins did something I’ll never forget.
Sixty-eight years old. Forty-seven years in the club. Vietnam. The toughest man I’ve ever known.
He took his phone out of his vest. He scrolled for a minute. Then he held it up to his ear.
“Mary Beth,” he said. “It’s Granddaddy.”
A pause.
“No, honey, nothing’s wrong. I need to ask Kaylee something. Can you put her on?”
Another pause. His voice changed. It got high and soft in a way I never knew Boss Rollins’s voice could go.
“Hey, sugar. Granddaddy needs something for his helmet. Something you pick. Anything you want.”
The whole line of bikes went quiet.
Then Rooster Hayes took out his phone.
Then Danny Pruitt.
Then Little Mike.
One by one, I stood in that parking lot and listened to thirty-seven bikers call their kids and grandkids.
I didn’t call anybody.
I didn’t have anybody to call.
Part 5
I need to tell you about Kelsey.
My daughter. She’s thirty-one now. She lives in Knoxville, an hour and a half up I-75.
In 2012, I missed her high school graduation. The club was going to Sturgis. I’d committed. I told her the club needed me. She said she needed me. I went to Sturgis.
In 2016, I missed her wedding. Same thing. A club run to Daytona. I told myself it was just a party. I told myself she’d understand.
She didn’t call me after that.
Nine years.
I knew she’d had a baby. My ex-wife told me. A girl. Named Lainey. She’d be five now.
I’d never seen her face.
I stood in that hospital parking lot holding my phone with my daughter’s number on the screen for twenty minutes. Thirty-seven men around me laughing and talking to their grandkids.
I didn’t call.
I rode home alone.
Two days later, I went to Clay’s house. I didn’t call first. I didn’t know what I was going to say.
He was in the garage, working on the sidecar. Junie was asleep inside.
I stood in the doorway. He looked up. He didn’t stop working.
“Why?” I finally said. “Why’d you give up your patch for a toy?”
He set the wrench down.
He reached over to his helmet on the workbench, lifted the liner, and took out the folded piece of notebook paper. He handed it to me.
Purple crayon. Big crooked letters.
DADDY NOW NOBODY WILL BE SKARED OF YOU. LOVE JUNIE
I read it four times.
“My old man rode a black Shovelhead,” Clay said. Quiet. He didn’t look at me. “Came home drunk most nights. I could hear that bike from a mile away. By the time it hit our road, I was under the bed.”
He picked up the wrench again. Turned it over.
“Swore my kid would never hide from the sound of my bike.”
He nodded at the note in my hand.
“She runs to it,” he said. “Every time. Fifty years old, that’s the only thing I ever did right.”
He looked at me.
“You think I’m giving that up for a patch?”
I drove home. I sat in my kitchen. I took out a pen and a piece of paper.
It took me four hours to write one page.
I didn’t ask Kelsey to forgive me. I didn’t make excuses about the club. I told her I’d been wrong. That I’d been wrong for nine years. That I’d chosen a vest over my daughter twice and I’d regret it every day I had left.
And at the bottom, I wrote one more line.
If Lainey ever wanted to make something for her grandpa’s helmet, he’d wear it every day for the rest of his life.
I mailed it to the address my ex-wife gave me.
Then I waited.
Part 6
The club voted again in May.
Boss made the motion this time. To reverse the April vote. To invite Clay Dorsey back. Patch and all. Ears and all.
Thirty-four hands.
Mine was the first one up.
Clay came back. He didn’t make a speech. He put his vest back on, buttoned it up, and went to the bar for a coffee.
Then he looked around the room.
By June, it had started.
Boss Rollins rode in with a purple plastic unicorn horn glued to the top of his helmet. Kaylee had picked it.
Rooster Hayes had a row of dinosaur spikes running down the back of his. Green. Rubber. From his grandson Jace.
Danny Pruitt had a pair of bunny ears. Little Mike had a propeller. A real one. It spun at fifty miles an hour.
One by one, every helmet in the Ocoee River Riders got something. Stickers. Bows. A plastic tiara. Googly eyes. A yellow felt duck. A pair of reindeer antlers somebody wore straight through July.
Six months later, there’s not one plain black helmet left in our club.
Thirty-nine helmets. Thirty-nine kids.
People still pull their children close when the Ocoee River Riders come through Ducktown.
Then they see the unicorn horn, and they let go.
And every school-day morning, at 7:40, there’s a line of bikes in the car-rider lane at Blythe Elementary. Six, eight, sometimes twelve. Grandkids in sidecars. Grandkids on the back with tiny helmets. Teachers come out to the curb with their coffee to watch.
Miss Pearl stops traffic for us now.
At the front of the line, always, an Ultra with a pink pinstripe.
Junie still runs to it.
Every time.
Part 7
My letter came back in August.
Not the one I wrote. A new one. A thick padded envelope with a Knoxville return address.
I sat in my truck in the post office parking lot and opened it with shaking hands.
Inside was a note in my daughter’s handwriting. Two lines.
She’s been asking about her grandpa since she could talk. We’ll be at the Cracker Barrel in Sweetwater on Saturday at noon. Wear the helmet. — K
And underneath it, wrapped in a paper towel, something small.
A felt flower. Bright yellow, with an orange center. Hand-cut. The petals not quite even. A dab of hot glue already on the back.
On a piece of construction paper beside it, in crayon, someone had drawn a stick figure on a motorcycle with a big yellow flower on its head.
FOR GRAMPA. LOVE LAINEY.
That’s the parking lot I was crying in.
Fifty-six years old. Road captain. Forty years riding.
I glued it on right there. Crooked. Too much glue. I didn’t straighten it.
On Saturday, I rode up I-75 to Sweetwater. Sixty miles.
I didn’t ride alone.
Clay rode on my right. Junie waved from the sidecar the whole way. Boss rode on my left with his unicorn horn. Behind us, thirty-six more bikes. Dinosaur spikes. Bunny ears. The propeller.
We pulled into that Cracker Barrel lot in a long, loud, ridiculous line.
My daughter was standing on the porch by the rocking chairs. Older. My face around her eyes.
And holding her hand was a little girl with yellow barrettes.
She saw the flower on my helmet.
She let go of her mother’s hand.
And she ran toward the sound of my bike.
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