Hard Road

by Peter Edwards

  Guindon’s mother told Suzanne Blais about the marriage, and Bernie’s old girlfriend saw it in a flattering light for him. “I wasn’t surprised. She was pregnant. He wanted to honour it. A lot of guys wouldn’t.”

  Suzanne had plenty of her own problems. She underwent back surgery in December 1962 at Toronto General Hospital. The eight-hour operation to fuse her spine went horribly wrong. She was later told that her heart had stopped and she had to be revived during the operation. “I could hear the priest giving me the prayers,” she said. “My mom was crying.”

  Five months later, in April 1963, Suzanne got married in Toronto. She and Guindon hadn’t seen each other since the previous year, just before he missed their date because of car trouble. If his car had stayed on the road that day, they might have married each other. Instead, they were each newly married to someone else. But Guindon was consumed not with thoughts of romance, but revenge.

  CHAPTER 5

  Fight Club

  He only took his cane to me once. I hit him with a right and down he went. He never tried that again…You had to be careful with him. Those canes were thick.

  BERNIE GUINDON on fighting a disabled biker

  As a teenaged father, Guindon supported his young family by hoisting cattle hides on and off an assembly line in a tannery. He was seldom home, and when he was there, he was often impatient and abusive. That’s what Teresa heard in retrospect, growing up, although she was just a baby at the time. “I confronted him years later,” Teresa said. “He doesn’t remember a lot of it. Some of it he does.”

  In 1963, Guindon scored the motherlode for a high school dropout in Oshawa: a union job at General Motors. Suddenly he was doing better financially than his father ever had. The couple and baby Teresa moved into a nice brick bungalow on tree-lined Browning Avenue, edging their way out of Oshawa’s troubled south end.

  Parenthood and life on an assembly line were helping move Guindon up in the world, but they were also leaving him supremely bored. He started up a new motorcycle club called the Phantom Riders and began obsessing about how to make it better. While the name had a certain coolness, the club’s crest of a ghost riding a chopper looked like something a grade-school kid might draw. “We were saddled with the worst-looking crest in Ontario,” he said.

  Phantom Riders rode Japanese bikes, BSA Triumphs and Nortons, but many of their bikes were old police-issue, American-made Harleys. Guindon wasn’t troubled by his gang riding Harley Panheads that were once used by police to chase criminals, including some of his club members. “If you painted it, who would know it was a cop bike?”

  Guindon began work on a custom chrome fantasy bike, built out of a 1953 Harley-Davidson Panhead. He salvaged some of the parts from old army bikes and lovingly coaxed them back into service. The twin front lights were from the local GM plant and had originally been intended for a Pontiac Grande Parisienne. He did much of the work on the bike inside the GM machine shop. “It took me all winter to do it,” Bernie said. “I had to go everywhere to find parts and get them chromed. The chrome shop was in Toronto.” His friend Vince Carducci from the Para-Dice Riders in Toronto painted Guindon’s new ride a metallic tangerine colour, offset by gold plate and chrome everywhere else.

  Guindon enjoyed the attention and feeling of power that his fantasy-come-true brought him. He had come a long way since he and Jack were scared kids hiding out from their father in a junkyard. Now he was front and centre on the street where he used to live, atop a one-of-a-kind, badass, otherworldly creation that was unmistakably his own. The fact that his father hated motorcycles made the feeling all the better. “People would say, ‘Geez, that looks like a wild thing.’ ” Guindon agreed and named his ride “The Wild Thing.” (This was before The Troggs’ hit song “Wild Thing.”) Guindon cut an impressive figure as he looked out between its high-rise handlebars and over its ridiculously extended front forks. “I used to love riding that thing,” he said. “Going around corners, it was like a transport truck. On a straight line, it was great. The seat was cozy. I was king of the road.”

  When not on the road, the Phantom Riders honed their fighting skills in a “fight club” Guindon ran out of the basement of his new home. The basement often hosted fellow workers from GM, as Guindon tested them to see if they were club-worthy. There was a heavy bag, a speed bag, and a ring for fighting with a concrete floor to fall on, if you took a hard shot to the chin. The first rule of Guindon’s basement biker fight club was to always be on guard, for there was no medical care and little sympathy for anyone starched with a hard punch.

  Canadian anthropologist Daniel R. Wolf described outlaw bikers as an urban, industrial, bohemian subculture generally drawn from the lower middle class. “If the labourer is a young man in search of himself, he will find nothing in his self-image at work that will excite him; he had best look elsewhere,” Wolf wrote in The Rebels: A Brotherhood of Outlaw Bikers. “Men who are chained to these circumstances share a compelling desire to escape.”

  That certainly described Guindon’s basement fight-club regulars, who included Carmen Neal, the club’s Oshawa vice-president, whose temper often got the better of him. “I had to put him in his place,” Guindon said. “He was okay. He settled down.”

  There was also Reginald Robert (Reg) Hawke, an alcoholic with a massive upper body and stumps for legs, who walked with canes and drove a customized tricycle. His short temper was made worse whenever someone called him “Shorty.” Hawke fought by his own rules, which included his personal brand of kendo. “He only took his cane to me once,” Guindon recalled. “I hit him with a right and down he went. He never tried that again…You had to be careful with him. Those canes were thick.”

  Hawke served as the club’s first secretary treasurer, which meant he was in charge of picky things, like remembering anniversaries and communications. It was an important job—bikers are particularly sensitive about anniversaries. Many had had birthdays and other key dates repeatedly spoiled when they were children and still craved a little recognition.

  Guindon’s wife, Veronica, hated conflict. She even had trouble returning defective goods to the store. But even she had her limits, and she felt she had to do something to protect her young family from the men who were consuming her husband’s time. “My mother loved him to pieces, regardless of what he did to her,” Teresa said. “My mom gave him an ultimatum: you pick the family or the club. He picked the club.”

  Veronica moved to her parents’ home, where Teresa was raised in a God-fearing, sheltered environment. “You’ve got to play it a day at a time and hope the next day is better,” Guindon said, thinking of the lost time with his daughter and the dissolution of his young marriage. At the time, however, he was more a biker than a husband or father. He didn’t dwell on the loss.

  CHAPTER 6

  Expansion

  It wasn’t organized crime, as it became. But I don’t think you wanted to cross them.

  Filmmaker DON SHEBIB on early bikers

  Twenty-seven-year-old filmmaker Don Shebib read an article about new bike clubs in Toronto in 1965 and immediately wanted to know more. He was trained as a sociologist and fringe groups fascinated him. His first professional documentary was about surfers in California, and something about these hometown bikers seemed like a natural follow-up. Neither surfers nor bikers trusted the media, which made them all the more authentic and interesting. “The bikers were just a little rougher around the edges,” Shebib said in an interview. “They were very similar to surfers. Talking of how free they felt on a bike or on a board. They’re classic rebels.”

  Shebib went to a hamburger joint on the Danforth near Warden Avenue in Scarborough where the Canadian Lancers hung out. In those early days, bikers had hangouts more than real clubhouses. Most of them were greasy spoons, like the Army Navy Club on Spadina Avenue in Toronto for the early Satan’s Choice, before they shifted over to Aida’s Restaurant at St. Clair Avenue and Kingston Road. Shebib kept going back, trying to get to know the club me
mbers. The Lancers appreciated the respect and began opening up to him. He learned that most of the Lancers were in their late teens and early twenties but their ranks also included an ex-con in his thirties who had served time for theft, and a forty-four-year-old veteran of World War II named Ken. The military connection made sense. The bike clubs forming in California at the time were established by veterans of bomber squadrons who had been issued motorcycles to get around air bases and conserve gasoline during the war.

  As a trust developed, Shebib began meeting members from neigh-bouring clubs. One, Edjo, lived west of Toronto, by the lakeshore, and ran the Vagabonds. Edjo, aka Captain Ed, was a savvy man who could sometimes be found behind the wheel of a red Cadillac convertible or Italian sports car. He ran a charter boat company and a motorcycle shop. His Vagabonds met on Britain Street, near Moss Park at Queen and Sherbourne Streets, and in a downtown laneway near the Art Gallery of Ontario. “I thought he was a riot,” Shebib said of Edjo.

  The bikers had attitude and were tough. They liked their beer, booze and marijuana. A couple of them pimped out their stripper girlfriends. Several were middle-class kids who bridled when their parents pushed them toward university and the professional life. Many didn’t see belonging to a motorcycle club as a permanent thing, but more of a temporary state of mind. “It was a lot of booze, broads and bikes,” Shebib said. “It wasn’t organized crime, as it became. But I don’t think you wanted to cross them.”

  As Shebib began to work on his documentary with cinematographer Martin Duckworth, Guindon shook up the biker community with a sudden move that startled police and bikers alike. He merged his Phantom Riders with the Canadian Lancers, the Wild Ones from Port Credit and the Throttle Twisters from Preston (near Kitchener, an hour west of Toronto). There were now 110 members in his club, which suddenly made them the largest motorcycle club in the country. As a final, provocative jab, they took the name and patch of a club that Sombrero had driven off the road twice: Satan’s Choice. It was an intimidating name that would make outsiders think twice about giving its members a hard time. Those who knew its history would be even more impressed.

  Guindon imagined how it would enrage Sombrero to see more than a hundred of the grinning devil patches roaring past him on the highway. As an added bonus, they could finally lay to rest the lame patch of the ghost riding a motorcycle that had haunted the Phantom Riders.

  Shebib recorded their thoughts on film, like how they grandly said they rejected materialism and valued no possessions beyond their bikes. They boasted about how they were rejecting conformity, even though they were conforming to a newly invented culture of their own in a tight-knit group. The bikers expressed something between pity and contempt for members of mainstream society and the importance they placed on security, money and haircuts. “They let other people rule their lives,” one member said on camera. “We just laugh at them.”

  There was a summer camp or hootenanny feel to the bikers Shebib filmed, especially when they sang “Satan’s Choice We Roll Along” to the tune of “Merrily We Roll Along.” Club meetings were held in an apartment above a store—a far cry from the metal doors, security cameras and barbed wire that would one day become common features of biker bunkers. Shebib also followed them with a movie camera to the Heidelberg hill climb near Kitchener, where they showed off their riding skills.

  The opening chords in the soundtrack of Shebib’s documentary were performed by John Kay, who sang for a band called The Sparrow. Within a few years, The Sparrow evolved into Steppenwolf and those opening chords were developed into “Born to Be Wild,” which was used in the soundtrack to the Hollywood blockbuster movie Easy Rider.

  Shebib’s documentary featured a rotund biker called “Tiny,” one of a countless number of Tinys in the biker world. Guindon also made a fleeting appearance. He didn’t object when Shebib called his documentary Satan’s Choice. While Guindon didn’t like the way many in the club came off as scruffy whiners, he liked the attention.

  Not long before, a club named Satan’s Choice had been forced off the road by a braggart in a fancy shirt. Now Guindon’s club had laid claim to that fearsome name as their own and become known, and even feared, from coast to coast.

  CHAPTER 7

  National President

  They fired me and then they said they’d give me back my job, if I quit riding my bike to work.

  BERNIE GUINDON

  Formalizing a status that had never been in doubt, Guindon was voted national president of the Satan’s Choice at age twenty-two. The title placed him squarely on the radar of ambitious police officers. His club members also made themselves hard to miss. They travelled in a pack that included—aside from the bikes and the snazzy, plastic, glow-in-the-dark grinning devil patches on their backs—a green 1948 Packard hearse, complete with a coffin in the back. For a time, a dummy took up residence in the coffin. It never doubled as a beer cooler, as some suspected. “It just blew people’s minds,” Guindon recalled.

  He was a commanding presence, despite standing no more than five foot nine and weighing about 150 pounds. Sometimes he travelled in a black 1956 Cadillac stretch limo with his 350-pound, wildly bearded second-in-command, Big Jack Olliffe, also known to members as “Bear.” Though he was no fitness enthusiast, he knew how to fight, which helped in meting out discipline. Despite Big Jack’s considerable girth, he’d had enough martial arts training to boot a tall man in the chin.

  The Choice might look unkempt and out of control, but they did have some rules. “You could buy hot [bike] parts but you couldn’t steal them,” Guindon said. “There were a lot of bike thefts. Parts were expensive and they weren’t plentiful. You used to have to order them right from Harley-Davidson.”

  Another rule was more an attempt to stop fights than legislate morality. “You couldn’t come on to another guy’s old lady.” That rule wasn’t carved in stone, however. In one extreme case, a biker contracted a social disease from the old lady of another biker. The bikers’ friendship carried on, and the woman departed the scene.

  Guindon was strongly anti-drug at this point. He beat and expelled members for any illegal substance use. Eventually, the rules were relaxed and only needles were prohibited, unless they were medically prescribed. Membership was closed to any current or former police officers or prison guards. Rules also forbade homosexuality and repeated excessive drunkenness.

  Members also had to have a motorcycle on the road by the Victoria Day weekend, the third week of May. In most of Canada that marked the start of riding season, which continued until Labour Day. The mileage would be noted on both dates, and a club member who hadn’t racked up serious travel could expect to lose his patch. “If he didn’t put any miles on his bike, he’s out,” Guindon said. “You’re not a biker. You’re a wannabe.”

  For Satan’s Choice members, those bikes had to be Harley-Davidsons, except for first-year strikers, who were allowed to ride British Nortons, Triumphs and BSAs. Under no circumstances was anyone connected to the club allowed to be seen atop a Japanese motorcycle. They might be good bikes, but they were alternately associated with the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, the establishment and the cringe-worthy “Nice Guys Ride Hondas” ad campaign.

  One rule mattered more than all others: members couldn’t be rats. Nothing was simpler or more important than that. They couldn’t co-operate with police to deprive someone of his or her freedom, even if that person was an enemy. Members could beat or even kill someone and not violate club rules, but they couldn’t rat on anyone under any circumstances. Even associating with a rat was trouble. Sponsoring someone for membership who turned out to be a rat meant the sponsor would be lucky to escape with a one-month suspension and a ban from holding club offices.

  The thrill of roaring about in a pack while wearing a big devil’s head patch proved to be too much adrenalin for some new members. Guindon found himself pressured to enter skirmishes created by new Satan’s Choice members whose shiny new patches made them feel ten feet tall and in
vincible. “We tried to stop those guys from fighting the small clubs, but we couldn’t.”

  The club didn’t have a clubhouse yet, so they met in the basement of a home on Colborne Street in Oshawa. It was hard for neighbours to miss members as they rode in. Hawke sported a six-inch beard cut like a Pharaoh’s. Vice-president Carmen Neal had a nasty scar across his nose that made the violence in his past impossible to ignore. A member named Puff wore his devil patch on the back of a fur coat.

  The Choice strived for attention but bristled when they got too much. Guindon felt that an Oshawa cop named Forgette was watching them all too closely and going out of his way to make life miserable. The constable was stopping Choice vehicles for making too much noise or not having working signals or other violations the Choice president considered petty. One day, Forgette hit Guindon with both a traffic ticket and a challenge. “If you want to get even for this, we can duke it out in the ring at the [boxing] club,” the cop offered.

  When Guindon agreed to the bout, Forgette added, “I think it’s only fair to warn you that I was a pretty good boxer in the navy.” Guindon didn’t know anything about Forgette being some kind of navy boxing champion. He did know that he badly wanted to give him a righteous beating. “He was a bully. He’d beat the kids up with the billy [club].”

  They met at the Cedardale community centre in Oshawa. Guindon handled him easily and, sensing that victory was imminent, began to have fun and prolong the bout. “I just played with him.” After that, Guindon didn’t miss an opportunity to taunt the officer. “I’d meet him downtown. I’d say, ‘For-shit, isn’t it?’

  “He’d say, ‘You know it’s Forgette.’ I’d say, ‘That’s what I said. For-shit.’ He’d get fucking mad.”