Unrepentant

by Peter Edwards

  Scotty, the biker Guindon had dispatched in the first bout, was conscious and feisty again. “Scotty thought I was going to kick him [Billy], but I wasn’t. He grabbed me from behind.”

  That was just the permission Guindon needed to get back into the fray. He grabbed Billy, spun him around and landed another crisp, hard hook. It was the defining shot of a night of semi-organized violence. “I thought he was dead. His head hit the concrete when he went down and he was out before he hit the floor. He just lay there. You could see the whites of his eyes.” Billy wisely declined a rematch with Campbell. “He was finished.”

  The next day, once the bloodied Hamiltonians were gone from the clubhouse, Guindon nominated Campbell to become a “striker,” or probationary member, of the Satan’s Choice Motorcycle Club. Later that year, Campbell became their youngest-ever full member. “I didn’t nominate many guys. He had parts.” Guindon made this comment during an interview in a room full of women. Asked what “parts” meant, Guindon whispered, “It’s not polite to use ‘balls’ in front of ladies. The slang word would be ‘parts’.”

  “Right away you thought this guy would be a good candidate for the club,” Willerton agreed. Eighteen years after that, Campbell would run across the man he had beaten in the fight. Billy was then an inmate barber at Collins Bay Penitentiary and cut Campbell’s hair and shaved him with a straight razor. He either didn’t recall Campbell or didn’t bear any hard feelings as he applied the sharp blade to Campbell’s cheeks. Whatever the case, Campbell started shaving himself in prison after that.

  Back in 1966, in his new status as a full-fledged Satan’s Choice member, Campbell rode a Triumph Bonneville he bought from another member. For their initiations, some new members had outhouse buckets emptied on them at a club property near Coboconk, in cottage country, while others held them down. “Guys would fight back. They’d run and fight and everything,” Willerton says. Campbell says that members often joined in the dirtying of their colours. “Everybody was trying to get their crests nice and dirty. Have everybody at a party pour beer on it, step on it, urinate on it. One guy, Pigpen, puked on it.”

  Campbell’s initiation was relatively tame compared with what was inflicted upon other members. It wasn’t that fellow bikers were in a polite mood the day Campbell joined their ranks; they just didn’t want him to punch them out. The day he became a full member, Campbell bought beer for a party while others dirtied his club crest. “I got food and mustard thrown on my colours. Mine was dirty five minutes after I became a member.”

  Campbell took to wearing his Choice patch on the back of a brown buckskin jacket he bought at Berg’s Men’s Wear, beneath his old family apartment. It cost eighty-four dollars and had eighteen-inch fringes. Girls riding on the back of his bike would pull off handfuls of fringes as souvenirs. Within four months there were just a few of them left hanging from the jacket, so he cut off the sleeves to make it into a vest.

  It seemed like no time before the Choice had swelled to thirteen chapters and some five hundred members, easily making it Canada’s biggest, baddest outlaw motorcycle club. They chose Canada’s colours—red and white—as their own and Guindon nourished the dream of expanding from coast to coast. Membership was fluid, with a high turnover in the ranks. “In a year or two you’d lose at least a hundred members,” Guindon recalls. “They’d come and go so fast.” A rumour circulated that prospective members had to murder someone to get into the club. Long-time member Bill (Mr. Bill) Lavoie joked that the body count would fill a cemetery the size of the city of Cobourg if this were true.

  Campbell and Guindon were particularly proud that they were from the “Mother”—or founding—chapter of the club, and that they rode together, in formation, two abreast. “The Oshawa chapter always stood proud,” Guindon says. “We’d fight anybody and ride to the fight.” Adds Campbell: “There wasn’t machine guns or knives back then, but there were pretty serious fights.”

  Guindon wanted plenty of fresh blood in his club, but he didn’t want druggies, who reminded him of the annoying rubbies from his father’s old bootlegging operation. “I didn’t allow drugs in the club, believe it or not.” Pain-killing Percocets and green speed pills were particularly common back then, and both drugs produced addicts. “I didn’t want guys like that.” He threatened anyone caught with drugs with a baseball bat beating, but that wasn’t really necessary. “I had these,” Guindon says, holding up his fists. “The bat was merely a backup system.”

  Despite the warning, Campbell and Willerton once tried smoking a nickel bag of particularly low-grade marijuana while riding in Willerton’s white 1957 Chevy convertible, which had Barbarian painted on its side. For all the hype about marijuana, they were decidedly underwhelmed as they puffed on a joint.

  “Do you notice anything different?” Campbell asked.

  “The posts seem to be coming slower,” Willerton said, motioning towards the oncoming street lights.

  “Yeah, I see that,” Campbell replied.

  “Maybe I’m just driving slower,” Willerton observed.

  They mulled over that possibility and soon decided that non-premium pot wasn’t worth the effort.

  Campbell and Willerton were among the hundred or so Choice at a field day in Heidelberg, near Kitchener, in the summer of 1966. There were plenty of laughs when a salesman in a suit, who had been peddling condoms, bolted after bikers absconded with his products, blew them up like balloons and launched them into the air. There were more laughs at the expense of Alex Trebek, future host of the television game show Jeopardy. Trebek, then a television reporter covering the event, went red-faced when a splasher approached him and simulated oral sex on his CBC microphone.

  “Weren’t you the splasher we were with last night?” Willerton asked her when she was done with Trebek’s microphone.

  “Yeah, I didn’t mind, but one of them stole my panties,” she replied matter-of-factly.

  As the weekend wound down, a young biker who wasn’t with any club tried to impress other riders by doing an extended wheel stand. He wiped out, dying on the pavement.

  On their way home, Willerton stole chocolate bars and chips from a gas station, more for the fun than the food. Not to be outdone, Campbell lifted a car tire with a Display sign on it. They knew there wasn’t much point in stealing only one car tire, just as there wasn’t much hope for a successful getaway when they were double-riding on a motorcycle, with Campbell holding the tire and sign.

  Later that day, Campbell and Willerton occupied neighbouring jail cells and Willerton was able to slip Campbell some chocolate bars and chips. The charges were eventually settled with a fifty-dollar fine for possession of stolen goods.

  Back at the GM plant after weekend escapades like these, Willerton was treated like a rock star, as he showed up for the assembly line with steel-tipped cowboy boots and plenty of stories. “Guys would always come around. [They’d say,] ‘What did you do? Where did you go?’ ”

  “That guy must be in a band,” said one worker who didn’t know about Willerton’s Choice membership.

  “Oh, he’s in a band all right,” another worker replied.

  Willerton could barely contain himself one evening when he was home and the television news came on with a story of a fresh biker bust.

  “Mom, we’re going to be on TV.”

  She saw film footage of her son being escorted out of a paddy wagon. “She was not impressed,” Willerton recalls.

  Campbell had Elinor tattooed onto his upper right arm for his girlfriend when he was seventeen, along with Japanese characters on his left leg that meant “the gentle art of karate.” His father wouldn’t have approved, but he was now practising karate daily. Getting this ink work was a far more pleasant experience than some of his earlier ventures to tattoo parlours. At fifteen, he’d had Lorne inked onto his arm at Don Spicer Tattoos at the corner of Simcoe and Bond streets in Oshawa. “I thought I was going to pass out.” His queasiness about the needle was offset to a point by the sight of
the panty-less artist inking his skin. “She had a miniskirt pulled up. I was thinking, ‘Should I go for it?’ I didn’t. I wish I would have went for it.”

  At sixteen, he added a cross for his sister Roberta, who had died at six months, and Pegasus, the winged mythological horse. The tattoos at age seventeen—including Elinor—were done in the basement of a building next to the Warwick Hotel in downtown Toronto, on Jarvis Street near Maple Leaf Gardens, legendary home of the Toronto Maple Leafs hockey team. Literary types knew the Warwick as the one-time home of novelist Hugh Garner, while sleaze aficionados were familiar with it as the base of operations for a “No cover. No minimum” strip club and an assortment of weary prostitutes.

  The tattoo artist who worked next to the Warwick was known as “the Chinaman,” and he was one of a small and select group of local skin art professionals that also included Sailor Joe (“the most tattooed man in the world”) and the Beachcomber. The Chinaman was a fine artist, but he was no stickler for sanitation. “He had a fish tank. It was so dirty you couldn’t see the fish. [I thought,] ‘And you’re getting tattoos there?’ ”

  When Elinor became pregnant, Campbell moved in with her and her father. The latter was a factory maintenance man, and it was a solid Oshawa house with two upstairs bedrooms. He was also a Second World War veteran and a divorcee who smoked heavily and was prone to bouts of binge drinking. More than anything else, he was a protective father. “I don’t think he liked the idea that Elinor was pregnant, but he loved our daughter, Janice, to death after her birth.”

  Riding season officially began each year with the Victoria Day weekend in May. That’s when all club members were expected to have their bikes on the road for a major party, generally held at Wasaga Beach on Georgian Bay, north of Toronto. Elinor was expecting the baby to arrive that weekend in 1967. Campbell was eighteen years old, a year older than Elinor. Campbell drove her to the hospital when she went into labour. Then he collected his mother and drove her to the hospital too. Immediately after Janice’s birth, he rejoined his biker buddies for two days of hard partying, something he would later regret. “That’s a real prick thing to do.”

  The Choice rode into Wasaga Beach that weekend a hundred bikers strong, like modern-day Cossack warriors. Cabins had already been rented by a girlfriend of a club member, since no one in their right mind would rent rooms to a patch-wearing outlaw biker for the May Two-Four weekend (the Victoria Day holiday, which occurs as near as possible to May 24, nicknamed May Two-Four like the twenty-four case of beer).

  On the ride into Wasaga Beach, two Red Devils somehow offended Guindon. When they pulled over to the side of the road, he levelled one of them with a short, hard shot. Then he turned to his buddy and laid him out too. “With Bernie, there was no waiting,” Willerton recalls.

  At the back of the pack was a jumbo-sized Choice member with a squeaky voice named Crash, who was a legend of sorts in the outlaw biker world. He was surrounded by bike-riding experts who could maintain a tight formation at a hundred kilometres an hour with no stress, like an asphalt version of the Royal Canadian Air Force precision flying team, the Snowbirds. Crash, by contrast, was a remarkably bad rider even by regular standards, and remained uniquely unable to master the most essential part of motorcycle riding: coming to a full stop without smashing hard into something or somebody.

  Guindon wasn’t a patient instructor, but he was a knowledgeable and enthusiastic one. He genuinely liked Crash, whom he met at GM. He tried to tell Crash that it was important to use the brakes and to gear down if he wanted to pull over safely. He might as well have been explaining advanced physics to a goat. More than once, when riding at the back of the pack, Crash simply zoned out and lost control. “Crash came from the back of the pack and ran into the side of this guy,” Willerton says. “The guy flew off his bike. Crash flew off his bike. That was Crash.”

  On a tour of Manhattan with other Choice members, Crash once managed to lurch with his growling chopper onto a crowded sidewalk, sending horror-struck New Yorkers scrambling for their lives. Yet another time, Crash barrelled through a tent set up by the Para-Dice Riders at a field day and came to a stop with a hard collision that put their bikes out of operation.

  Years later, at a Christmas get-together at Campbell’s home in December 2011, Guindon, Willerton and Campbell were reminiscing about the old days when the topic turned to Crash.

  “It’s a wonder he didn’t get a shit-kicking,” Guindon said.

  “Everybody knew he was your friend,” Campbell replied.

  Guindon made Crash ride far to the back of the pack, but that just delayed the inevitable, as he kept running hard into the backs of other members’ bikes.

  “Crash! What are you doing? Hit the brakes!” Guindon would shout at him.

  “I don’t know what happened, Bernie,” Crash would reply, his voice as high as a schoolgirl’s.

  Crash’s personal life was as jarring as his motorcycle riding. “Crash started going out with a splasher and he was going to marry her,” Campbell recalls. “During that same time, she had been with a whole bunch of guys, splashed all of the time.”

  Crash went to Guindon with a personal question that had been gnawing at him.

  “Remember when the guys were with her?” Crash asked. “There was only three or four guys, wasn’t there?”

  “Yeah,” Guindon lied, not wanting to hurt his friend’s feelings.

  In 1967, Campbell broke his foot and split his ear when running an intersection while doing a wheel stand. That was also the year the club got news that Neal had died out West in what had started as a prank on a construction site. Workers were throwing water back and forth at each other when someone threw a bucket of a flammable liquid on Neal. It ignited, and club members heard how Neal had kept walking while on fire, and how his body was cooled with ice in hospital until the pain ended only when he stopped breathing. Fifteen clubs from Montreal to Windsor showed up for the funeral, with about two hundred members putting on a show of respect. In outlaw biker fashion, the bikers didn’t wear helmets in the funeral procession in Durham Region and shovelled the dirt onto the grave themselves.

  Club colours were as sacred as anything in their world, so Campbell was upset when two Red Devils from Hamilton showed up for a party in Scarborough with jackets over their patches. The Red Devils liked to bill themselves as Canada’s oldest outlaw biker club, but this evening it was as though they were ashamed of their identities. “These guys are hiding their patches, so they ended up getting a beating. In all fairness to them, they got beaten, but they fought.” They didn’t fight well enough, and so after Campbell punched them out, he rolled them over and yanked off their club crests.

  The captured patches were hung on the wall of the Choice clubhouse alongside patches from the Warlords, Outcasts, Satan’s Martyrs (“They were cocky, but only for a few minutes”), Hell’s Creation, 13th Sin, Wheels of Destruction, Wild Rebels, Lonesome Rogues, Trojans, Vikings, Prophets of Hell and plenty of other clubs.

  It was survival of the fittest and a culling of the herd; a two-wheeled version of Charles Darwin’s theory of natural selection. For his part, Campbell doesn’t get bogged down in theoretical terms when explaining why they pulled the other clubs’ patches: “We were the biggest guys on the block. We didn’t want any other clubs in the area. We wanted to be the only boys on the block. It was just, ‘We’re Satan’s Choice and don’t fuck with us.’ ”

  There were hippies who considered outlaw bikers to be the noble savages of the 1960s counterculture. Choice members may have liked psychedelic music and free love (or at least sex), but they weren’t so big on the flower-power philosophy of the largely middle-class hippies. “I didn’t like hippies,” Campbell says. “They were professing peace and love and everything and I didn’t advocate that at all.”

  Campbell’s crowd was quasi-militaristic and attracted to the power of packs, drawing a strict line between themselves and “civilians” who weren’t in clubs. They looked like a leathe
red army of sorts, travelling in a line of roaring Harleys, trailed by a green hearse filled with beer. “Back in those days it was all about freaking people out,” Willerton says.

  Part of freaking people out was wearing Nazi memorabilia, which was relatively common and cheap in the 1960s. There was a widely circulated story that the Canadian Nazi Party thought they had fascist political allies in the Satan’s Choice, and that they offered them land for muscle. Guindon says he wasn’t aware if it was true but that he would have told the Nazis to fuck off if he had ever been approached. For his part, Willerton bought a German soldier’s helmet at a flea market, then had it chromed lest anyone not notice it. He relished the attention until an elderly veteran shouted at him, “Look at that trash.” Willerton couldn’t help but sympathize with the old soldier.

  Campbell would later cringe while recalling the lengths to which outlaw bikers went to inflict shocks on civilians. “Guys have eaten their own shit. Drank their own vomit. That was part of what people did to freak people out.” The most shocking of the one-percenters, without peer, was Howard from Peterborough, the original “Pigpen” in Canadian outlaw biker circles. He patrolled the outer frontiers of crazy all by himself. There would be a host of other bikers called Pigpen over the years, just as there would be a waddling parade of 300-plus-pound guys called Tiny. Each of these Pigpens was revolting in his own right, but no one embodied the essence of the name better than Howard. Once, while visiting the Hamilton clubhouse, Pigpen went out to a corner store to buy some cigarettes. “He put his hand down his pants. He had shit himself. When the girl turned around to hand him cigarettes, he handed shit to her. She ran out down the street.” Shocking people was like oxygen for Pigpen. “He was eating Tampax. Not Tampax just out of the box. Even eating dog shit. He wouldn’t try stuff like that with me. I told him, ‘If you ever try that with me, I’ll kill you.’ ”