When I informed Larry, my taxi driver from the airport, that I was in town to cover a convention of police air support units, I thought he was going to choke on his Tiparillo from laughing. Didn’t I know it was Bike Week? "Bike Week?" I asked. As far as I was concerned, Daytona Beach’s only cultural distinctions were its eponymous car race and the increasingly distant memory of a once mythic spring break. Beyond that, I thought it just another community of spritzer-sipping retirees.

"Well, you’re in for something real special, man," he said. "This place goes absolutely fucking nuts and stays that way for almost two weeks. You’ve never seen nothin’ like it. Trust me."

But, as it happened, Larry smelled distinctly of shrimp and was driving in his slippers, so the last thing he inspired was trust. I found it even harder to believe him when he told me that by mid-week some 500,000 people would motor their way into town. On a related note, I wondered if the cops I’d come to meet knew about the portentous exhaust clouds gathering on the horizon.

Well, if they did, they didn’t let on during the daylong seminar the following afternoon. They were all business, and I found myself so incapacitated by boredom I resorted to counting the number of cops wearing mustaches. I can’t certify these numbers, but it was somewhere in the 65 percent range.

When the day’s duties were completed, I made for Main Street, the home, I was told, of the town’s most popular biker establishments. "Go to Boot Hill Saloon," the hotel clerk said, and I would get a chance to see firsthand what Bike Week was all about. As I walked the mile or so in the direction of the clerk’s pointing finger, I wished for the first time in my life, that I had something leather to wear. Dressed more like a high school gym teacher than a biker, I worried I’d get my ass handed to me by someone with a tattooed head.

Main Street was a spectacle, just as I’d hoped. Imagine a strip of five or six blocks, flanked on both sides by shops, restaurants, and bars, every one bustling and every one devoted to either outfitting, feeding or lubing up motorcycle owners. At the curb motorcycles were lined up as far as the eye could see, like teeth on a comb. There were choppers, hogs, road kings, motorcycles with sidecars, some with flashing lights, some with back ends as wide as a two-door sedan. There were motorcycles with simple paint jobs and others with elaborate multi-colored designs, all of them washed, waxed and detailed for the event.

I stopped for a beer at the Cruisin’ Café as it was the least intimidating place on the street, and so, I figured, a good place to start. Think T.G.I. Fridays but replace the ridiculous hats and suspenders with t-shirts identifying, in motor-speak, each employee’s role. The bartenders’ shirts read, "Fuellers," as in "Hi, I’m Brad, I’ll be your fueller. Can I get you something from the bar? We have an array of beers that includes Bud, Bud Light, Coors, Coors Light, Michelob, and Michelob Light."

The hostesses advertised themselves as "Starters" and the wait staff, "Crew." I wanted to ask if, as a patron during Bike Week, I was to be issued a shirt that said, "Drunk-ass Hooligan." However, I decided by the time most people were deserving of that title, they probably weren’t wearing shirts anyway.

Jamey, my waitress, a cute curly-haired twenty-something, was a veteran of seven Bike Weeks. She had the sort of weary but loving look of a wife who can’t get mad at her wasted husband because he’s just too damn adorable when he’s drunk.

"You have all types here really," she said. "You have your normal middle class and your doctors who grow their beards out before they come. There’s no real characterizing them. But they do all sort of look alike."

She informed me that contrary to what most people expect, the bikers are a pretty well behaved lot. They were always courteous and much better tippers than the "race fans," who come to town for the Daytona 500.

On my way out she offered one last piece of advice for the evening. "You have to go out to Pub 44," she said. "They have coleslaw wrestling."

When I asked what coleslaw wrestling had to do with motorcycles, she only shrugged and said, "They wrestle in coleslaw."

Out on the street, which was busy with bikers and other cruisers, I very quickly realized how right Jamey was about the uniformity of the look of Bike Week attendees. Here’s how it broke down:

Men: Shaved head or long hair in a ponytail. Must wear some sort of bandana on head, with preferences leaning toward a confederate flag or a leather Harley version. Shirt must be sleeveless, arms tattooed. Pants — jeans, or jeans in chaps. Facial hair is a necessity but must meet certain design parameters. Goatees are good, but they must be long and, ideally, pointed at the end. Full beards are also permissible, though these too must be long, and the more unkempt the better. More Grizzly Adams than Mr. Keaton.

Women: Blonde hair; bleached is best. The operative word for clothing is tight. This goes for jeans, leather pants, tank-tops, bikini tops, fringed leather Indian shirts, whatever. The tighter, the better. Tattoos are also permissible, preferably on the small of the back, just above the elastic band of the thong, which should be peeking out.

I headed for the Boot Hill Saloon, which gets its name from the cemetery across the street. It is, along with Froggy’s, one of most famous biker bars in town. It’s at the eastern end of the strip and is, as places that have earned a place in history tend to be, nothing special. It is a squat, square building that looks more like a garage than a storied bikers’ watering hole. But as I attempted to enter, the guy at the door shot his arm out to stop me. Finally, my Bermuda shorts and prescription eyeglasses had caught up to me.

"Is that a digital camera or a 35 mm?" he asked.

I had been taking pictures up and down the street and expected to get a few in Boot Hill.

"Digital," I said.

"Sorry," he said, pointing at a sign that read, "Absolutely No Video Cameras."

"But this isn’t a video camera," I said, displaying the camera as evidence.

"Yeah, but you can look at the pictures right after you take them. If a cop walks in here and sees a shot of, say, a young lady lifting her top up, we could get busted. We’re not licensed as a titty bar. Big problem."

I looked at my camera, then peered beyond the bouncer to the throng inside. Young ladies lifting their tops up? It was a tough decision. I decided to try Froggy’s, this time hiding the camera.

On my way, I wandered into one of the countless souvenir shops on Main Street. I surveyed the t-shirts (black), hats (black), bikinis (small), beach towels (Harley-Davidson), leather accessories (chafing).

Tammy, the proprietor of Tammy’s Stitching Hole, was, I guessed, in her mid-50s, dressed in camouflage pants, a jaunty beach hat and smoking a cigar. She was pretty in a way that people are who’ve learned to relax.

"I came down here 14 years ago for Bike Week with my Triumph," she said. "When it was over I went home and packed my stuff and came back down for good."

Tammy makes 80 percent of her year’s revenues during Bike Week, but you wouldn’t know it by her easy manner. She loves the event and the bikers, and resents local residents who complain about the noise and traffic hassle.

"What those folks keep forgetting is that if it weren’t for Bike Week this place would be a ghost town," she said. "Bike Week is how they can afford to live here."

This was too good a quote from a cigar-smoking fifty-year-old woman to mess it up by asking about how Race Week and spring break figure in that formula. Instead, we both turn our attention to a patch peddler who’s just arrived and has opened his portfolio to make his pitch.

Sandy, from New Jersey, had only just gotten into the biker patch business.

"We mostly do flowers and butterflies and stuff like that for the garment industry," he admitted. "But we recently decided to start making, you know, these ‘I’m a bad-ass bitch, fuck the world’ sort of patches."

We review the iron crosses, skulls, and eagles he now has to offer.

"You know what we’re really looking for," Tammy said, "some of those ‘If you can read this, the bitch fell off the back’ patches. Do you have any of those?"

Thirsty, I left Tammy and Sandy to negotiate and proceeded down to Froggy’s. Hiding my camera, I passed the drunk bouncer slouched on his stool and entered the busy, dimly lit interior. To my left was a buxom female bartender in a bikini. On my right, looking down from a raised platform was another of the same. Folded bills peeked from their tops and bottoms. At the back of the room worked a third.

I ordered a beer and having my request for a picture summarily turned down, I walked out the back door onto a large outdoor patio offering two more bars, similarly staffed. Immediately, a female patron, drunk, mostly toothless, and wearing cutoffs and a bra greeted me. She was in the process of tying, what looked to be, another bra around the head of an unusually understanding man. When finished, she gyrated out of tune with the Bob Seeger that was playing, and then showed her breasts. Now this was Bike Week!

I approached two men sipping beer and looking wholly uninterested in the spectacle. Dennis and Jim were bikers from way back, and had seen their share of wasted biker chicks. Natives of Atlanta, they’d attended some 24 Bike Weeks between them.

"I needed a new bad habit," Dennis said to explain his dedication to the event. His lidded eyes said volumes about his ultra-relaxed demeanor. "We do this and Sturgis. A lot of buddies come down here and we just have fun."

Jim, a large and sort of demonic-looking Santa Claus, added, "A few years ago we covered about 7,800 miles in 15 days. From Atlanta, to Washington, down to Eureka and back home. They have a bumper sticker that says ‘No Bar Too Far’ and we’ve been there and pissed on the floor."

Everyone I spoke to shared the same dedication to Bike Week, and were clear about what drew them back year after year.

Bill, a grizzled sixty-year-old Bostonian in a shirt that ordered you to "Get High!" was enjoying his 20^th year at Bike Week.

"We come down here for the motorcycles and for looking at the girls," he said.

John, a soft-spoken security guard from Georgia with arms literally blued from the sheer number of tattoos, agreed. "Everybody’s here for the same thing — the love of Harleys and to party."

They seemed excited, but there was something else. Starting with Tammy back at Tammy’s Stitching Hole, I’d begun to sense another story hidden behind the rah, rah. There was a note of nostalgia, a longing for a bygone era: before the world knew about Bike Week, before the cops cracked down, before the city found it necessary to regulate everything.

"Hell," Bill said forlornly, "they’ve now passed laws like no showing your tits." He shook his head. "Used to be you could stand here and see them all day long. They’ve even passed a law that the women can’t wear tea-bags anymore." (Biker glossary item #11: tea bag, see thong.)

And still they come. The final numbers for Bike Week 2003 included about 750,000 visitors, filling every hotel, motel and campground from Orlando to Ormand Beach. And why shouldn’t they come, tea bags or no tea bags? These are the children of our nation’s first pioneers, who joined the dusty plains and forded the many rivers simply to see what was out there. They’re the keepers of the open road and to them I say, ride on, Bike Week revelers, ride on!