Becoming A Son

by David Labrava

  I had been there about a week. I was still waiting for my Chopper and all my stuff to arrive on the ship. I was just taking my time getting to know the Brothers that I didn’t already know, and adjust to Dutch culture. Dutch people are relaxed. They work hard and party hard. I always loved it in Holland, probably why I moved there. There were fishing docks and canneries all over Ijmuiden and the people that lived and worked there worked hard. And partied harder.

  I was standing in front of the bar and I looked over and saw a big guy pointing at me talking to one of the Brothers that I had just met. Both the guy and the Brother were big men. Six foot six and three hundred pounders. They both started walking over to me and the Brother stopped next to me. The big guy kept walking past me.

  “He said you grabbed his girls ass. I told him you would never do that.” The brother said. “He was talking about that guy.”

  I looked over and the big guy was beating the shit out of this very drunk guy from London. We stood there and watched the beating, which was especially brutal for about four minutes.

  “All right, he’s had enough. Come on that’s enough.” The brother said.

  The big guy was out of breath and he walked back in the bar. The London guy was on the ground beaten and bleeding.

  “You never know how it’s going to go.” He said to me.

  “Guess not.”

  Just then the London guy jumped up.

  “YOU BASTARD.” He screamed as he tried to swing at the brother. He missed and I knocked him back out with a left hook. Before I could do anything else two young guys came running from out of the bar out and gave that Londoner one of the worst beatings I ever saw a man take at one time. These guys must have been around twenty. Probably played rugby or something. They beat the Londoner beyond recognition. His cheekbone was crushed. He was bleeding all over the place. One of the guys was kicking his head over and over when he was already unconscious.

  “Enough.” I said.

  The brother had gone back in the bar so the only people on the street were me the two young guys and the Londoner who was on the ground bleeding and out cold. I grabbed a bucket and filled it up with water and poured it on the him. I wanted him to get up and leave. I knew enough to know we don’t need some beaten bloody dude laying on the floor in front of the bar. I figured if he dies who’s going to get blamed? Probably the guy no one knows. Probably me.

  “We gotta get him out of here.” I said.

  Before I could say anything else the two guys from the bar dragged the guy about thirty feet to a small alley between two buildings. They were totally satisfied with their efforts, patting each other on the back as they walked back to the bar. I stood over the guy looking at him for a minute. It didn’t look like he was breathing at all. I walked back to the bar and sat down next to one of the brothers. They were in mid conversation, which was all in Dutch so I didn’t understand most of it. There was a break in the conversation and one of the brothers looked at me. He could see something was wrong.

  “Tell me.” He said to me. I leaned in close so I could say it quietly.

  “We beat a guy real good out there. I think he might die.”

  “Show me.” He said as he got up and walked out of the bar. I followed quickly behind him. We walked over to the alley where the guy was laying. The two guys were a few feet away having a smoke. The brother looked at the Londoner real close for a minute then at at me.

  “Yes. If you leave him here he is going to die.” He said and turned and walked back to the bar. He looked at the two guys.

  “Cold out.” He said with a wink. I stood there freezing with the two guys.

  “We gotta get him out of here.” I said.

  “Gotta get him away from the bar.” One of the guys said as they picked him up and carried him towards the main street. I ran ahead to look out for cars and when it was clear I signaled them to bring him along. They set him down on the other side of a cement wall that was there to stop cars from driving in the water.

  By the time we got back to the bar everyone knew what happened. Another brother wanted me to show him the guy so we walked back down to where he was. We looked over the wall and the guy was still unconscious laying in a pool of his own blood.

  “He looks like he was hit by a car.” The brother said.

  “Or a truck.”

  “I’m going to call an ambulance and tell them it was a hit and run.” The brother said. That was the best idea I had heard all night. He made the call and they said help was on the way. Satisfied we walked back to the bar.

  We walked in and the party was still raging, the whole bar singing together as drunk as can be. The brothers didn’t sing, they found it all amusing.

  I sat with the brother who told me if I leave the guy there he will die. Me and that began brother smoking joint after joint. We smoked solidly for over an hour. It must have been ten joints. We didn’t say a word. Just smoked and laughed with all the rest of the folks. He passed the joint back to me and looked at me with a smile.

  “Well you passed the first test.”

  “And what test was that.”

  “That you could sit here and just enjoy sitting here with a brother. That you didn’t have too fill all the space with the sound of you talking. That you could just be here and that is enough.”

  It was a compliment and I knew it. I think he could appreciate the fact that I moved myself, and all my stuff across an ocean to this tiny little fishing village because that’s where I wanted to be. The bar raged till six in the morning. As the sun was coming up I went outside for some air. You could cut the smoke in the bar with a knife. Everybody smokes weed or tobacco in Holland, and I mean EVERYBODY.

  I stood on the red cobblestone street taking in the sea air. The seagulls were making a hell of a racket. I felt absolutely complete, confident, on top of the world.

  I looked towards the Ocean to where the guy who got beaten earlier in the night was laying and I wondered if the ambulance found him. I started to walk over there and all of a sudden I saw a little red beach ball stick up by the wall. I rubbed my eyes and looked closer and I saw the guy climbing back up over the wall. He was having a hard time doing it. He looked like a red clown or something he had so much blood on him. He got to the top of the wall and fell onto this side. He got up and started walking towards the bar. I stood there and watched him limp closer and closer. He was wasted. I went back in side.

  “HE’S COMING BACK.” I said to whoever was left in the bar. Everybody got up and all squeezed into the doorway and watched the guy walk up. Nobody made a sound. The guy wobbled up to the bar and stopped right in front of it. He looked at the sign, then the bar, then all of us in the doorway. Nobody spoke while he tried to see what he was looking at. It was another surreal moment. He then realized where he was and turned around and hobbled down the street. Everyone started laughing and went back in the bar. That party raged until two the next day. One of many, many parties that raged till the next day.

  61

  My chopper arrived about a week later. Me and one of the brothers went to the port and picked it up. I had made a really good crate to ship it over in. We uncrated it at the dock. The longshoremen who worked there really liked the crate and I left it there with them.

  The bike was easier to transport on the truck without the crate anyway. Whether you knew bikes or not you could look at mine and know it was a serious machine. It looked like a frame wrapped around a tire with a big motor. I had an S&S 100 cubic inch, with an Avon 230 series tire. This at the time was the state of the art chopper. I had the second 230 series tire on the road. It used to be a Chevy rim. My old boss Billy chiseled it out, smoothed it, marked it had it dimpled, chromed then I laced and trued it and we brought it to the tire store to have the tire put on the rim. The tire guy had a hell of a time fitting that tire but he finally got it on..

  People would lose their minds when they saw us coming up the block with our rigid frame, kick only, custom made choppers. Raked and stretche
d with big motors and fat tires in back. I had just gotten on the cover of the magazine with this bike a few months before I arrived in Holland. I built this bike from scratch and I loved it. I had to bend and weld the frame three times just to get the exact correct clearance for the rear tire. Everything was custom about this bike and you could tell just from looking at it.

  We took it to the bike shop that one of he brothers owned and got it off the truck. At first the brothers tried to hold back the laughter, but then they couldn’t and they broke out laughing real hard.

  “What’s so funny?”

  “You are.” Said one.

  “That bike.” Said another.

  “Not every road here is straight.”

  Then to add insult to injury I kicked my bike about twenty times and it wouldn’t kick over. Which only made the brothers laugh harder. It was kind of funny. After about a hundred kicks it kicked over and roared to life.

  “We should go for a ride.” One of the brothers said to me. It was sunny, not too sunny but clear and dry which was good. I was dying to ride my bike. It had been about two weeks since I had ridden any bike and I was jonesing.

  We took off and rode slowly through town. We got to the highway and I wanted to hammer it, but I know better than to pass a brother like that. He could feel I wanted to take off and he waved me ahead, so I cut over a few lanes and I held that throttle wide open. It felt so great to take off in the crisp Dutch air. I could see him in the rear view mirror staying close to me so after I got my fix I slowed down and fell in behind him. He waved me up and we rode sided by side for a few miles. What a cool feeling. I waited my whole life to be right where I was and it felt good. And the fact that there was so much in front of me to get where I wanted to be felt even better. I love a challenge. You have to keep challenging yourself. Or life gets boring.

  We rode like that for a while then we pulled off and the road quickly became a series of S turns. At every turn the brother was getting further away from me. I would stab the throttle on the straight away and try to catch up but it didn’t matter. He kept getting further and further away. Then he started leaning into the turns and that was it and he really took off.

  I started thinking about where the hell am I if he loses me completely. I had this cheap nylon jacket on that flapped so hard it fell apart. I didn’t even have good foul weather gear yet.

  Where he turned off was actually a back road to the bike shop. We pulled up and the brothers took one look at me, with my torn up jacket and they started laughing all over again.

  “Bike like that might be nice over there, but here you need a different bike. You need an FXR.”

  The brothers all road Dyna’s and FXR’s with inverted forks made to ride across the continent. I always laughed at stock bikes but I knew he was right. I knew how important it was to be able to take advice from people who know better than you. That’s a gift and a very deep lesson.

  I rode my bike around town a little bit while I tried to sell it. A couple of Dutch guys looked at it but that’s not the bikes they like. I called one of my friends in Washington state who could afford it and he bought the bike for twenty grand. He even flew over and brought me the money. He wanted to see the bike before I shipped it to him. Fortunately the shipping company kept the crate. They couldn’t believe I was shipping the bike back within two weeks.

  Like I said at that time the Euro wasn’t invented yet so twenty grand converted into about thirty six thousand guilders. I was loaded. I rented a top floor apartment and built a complete grow room in one of the rooms. I broke the window in the attic and used it for the intake to take out and put in the fresh and old air.

  I also started shopping for an FXR. In the crew I ran with at home we always laughed at stock bikes. If you didn’t build it, then it wasn’t the same for us. I hadn’t ever really ridden a stock bike. Maybe once or twice but that was it. Every bike I had was a rigid frame chopper, even the first one. I shopped around for a few weeks and I found a 1994 Harley Davidson FXR with 5000 kilometers on it. It was almost new. Some dentist bought it and rode it a few times and left it in his garage. 1994 is the last year Harley made the FXR, except for an anniversary edition in 1999, but I didn’t want that.

  We drove over to the dentist’s house to buy the bike. He didn’t look like a biker he looked like a dentist, which I figured was good, he probably didn’t beat up the bike.

  We walked in the garage and I couldn’t believe it. The bike looked brand spanking new. Like it had never been ridden before.

  “I rode it a few times. I just don’t have the time. My wife wants me to sell it.”

  I handed over the money.

  “Nine grand.” I handed him nine thousand Guilders. This equaled about five thousand dollars. There was no negotiating with him. The brothers did that on my behalf before we got there. He took the money and started counting it. We wheeled the bike out and put it on the truck. I wanted to ride it but the brothers wanted to go over it with a fine tooth comb first.

  My first FXR. And I still had over ten grand. The grow room was working in my apartment. Quite a change from my previous life which was getting further and further behind me.

  62

  I still had a good bit of money left over so I bought a little caravan to build a glass shop in. It was a one room caravan with a sink and a shower that you towed behind your car or truck. We bought it from some Dutch gypsies about three hours away. It was in real good shape and I got to work on it right away. I had already made a few glass shops in motorhomes, mine or helping friends build their shops so I knew how to build it good. I had my own working glass shop with in two weeks. It was something to learn how to do this with different equipment than I was used to, they had different regulators and stuff like at the air and gas company, but I figured it out. The brothers let me put the glass shop behind the bike shop, which was a real good set up. I got to see the brothers alot, and they got to see one of the ways I make my money, and I was always near the action.

  I had a travelling tattoo case also so in between tattooing folks in town and making glass pipes and selling them to the head shops I was doing ok. Having a harvest every nine weeks of a couple of pounds was just icing on top. But the weed had to be great. The competition was fierce. And bone dry. The guys at the coffee shop, which is where you sold your weed, would grab a bud and break it in half. If it didn’t ‘CRACK’ then it wasn’t dry.

  “Come back when it’s finished.” He would say with a smile.

  The other thing that consumed my time was riding. The brothers rode. A LOT. It didn’t matter what weather it was either rain or shine, they still rode. And I had just come from Miami. No helmet law and sunshine. I didn’t even own decent rain gear. Rain gear for me was a plastic bag to put my cell phone in. These guys rode a lot to practice being the best. They rode in the tightest formation possible, inches apart, weaving in and out of traffic like a swarm of bees. We would be getting ready to leave, putting on all this rain gear and I would look out the window and the sleet, which is a combination of snow and hail and rain, would be so strong it was moving sideways.

  “We’re really leaving?” I would ask.

  They would all laugh. These are the kind of storms in Florida that the cars would pull over to let go by, except way colder. We weren’t going anywhere except on a ride. The starting point and finishing point are the same. It’s just a ride. I was always in the back and I always stayed a bike length or two back. Riding the bike like it’s synchronized swimming takes practice. You have to trust yourself and trust the guys you are riding with. And that takes practice.

  I couldn’t get the hang of the FXR. I was always a little too far in the back of the pack and it felt like the bike was slipping all over the place. I didn’t feel confident enough on the bike to ride up in the tight formation. I was used to a rigid frame motorcycle, which is real tight in the turns. I got back to the bar and I was disappointed again with the ride.

  “What’s wrong?” One of the brothers aske
d me.

  “Is that what these bikes are about? Slipping all over the place? Cause that’s what they feel like.”

  The brother I was talking to looked at me like I was from Mars and walked out to look at my bike. He stuck his head back in the bar.

  “Come out here.” I got off my stool and went outside.

  “Look at this.” He pointed to my tires.

  “These tires are dry rotted. That dentist had this bike sitting in his garage for so long the tires got dry rotted. They are cracking and too hard to grip.”

  He jumped in his car and I went back into the bar. In about twenty minutes he came back in with two new Dunlops.

  “These are really sticky.” He handed me the two new tires.

  “Thank You.”

  “Go put them on.”

  I went down to the bike shop and one of the other brothers helped me change the tires.

  I can easily say that after all the years of riding bikes a whole new world of riding opened up for me. I felt like I was finally having fun on my motorcycle. Now instead of me being way behind the pack I was in it. Right on the tail of the last guy only inches away. I have always been into Star Wars, since I am a little kid, so in my head was the voice of Darth Vader saying, ’Stay On The Leader’.

  We rode all the time, rain or shine seven days a week. It seemed like the guys went faster in the rain. They would start splitting lanes and speed up.

  “Why do you guys go faster when it starts raining?” I asked one of the brothers.

  “Because we want to get home.”

  63

  Days turned into weeks turned into months turned into over a year. I fell into a good schedule. I got a decent job at a place in the Red Light District at a marijuana museum called The Cannabis College.

  I would make glass pipes at a big bench with three other glass artists. The tourists would walk by on a small tour about the history of cannabis, then end up at the glass bench and watch us work for a few minutes. They couldn’t stand there too long, just long enough to make them want to buy a pipe.