Hard Road

by Peter Edwards

  That afternoon, it came down to just two teams vying for the stick race championship: Guindon and the massive Sarnia striker against McQueen and McIntyre. When the final stick was thrown, McIntyre saw he could easily out-leg the Goliath. “He was such a big three-toed fucking sloth.” However, McIntyre thought it would be bad form to win in this manner, since he was an invited guest and not a Satan’s Choice club member. So he did what he thought was the more polite thing: he drop-kicked, airplane-spun and body-slammed the Goliath into submission. McIntyre was just five-foot-nine, but he had beefed up to more than 220 pounds in the weight room. Years later, McIntyre still laughed at the memory of Guindon chewing out the Goliath after their loss: “You big fucking galoot! Look at the size of him! You had your chance to shine and you blew it!”

  Despite Guindon’s furious outburst, McQueen was impressed with how accessible he was with club members, including newcomers like himself. “Anybody could talk to Bernie. It didn’t matter what your problem was. He was like a big brother to everybody.”

  Guindon also displayed some surprising life skills. McQueen recalled taking part in a brawl in a Kitchener bar that left him with a huge black shiner that shut his left eye, and an ugly gash in his face. “You could see the bone in my forehead. It was opened up.” Going to the hospital wasn’t an option, because that would mean certain arrest. “Police were involved in the fight and they didn’t do so good.”

  McQueen and other bikers regrouped in the local Satan’s Choice clubhouse, where Guindon was visiting. Guindon had seen plenty of ugly eye injuries in the ring and on the street. He was convinced that McQueen would lose the sight in his left eye if something wasn’t done soon. He sat McQueen down in a chair, and a mammoth biker from the Oshawa chapter held him from behind while another biker sat on his thighs. Then Guindon splashed whisky on McQueen’s face and commenced operating. He had no training whatsoever in medicine, but he’d practised stitching while in prison, doing petit point, and watched other boxers get stitched up. He reckoned he could handle the job as well as anyone in his circle.

  First, he lanced the mouse under McQueen’s eye and then sewed it up with three or four stitches. Next came another ten or so stitches above his eye until the bone was no longer visible. “He did the sewing. He knew what he was doing,” McQueen said. “It was just like in the movies, buddy. They poured whisky on my face and started sewing me up. I was pretty much tethered to the chair by Bernie’s helpers. I’m far from handsome, but I have Bernie to thank for the sight in my left eye. Unless you run your hand over my eyebrow, you can’t tell.”

  It was around this time that McQueen met his future wife, Lucy. His life got immeasurably better from that moment on, he said. “I’m still enjoying my marriage as much as I did in the first day I met her,” he said two decades later. “I won the wife lottery.”

  When Lucy was almost killed in a car accident in 1994, McQueen did not hesitate to quit the club to be by her side. “You’re not allowed to quit, but I quit anyway,” he said. Some of the members gave him grief, but McQueen didn’t doubt for a second that he was doing the right thing. “It’s what any man is supposed to do. You’re supposed to take care of your family.”

  McQueen knew he’d have to tell Guindon of his decision. He wasn’t sure what to expect. The president had been working hard to find good guys to rebuild the club; losing McQueen would be a blow to that effort.

  “Go look after your family,” Guindon replied, perhaps respecting McQueen even more for making the tough call to leave and tell him face to face. “That’s the most important thing.”

  CHAPTER 36

  Human

  I’m sorry. I was a young dad. I didn’t have the patience. You don’t know how I grew up.

  BERNIE GUINDON apologizes to his daughter

  Ever since Guindon left General Motors, earning a legitimate living was complicated. His daughter Shanan said his resumé was marked by “great ideas, lousy partners.”

  There was his brief career as a barber after his second prison stint, when he worked for a time with a friend in Ajax, between Oshawa and Toronto. He had apprenticed at the trade while behind bars, but not all of that experience had been positive. He once accidentally gave an inmate a nasty two-inch gash while shaving him with a straight razor. “I wasn’t bad. It’s just it wasn’t my cup of tea. I didn’t feel comfortable.”

  On the outside, he practised on Harley. Little Harley sat relatively still for a variety of haircuts from his father, most of them of the pompadour variety. It was fun naming the haircuts his father gave him, but not so enjoyable actually getting them. “I never went to a barber until I was fifteen,” Harley said. “I had the Rat Tail, the Step.” Still, the price was right and it was an adventure. There was sometimes a lineup of neighbourhood kids at the house, waiting for haircuts that included “the Bowl” and “the Staircase.”

  Guindon also tried cutting Shanan’s hair when she was eleven. At first she was happy for the one-on-one attention from her father, but then she became afraid as her hair kept hitting the floor. “It was lopsided, severely lopsided…I said, ‘Okay, that’s short enough.’ He kept trying to straighten it up. I would have been bald if I let him keep going.”

  Guindon also did some work fixing transport trailers, but making custom motorcycles seemed more of a fit. This too presented challenges. Guindon was a perfectionist and not particularly businesslike, and many of his customers wanted Easy Rider magic on a moped budget. “A lot of people expected miracles,” Guindon said. “They didn’t want to give you the money to build a bike. They didn’t realize the work and the money that goes into that.”

  There wasn’t much money in leatherwork, as good as he was, since Guindon’s craft was time-consuming and could be roughly imitated with cheap machinery. Few people want to pay a hundred dollars for a wallet, however well made it might be.

  Guindon had plenty of other ideas for making an honest living. One particularly ambitious project was a fertilizer business run from a verdant property in tiny Baltimore, Ontario, north of Cobourg. Called Nature’s Magic, the organic plant food was made by burning off silt and mixing in leaves and a special substance. The product was sold in bottles, and its makers believed it was so potent, it could grow crops on the desert sand. “We were convinced we were going to feed all of the poor people across the globe,” Harley’s stepmother said. “We spent day and night on that thing.”

  There were plenty of biker-related issues taking up Guindon’s time in the early 1990s, and it was common for Guindon to answer his phone with “What’s wrong?” That’s how he answered it when his daughter Teresa called one night in a panic. She was unable to get into the room of her three-year-old son, Devin.

  Guindon rushed over and took Devin’s door off its hinges. Once inside, they frantically scanned the room but couldn’t find the toddler. Devin wasn’t on the bed or under the bed or in the closet. The boy had medical problems, so there was no time to spare. Could he have been abducted? Could someone have come in through the window? Guindon had always feared that his enemies might come after Harley to get at him. Had they targeted his grandson?

  Finally, they found the boy, wedged between his mattress and headboard, curled up and sound asleep. What Teresa saw next was something she hadn’t seen before and she wouldn’t ever see again.

  Her father was crying.

  “Wow, that’s a first,” she said. “I’ve never seen you cry before.”

  “Well, I am human.”

  “Really? News to me.”

  “What do you mean by that?”

  “You weren’t the best dad in the world.”

  Perhaps the horrors of his own childhood flooded back to him as he said, “I’m sorry. I was a young dad. I didn’t have the patience. You don’t know how I grew up.”

  “I have an issue with men crying,” Teresa later said. “I always look at them like they’re wimpy or something. My dad was tough. I had never seen a gentle side of him.”

  She wasn’t pleas
ant with her father as he shed tears over the thought of losing Devin to his enemies. “I wasn’t being sweet and nice. I was being a bitch, basically. I was throwing in a dig.

  “He cried and said, ‘Teresa, I’m sorry.’ I cried too. I said, ‘I forgive you.’ ”

  CHAPTER 37

  Black Death Eyes

  Being a Roman Catholic school, we don’t choose Satan. We choose Jesus Christ.

  PRINCIPAL at Harley Guindon’s school

  Harley couldn’t understand why he was sent home from Holy Cross Catholic Elementary School in Grade 1 for wearing a black and orange T-shirt with “Harley-Davidson” written across the front. He tried to argue that it was just his name, but didn’t convince anyone. He faced another shirt-related drama when he was nine years old and in Grade 4. That time, he was sent home for wearing a black T-shirt celebrating the thirtieth anniversary of his father’s club with the message, “Support Your Local Choice.”

  His father didn’t take the school’s reprimand lightly. He took his complaint to the Whitby This Week newspaper. “I can’t see anything wrong with the T-shirt,” Guindon told a reporter. “It was never meant to be offensive. We went out of our way to design the T-shirt to be socially acceptable. It doesn’t have the club’s emblem. It doesn’t have the word ‘Satan’ or anything like that. In my opinion, Harley was discriminated against because of who his father was, rather than the actual shirt.”

  Guindon and Harley’s stepmother had met with the school’s principal, but nothing was resolved. “We pointed out Satan’s Choice was a motorcycle club,” Guindon told the newspaper. “We represent an alternative lifestyle, but we’re not a political or religious organization.”

  Principal Tisi wasn’t impressed, calling it “inappropriate dress” that made an indirect reference to Satan. “Being a Roman Catholic school, we don’t choose Satan,” Tisi said. “We choose Jesus Christ.”

  Guindon took his protest up a notch—in volume. He began taking Harley to school on his motorcycle. The Guindons lived on a school bus route, near where Guindon had grown up, but Harley often deliberately missed the bus to get a ride on the back of his father’s bike. “Most times when riding through the streets on our way to school, he would pop wheelies in front of my peers walking, leaving me holding on for dear life,” Harley recalled. “I never got used to it. The back rest didn’t give me that feeling of comfort one would expect. Every time he did it, even if I knew it was coming, it would still scare the shit out of me.”

  Harley was a naturally energetic child, and Guindon refused to allow him to take any medication to calm him. Booze and pills of any sort were foreign to the Guindon household. “People believe that because my dad had a beard and rode a Harley, he must have been a party animal,” Harley said in 2016. “To this day, I have never witnessed my dad drink alcohol or do drugs or saw him under the influence.” Guindon extended his own abstention to his son, whether he could use the medicinal help or not.

  Years later, it irritated Harley’s stepmother to hear people say that Harley was groomed to be an outlaw biker. She spoke instead of a birthday at Chuck E. Cheese’s and family photos taken at the front of the house, under the “family tree.” Another photo shows a grinning Harley in his Boy Scout uniform on a Santa Claus parade float. “He really wasn’t exposed to a lot of it when he was growing up.”

  Harley was exposed to violence early, however. One day after school, he was getting ready to step off the school bus when he saw a man running up his driveway, carrying an axe.

  “Fight!” kids screamed.

  That’s not a fight, Harley thought. That’s someone trying to kill my father with an axe in front of twenty-five of my schoolmates.

  Harley later recalled: “I can remember this as clear as day. The guy was…ready to cut his head off, and he [Guindon] slid like a boxer, throwing out a jab, and knocked the attacker out cold upon the lawn.”

  Guindon was so focused on his attacker that he didn’t realize the school bus had stopped directly across the street. Harley and his friends stared as Guindon dragged the unconscious man from the lawn into the garage. Harley rode the bus for a few extra stops, giving his father appropriate time to dispose of the unconscious man. Then he walked home as if nothing had happened. “I didn’t lay eyes on him [Guindon] until dinner and didn’t even receive an explanation. Almost like I must have been dreaming.” The police never showed up at the door, despite the many little witnesses. “Not even the bus driver called the cops that day,” Harley said. “The kids at school used to tease me because my real name is Harley Davidson, but after that, things became much easier.”

  Harley didn’t see much of his father’s rough side. “For the most part, I was sheltered,” Harley said. But when Guindon drove Harley around town, there was always a baseball glove, ball and bat on the back seat, even though they never went to the ballpark. “I’ve never seen him throw a baseball,” Harley said. The bat was for self-protection, and the glove and ball were to make the bat look less suspicious.

  On some special days, Harley got to escort his dad to work on film sets. Guindon’s grizzled biker look was helping solve his employment problem by getting him work as an extra in movies and television shows such as Jungle Movie, My Date with the President’s Daughter, Kung Fu: The Legend Continues and Blues Brothers 2000, when he got to visit inside actor John Goodman’s trailer.

  The most frightening sight Harley saw while growing up wasn’t the man with the axe, or a Molotov cocktail crashing through the front window of his home for reasons his father refused to explain. It was the change he occasionally saw deep in his father’s eyes, when they seemed to turn black with rage. Harley recounted a chilling pattern to his father’s anger. When he started to lose control, Guindon looked up to the left. Next, he crossed his hands, rubbed his neck and tilted his glasses down to the tip of his nose. Then he shook his head. The final and most horrifying part of this metamorphosis followed. “When my eyes go darker, I’m at my worst,” Guindon confessed.

  Harley called the angry eyes “black death” and thought, Black eyes, it’s on. Harley didn’t remember the black death eyes from the many times he was suspended from school, although he did receive the occasional whupping for that. The pupils went black when someone challenged or disobeyed his dad. “The only person on this earth that can make me nervous is my father,” Harley later said. “When he is mad, you can see his pupils capture all colour flaring black before you, almost like you can see death behind his eyes. It doesn’t take much. The man lacks patience in a serious way.”

  The black death eyes were almost exclusively reserved for adults, but one time, they were aimed directly at Harley. “That was because a school friend stole nearly two thousand dollars out of his drawer and he thought it was me,” Harley said. “There are countless times that man scared the shit out of me, but that day is etched into my mind forever.”

  The black death eyes could also make an appearance at family cribbage games, when Harley’s uncle, Jack, dropped by to play a game or two. Cribbage was a game that Guindon mastered in prison and he didn’t take losing gently. Harley recalled games punctuated by bouts of “choking, yelling, punching, smacking and wrestling.”

  “You would believe they despised one another, but there’s a genuine love somewhere under the exterior,” Harley said. “He’s never flew across the table at me, and we’ve played thousands of games together. Then again, I know better than to raise my voice and his blood pressure.”

  During one game with his father, Harley was dealt a twenty-nine hand, the best one possible. “The odds are like a royal flush in poker,” Harley said. “He always told me if I got a twenty-nine hand he would give me five hundred dollars. The day I did, I moved our couch set to my room, and he purchased a new one. He bragged for months about it to basically every visitor. We lived with the cribbage board on the dining room table, which made it a constant reminder. He used to say I was the luckiest kid he’s ever met and I don’t just have a horseshoe up my ass, I hav
e the whole horse.”

  Whether they were watching the Toronto Maple Leafs on television or attending Scouting events, Harley got something his sisters never did: Bernie Guindon just being a dad. Harley was always working on a new badge to add to his Boy Scouts sash, but the most noticeable badge was the one his father gave him: his name. “I used to tell him to behave,” Guindon said. “They were teasing him all the time. ‘Harley, can I ride you?’ It’s hard.” Harley’s last name was tough to miss, too.

  He was just a Beaver Scout when he approached his big sister Teresa. He was clearly upset about something.

  “You’re my sister and you love me, right? Can I tell you a secret?”

  Teresa told him that of course she loved him and of course he could confide in her. Harley explained how a police officer had approached him at Beaver Scouts.

  “He came up and told me how bad my dad was and he was going to kill him,” Harley said.

  “I said, ‘I’m going to pray,’ ” Teresa recalled. “He was scared to go to sleep after that. He thought they were going to kill his dad. He was traumatized. He was like five years old. He said, ‘My daddy’s a bad man and they’re going to kill him, and if I tell anybody, they’re going to hurt the family.’ ”

  It was four or five years later when Guindon first took his son aside and spoke to him man-to-man. On a Wednesday evening, they stopped by a pizzeria before a Cub Scout meeting. Harley was nine or ten years old and not even tall enough to see over the counter. After getting their slices, the father and son walked out the door, and in an uncharacteristically grave tone, Guindon said he needed to speak to him. “That was different, and I knew from his demeanour that he was troubled and it couldn’t be good,” Harley said. “He gave me a real hug, not something I was accustomed to if I didn’t initiate it, and he said, ‘Harley, you know I love you. I may never be coming home again, but you will be looked after. Harley, when you’re older, you’ll understand that sometimes a man has to do what a man has to do, no matter the consequences.’ ”