ROT Rally – The Pleasurecraft

June9, 2010

Congress Avenue

If you’re into beef jerky, this weekend your meat market is going to get a whole lot bigger. The incessant rumble of Harleys should have told you something is up, and that something is the Republic of Texas Biker Rally, aka the ROT Rally, the annual gathering of 50,000 or so motorcycle enthusiasts that takes place in Austin each June – mainly out at the Travis County Expo Center but also at swank places like Bikinis Sports Bar & Grill, Twin Peaks, Hooters, and Coyote Ugly. For most Austinites, the locus is a little harder to pin down. If you’re anywhere inside the loop, the incessant cacophony of blurts and pops rattling every sash in your home might lead you to believe there’s a hawg rally right in your backyard. If you’re feeling a little smug about living in the suburbs or exurbs, don’t gloat. There’s nothing like having your REM sleep shattered at three in the morning by the farting exhaust of some bewildered biker tooling through your quiet subdivision to remind you that the ROT Rally isn’t just that thing they have at that place out past the dump. No, ROT is all up in our chili, parading down Congress, tearing around the Hill Country, clogging up Sixth Street, and scaring away nearly as many hipsters as the Texas Relays. The difference with ROT is that nobody is going to be closing down clubs for this crowd. Sure, there are still some scary biker gangs – leathery old dudes with meth-rotted grills and biker bitches who look like the granny from the Playboy cartoons (especially topless) – but a huge swath of the ROT demo are suburban professionals: lawyers, accountants, and middle-management types who had a deferred midlife crisis and dropped 20 large on a steel show pony thinking they could recapture the wild youth they never had. In a way, they have … as long as their wild youth fantasies involved hanging out with a bunch of trussed up, rheumatoid old dudes in mechanic-themed bars listening to Van Halen and hitting on saddle-bagged, butter-faced 35-year-old women in leather halter tops. Careful, even though you might feel compelled to pop off audibly to your skinny-jeaned buddies about some potbellied, do-ragged sexagenarian who is wearing a T-shirt that says, “Yeah, I’m hitting that!,” don’t discount the possibility that the shirt’s meaning is literal. With bikers, you just never know. You should also consider the possibility that anyone willing to spend their recreational hours straddling a 600 pound suicycle/legchopper/murdercycle probably has a bit of a death wish – and really, wouldn’t you if you were tapping that? The best policy for most people is to just lay low until the whole thing blows over – ideally with a bottle of Demerol and some really expensive noise-canceling headphones. On the other hand, if you’re one of those hellions like Sandy Bullock who gets turned on by a guy who gets turned on by a huge vibrator with wheels, you’ll want to make sure to get down to Congress Avenue this Friday night for the “Longest Parade of Motorcycles Known to Mankind.” At around 8pm, nearly all the cyclists from the Expo Center will rumble through a waiting throng of willing voyeurs. Yes, you can bring dogs and children, but it’s about as smart as taking them to Mardi Gras. It’s pretty safe bet that both animal and child will surely be debauched at some point during the evening. Yes, there is beauty – some of the finest, most lovingly cared for machines you will every see – but there is also plenty of ugliness as well, both figurative and literal. Regardless, it’s all riveting entertainment … and afterward you get your fun tank topped off with a concert by Vallejo, Grady featuring Dee Snider, and the L.A. Guns. If you’ve never been to the ROT Rally, Friday night will give you a good taste: tough and salty, but ultimately satisfying – sort of like beef jerky.

June 10, 2008

This weekend both the ROT Biker Rally and Pride Texas are knocking knees Downtown. Talk about a summer blockbuster. It’s like Jerry Bruckheimer, Judd Apatow, and the Cohen Brothers had a business lunch at Hooters, smoked a fatty, and dreamed up this weekend. Bikers … gays … lesbians … if the Convention and Visitors Bureau was really on the ball they would have booked a mime festival this weekend too … or better yet, the Southern Baptist Convention (same amount of make-up really, just different technique). Regardless, you can expect about 40,000 bikers, 15,000 gays, 100,000 or so wide-eyed onlookers, and roughly 1.5 million Mexican free-tail bats buzzing around Downtown this weekend. That’s a goldmine in guano alone, but the ROT claims to rev up the local economy by nearly $40 million – the bulk of which surely ends up folded into the g-strings of local tittie dancers. Basic trickle-down theory states that the surplus tittie-dancer cash will make its way into the pockets of meth dealers and all-night day-care centers, which will in turn blow its respective wads on Sudafed and disposable diapers, thereby feeding the vicious cycle of corporate consumerism through which the bikers define their freedom and individuality. Ronald Reagan couldn’t have sketched it up any better … right down to the self-fulfilling prophecy of overinflated economic impact. Bitch about their flatulent, lumbering, gas-sucking anachronisms of modern engineering all you want, Harley riders are superior in at least one way: Brand loyalty. That’s a state of economic Zen that’s hard to achieve in modern society. You really have to ignore a lot of facts and statistics and just go with your gut, which, if Harley riders are any indication, is one of the most lovingly developed parts of the human anatomy. You should be seeing plenty of spectacular ones this weekend – usually stretching out a T-shirt that says, “If you can read this, the bitch fell off” on the back. Of course, fetish leather, chaps, and biker outfits aren’t the sole domain of motorcyclists. Remember that on Saturday Auditorium Shores will be teeming with Pride, Austin’s annual celebration of lesbianity/gayness/bisexuality/transgenderdom that loosely coincides with NYC’s Stonewall Uprising (Google it) of June 1969, aka the summer of reciprocal oral gratification. Pride may not have the shock and awe of ROT (maybe because the parade’s participant waiver form expressly forbids anything racy, or for that matter, gay), but at least you know that the participants are parading ostensibly for LGBT rights and not because they want a venue for their AARP qualifying bitches to show off their boob jobs. Subtle difference but worth noting. In other cities you can see plenty of tit in the Pride Parade (even if you didn’t necessarily want to), but the smart gays here in Austin decided that assless chaps, banana hammocks, and cosmetically unenhanced boobage are not the best way to sell gay rights to the breeders. Thus, the kibosh was put on the exhibitionists, and Pride took on a fam friendlier tone. This is not to say there aren’t still some occasional flashes of freakiness, but don’t expect the parade route be littered with empty amyl nitrate vials, spit-soaked dental dams, and spent condoms. Selling the idea that gays should have the same rights and freedoms as the model citizens out at the Expo Center takes a certain amount of decorum and restraint. If they can just keep it buttoned down long enough to get some gay rights to the hets – maybe someday the LGBT crowd can be as obnoxious as their ROT Rally rivals. Imagine 50,000 gay exhibitionists on Congress Avenue gunning their pastel Vespas and showing off their hairy-legged, braless bitches. That’s worth popping for the $15 entrance fee for Pride, isn’t it? You bet it is. Plus, you get Meshell Ndegeocello and Pansy Division as a reach-around. Could this weekend get any better or what?