Red Room Where the Writers Are

Synopsis:

Wicked Bitch is the amazing autobiography of a truly colourful and amazing character whose lair is located in the heart of biker culture. Amy (the wicked bitch) White writes her account of her life experiences in the characteristic vividness and deep story lines which remind the reader of the many wonderful Southern writers who have preceded her. Born into an Arkansas family, she learned early to cope with adversity, hardship and poverty. Her family lineage gives one the first indicator of just who we are dealing with. She comes from a family of incredibly strong and determined women who were rumoured to be witches and bitches due to their highly eccentric lifestyles and attitudes spanning many generations of her Arkansas family. Her accounts of her early, formative years gives readers a wonderful insight of growing up in hill billy country Arkansas and leaves readers with the crystal clear cultural factors which spawn the very rare woman she is to become.Her father recognized his little girl’s talents early in life and she became his shadow... painting, body work, mechanics and respite from her horribly injured Mother’s verbal and physical problems created in her a love of the masculine. She is a Man’s woman and this shines through her story.Her early years were spent spray painting cars and working with other toxic materials with her larger than life father. His baby girl had inherited from her mother’s side of the family a genetic disorder which is gradually causing her to go deaf. However, song is always with her and her writings capture the ‘head talk’ of songs which richly permeates her writings. The readers get to hear just what song is in her head as the rich tapestry of her life is hung out before us. Some of us will not recognize any of the songs, others some and the majority will recognize all. This extremely unusual writing style was refreshing to this reader, providing changes in mood, tone and ambiance as the songs which fill her heart and soul are hinted at throughout this wonderful autobiography. The book made me laugh (see Steve’s actions at the Gulfport rally and crawdad festival for an example), cry (see her diagnoses of Lupus) and come to the awareness that from adversity comes strength and character. The toxic fumes she breathed while working with her Daddy and on her own creations completely ruined her immune system and she now suffers from a medical condition called Multiple Connective Tissue Disorder, which means she has several autoimmune disorders, including life-threatening Lupus. While this is perhaps one of the most devastating diseases on this planet, Amy transcends the disease by taking constant chemo-therapy. Once she was able to pull herself together from the Lupus and learned to live in her ever silencing world; I again found myself saying in my own mind “Go on Amy, you can do it girl,” when she finally gets back onto her Road King after several years of total incapacitation from Lupus.Oh, she can be tough, a cyber bully in her own terms; she can kick ass in person too, be ever so sweet (watch out for her then!) – But most of all she has a huge heart, a zest for life which is truly inspirational and a great friend – always making time to help those who are in situations similar to herself.The story of the Wicked Bitch is a must read for many reasons. It is the first biker book written in the traditional Southern literary style; it is about accepting and being the best you can with the cards you have been dealt and, finally; it is an inspirational and outstanding read from an accomplished magazine writer and contributing author to several books who has chosen to lay it on the line and tell it like it is in one book.Amy is truly a biker chick. The 1% tiny little tattoo on her shoulder had me confused at first. I wondered if she was associated with one of these clubs. However, I soon came to understand that Amy is truly a 1% er in life and passion for life. She is also a 1%er in her love for motorcycles and the raucous fun of a damned good rally. This is the kind of book which has huge hairy behemoths from the clubs crying when they read it. Sometimes they are tears of sorrow; other times they are tears of joy. Women readers of the book, will, of course, have another take. There will still be the tears of joy and sorrow, but; it’s the manna which floors you gals as I am told by my missus. She is inspiration and living proof that love of life conquers all. Men come and go, the bike stays. Thank you so much for letting me read your wonderful book and honouring me with the opportunity to write this forward. Go for it Girl! I can’t wait for the next one.Arthur Veno, Ph.D.Professor of Criminology and PsychologyMonash UniversityAuthor of The Brotherhoods: Inside outlaw motorcycle clubs 2002, 2003, 2009), co-author Biker Chicks: The magnetic attraction of women to bad boys and big motorcycles (2009) and several other popular books.

Book Excerpt:

“She arrives in all her splendor…” There are those that would say I am a whore. Many say I am a bitch. Some would call me a home wrecker, mechanic, nut, hippie, artist, gold digger, and thankfully, a biker. I think I simply agree with Tennyson that the happiness of man in this life does not consist in the absence but in the mastery of his passions. I also agree with Mae West, a hard man is good to find. I am larger than life. I am a rock star. I have never aspired to second place. I am a boy. I am a temptress. I am meaner than nine rattlesnakes and a sawed off shot gun. I can fly thru air weightless and free, from a dirty little kid with scabby knees screaming down the twisty steep hills in front of my dad’s shop on a three speed bicycle to a leather clad goddess raping thousands of miles of highways with the thunder of two wheeled dragons. I generally offer my opinions for anyone who will listen, usually adorned with more four letter words than any seasoned sailor could conquer.. I believe in God and weep at the wonder of him as I cross the Great Divide, gaze across the hills of Kentucky, smell a puppy‘s breath or watch a newborn baby open its eyes… I am the wicked witch on her broomstick when I take my Harley on a midnight, moonlight ride. I am Scarlett O’Hara stomping over men like Sherman through Atlanta, claiming as my God given southern right to fiddle dee dee wherever I please. I am a honky tonk angel and a southern Baptist deacon’s daughter. I can tell you down to the most precise second how to make blackberry plum jelly, turnip greens and fatback, or smooth corn moonshine, and can rattle off the timing on a Chevy 350 or the paint code for Plum Crazy on a 1974 Charger. I devour novels of every form and fashion, and men as well. I ride Harley Davidson, and only, Harley Davidson motorcycles. I am ninety percent deaf. I drip diamonds like Eva Gabor in cut off overalls and dirty bare feet, picking black eyed peas or painting a hot rod. I swig 100 proof Kentucky bourbon straight out of the bottle and smoke 2 packs of camels a day. I am dying rather swiftly at age 35 of autoimmune diseases. A select few think I am heaven sent.. I reckon the sources of my inspiration and adventures are aroused by someplace a good bit warmer than that. “ She’s a Poet, She’s a prophet, She’s a walking contradiction taking every wrong direction on her lonely way back home...” In 1974, people still mourned Janis, Elvis was still the king, Nixon was lying to us all on T.V., and the world sounded like Sweet Home Alabama. America’s boys were still trying to get home from Vietnam. Fonzie and Marcia Brady were the kids next door, Harleys were built by a bowling ball factory, and my mother was due to have a New Year‘s baby. I was born February 24^th.  It seems my mother and I were destined from the start to have different ideas. My earliest memories are not the powder scented daydreams most little girls are said to have.. My initial memory is probably the metal brace that I had to wear on my feet every night because I was born pigeon toed. That brace is still a thing of my worst nightmares… a device of unimaginable torture to a little girl who simply could not be like her peers, I was subjected to a nightly routine of persecution which seemed to be making me feel as if I was being punished for some unknown atrocity. The nightly routine was to have a cold blue flat metal bar with two big silver clamps that tightened down onto the bottoms of heavy walking shoes. The result was both of my feet pointing almost straight out to the sides at about 80 degree angles for my night’s activities. I was bound together so that I could only flounder about like a fish on a pier with it on. I wore this accursed device each evening and had to sleep in it every single night until I was five or six.  Perhaps this start shaped the start of the wicked bitch in me. I am told that my mother had to stick bows on my head with Karo syrup, because I was bald except for a little bit of red hair on the back of my head. Even in the frilly creations in which my mother adorned me, people often  mistook me for a boy. As I now pour out my existence, I find myself wondering if that was perhaps prophetic. Unknown to anyone at the time, there was another abnormality in that baby girl. If indeed our physical discrepancies are deduced by fate according to wickedness, the more profoundly obvious is the explanation of my countenance. I found out at the age of 24 that I was born with  degenerative nerve deterioration in my ears. In other words, the same auditory problems that makes my mother and her brothers, and their mother before them, wear hearing aids has manifested itself again in me, causing me to start losing my hearing about ten years ago. Now I am nearly 90 percent deaf. One of my greatest deficiencies or punishments is my ever intensifying deafness. I choose not to use auditory aids, however. Besides the fact that they irritate me to hell and back, I simply choose to be who I am, factory original. I read lips, I read books, and my entire life is cloaked in a soundtrack of old country music and early rock that I learned as a kid. My hearing loss has reached the point that I cannot learn new songs, so I exist happily in satin sheets and whiskey rivers, storing within the cavernous reaches of my mind every intonation of that old school music to keep me company when I am plunged forever into the sound of silence. So, the soundtrack of my existence, the tones that flow unbidden within my helmet, are born from memory traces of these songs. When I found myself time and again punished and sent away to my room, it never bothered me much whether I was guilty of the transgression or not, because I had a big ol’ record player and my mother’s extensive record collection to keep me company.  When I had incurred my mother’s wrath, whatever happened didn’t seem so bad when I was finally able to retreat to the comforting guardian arms of  honky tonk angels. As I grew old enough to haunt the shadows of my dad’s shop, my friends came to visit through the dilapidated old FM radio that sat precariously perched on a shelf, covered with so much paint overspray you couldn’t even see the numbers. They were right there by my side and in my head, on through adolescence and high school. Over time Merle Haggard has soothed my tears, from childhood fears to broken hearts. Willie Nelson had whisked me away to the city of New Orleans when I felt imprisoned, and Conway Twitty has escorted me through countless affairs and liasons. I wept over the demise of Waylon Jennings and Johnny Cash as if they were intimate friends... because to me, they were. When life was hard, they consoled me, chased away my loneliness and made me smile. Tammy Wynette taught me to stand by my men,  Loretta Lynn told me even ladies sometimes have to visit fist city, and Dolly Parton helped an ugly little girl dream of growing into a beauty with flaming locks of auburn hair and ivory skin. So powerful are these songs and artists in my life, I find that they shape the way I see life and have used snippets of these songs in the writing of this tome as the ‘head talk’ which remains clear and wonderful in my ever more isolated life, even if only in my mind.   Though my auditory dysfunction is obviously a burden that causes life to be a bit more difficult each day in trivial tasks, I also allow credit and even a bit of appreciation as well, since it is possibly an asset towards allowing me a clearer, quieter view of the world around me. Quite conceivably this ever expanding lack of auditory abilities gifts me with a more focused view of events and life that goes unnoticed by those whose lives are cluttered by unnecessary and as I have come to learn, very distracting noises. For the most part, I restrict my rapidly advancing limits of remembered sounds to the things I consider significant... my beautiful son’s infectious laughter.. the steady rumble of my Harley combined with the echo of the highway... the way my old man says my name... Even in the recesses of my reminiscences live the sad stories of Merle Haggard and George Jones, the sound of rain on a tin roof, and even the mating call of lovelorn birds to be relived in ever nearing silent future when such frivolous noises are only available to me in the echoes of my mind. For the most part I consider myself fortunate that I was afforded at least three decades before my every moment is draped in stillness, my existence sentenced forever to a silence as absolute and permanent as death itself. However, I choose not to wallow in things I have no control over, nor do I often mourn the demise of my ears, so I assume this is all that needs to be said in reference to such. However, I again felt that I had been dealt a hand which indicated that I was fundamentally different from the mainstream. Was this due to some wickedness from my past lives? Was I just some one who pissed God off? “Those Williams boys they still mean a lot to me, Hank and Tennessee…” The more obvious countenances and deviations of my projected image are perhaps more interesting and lean heavily upon the world in which I have evolved. I believe that quite a bit of my self inherent charisma is based upon the fact that I am who I choose to be, and am basically and perpetually the exact same person at all times. I do not believe in affecting airs, regardless of the image I may have just painted, other than that of exhuming a bit more confidence than I inwardly possess, if circumstances require me to do so. Yet is it not merely human to strive toward pride and accomplishment, despite the alleged fall that invariably comes later? I am probably straightforward and plain spoken to a fault, but based upon most experiences thus far, this succeeds in preventing misunderstandings of what I mean. It is truly an exhilarating existence to be able to transform oneself from seductress to boy to artist in the briefest of time. Regardless of whether this is intriguing or appalling, it is in fact who I am, and I see no reason to change it. Insofar as my experience goes, the combination seems to be an amicable one. Perhaps my grandiose ego had a rich and eager conception due to these hardships and idiosyncrasies… From the very first breath it appears that I knew I was going to have to work a little bit harder than everyone else, but whatever endeavor I was forced or chose to embark on; I was determined to succeed… One would think surely this is more than enough for one body to endure in a lifetime, but alas fate didn’t deem it to be.  Yet another affliction was to surface later in my life, convincing me that I was being punished for some unknown reason. I was diagnosed with Lupus. My immune system has failed and I am kept alive by constant chemotherapy, the result being an expectation of a very shortened life. So, at 35 I am dying. But this instilled in me a sense of desperately living life to the fullest… squeezing as much life in as possible in the few years I am destined to have on this earth. One response that is so often seen in people who suffer as I have is depression and a victim mentality, choosing to live a ‘cotton wool’ lifestyle to do nothing more than wallow in self pity. Somehow, the reverse was to be my fate. I developed a gritty determination to live and enjoy life to the fullest with what I could do.   Throughout the bittersweet years, I have been through seven Harleys, a few men, a billion camels, a million miles, a river of tears, a good bit of whiskey, and a lifetime of highways. I have painted hundreds, probably thousands of cars and trucks. Through lots of Steroids and chemotherapy type drugs, I mourned the years that I wasn’t able to ride, admiring the fact that I made it to Sturgis and back to Arkansas, most likely with the onsets of lupus torturing my body for over four thousand miles. I do not write this in search of pity. I do not want anyone to feel sorry for me. There is certain serenity in knowing how you will die. It makes you treasure each day, and realize truly what people and life really mean to you. Don’t cry when I am gone… rejoice because I was here.  I have lived a thousand lifetimes in thirty five years. I have loved and lost, cried and died, and loved again. I have learned that no matter how bad it hurts, you can keep on going on. I now know it solves nothing to despair over things you cannot cure. I no longer rail at fate for allowing me to be struck down so soon… instead I treasure the memories of the heights I soared to before I crashed. I have driven 80 miles an hour down a gravel road. I have met legends. I have laughed until my stomach hurt, and I have cried real tears. I never would have believed I would live to see a black man elected president. Never could I have imagined Brett Favre being anything but a Packer. I thought Chargers and Challengers were muscled myths of my childhood. I never imagined you could feel so very old when you are still so young. Never could I have thought living could be so hard, or take so much effort. But what do I know? Some days I’m not even sure I’ll see tomorrow. But, these are the days when I am feeling bad. On good days, the physical limitations slowly fade to that of life in a head space which is awesome. For nearly a decade my life has consisted of rumbling chrome dragons that breathe hot exhaust that is a sweeter scent than any flower, for it also carries the scent of freedom, wind, laughter, tears, and memories. Probably thousands of these amazing memories flood my brain as I try to choose the parts that best portray my life, and who I am. I guess the best way to describe it is recently I had a conversation with my husband, when he was first contemplating learning to ride with me…He said, “I guess you will always be a biker’s girl.“ I answered, “No, honey, I will always be a biker.”  In 2008, against the advice of doctors and to the mortification of my mother, I came back. If riding my bike takes away from my time here on earth, so be it. One percent of something wonderful is better than ninety nine percent of a lifetime of ordinary. I decided I will stop riding when they pry my cold dead hand off the throttle.  If I’m gonna go to hell, I’ll go there riding my Harley.

"Amy White’s Wicked Bitch is a white-knuckle, runaway ride on a motorcycle on fire; a white trash manifesto that hits like a crowbar to the brainpan and goes down with all the subtlety of a straight shot of whiskey. Dripping with pickup truck sex and sung to the tune of red, white and blue rock ‘n’ roll with a southern twang, Wicked Bitch is an American love story told in a smoky roadhouse; the true story of a biker woman who will not rest until she spits in the devil’s eye." Dave Nichols Editor Easyriders & V-Twin Magazine Paisano Publications, LLC

"Wicked Bitch screams through the backdrop of the real south just the way the moonshiners and the booze runners did in their hot rod Fords a generation ago--hammer down and to hell with anything that gets in their way!" Bill Hayes, author of The Original Wild Ones and American Biker

Write a Review »

Topics/Categories:

Biker Chicks, Biker Journalists, bikers, Women Bikers

Genre:

Autobiography

Type of Work:

Book

Publishers:

Lulu

Purchase From:

Wicked Bitch by Amy Irene White
http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=1642394895&ref=profile

Original Publish Date:

July 5, 2008

• Share With:
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
•