The Vagabonds invited Guindon to a meeting on Hamilton Mountain. He didn’t want a war, but he couldn’t appear soft. More than a hundred Choice members accompanied him. They were still outnumbered. Guindon approached the Vagabonds’ leader, Edjo, to tell him: “Let’s you and I get it on and we’ll solve the problem.”
The Vagabond leader declined and, for the time being, the threat of war was averted.
A year after joining the Satan’s Choice, the former Canadian Lancers and Wild Ones decided to quit and resume riding under their old colours. The split was friendly enough—it was against Guindon’s nature to beg anyone to keep his company. Besides, life was getting more hardcore in the outlaw biker world and not everyone liked it.
Others in his circle were feeling pressure to trade on their associations with him. Mark DeMarco was building a thriving business, painting bikes and race cars, and he was always welcome at field days in Oshawa, Kitchener, Niagara and Kingston. One day, two police officers visited him at his shop in St. Catharines. He recalled the conversation going like this: “You paint motorcycles, right?”
“We paint everything. What are you here for?”
DeMarco remembered being quite hot-tempered and impatient in those days.
The officers showed a series of photos of bikers and their wives and girlfriends. DeMarco knew all of them.
“What did they say to you?”
“They said thank you after I painted their motorcycles.”
At this point, DeMarco recalled, the officers became testy. One of them commented, “You’re either part of the problem or part of the solution. If you’re part of the problem, we’ll dog you every day and visit you every day.”
“That ain’t going to work.”
“That means you’re not going to co-operate.”
“I’m not going to do your work for you.”
Over the next few weeks, DeMarco said, he was pulled over almost twenty times by officers. There was also a police visit to his house, which rattled his wife. He said officers pointed out that his uncle Hap had connections to mobster Johnny (Pops) Papalia of Hamilton. This came as no shock to DeMarco, who had a Johnny Pops association of his own. DeMarco used to bring old jukeboxes and slot machines over to Monarch Vending on Railway Street in downtown Hamilton, where Papalia spent much of his time. Papalia fixed the machines gratis, but asked DeMarco to keep an eye out for interesting clocks for him. The mobster had a fascination with timepieces. “Mark, if you ever get any old clocks…,” Papalia would say.
DeMarco didn’t rat, and the police continued to dog him: “You’re either part of the problem or part of the solution. To this point, we think you’re not part of the solution.”
“You’ve got the wrong guy. I’m not going to do your work for you.”
Things were heating up around Guindon. Just being his friend was enough to put someone on the police radar.
—
Fire trucks were back at the Satan’s Choice Scarborough clubhouse on Thursday, August 1, 1968. This time, firefighters couldn’t contain a blaze that consumed the farmhouse on the same property where the barn had burned to the ground earlier in the year.
“I’m glad,” a middle-aged woman near the scene told Don Dutton of the Toronto Daily Star. “They used to come here, hundreds of them—dirty bears and those stinking motorcycles—just about every weekend. They called them conventions and they came from Ottawa and Hamilton and all over with their girls, and the parties went on all night.”
As she spoke, a couple of teenaged girls picked up broken glass from an abandoned hearse with a crudely labelled sign on it reading “Danger—Keep Out.” They took the glass away as a souvenir.
The first weekend of August 1968 was a big one on the social calendar for the Choice. There was a field day in a pasture near Nestleton, north of Oshawa. Toronto Daily Star readers were mortified as they read of bikers “lightly whipping” a teenaged girl who had reportedly got out of hand. One biker told a reporter that she was punished “as an example” to others. The reporter also noted that the girl resumed socializing with the bikers that evening.
Shocking as the public found the bikers’ treatment of the young woman, the biggest outrage was reserved for the chicken race. As grand marshal of the weekend, Guindon threw a live chicken into the air so that bikers could race to it and fight for it. Whoever emerged with the biggest chunk of chicken was declared the winner. “I bet the Humane Society doesn’t like it, but it was a lot of fun,” Guindon told a reporter.
As the party pushed on into the weekend, police had to block off two highways as fifteen chapters of the Choice and their friends showed up on some five hundred motorcycles. There were the obligatory stare downs between the bikers and police. Some of the OPP even drew batons.
Canada’s national newspaper, The Globe and Mail, published some serious tut-tutting about the chicken incident and mocked a Satan’s Choice member who wore war medals that were not his own:
Obviously, he was an admirer of gallantry in the field. Let no one accuse the Satan’s Choice members of running away from danger, however. Why, only the other day, 60 of them stood their ground against a savage attack by a single chicken. In a breathtaking display of fearlessness, they rode it down and tore it apart before the ferocious fowl could harm anyone.
The Humane Society offered a reward to any member of the public who could bring the bikers to justice for the chicken race, but no one obliged. “They had a thousand-dollar reward for anybody who’d put me away regarding the chicken,” Guindon recalled. “A thousand dollars for anybody that would squeal on me. That was a lot of money in those days.”
Guindon hadn’t expected anything like the reaction the chicken story brought, and he remained absolutely unapologetic decades later. “I didn’t give a shit,” he said. “Farmers kill chickens any time they want. Thousands of chickens get killed every day to feed people. How are they killed? We don’t know.”
The unwelcome attention Guindon was drawing extended beyond his associates in the biker world.
Teresa Guindon was thrilled to become the proud owner of a bicycle with high handlebars and a banana seat. She was just six or seven years old and thrilled when her uncle Jack painted it a metallic purple. “It looked like there were diamonds in the paint,” Teresa said.
Then one day, it was gone and little Teresa was distraught. Veronica still lived in Oshawa but had cut off any contact with Bernie. She took the problem to the local police, and officers took her daughter into a station room alone, ostensibly to identify bicycles. Once she was separated from her mother, the conversation quickly became about her father, not bicycles, Teresa later said. “They’re scaring the crap out of me. Telling me how evil my dad is. That they’re going to rub him out. They’re trying to get information out of me. I’m a little girl. I don’t know.”
Teresa was in tears when she returned to her mother. Naturally, Veronica wanted to know why her little girl was crying. Teresa recalled an officer replying, “She’s just upset we couldn’t get her bike.”
Just sharing Bernie Guindon’s last name was now a liability.
CHAPTER 11
Shock Value
Whatever you do, don’t eat a frog and a toad. Gross.
HOWARD (PIGPEN) BERRY
Within six months of joining the Satan’s Choice, Pigpen Berry was a man transformed. Long gone was his clean-shaven, campus hootenanny look, although he still wore his dark-rimmed Buddy Holly glasses. He had grabbed onto the image of a boorish outlaw biker and ridden it to dizzying, stomach-turning, eye-watering extremes.
While some bikers sought out women at parties, Pigpen craved shock and disgust. In biker terminology, to truly unnerve someone by grossing them out was called “showing class” or giving a “high one,” and no one did it better than Pigpen.
At one biker get-together, he put a live starling in a hot dog bun and bit through it, then offered a nibble to visiting members of the Outlaws. They passed. There are worse snacks, Pigpen later said.
“I’ve ate mouse lots of times. A bird. Doo-doo. Heavy on the doo-doo. Whatever you do, don’t eat a frog and a toad. Gross.”
The Vagabonds routinely brought Pigpen food, marijuana and beer at parties, on the condition that he consume them at a distance. “They’d say, ‘Have this and stay away from us,’ ” Pigpen recalled. Rather than be offended, he took this as a well-earned compliment.
Pigpen viewed his vomiting on new members’ vests as a rite of passage. He managed to be creative as well as revolting. On one particularly memorable day, Pigpen saw a dead skunk in the middle of a road and pulled over to pick it up. He pinned it onto his Choice vest, wearing it like he once wore a boutonniere on his suit jacket back when he sang Buddy Holly songs. “I went from a corsage to a skunk in a couple of years,” he said.
“I walked in the clubhouse,” he later recalled. “Cleared it out. They sent in some strikers. I cleared them out. They hung me up off the tree upside down.” When he was finally lowered to the ground, he dispatched a striker to retrieve the skunk carcass, and then Pigpen pinned it back on his vest as if nothing had happened. “What did it smell like wearing a skunk? Stunk. It makes your eyes tear. It’s really hard on your eyes.”
Pigpen appeared impervious to physical pain or pleas to be less disgusting. Revulsion was like oxygen for him, but it also seemed to unleash his rampant paranoia. The more disgustingly he behaved, the more paranoid he became. He yanked his own teeth to be sure there weren’t hearing devices inserted in them. He smeared himself with his own feces while in a police holding cell to avoid being brought into court. Other bikers debated whether he was truly nuts. Pigpen thought his behaviour was more a product of discipline than craziness. “It was just a gross-out thing,” Pigpen later said. “I just put my mind into space. It’s mind over matter. If you don’t mind, it don’t matter.”
The longer Guindon knew Pigpen, the more the gross-out artist amused and confused him. “A couple of times, I had to turn around because I had to get away from him. I remember it [vomit] coming up to my throat twice.” Pigpen gave him plenty to think about, if he wanted to let his mind go in that direction. Here was a trained chef who would drink a glass full of chewing tobacco spit or publicly eat his own feces; a sometimes painfully shy man who could be a revolting exhibitionist or yank out a strange woman’s earrings. “I always liked Howard. The first time, I couldn’t believe it. A college guy coming around? Glasses. Straitlaced,” Guindon said. He chalked up a lot of Berry’s Pigpen act to competitiveness. “He always wanted to be number one. He couldn’t be number one as the head of the club, but he was number one as entertainment. He blew a lot of minds, that fucking guy.”
Guindon also considered Pigpen’s repulsive behaviour to be a defence mechanism, like a porcupine’s quills or a skunk’s terrible smell. “He’d do things just to blow your lights and get a reputation so people would leave him alone…He wasn’t crazy. He was just acting crazy.”
For those who truly knew Pigpen, he was at his most horrifying not when he was munching on a bird or a mouse or feces, but when he was dressing up in a jacket and tie and combing his hair perfectly into place, just like in his Buddy Holly impersonator days. He looked like a husky choirmaster, not an outlaw biker. If you didn’t know him, he would look quite normal. Those were the days he was planning something truly fearsome.
“Nobody would recognize me,” Pigpen later said. “Then I went to the dark side of town.”
CHAPTER 12
Big Apple
From a distance, I thought he was a chick.
BERNIE GUINDON on the young Bob Dylan
For all the politics of club life, Guindon was a biker at heart and enjoyed nothing more than the freedom of the open road. One day in the late 1960s, he decided to ride to the Maritimes on his Harley Panhead, which was a definite step up from the old Knuckleheads. “The Knuckleheads used to leak like a sonofabitch.” Whatever the model, he was a Harley man, and Harley men need to be on the road, moving, listening to the motor rumble and watching the scenery blow by. “There’s just something about them. The old ones at least. When you’re growing up with them.”
Hydraulics hadn’t advanced to the point that riding a Harley was anywhere near comfortable. “You hit a bump, you can just feel your back going crunch.” But that wasn’t the point. There was something both primal and soothing about the sound of a Harley’s short-stroke V-twin engine between your legs that made up for the jarring ride. All it took was a flip of the wrists and a working-class kid from Oshawa could feel like a snob, a modern-day knight atop the best, loudest bike money could buy. So distinctive was the Harley sound that the company would actually try decades later to patent it.
On Guindon’s way to the East Coast, the romance of Harley and highway didn’t hold up. His Panhead sputtered to a stop in Montreal, where he was told it would take a couple days to get the parts to fix it. While passing time at the Montreal clubhouse, he heard that Rod MacLeod and a few Choice members were headed for New York City to check out the hippie scene in Greenwich Village.
“Can I come?” Guindon asked.
They obliged and Guindon hopped a ride on the back of the 1959 Decker of the club’s road captain, a suburban Italian named Tony. Also along for the ride were the Kitchener chapter president and vice-president and MacLeod’s friend Jono, the serial bank robber. Across the border, they tried camping on a rocky ridge by the side of the highway but were rousted by highway cops and told that no one camps by the side of the road in New York.
When Guindon saw the police, he wondered if his little crew had brought hashish with them. Chances were good that they had. It was fairly easy to hide it in a bike’s handlebars or under the seat. Borders didn’t really scare them then, in the more relaxed days before 9/11. “That’s life,” Guindon said. “You take your chance. You win or you lose.” On that night, they won and kept riding.
When they got to New York City, MacLeod took the lead, even though Tony was officially road captain. “It’s my territory,” MacLeod explained. “They’re all black here.”
That sounded good to Guindon. “I got to see parts of New York that I didn’t see before,” he reflected.
At 42nd and Broadway, in the heart of Manhattan, the throttle stuck on Tony’s bike and it crashed onto a crowded sidewalk. Tent poles on the bike smashed a shop window, and soon police were on the scene. Tony escaped with a warning and an order to immediately pay for the window.
After covering the cost of the damage, the bikers slipped from poor to broke and headed off to a blood bank to raise money for food and gas. Guindon was proud that his Rh-negative blood was relatively rare and fetched seven dollars—two dollars more than the blood of each of the others. That meant he was able to buy a hot dog for fifty cents and gas up the tank.
That night, they pitched their tents in Central Park but kept getting moved on by the police. Through the darkness, they could see a woman who recognized MacLeod and Jono from a visit a few months earlier. She was hard to miss since she was stoned, topless and running hard toward them. Her Hells Angel boyfriend was chasing her down, and he caught her before there could be any reunion with the Canadian bikers.
After pitching their tents, Guindon and his friends went to Greenwich Village to see an outdoor concert. Guindon found the curly-haired singer alluring in an unconventional way. He considered making an approach but was uncharacteristically shy. Later, he discovered that this was just as well. The guitar-playing folk singer was actually a man and a famous one at that: Bob Dylan. “He sounded like a female in those days. I wasn’t into the folk art in those days. I was into the country and the rock. From a distance, I thought he was a chick.” Guindon was more partial to the music of Johnny Cash, Buddy Holly and Merle Haggard.
That wasn’t the only time Guindon experienced a gender-related surprise. Hippy recalled a time in Toronto when they were in a second-floor nightclub at Avenue and Webster Avenues, across from Webster’s diner: “There were about ten of us there getting drunk and having a
great time. Bernie had his eye on one gal there that looked super sexy. We all kept bugging him to go and have a dance with her…Bernie started dancing with her. He was really into her and they were dancing up close in a slow dance, kind of grinding away if you know what I mean.”
Guindon’s buddies realized his dance partner was a man, although Hippy considered him the “best damn good-looking man I ever saw!” Guindon, however, didn’t notice.
“We were laughing hysterically, but nobody was man enough to tell Bernie. Bernie was a tough guy and could knock you out with one punch. It took a long time for us to tell him. I don’t think I have ever laughed like that in my life. In the end, Bernie was okay with it.”
CHAPTER 13
Ring Wars
He knew what he had to do to be a good fighter. He had the stuff.
GEORGE CHUVALO on Bernie Guindon
Guindon was so caught up in club business that he wasn’t in good enough shape to make the Canadian boxing team for the 1968 Summer Olympics in Mexico City. He did fight in qualifying matches but wasn’t at his best. “You’d get so involved. I never used to train. I’d be doing club stuff and then I’d go out and box. It shows in your boxing.”
His friend Walter Henry made the Canadian Olympic team again as a flyweight, after representing Canada in the 1964 Olympic Games in Tokyo. He thought Guindon could have made the Mexico City team, despite his substandard conditioning, but some judges of his bouts had other ideas. “There were some very bad decisions that went against him,” Henry said.
It didn’t help that Guindon drew large, vocal crowds of Satan’s Choice to his matches, which rankled officials worried about the sport’s image. “I would think that was working against him,” Henry said. “They knew who he was and they probably leaned the other way not to let him go to the Olympics.”
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