Hard Road

by Peter Edwards

  Also in the cast of extras was Choice clubmate Ted (Blue) Anderson, a twenty-six-year-old on his third marriage who had once run a health club. “I don’t work. My wife doesn’t work. But we get by, by hook or by crook.” Anderson didn’t apologize for the hook and crook part, telling King that he was facing charges of robbery with violence and assault causing bodily harm. “First my club,” he said, explaining his personal values. “Second my bike, and then my wife and kids.”

  Then there was twenty-three-year-old David White, who looked a little like General George Custer, with his flowing hair and whiskers. White told King he had spent eight years in English boarding schools and nineteen months in reformatory for assault.

  Also on set was twenty-two-year-old Doug (Chicklet) MacDonald, the Toronto chapter president. MacDonald said that he lived in the clubhouse and that nothing made him prouder than his nine-hundred-pound Harley Dresser. “You can beat my brains in. I don’t care. But don’t touch my bike.”

  King didn’t interview Giovanni (John) Raso, who was also on set. Raso was impressed as a young teenager by Guindon and joined the club when he grew up. Raso would go on to lead the Loners Motorcycle Club based in York Region, north of Toronto. “I met Bernie in the early 1970s. I always looked up to him. I thought he was a cool guy, a very smart man. Bernie’s Bernie. Bernie doesn’t take shit from anybody.” Guns were becoming a staple in the biker life, but Guindon still preferred to use his fists. “He didn’t have to [carry a gun]. It was a different life back then,” Raso said.

  The movie features nice close-ups of Pigpen and Big Jack sans helmets. There are scenes showing bikes on a lawn, bikes running red lights and a bike wipeout. No one expected Ingmar Bergman and no one was disappointed.

  The Proud Rider opened strongly in Toronto-area theatres, then crashed like a Harley with a faulty suicide clutch on a tight corner. Critic Clyde Gilmour of the Toronto Daily Star gave it a stomping, calling it a “ramshackle melodrama.” He sniffed, “The Proud Rider, a Canadian movie topping the bill at the Capri, was filmed in Oshawa in the fall of 1970 but kept out of release until now, making it eligible for consideration as one of the worst of 1972.”

  —

  On the West Coast, Choice member Ken Goobie was working behind the scenes to make connections with the Satan’s Angels Motorcycle Club. “Goobie wanted to get a drug connection with them,” clubmate Cecil Kirby said.

  “Goobie was a kind of a different kind of guy,” Guindon recalled. “He was smart, very smart. He wasn’t really a biker. He was a street person. He’d rather ride in his car than ride on his bike. It wasn’t in his heart. He just liked the association with the guys, what the guys could help him with and what he could help them with.”

  Pigpen stayed close to home, where he was needed as the Satan’s Choice fought with the Wild Ones and Henchmen of Southern Ontario. Dynamite was ignited and crowbars were bloodied. The Henchmen’s Kitchener clubhouse was torched. In a clever coup de gráce, Choice members kidnapped two Henchmen. In exchange for their release, the rest of the club had to hand over their colours. Then, as a parting shot, one of the Henchmen had his legs broken when a car drove into him.

  “I shot a couple guys,” Pigpen later said. “Never killed anyone. I was the general. Do this and do that.” He said the Henchmen had tough members, though they didn’t have a lot of them. “They were tough. They were not pushovers.”

  As she became a young woman, Guindon’s eldest daughter, Teresa, didn’t have many memories of her father. Even when he wasn’t in prison, he was seldom in touch. “He wasn’t very active in my life,” she said. Still, she was a Guindon living in Oshawa, which made her different. One day, when she was fifteen years old and in Grade 10, she was summoned over the intercom to the principal’s office. She could guess it had something to do with her father when she saw a Harley-Davidson parked in the hallway outside the office. She went in. “There’s this big burly biker sitting there, and my principal is sitting there, scared to death.”

  The biker told her that her dad would like her to visit him in prison. She didn’t go visit her father, but the clubmate’s visit to her school did have an impact on her life. Already, she felt that boys were afraid to date her because of her family name. Now it seemed like everyone was talking about her. “I quit high school after that. You know what an embarrassment that was?”

  CHAPTER 17

  Thunder Bay I

  He had the face of a boxer and his nose was a little bent.

  VERG ERSLAVAS describing his first impression of Bernie Guindon

  Guindon was finally paroled from Joyceville Institution in January 1971. His release conditions required him to join his father, who now ran a small diner and confectionary store on the Port Arthur side of Thunder Bay. He was also strictly prohibited from associating with outlaw bikers. Guindon later marvelled at the nerve of the parole board even considering placing such a restriction upon him. “That’s like telling the pope not to hang out with Catholics.”

  Verg Erslavas was a twenty-year-old biker in Thunder Bay. He’d had a series of minor run-ins with the law for offences like shoplifting and other forms of theft. “In 1970, Port Arthur and Fort William had just amalgamated to form Canada’s newest city,” Erslavas said in an interview. “My buddies and I hung out in downtown PA [Port Arthur] and could usually be found in Fiero’s Restaurant or the New Ontario Hotel. We’d heard some rumours about a Choice in town asking a few questions. The first thing we thought was it must be cops doing some clumsy undercover work, as they were known to do. A couple of days later, we were in Fiero’s when a guy came in and came over to our booth and introduced himself as Bernie of the Satan’s Choice. He had the face of a boxer and his nose was a little bent. I noticed that his gestures with his hands and body indicated he’d spent time in the ring.”

  Guindon hit it off immediately with the Thunder Bay guys. “We were Harley riders,” Erslavas said. “We were no strangers to the cops or bike clubs. We were young but we were pretty badass. It was a natural fit when we met.”

  Erslavas had read the recent magazine articles about the Satan’s Choice and had hoped they might one day meet their leader in person. “Needless to say, we were pretty impressed with Bernie. We knew all about the Choice, the biggest and baddest club in all Canada. Here was Bernie, national president, sitting with us small-town boys, chewing the fat just like one of the guys. There was nothing pretentious about him and he was friendly in every way.”

  Erslavas and his friends were all building Harley-Davidson Panhead choppers for the next riding season. Erslavas took Guindon to the basement of his parents’ home and showed him his bike. “He rolled up his sleeves and turned a few wrenches and offered some helpful suggestions. He told us about his Knucklehead and how the first thing he wanted to do was get his bike up to T. Bay so he could go for a ride. Remember, this was still the middle of winter.”

  Erslavas could barely believe what was happening: “Here’s Bernie Guindon, leader of the Choice, down in my parents’ basement, checking out the bike. We were really impressed. We really never met anybody like Bernie.”

  Later that night, Guindon, Erslavas and a couple of others drove over to the Flamingo Club, a watering hole on the Fort William side of town. “Thunder Bay was just newly formed as one city, but before that, it was always one side against the other, from politics to barroom brawls,” Erslavas said. “In 1970, things had changed in name only for the most part.”

  Just a few years earlier, the Flamingo had been a nice enough place that handled wedding receptions and featured live bands, including Neil Young and The Squires. By the time Guindon and his new friends drove up that Saturday night, it was well into a seedy, downward slide. Inside were members of a local motorcycle club called the Eagles, all of whom were from Fort William. “The Eagles were a poor excuse for a club,” Erslavas said. “We called them ‘the Beagles’ and generally gave them little respect.”

  It wasn’t long before a fight was on, spilling out to the parkin
g lot. Erslavas saw Guindon reaching for a tire jack in the trunk of his car. “Not the handle, but the whole jack and he was going to use it on these guys. He said, ‘I’m gonna kill these fuckers. I don’t care if they send me back right now.’ ”

  Erslavas jumped in, hoping Guindon would think twice about hitting someone with the jack. “You don’t need that for these guys,” he told him, hoping to calm him down a little. “Thankfully, he didn’t use it, but I could see he was ready. I thought to myself, This guy is nobody to fuck with.”

  The brawl made for a full and memorable introductory evening for Erslavas and his friends. “We headed back over to our own side of town to talk it over and to have some laughs about the whole thing—the best part of bar fights. Stuff happens which later, thinking about it, is really comical. You have to remember the ground was frozen like a skating rink. Ask any hockey player, fighting on ice requires a special technique: hang on and punch the other guy’s lights out.”

  They managed to get Guindon home in time for his parole curfew, and then discussed their new buddy amongst themselves. “He didn’t try to be impressive. He just was. He was cool. Someone to emulate.”

  News that Guindon had arrived in town soon reached local tough guy Harold Dorlander, who showed up at their house where they had gathered, looking for him. “I guess he wanted to prove he was tougher than Bernie,” Erslavas said. “He wanted to wait for Bernie.”

  As Dorlander waited, he began the trash talk. “I don’t think that Guindon is so tough,” he said.

  “Okay, just hang on,” Erslavas replied. “He said, ‘There’s nobody else worth fighting here.’ He said, ‘I could clean your clock. You’re not worth fighting.’ He probably was right.”

  Dorlander was bigger than Guindon and clearly confident with his fists. Eventually, Guindon snuck back to Erslavas’s house and the fight was on. “They squared off in the living room,” Erslavas said. “Bernie left-hooked him and dropped him. He got up. He left-hooked him again, knocked him down again. I think he got him with one more.”

  Erslavas was impressed at how Guindon kept bobbing and weaving, moving forward, slipping punches and connecting with shots of his own. “He didn’t land a hand on Bernie. That was the first time I saw his boxing skills.”

  A little later that same winter, Erslavas, Guindon and a buddy named Pete took a trip “down east” to pick up Guindon’s 1947 Harley Knucklehead chopper from a former girlfriend. “What a great time it was meeting a lot of the guys,” Erslavas said. “Everyone we met treated us great, and it was hard to miss the respect accorded to Bernie everywhere we went. The more I saw, the more I liked.”

  They returned north with the Knucklehead and some parts loaded onto a truck. Soon, Guindon had the bike running. Unable to wait for spring, he took it for a couple of rides across Thunder Bay in minus thirty-five degrees Fahrenheit. After a prison stretch spent dreaming about bikes, he couldn’t wait for the snow to thaw. “It was fucking cold…The front end went out hitting ice,” he recalled.

  Erslavas and his friends stayed close with Guindon throughout the winter, and things soon reached the point where they were ready to strike for the Satan’s Choice. “Of course, we wanted to form our own chapter in T. Bay, but we didn’t have enough guys. So the first step would be striking for Oshawa chapter. SCMC [Satan’s Choice Motorcycle Club] wasn’t for everyone, but it sure seemed like the right move for me. We were all for it. I proudly put on my Oshawa striker patch.”

  Erslavas and his friends were the sons and daughters of the Italians, Poles, Finns, Ukrainians, Lithuanians and others from across Europe who changed the face of Thunder Bay after World War II. His Lithuanian father crossed the ocean to Canada in 1948, and his Polish mother landed in Canada the next year. Erslavas was born a year later in Pickle Lake in Northern Ontario, where his father worked in a gold mine. “I can recall as a child being taunted as a ‘fuckin’ DP.’ I didn’t know until much later what the DP meant [displaced person] or to have the sense to say, ‘Fuck you, I was born in Canada.’ ”

  Thunder Bay was isolated and had its own particular brand of roughness. “Northern Ontario winters were long and cold, and you had to travel 420 miles in either direction to the nearest city of any size,” Erslavas said. “Saturday nights were for drinking and fighting. There were a lot of bars and clubs and they were generally full of rounders and local toughs. Everyone had a ‘rep’ to build or protect. Often we had to assert ourselves because we would get called out. We had a lot to prove, and backing down was not an option.”

  By the time he met Guindon, Erslavas was a regular at Cook Street (a police station, court and jail) and the “DJ” (the district jail), and “the Mountain” (Stony Mountain penitentiary) was a logical next step. “Looking back, I think after I met Bernie, he had a positive influence on me,” Erslavas said. “Being older and just out of the pen, he was a mentor in many ways. It’s not so much what he said but just the way he did things.”

  Guindon gave Erslavas and his buddies some advice about joining a one percenter club. He didn’t want them getting drunk on any perceived power that might come from wearing a grinning devil patch on their backs. “He said to be yourself. That was something I stuck by.”

  Erslavas saw that Guindon took being a motorcyclist seriously. “He could really handle a bike well and make it do things for which it was not intended.” Once, at a motocross track, Guindon decided to take Erslavas’s 1965 Panhead out for a spin. It was a former police bike with the dubious distinction of appearing in the movie The Proud Rider as a law enforcement vehicle. “You have to understand even though it was ex-police, it was still a police-type bagger with everything but the radio,” Erslavas said. “So here goes Bernie laying it over in the turns with the front end crossed over, flat-track style, getting air off the jumps, standing on the floorboards, all in full control. You could see him smiling from ear to ear.”

  When Guindon brought the bike back, Erslavas saw that there was a big gap in his smile. “When he was sliding around, he snagged a wire attached to a fence picket, which had swung around and caught him flush in the teeth,” Erslavas said. “He was laughing though, and I thought it was funny as hell too.”

  Motorcycles provided a connection between Guindon and Erslavas that didn’t have to be spoken. It went beyond words. Erslavas had longed for that connection since he saw Steve McQueen atop a Triumph in the movie The Great Escape back when he was a teenager. “McQueen was so cool, and I knew I had to ride and it had to be a Triumph. It took a while, but before my eighteenth birthday, I finally got a Triumph. It was a beauty, a shiny red ’69 Bonneville, not new but pretty close.” Erslavas liked riding his Triumph so much, he quit his final year of school, to his parents’ consternation. He didn’t care. “Nobody was going to tell me different. I loved riding my ‘Bonnie’ and hanging out. I didn’t have much money then, but the Triumph didn’t take much gas and a siphon hose helped.”

  Erslavas found that Triumphs and other English bikes were cool but not particularly reliable. “If you rode them hard, which we did, they often wouldn’t last the riding season.” Harley-Davidsons seemed the way to go. “The Harleys were heavier, stronger and more robust in every way…They were also beautiful to look at.”

  For Erslavas, nothing topped the fun of club runs, which were usually planned around field days. There were plenty of preparations to make to ensure their bikes were ready for the 994 miles between Thunder Bay and “down east.”

  “It would be a real adventure, and no two runs were alike,” Erslavas said. “We’d travel with a tent and camp gear, never using motels. Real life on the road. It was the greatest feeling motoring down the road with a bunch of like-minded guys. Sometimes it seemed like we never got off the road. We’d get home from a run and turn around and go again.”

  The only negative for Erslavas was law enforcement. “They’d be out there always on the lookout, and once seen, we’d inevitably be pulled over for the obligatory road checks and usually resulting in tickets.”r />
  That summer, Erslavas and his friends met the characters he had previously only read about in newspapers and magazines, including Big Jack Olliffe, Chicklet MacDonald and Pigpen Berry. Guindon warned Erslavas about Pigpen: “I said to the guys, ‘He’s going to blow your fucking lights. He’s going to try to make you get sick. Just act normal, like it’s not bothering you.’ He only acted like that when he knew he could blow lights.”

  Erslavas had never met anyone like Pigpen. “Once, he came up behind me and quickly popped a tiny ball of shit, which had been formed into just the right size, up my nostril, where it jammed,” Erslavas said. “Had I panicked, the result would have been disastrous, but I kept my cool and gently blew it out. I laughed along with him. To show fear would have been a mistake, because then he’d be on you relentlessly. I saw it happen to Mike, a guy in our chapter who had a weak stomach. Piggy worked the poor guy into such a state that he would only have to give Mike a certain look to make him start gagging and puking…[He’d shout,] ‘Piggy, don’t come near me! Please go away!’

  “Did Pigpen really love it? I mean, we’re talking about shit here. Or was he putting on the act just to show some class? With Pigpen, you never really knew. One thing certain about Pigpen was that if he succeeded freaking someone out, he would derive great pleasure from it. You could always tell by the completely demented look he would get on his face afterwards.”

  It was unnerving to attend a party with Pigpen, and a total test of character to wander out into the woods in the wintertime with him and a high-powered rifle to camp overnight. A handful of Choice members did just that after a club member who worked for CN was able to get them a train ride and the use of a line shack for a hunt.

  “Our shack had some bunks and a wood stove and not much else,” Erslavas said. “We made sure that we got Pigpen’s promise that he would behave, as quarters were too tight in the small shack.”