Continued from: “Episode 3”, click to read the previous episode
The Chase
Episode 4 of 6
By Idella Sweetwater, PhD
Chief Cheerleading Officer, CCO
“You like Lucchese?” Bandit asked, referring my rattlesnake-hide boots.
“No,” I lied. “Ariat.” The were in fact Lucchese, but I need to take this joker down a notch.
“Oh. Better run them through proofreading,” Bandit said, with the subtlest twitch of an eyebrow.
“What?” I asked, as if I’d hit a pothole in the dark.
“Got a typo. Reads ‘Lucchese Bootmakers’ on the sole. Stamped right there in the leather. It’s critical to get the basics like proofreading right in publishing.” Crap, I thought. Of course they do! Then I caught it, the subtlest crack of daylight in Bandit’s seemingly flawless armor of aplomb. He glanced, be it ever so quickly, up the length of my tanned, crossed, outstretched, 20-something legs. Fish on, bitches!
“Well, how’s a simple country girl from Georgia to tell one set of custom snake-hide boots from another, really?” I asked, cranking up my southern accent twenty percent. “I own so many. As long as the snake is long and has venom in it, I’m in. And before I’m done, I’ll be wearing it.”
“So you like boots and motorcycles,” Bandit said. “What else to you like?” Oh you are mine, you motherfuc—
“I like to win,” I said sweetly, taking a sip from my iced-tea, trying to control my rage. “Do you like to win, Mr. Ball?” I used his last name to take away the air of call-sign cool.
“You sound competitive,” Bandit said.
“If you call crushing the opposition and taking everything they’ve got right down to their silver and their women, like a pack of Vikings hopped up on go-pills, guts and glory, then yes, I am that adorable little Georgia kitten.”
“I wonder,” Bandit said.
“Wonder what?” I asked.
“How long are you going to sit here and try to distract me with your lovely legs and gravity-defying tail-light, resume dropping and wit matching, before you get to the point, sister? You want something from me. What is it? Spit it out. Who knows, I might even let you have it. Or, I might not.”
“It’s not what I want from you, it’s what I want to give you,” I said, trying to counter, insulted, rattled once again.
Bandit motioned to the cook for two iced-tea refills. He wasn’t exactly taking the bait. And it was really good bait. At least I thought so. All right, I thought, let this smug graybeard have it, girl.
“You just bought the biggest publication in motorcycling history,” I said. "At the worst possible time. Ridership is down. Readership is down. Boomers are starting to hang it up. The big motorcycle manufacturers are struggling to sell motorcycles. The trend is trending towards the center of the earth. The next five younger generations don’t even think of motorcycles, much less aspire to own, much less own, much less ride regularly, much less give a damn about anything but their screen addictions. Subscriptions are a tenth of what they used to be. Even digital is chugging. I ride. I wrench. I build my own scoots. I have an education that would make President Trump do a double-take. In fact he and I went to the same alma mater and my GPA was higher than his. I have five standing offers right now (I had two). But I’m here to help. My ‘Rainman’ is organizational prowess, I can make anything run better, faster, smoother, more profitably. Anything. You don’t have a COO. You need a COO. You’re the CEO/Owner. You’re the only other person even close to me in qualification and that’s only because you’ve done this sport a long, long time (I threw in two “longs” for the ageism dig power). You’ll be two busy EO-ing that monster you just acquired to also COO that monster. You need me. I’m interested. What’s your offer?”
Bandit grinned. He liked that last bit, I could tell. The cook brought two new iced teas. Bandit took a sip. He squeezed a lemon slice into the tea, never breaking eye contact with me.
“Go on,” he said.
“Go on?” I asked. What? Go on where? That was it, that was my spiel.
“Sure, you’re on a roll,” Bandit said, nearly chuckling. You, you—I had nowhere else to “go”. I was all “goed” out. But I wanted to go somewhere additional, say something pithy and devastating.
“I’m already gone,” I said. “Your job is to stop me.” Whoa, that was either brilliant or incredibly lame, I thought.
“I already did that,” Bandit said. A beat. He had me. This felt like a game of nonstop checkmates and he was doing all the checking and there wasn’t even going to be any mating.
“So you want to COO Easyriders,” Bandit asked, rolling his sweating glass around in his hand.
“Not as much as you want me to,” I said. Bandit cocked an eyebrow.
“What makes you think I don’t already have someone in mind?” Bandit asked.
“Doesn’t matter,” I said.
“Doesn’t?”
“Nope. Cause even if you do, they’re not me. And you want me. Not them. You need me. Without me your chances of 50-50 go down to about 50-0 in this market. But the one thing your Boomers can still do for you is leave behind giant inheritances as they roll off, and with that capital your next three generations will have the cash they need to buy subscriptions, buy motorcycles and do a lot of rides. I will make sure they do just that with their inherited wealth. I will make sure Easyriders is the fastest, best-built, most reliable, most interesting thing in motorcycling since horsepower.” Bandit glanced at my boots still planted atop the table. His eyes casually rolled along the boots to my legs, then north to my cutoffs, then up to my face.
“You ever COO’ed a major publication before?”
“No.”
“Why is that good?” Bandit asked.
“I’ll give you fresh ideas,” I said.
“Hit me,” Bandit said.
“To launch a major print-and-ink comeback, leverage digital,” I said. “Digital is not the natural enemy of print-and-ink. It’s not one or the other. It’s both. That’s where everyone blew it. They all went digital in the mid-2000s, which is fine, but they shrank print accordingly, which was short-bus-full-retard-stupid. That was a massive mistake. That was Harvard-level dumb. Humans are analog. We are not digital. We never will be. We will always be analog. We want to feel what we interact with. We don’t just want information in a water-fall scrolling delivery system. Sure, it’s great, but we also need wind in our gorgeous hair, rain on our perfect faces. We need to read on wood periodically, monthly, not only on plastic screens. Digital is the print-and-ink support unit, the high-speed pit crew swapping tires in four-seconds flat, the 160th Nightstalkers hauling ass ten feet off the deck at 150MPH down a dark street, blacked out, running on NODS, beneath the power-lines, dual mini-guns belching fire as they infil hot to pick up a crew of enemy-blood-covered A-Squadron nut-cutters from First Group who just took down a Presidential high-priority target in a fifth-world shithole on the wrong side of earth, get some!” I paused to catch my breath and for effect. "That’s what digital is to print. That’s why you use it to bring back what we girls on motorcycles all want.” Bandit leaned in.
“And what is that?” he asked. I leaned in.
“We want the experience of holding a big, fat, long, rolled up magazine in our pretty, manicured hands. We want the excitement of knowing that what we are hanging onto, just like our grips, represents, thrills, adrenaline, adventure, outlaw moves that momma might frown on, but might have done herself twenty years ago. We girls want to straddle the thunder and we want it at 150 miles an hour at midnight without censorship, hesitation or apologies. That’s what.”
“What do you know about the 160th?” Bandit asked, shifting down a gear, leaning back into his chair again, trying to mask approval. And failing. I had this CEO dialed in. Because I’m me, Idella Sweetwater.
“My daddy was a Ranger, Army SF, he taught me everything I know that’s worth knowing,” I said. “The rest I got at school.”
“So you want to be CCO?”
“COO. Chief Operations Officer.”
“CCO, Chief Cheerleading Officer,” Bandit countered. “We don’t do typical corporate B.S. titles. We do it our way, the biker way.”
“To whom would I report?” I asked.
“All the way to the top,” Bandit said.
“I’ll want to think about it,” I said. “I have six other offers.” Bandit chuckled.
“You mean five,” he corrected. "Which means you probably have two. Take all the time you need. I’m in no hur—“
“I’ll take it. But on one condition,” I said.
“What’s that?” Bandit asked.
“I get to pick out the company jet.” Bandit snorted.
“Sure, kid. You do the jet.”
“You think I’m joking,” I said. “I go big.”
“Go big, kid. Go big.” Bandit stood up, dropping a crisp new $100, from a neat stack that he pulled from his vest pocket, onto the table for the iced-teas. “Now it you’ll excuse me, I’ve got an empire to run.”
“You won’t regret this,” I told him as he walked out. I got up to follow him. I was trying to stay cool, but my insides were suddenly made of butterflies. He didn’t kill me. He didn’t knock me out. He didn’t even ask me to pay for the damages. Heck, he bought the drinks! This guy liked me. I was going to crush it. Man I’m good, nice work, Sweet-water. You rock, woman. Girl power!
“You’re damned right I won’t kid. I stopped doing regret 30 years before you even hit this planet. Now see if you can keep up this time, sister. Let’s ride, goddammit, we’re burning daylight.”
To be continued…....the final chapter will be featured in the March/April issue of Easyriders magazine
