Chapter 1

Having just turned forty, I am having a midlife crisis. I quit my job. I sold my BMW 328 convertible and bought a Honda ST1300 motorcycle, a full set of leathers, a helmet and a backpack. I put everything I did not need on my trip in storage, left my apartment in Boston on the day the lease ran out and headed west. I did not have any real plan, but I had the whole summer to reach the west coast if I decided to go that far.

I was a prosecutor for the state. The last straw was when a dirtbag with a two-page rap sheet that included four grand larceny counts, three assaults and two armed robberies walked because of a video his buddy took when the police officer punched his lights out. The part of the video where the dirt-bag bit the officer and tried to rip his balls off before the officer was able to subdue him mysteriously disappeared. Local and national news ate it up and ran the video every hour for a week. After 18 years of service to the community, the decorated officer lost his job and pension. A week later, the dirtbag killed a sixteen-year-old girl in a failed robbery attempt. Her father, the convenience store owner, literally blew his ass away with a 12 gauge shotgun. They had to arrest the dead girl’s father for manslaughter because the dirtbag was already heading out the door and no longer posed a threat to the girl’s father. Okay, so he shot him four more times after he was down. Maybe that was a bit excessive, or maybe not?

As I mounted my new bike to head out of the city, A feeling of misgiving came over me. I spoke out loud to no one but myself, “God, I thought only men did crazy shit like this.”

The first couple of hours were painful, and I thought I had made a big mistake. But once I got out of the stop-and-go city traffic and the surrounding suburbs, I could start to feel the bike out and test its performance. My mind started to clear. I began to reminisce about when I was a teenager and would ride my beat-up 1960 Indian Chief on upstate New York’s back roads alongside my big brother riding on his hog.

My brother Roger is a year and a half older than me, and we often would ride out to a pond a few miles from our house. It was down some dirt logging roads, and we would go swimming in the summer. We were a little naughty and would go skinny dipping every chance we got. That’s pretty much how I learned the difference between boys and girls. We never did anything incestuous. But he would always make me laugh when he got a hard-on and blamed me. I wasn’t above teasing him a little.

We both started dating around the same time. Most of the time, we would double date, and it was not unusual for my brother to be screwing his date in the front seat while I was giving my date a blowjob in the back seat. I know he would peek sometimes, but I didn’t care. I peeked at him too. After we dropped our dates off, we would laugh and make stupid comments all the way home about watching each other getting laid.

My brother and his family are my only living relatives and still live at the old homestead in upstate New York. He is a volunteer fireman and owns the local hardware store like our father did before him. To say I love my brother is an understatement. There was not a week that went by that I did not call him to make sure he was alright and to assure myself someone out there still loved me.

My last year at the County law office was hell for me. I turned into the office bitch. I could not even get laid because I was so angry with the system that I scared men away whenever they would strike up a conversation with me. I was not a fun person to be around.