Taking My Life Into My Hands

I probably wrote about this one before, but when the weather gets warm I think about those times in which I risked life and limb so I could go out and have a good time.

My friend Jerry had a Lambretta motor scooter, probably a 150 or 175 cc variety, and the year would have been somewhere at the end of the 50’s, and maybe even 1960. The motor scooter was a few years old but it was in good condition.

The drinking laws in Maryland were quite simple, you had to be 21 years old to drink anywhere in the state, but, if you went to Washington D.C., some 40 miles away from Baltimore, you could drink beer and wine at 18! This changed our lives and probably ended a few of them as well.

We were not quite 18, of course, but we could easily come up with fake ID’s proving we were over 18. They were simpler to prove than 21.

The fact that this all promoted drinking and driving was never considered by the folks in charge at the time, or at least I don’t remember this ever coming up. MADD had not yet been invented and drinking and driving was probably considered a contact sport.

When we put these two items together, easy drinking and Jerry’s motor scooter, we had a deadly cocktail to swallow!

One of the nice things about going to Washington for a night out was that we were able to bring dates with fake ID’s and have dancing and drinking, night club experiences, at a very young age. However, these were car oriented, not scooters.

A night of just drinking was easy to do on the scooter. So, off we’d go, at 60 mph down the Baltimore Washington Expressway in the dark, with two of us on one little scooter. Our best rides were ones with little traffic, and the worst were ones with trucks and buses. One has no idea how much wake there is when passed by a bus going 70 mph when you’re on one small scooter.

As we got later into the fall the weather got colder and the ride became more dangerous, especially if it decided to rain after we arrived, and we had to drive home inebriated in a rain.

These were all insane ideas, and one should never have survived. When I last saw Jerry last year he was fine, and none of us can understand why we're all still here.