Hard Road

by Peter Edwards

  “They wouldn’t say that,” Guindon replied.

  “Dad, they’re not your friends,” Teresa told him. “Family comes first. You have to choose your family.”

  Like her father, Teresa went for knockouts. Once, she told him, “One day you’re going to wake up from this dream and you’re going to realize you screwed up your life.”

  Despite the dust-ups that inevitably occur between forceful personalities, she is proud to possess some of her father’s better qualities, like resiliency and leadership and a certain charisma, all of which help in her ministry. She also shares his fearlessness. “Do I hate him? No. I don’t hate him. Do I love him? There’s parts of him that I love. I wouldn’t be here without him. I have empathy for him.”

  Teresa sometimes wondered how things might have turned out differently for her half-brother Harley if he had grown up with a different name, or if she had been allowed to adopt him when he was a baby. “He didn’t have a prayer growing up with his dad,” she said.

  Once, Teresa pointedly asked her father if he even knew what love is. Guindon kept his infamous temper in check and made a point of telling her he loved her at the end of their talks, however rough they became. Guindon wasn’t quick to tell people he loved them, but Teresa could draw it out of him.

  One of Teresa’s sons grew up to be a hip-hop artist, and her other son, Devin, became a successful construction subcontractor in Alberta. Guindon had once been reduced to tears with the fear that Devin had been kidnapped by his grandfather’s biker enemies. Now, Devin had a son of his own, making Guindon a great-grandfather.

  “The last time I visited him was in ’08 and we went for a bike ride together,” Devin said in 2016. “I love him as my grandpa, but he’s definitely made my life hard carrying his last name.” One of the reasons Devin moved west was because he grew weary of being pulled over and interrogated by police in the Oshawa area for no reason. Once, when he was seventeen, he parked on King Street in Bowmanville with his girlfriend and began counting out change to buy candy from a convenience store. “Then a cop pulled up behind me and ran my plate,” Devin recalled. “That’s when he called in for backup and K-9 units. They arrived very quickly. I asked what all this was about, and they said it was suspicious that I was pulled over to the side of the road. I asked him if it had anything to do with my last name, and they refused to comment on that.”

  Devin said that his mother tried to keep him away from Guindon, but he grew up wanting to be like his grandfather and uncle Harley anyway. They had a certain magnetic pull that was hard to explain or resist. “I was very young at the time and didn’t know better,” he said, adding that he can’t help but have mixed feelings about his grandfather.

  There’s love but there’s also something darker. “He always treated us good, but that doesn’t mean he was a good person.”

  —

  Harley’s stepmother was planning a family get-together for his thirtieth birthday on October 15, 2015. Those party plans were ruined, however, when Harley was arrested six days before his birthday after a high-speed chase. He faced fresh charges of robbery, impersonating a police officer, pointing a firearm, possession of a military-style submachine gun, forcible confinement and three counts of assault with a weapon relating to a home invasion.

  Four months later, he was transferred from the Lindsay superjail to the much smaller county bucket in Napanee, near Belleville, after he was given a Security Threat Group rating. That move came as prison authorities investigated a rash of stabbings in the Lindsay jail and concluded that things would be safer for Harley’s enemies if he was somewhere else. He spent a night at Ottawa jail, when he shared a cell with a member of the Rock Machine, a gang that had been locked in a bloody war in Quebec with the Hells Angels in the late 1990s and early 2000s. The Rock Machine member gestured toward a sketch of a man urinating on the number “81.” For Hells Angels, the number “81” is a club nickname of sorts, as their initials are from the eighth and first letters of the alphabet. Words were quickly exchanged, and Harley was hauled off to the hole after smashing the prisoner’s orbital bone. With that, Harley was returned to Lindsay.

  Guindon had long been worrying about Harley’s fate. “Don’t try to live on my history,” Guindon said in a message to his son. “Get a fucking job. I quit GM. Kicked my ass ever since. After that, I’ve had mediocre jobs. I worry about Harley all the time. I told him, ‘Quit trying to walk in my footsteps. Try not to be like me or you’ll be in jail the rest of your life.’ I did most of my best years in jail.”

  As Harley adjusted to life behind bars, Guindon maintained a relationship of sorts with his brother, Jack. Among other things, Guindon couldn’t abide the fact that Jack insisted on riding a Japanese motorcycle. He didn’t just consider it the wrong bike; he saw it as an attack on an entire belief system. To make matters worse, Jack once got a ticket from police for riding too slowly. For Guindon, that was an affront to nature. Jack eventually came around and got a Harley 1200 Roadster, but not before a wild public brawl with Guindon that began with a debate on motorcycle merits. “He almost choked me to death at a car-bike show,” Jack recalled. “I made a comment: ‘Bernie, all you think about is Harley-Davidson. You don’t think about anything else.’ Then he got really pissed off. He had me by the neck. He was choking me.” That said, Jack had to admit that his 1200 Roadster was a fine ride.

  Now in his slower-paced senior years, Guindon has time to daydream. Sometimes his mind drifts to revenge fantasies, even though many of his targets have predeceased him. “Sometimes in my sleep, I get some pretty bad thoughts going through my mind. If I ever get sick and I am dying, these guys might pay.”

  He doesn’t miss the biker politics that once consumed him. “I don’t get involved in that anymore. I just say, ‘Enjoy your life. You haven’t got much left.’ I look at life like a bingo. It turns around and around and all of a sudden, there’s a number for Bernie Guindon. When your number is up, it’s up.”

  Like many seniors, Guindon sometimes thinks about his funeral. He knows for sure that he wants Frank Sinatra’s “My Way” played. Suzanne approves, since its lyrics were penned by her beloved Paul Anka. Guindon is particularly moved by the song’s ending, which goes, “The record shows I took the blows/And did it my way.”

  Some days that funeral feels closer than others. His memory, once so crisp and focused, sometimes fails him. “I go down the street and I think, How the fuck did I get back here?” Once, he found the drive back home from Canadian Tire unusually quiet. He had left Suzanne back at the store. He often struggles to remember the names of old friends, even though he can picture them. “The cops could hit me until tomorrow and I couldn’t give them any name.”

  —

  Guindon got a phone call from a Black Diamond Rider in November 2016, inviting him and Suzanne to a special event. His old nemesis Johnny Sombrero had died at the age of eighty-one, after suffering from diabetes and heart disease. It was a singular ceremony, as befitted Sombrero. The funeral cards referred to “Johnny Sombrero aka Harry Paul Barnes” as “The man who was larger than Life/who walked to the beat of his own drum…in silver toed boots…”

  There were some Outlaws, Amigos from the U.S. and about forty or so Black Diamond Riders. Guindon was taken aback to see that some of the mourners wearing BDR colours were women.

  Some of Sombrero’s old clubmates stood as an honour guard by the casket, which was draped in a Union Jack. At the gravesite, two women passed out glasses of Scotch. Guindon joined in as they said “Goodbye, Johnny” and quaffed down their Scotch. Guindon drank his too, as a show of respect. “It was for him. Otherwise I wouldn’t have drank it.”

  A week later, Guindon had another reminder of his mortality, as he turned seventy-four. Harley arranged from behind bars for him and Suzanne to have a special table at a United Boxing pro card at Mississauga’s Hershey Centre.

  His old buddies Steve (Slick) McQueen, Paul Gravelle and Lorne Campbell, and Guindon’s daughter Michelle slipp
ed through security to join him, Suzanne and his son Rick Gibson at their ring-level table, with McQueen sporting a herringbone bowler hat to mark the occasion. Michelle beamed and joked about how the biker landscape might have been transformed, had she been born a boy.

  Gibson gave him a card and said, “Happy birthday, Dad,” then spoke proudly of how he had worked himself into top shape with a good-paying construction job.

  —

  As the fog rolls in between Guindon and his past, he wonders sometimes if he was too harsh in judging his own father. His dad did deserve credit for cleaning himself up. If alcoholism was in his blood, he had at least quelled those fires. “My dad, he was an alcoholic. But he gave up drinking the last fifteen years of his life. He was probably a better father than I ever was. He raised us. What the hell? Put clothing on us and food in our mouths. What else do you want? He worked hard. You don’t realize that when you are a kid.”

  Guindon now feels an unexpected kinship with both his father and son. Like it or not, they are all part of a family line, with shared challenges. “He [my father] didn’t like me having a motorcycle club. Holy fuck. He was trying to keep me on the straight and narrow. That’s the same as my kid.”

  Guindon doesn’t condemn his father as a hypocrite just because he was a criminal. “He wasn’t a straight-up guy. He made money the only way he could, I guess. Sometimes you’ve got to take the curve on the path and make a few extra bucks. A lot of people were bootleggers in those days.”

  Whatever Guindon has decided, his father is no longer around to hear it. The Satan’s Choice Motorcycle Club is gone too, all but the memories, for as long as he can hold on to them. “I lost a lot of those days.”

  Sometimes he goes to his craft room in the basement and fashions leather copies of old Satan’s Choice crests. Other times, he works on belts, wallets, cellphone holders and images of sad clowns. More than once, he’s vowed that he will never again make a complex leather piece, as the tough material leaves his fingers and joints aching. But then someone comes along with a request or a hint, and he starts tapping away on the leather again. Even though his craft room is windowless, like a cell, he loves the quiet there.

  Gone is the raw adrenalin of Guindon’s youth, but a man in his seventies appreciates that there is more to life than adrenalin. Excitement was something in the past. Perhaps some peace is in the future. “You try and get rid of the bad memories and live on the good memories. All of the bad memories I’ve had…”

  And so he taps away on his leather projects, struggling to hang on to any good times while hoping the rest will finally blow past him, like scenery or phantoms on the open road.

  ENDNOTES

  CHAPTER 1: Beginnings

  Bernie Guindon was interviewed repeatedly for this book. His brother, Jack Guindon, helped here too.

  CHAPTER 2: Local Celebrity

  Suzanne Blais spoke at length and in detail about her life, including her early years.

  After World War II, the southern area of Oshawa where Guindon’s family settled was a magnet for thousands of workers from Europe and economically depressed areas of Canada, such as the Maritimes, rural Quebec and Northern Ontario.

  Suzanne Blais came to the Oshawa street corner where Guindon worked with a tangled backstory that rivalled that of Guindon. Her father had been a draft dodger who changed his identity to avoid conscription into the Canadian military. She said she had two sets of identification papers after she was born on September 6, 1946, in the former gold rush town of Kirkland Lake in Northeastern Ontario, 440 miles from the Quebec border. Her father was Reo Blais and her mother was the former Juliette Neveu, and Suzanne was a “Blais” for Ontario and a “Lacasse” for Quebec.

  Suzanne’s father worked for a time in the gold mines of Kirkland Lake, and then as a bouncer and bartender at a local hotel. In the early years of her marriage, Suzanne’s mother waited on tables in the nearby mill town of Iroquois Falls and its scruffy neighbour, Ansonville. Ansonville was a poorly planned sprawl of cabins and shacks with no water or electricity, and attracted many French-Canadians, as well as Russians and Ukrainians. Ansonville was roundly condemned by many of the inhabitants of Iroquois Falls as a dark den of foreigners preoccupied with brawling, boozing and God knows what else.

  The description of Ansonville “as a dark den of foreigners engaged in regular street brawls, illegal alcohol consumption, and other unsavoury activities” is from a report quoted by Kerry M. Abel in Changing Places: History, Community, and Identity in Northeastern Ontario, McGill-Queen’s University Press (Montreal, QC and Kingston, ON, 2006).

  Suzanne’s mother left her with Suzanne’s grandfather for a time, while she cooked in a bush camp in Temiskaming. Suzanne was the apple of her grandfather’s eye, and he was a tough man to please. She would ride on his lap on the tractor like a little princess. “I was spoiled. I got on my grandfather’s knee.” She would play him like a Stradivarius, asking, “Are you sure you love me?”

  Suzanne sorely needed to be loved and her grandfather appreciated that. He would always reply with words to the effect of, “Of course, Suzanne. You’re my favourite little girl.”

  So strong was the spell that little Suzanne cast over her grandfather that her aunt and uncle would ask her to approach him when they needed two dollars for the movies. She would then ask her grandfather, who would invariably give them the cash.

  Boxing bouts in Oshawa were held at the former Avalon Dance Hall on King Street West, the former Community Recreation Association building on Gibb Street, the United Auto Workers hall and the Civic Auditorium.

  CHAPTER 4: Supreme Commander

  I interviewed Harry (Johnny Sombrero) Barnes on June 22, 2015. He was cheerful and proud and didn’t let on that he was suffering from diabetes and heart disease. He died of those conditions in November 2016 at the age of eighty-one, leaving behind five children and seven grandchildren. He had been married for fifty-eight years. Long-time clubmates wore black and white club shirts to his funeral at the Ward Funeral Home on Weston Road, near his old stomping grounds. His casket was draped in the Union Jack, as befitted his pro-monarchist views.

  Sombrero’s Black Diamond Riders weren’t officially an outlaw club like the Hells Angels and Outlaws, as they didn’t have a diamond patch on the left breast with “1%” on it, signifying they were the 1 percent of bikers who go by their own rules. Still, diamond patch or no diamond patch, Johnny Sombrero did pack a wallop for any new clubs on what he considered his turf.

  In July 1963, Sombrero announced in a Toronto courtroom that he was shutting down his Black Diamond Riders. With a dramatic flair for words, Sombrero told Magistrate Joseph Addison that he was tearing apart the Riders’ clubhouse in Davisville and disbanding the club because “the papers have massacred us.”

  He made his statement after being charged at the time with threatening the wife of a club member, which he dismissed as an unfortunate misunderstanding.

  “Are you breaking up the club?” Addison asked.

  “Yes,” Sombrero replied.

  With that, Addison gave Sombrero a compliment of sorts, saying that club members are “a pretty crummy bunch and you appear to be the only man of intelligence among them.

  “You’re the obvious leader and you cut quite a figure as you drive down the street in your big Cadillac, sometimes with a big beard, sometimes without it.

  “There’s not much doubt that you’re using this group of illiterate, smelly-looking people.”

  Sombrero reassured the judge that he planned to spend his free time with his wife and three children, and that he realized now that he had been playing a dangerous game.

  With that, the magistrate set him free on two hundred dollars’ bail despite howls of protest from the Crown attorney. Perhaps the judge believed Sombrero when he said he was disbanding the Black Diamond Riders, but no one in Guindon’s world believed him for a second.

  During the Black Diamond Riders’ ride down the Gardiner, a rider in the front had a
club flag flying high above his bike. They all wore matching black shirts, looking like cleaned-up cowboys in the Rose Parade. Sombrero chose cotton for the club’s black and white dress shirts, a break from the garb of the Humber Valley Riders. “I didn’t want to get into this silk bullshit.”

  CHAPTER 5: Fight Club

  I benefited here from interviews with Bernie Guindon, Jack Guindon, Spider Jones and George Chuvalo.

  Chuvalo was impressed with Guindon’s attitude, as well as his ring skills. Chuvalo understood heart and boxing, as he earned a 79-15-2 career record as a pro and managed to stay on his feet in bouts with heavyweight champions Muhammad Ali, Joe Frazier, George Foreman and Floyd Patterson.

  The late Daniel R. Wolf, a sociologist and motorcycle enthusiast, did an excellent job of making sense of why people choose to be bikers in The Rebels: A Brotherhood of Outlaw Bikers, University of Toronto Press (Toronto, 1991).

  Yorkville during the hippie days is analyzed at length in “Making the Scene: Yorkville and Hip Toronto, 1960–1970” by Stuart Robert Henderson, a thesis submitted to the Department of History in conformity with the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, Queen’s University, Kingston, Ontario, October 2007.

  CHAPTER 6: Expansion

  I benefited from an interview with Don Shebib and greatly appreciate his insights.

  There’s a police history of biker gangs in Canada in The Gazette, Vol. 65, Nos. 7–12, 1999, a Royal Canadian Mounted Police publication. It’s a good look at the situation as it stood just before the Hells Angels patchover.

  The original Satan’s Choice included Don Norris and others named Spaceman, El-Pot Hole and Black Pete. The club was started in 1957 by teenagers and men who hung out at the Army Navy Club on Spadina Avenue in Toronto. The first members were called Sharkey, Jim Corbett, Frank Donnelly, Scotty, Big Ted and Red, according to Norris, with Sharkey acting as president. They later shifted their hangout to Aida’s Restaurant at St. Clair and Stop 17 on Kingston Road.