Hard Road

by Peter Edwards

  It didn’t take long for her to realize that Guindon was someone special in the Corky’s ecosystem. When he and other bikers rode into the parking lot, often after spending much of the evening at Dynasty’s strip club, some of the female patrons rushed down to the women’s washroom. “They’d be down there removing their panties,” she said. “It was nasty, nasty.”

  Those women then hustled out to the parking lot at closing time, circling the bikes of Choice members in the hope they would be one of the chosen few to score a ride home. “These girls just didn’t care,” she said. “Some of these young girls had big-time daddy issues.”

  Guindon began giving her rides home. Soon, he was spending the night, although he still maintained an apartment on Simcoe Street South with Angel, where he kept some clothes. As she got to know Guindon better, she would sometimes stake her turf by putting itching powder on the back of his helmet. She would later check out which girls at Corky’s seemed to be rubbing their eyes and faces suspiciously hard.

  One day, when the woman went to Guindon’s apartment to get some clothes for Harley, she stumbled on a situation there that she wouldn’t later describe, except to say that it was totally unfit for a child. “There were some things going on in the house that weren’t appropriate for children and Bernie didn’t approve of,” she said.

  That was enough for Guindon to move with Harley into her basement full-time. The decision to leave Angel was necessary but still painful. “I think she’s the only woman who crushed my dad,” Shanan said.

  Though the family won’t give specifics, the demise of Guindon and Angel’s relationship was as hot as its beginning. “She’s got to live with her own demons,” Shanan said. “It took a toll on both of them. I don’t think he ever wanted bad for her. She went down some pretty crazy, dark, winding roads. She doesn’t make a little bang. She makes a big kaboom!”

  Whatever had happened in the home was clearly having an effect on Harley, even after he was taken away. “We saw the nightmares,” the woman said. “We had to deal with the nightmares of that.”

  Harley was just four when he came into her life. She already had a boy of her own, who was living with her. She recalled one morning when Harley pleaded with the adults around him not to be sent to school. “He was terrified. Absolutely terrified. It was quite a scene.” Aside from her, the house was full of male friends of Guindon, all of whom were pushing the child to leave for school. “It seemed the closer he got to going out the door, the more terrified he got.”

  She dropped to a knee so she could talk to little Harley face-to-face. That’s when he explained why he was so afraid. “They had told him the day before that when they got to school, they would be doing the Eucharist. When they told him that he would be eating the baby Jesus and drinking His blood, he took it literally.

  After considerable coaxing, she convinced Harley to go to school. “He was so cute,” the woman said. “He needed a female there to look after him. He needed someone that was willing to listen to him rather than tell him. He was the littlest one in the house full of men and boys. He just needed to be listened to.”

  That morning marked a point of no return in her relationship with Harley. She decided then and there that she would become his stepmother. “That is absolutely the moment I fell in love with little Harley.”

  She still had issues of her own to sort out as she brought Harley into her life. She had been a foster kid and homeless at sixteen. At seventeen, she was pregnant from an abusive partner. “Bernie sobered me up, so to speak. I was getting involved in some things I shouldn’t have done. He straightened my life around.”

  She wanted something that she had constantly heard about but never experienced. Now, she felt like she was on the verge of finally getting it. “I wanted to be a part of a family.” She already loved little Harley to bits, but life with Guindon offered so much more. “It was a family accepting me,” she said. “It wasn’t just Bernie. It was his mother, his brother. I appreciated being part of the family. I grew up without a family and they took me in.”

  Soon, she was making contact with all of Guindon’s progeny that she could find, which was no small task. She took it upon herself to help the children connect and develop some sense of family. With her care, relationships blossomed as much as they could. “I took note of the birthdays. It was fun. Bernie was always there for them. He just needed someone to tell him when and where.”

  The stepmother found herself constantly telling Harley that his birth mother, Angel, loved him very much “in her own way,” which she believed was true. “He was such a cute kid and had such a big heart,” the stepmother said. “It was heartbreaking to see what he went through growing up. I’ve done my best to pick up the pieces and give him some loving roots he can call home.”

  The stepmother had dreams for Harley, just like other mothers have for their birth children. “I wanted him to be a firefighter,” she said. “I knew he would have helped people. He would have been fantastic. He’s a very intelligent young man.”

  Harley and her son grew inseparable. Much of Harley’s bonding came through play-fighting with his newfound older brother. “He was rough and tumble,” his stepmother said. “The boys collected baseball and hockey cards. They learned how to ride dirt bikes together in the back field and were forever building and rebuilding forts and exploring along a nearby creek. They chased snakes and whatever else they saw in the woods, and often brought animals home, either as additional pets or rescue projects.” They always seemed to have what his stepmother called “the most devilish grins.”

  Shanan found something familiar in Harley’s smile: “He’s got the little smirk. The Bernie smirk.”

  The boys also spent plenty of time roaming south Oshawa together. “They were mostly rowdy and boisterous, but it was when they got quiet that I dropped everything and went running to find them,” Harley’s stepmother said. “Mostly I would blow a whistle out the front door and the boys knew to come home. HD got smart and set up a line of kids outside and around the hood to extend his range. They relayed the info to him that it was time to come in, and he would race back without detection…until he got caught. One day, someone let him down and he was late. That was the end of the relay tactics.”

  Money was tight and Harley’s stepmother took another tenant into their bungalow. One day, that tenant’s boyfriend came by to see her. He was in an ugly mood and was carrying an axe. Guindon boxed him down the stairs, leaving a trail of blood to mark his exit path.

  Despite growing up with chaos around him, Harley understood from very early on that his stepmother’s love included plenty of rules and expectations. “She has always been the mother figure in my life,” Harley recalled. “She was strict. I got my ass whupped. She made sure I stayed with the books.”

  In turn, she noted, he genuinely wanted to make her happy. If she was feeling depressed, Harley quickly picked up on her mood and would ask, “What’s wrong?” The boy’s concern bolstered her flagging spirits. “He was the sensitive one,” his stepmother said. “He’d be sensitive to other people’s emotions…He was a kid with a big heart.”

  As his son grew up under his stepmother’s watchful eye and firm hand, Guindon often busied himself working on motorcycles in the downstairs living room, which opened onto the garage. He stored bike parts in the backyard, in a bomb shelter that he got for free from a Satan’s Choice member.

  “He often had guys hanging around to help him work on his bike, just to keep themselves busy, clean and sober,” Harley’s stepmother said. “They would show up first thing in the morning and leave at the end of the day. There were a few that would stay with him overnight too if they needed a ‘dry’ place to stay. We never kept alcohol here at the homestead. Just a bottle of wine with dinner for special occasions.”

  Guindon had begun sparring with Harley when the boy was only three. Not surprisingly, fighting was in Harley’s nature, something Lorne Campbell discovered when he was enlisted as the preschooler’s babysitter
. Campbell had worked for a time as a drug debt collector and had a serious reputation as a fighter. “He came out with the gloves on and smashed me in the nose,” Campbell recalled. “I thought, You little fucker. Then I sent him to bed.”

  Some of Harley’s other male babysitters suffered a fate worse than a smack in the nose with a boxing glove. Harley targeted them for “bagging,” his term for punching someone as hard as possible in the gonads.

  While still a boy, Harley’s fight training became serious. “The man lacks patience and scares the shit out of me,” Harley said of his father. “Throwing the wrong punch or throwing without using proper footwork was a serious issue. I hated it. The man would make me do sit-ups by the hundreds. Five hundred to seven hundred was a regular night at the gym at five to six years old…For the most part, I didn’t like training. Very repetitive, extremely strict.”

  One of the family’s neighbours was a martial artist who had trained police officers. His specialty was tae kwon do, and for several years, Harley trained with him privately before and after school. “Sensei Ron” didn’t rank Harley’s progress with coloured belts or enter him in tournaments. He told Harley that what he was learning was far more than a sport. “I was always told that my father may have enemies that may come after me to get at him and that the training may save my life one day,” Harley said.

  Guindon took out a life insurance policy on his son. It included specific payments for lost body parts, like his fingers. It was as if Guindon was gearing up for a war in the not-so-distant future, against an enemy who was yet to be announced. It was as if Guindon were fighting phantoms, who could attack at any time of the day or night, without warning.

  There was no way for Harley to escape his father’s eye, even when Guindon wasn’t physically present. “Sometimes my dad would watch the sessions, but when there was lack of progress or lack of respect, the sensei would bring the videotaped footage to him,” Harley later said. That meant Harley was constantly pushed and evaluated as a fighter. “Push-ups and jumping jacks were my life.”

  There was an assortment of boxing gyms for Harley to train in as well, including an old barn on Lake Ridge Road in Whitby and a gym on Bloor Street East, where Guindon volunteered in exchange for workout time for Harley and his stepbrother. When Harley was particularly boisterous, Guindon slipped a large boy five dollars to give his son an extra-tough workout in the ring. Back then, Harley was small for his age, but he could hold his own with larger boys.

  For Guindon, it was as if a clock was ticking loudly on his happy home life. He was receiving constant reminders of life’s dangers. A Durham Region bouncer smashed him in the head with a pool ball in his hand. A man with a shotgun showed up at the Oshawa Choice clubhouse, full of anger. Somehow, Guindon was able to talk him into going away, with no shots fired. These episodes didn’t surprise Guindon, but they ramped up his anxieties for his son. It was as though Guindon could see dark shadows approaching their happy little home.

  “I think he wanted to devote more time to him,” Shanan said, “because he knew he [Harley] was going to have a difficult time later.”

  CHAPTER 35

  Big Brother

  He [Guindon] was like a big brother to everybody.

  Former Satan’s Choice member STEVE (SLICK) MCQUEEN

  In the face of the Outlaws’ and Hells Angels’ push north, Guindon faced a daunting task in rebuilding his Satan’s Choice, partly because he questioned the loyalty of some new Choice members who had joined up while he was in prison. “I was having my doubts as to how many were on my side,” Guindon said. “I figured geez, I’d have a helluva time rebuilding the club.”

  Some rebuilding was sorely needed. In Toronto, the Iron Hawgs had patched over to the Outlaws in 1984, giving the American club a chapter in Canada’s most prosperous city. The Windsor area was lost for the foreseeable future after warlike Harry (Taco) Bowman of Detroit was elevated to the post of international president of the Outlaws. He would keep a firm grip on the Canadian city just across the Detroit River. Guindon visited Windsor anyway, displaying no warm feelings when he met up with Bill Hulko, former Choice president there. Hulko had bulked up considerably during his time in prison. “He had pecs bigger than my arms,” Guindon said. But he still had that left hook and wasted no time in letting Hulko know what he thought of the Windsor biker’s decision to patchover. “I socked him in the fucking head…He did nothing…I just wanted to see where his balls were. He didn’t have balls that fucking day.”

  The Hells Angels were also on the move inside Canada. The club got its first Maritime chapter as the result of a bizarre accident. Walter Stadnick had graduated to the Angels in 1982. In 1984 he nearly died after his Harley was struck by a priest who ran a stop sign near Saint-Pie-de-Guire, Quebec, in his rush to see the papal visit. Members of the 13th Tribe of Halifax helped guard Stadnick as he recovered in Hamilton’s St. Joseph’s Hospital. In return, they were promoted to membership in the Hells Angels.

  The Choice was bleeding members, and was a far cry from even the two hundred members who’d been holding down the fort during their president’s prison term. “A lot of guys went Outlaws,” Guindon said. “Others quit and got married. Some guys joined smaller clubs. Some guys went west, looking for jobs.”

  Guindon wasn’t impressed with many of those who stayed behind and still wore the grinning devil patch of the Choice. They seemed lax about attending meetings or club runs. Some seemed to want a patch just to look tough. What Guindon wanted were members like Lorne Campbell and David Hoffman, who were comfortable in their own skin and who “had parts”—his term for “balls.” He didn’t want anyone who needed a patch on his back to make him feel like a man. “They think the patch is going to save their ass. That’s why a lot of guys join motorcycle clubs. They’ve got no balls.”

  In an effort to reclaim some lost muscle, the Choice opened four new chapters in Ontario between 1985 and 1988, which gave them ninety-five members in seven chapters. That was a solid number, even if it was just a third of the Choice’s membership before Mother McEwen’s betrayal. Many of the members were enthusiastic cocaine traffickers, and the Toronto chapter specialized in moving the drug from Quebec to Alberta, home of Canada’s oil patch.

  Some of the new members were solid, like ironworker Steve (Slick) McQueen, who joined the Kitchener chapter of the Satan’s Choice in 1986. McQueen was a jaunty man given to wearing a custom-made bowler hat and who bore more than a passing resemblance to actor Jack Nicholson. He was also a ferocious street fighter and could speak with authority about having an eye coming out of its socket because of a broken orbital bone while battling. He could speak with equal authority about inflicting that condition on an opponent.

  McQueen respected Guindon’s reputation as a boxer. “I was a different kind of fighter,” McQueen said. “I did lots of street fighting in Hamilton.” He also fought as an underground cage fighter near construction sites around Fort McMurray, Alberta. “I fought in barns and different types of places,” he said. “That was craziness. It was a well-kept secret. I would always suggest, ‘Let’s make money. No rules. Just get up and get at it. Whoever wins gets all the money.’ ”

  Like Guindon, McQueen wasn’t particularly large. He stood five-foot-nine and weighed about 180 pounds, but he had the fighting spirit of a wolverine. “Size don’t mean anything,” he said. “When they’re unconscious, they’re only as tall as they are thick.”

  Like many members of the Choice, McQueen had some unresolved issues with his father. He ran away from home as an adolescent and made it all the way from the Niagara Peninsula to the Fraser Canyon of BC before he was caught and returned home. When police asked his father why he hadn’t filed a missing person’s report, McQueen’s dad told them they should try taking him into their own house for a week and then they’d be able to answer the question for themselves.

  McQueen recalled being impressed with Guindon’s attitude at a motorcycle rodeo in Kitchener. Guindon struck McQueen as a pro
ud, old-school biker, who was eager to participate in any event that was held, whether it was brawling for a chunk of a beheaded turkey or seeing who could ride the slowest without falling over. “There was Bernie, the living legend. He competed in every event. I don’t remember him winning anything, but he was a goer. He just wouldn’t quit.”

  George McIntyre of Hamilton’s East End Parkdale Gang was at the same motorcycle rodeo. McIntyre had brushed up against Choice members in jails and at boxing matches. “Bernie’s always been the same. Good-natured straight shooter. He treated everybody the same. Wasn’t a bully. Didn’t like rats. His word was his bond, and he was a tough boxer.”

  McIntyre noted that Guindon had definite ideas about how fights should be conducted: “He was Marquess of Queensberry rules…When the guy hit the ground, he didn’t go for putting his boots to his head. He had already made them look bad enough. He had respect for people…It was honour among thieves. Call it what you will.”

  That weekend near Kitchener, McIntyre and McQueen found themselves competing against Guindon in an event called the “stick race,” which was an outlaw biker version of musical chairs. It started with a dozen motorcycles slowly driving around a big circle of tires. Each motorcycle had a driver and a man on the back. A man standing in the middle of the circle held eleven sticks. The “road boss” threw the sticks in the air and the men on the back of the bikes ran to fetch one. “Then it’s full-on fucking war and anything goes,” McIntyre said. “There’s no weapons involved, except the stick. You can do whatever it takes.”

  Once a stick is secured, the passenger jumps back on his ride and races across the finish line. It should have been a good event for Guindon, since he carried a striker from Sarnia on the back of his Harley, who, McIntyre estimated, was about seven feet tall and three hundred pounds. “He was a Goliath,” McIntyre said. “He wasn’t a person. He was a place.”