Somewhere in Montana, a motorcyclist is missing his helmet. Somewhere in Big Sky Country said helmet may be behind a rock or beneath a pine tree, or perhaps inside a handcrafted tepee or next to a wooden chair from the Great Northern Railway. Somewhere in the tall grass between a log cabin and a barn, not far from fields of alfalfa, barley, and rye, a septuagenarian biker rides the Information Superhighway liked a concussed—and possibly dangerous—former guest star of “Wagon Train.”
Or so I imagine, based on what I can intuit from Peter Fonda’s Twitter account, including his since-deleted tweet about ripping 11-year-old Barron Trump from his mother’s arms and putting him in a cage with pedophiles.
Fonda later apologized for what he said—after, I presume, he inserted his false teeth and answered a series of questions from an internist who had him remove his sunglasses so he could inspect Fonda’s eyes with an ophthalmoscope.
Understand, too, that I am not a doctor. I can no more diagnose Peter Fonda’s mental health than I can describe Jane Fonda’s disregard for the health and safety of American pilots when she visited Hanoi and looked into the aperture of an anti-aircraft gun during the Vietnam War. So much, then, for the efficacy of helmets, since Jane wore one when she condemned the United States and Peter went without one when he lost control of his senses by condemning the youngest son of the president of the United States.
All fades, however, before the glory of the open road. It is where I crashed my motorcycle and cracked my head, where I shed more blood than my father ever did on either the small or silver screen, as mine was the real thing and his was the stuff of cornstarch and food coloring, as I was more of an ass than a badass while he was never evil, not even in his star-spangled, polyester glory as Evel Knievel.
I wish I could say the same for Peter Fonda.