by George Rowe
With Old Joe at my side, business took off. We began adding new clients and making money. I bought a new pickup and replaced the wood chipper, leased a bucket truck and hired more full-time employees. None of them midgets.
Of course, Joe wasn’t always employee-of-the-month material. I showed up at a job site one day and found him drunk on his feet, trying to move leaves with the wrong end of a rake. Even so, I liked and trusted the guy. And despite the drinking (or maybe because of it) we bonded as brothers . . . just a couple of screwed-up kindred spirits.
I banged on the door of Old Joe’s trailer. When he opened it, I hoisted a half pint of vodka I’d bought on the way back from Van Nuys.
“Can I come in? Got something important to talk about.” I followed Joe into the trailer, and he tucked himself in behind the small dining table. I set the bottle on top, then grabbed two plastic cups from beside a stainless-steel sink.
“These clean?”
“Clean as they’re gonna get,” said Joe.
I set the cups on the table and poured them half full of vodka.
“You know how pissed off I’ve been about the Vagos,” I remarked as I finished pouring.
“No, not really,” said Joe. “Lately I don’t know what to think.”
“I’m gonna explain that, partner. I just want you to know I’ve decided to do something about those bastards.”
Joe lifted his glass. “That right? Like what?”
“Like work with the feds to take ’em down.”
Joe lowered his glass without drinking.
“I’m going undercover, buddy,” I told him. “Gonna work for the ATF. That’s where I was this afternoon, over in Van Nuys signing papers.”
Joe’s eyes remained fixed on the table. I could almost read the man’s thoughts. My buddy was certainly no fan of the Vagos, but he absolutely despised the federal government that had taken his family home.
“This is a big fuckin’ deal,” I continued as I parked myself on the fold-out bed. “You can’t tell anyone, understand?”
Joe refused to look at me.
“Well, c’mon, man. What do you think?” I finally asked.
My friend lifted his head. “What do I think?” He raised his glass in mock tribute. “Happy trails, motherfucker. Have a good life.”
He tilted the cup and drained the booze.
I wasn’t sure what response I expected from my friend, but in hindsight I suppose “Happy trails, motherfucker” made the most sense. Joe was smarter than I was—smart enough to realize that sooner or later he’d be putting his life in harm’s way by sticking with his old pal George.
“Do you know what you’d be getting me into?” he asked, leaning forward with an intensity I’d never seen before. “Do you even know what you’re getting yourself into? Don’t be stupid, George. You’ve got a good life, brother. A nice business. Why would you risk it?”
I understood the man’s point. Yes, there was a lot to lose, but I had no intention of letting my life slip away. Despite John Carr’s warning, I still held some deluded notion that it would be “mission accomplished” after three to six months undercover. I’d just slip out the back and nobody would ever know it was ol’ George Rowe who took the Vagos down.
“Partner, with or without you I’m gonna do this thing,” I told him. “You can go your own way if that’s what you really want. No hard feelings. I just wanted you to know what’s going on, that’s all. I figure I owe you that much.”
Joe grabbed the bottle and poured himself another. He was done talking, so I left him in the trailer to think things through, then I climbed into my truck. I had to get over to Johnny’s Restaurant, where Christie, my girlfriend at the time, was waiting. She was the daughter of a notorious motorcycle outlaw named Blind Buck, a man who was dealing drugs in Hemet back when I was known as the U-Haul Bandit. Blind Buck was the P of the Mescaleros, one of the oldest biker clubs in town. A big bruiser, over six feet tall and north of three hundred pounds, who viewed life through thick, Coke bottle lenses.
Christie’s old man might have been half blind, but he was also a vicious, drug-dealing sonofabitch who would stick a knife in you if you so much as looked at him cross-eyed. People in town were scared of Buck, and I was warned, more than once, to watch my back, because the big bastard was out to nail me for dealing on his home turf.
Funny thing was, for a dude with a tough-guy reputation, that big Mescalero was just a big ol’ momma’s boy. Bucky’s mommy even paid his rent. If not for her, I don’t think that outlaw would have had a friend in the world. He hadn’t done a lick of jail time because everyone else had done it for him, earning Blind Buck a long list of enemies through the years. The man lived in a constant state of paranoia, seldom leaving his house because he felt certain someone out there in the big bad world was just itching to get even.
I had no sympathy for that brutal bastard, though. Buck ruined lives. It must have pissed him off to no end when I showed up years later to date his little girl.
As I turned onto Highway 74 and pulled up to a stoplight, a horn honked from behind. I recognized the face in the rearview. It was Billy, a punk I’d known since he was in diapers. I used to sell methamphetamine to his parents before his dad transitioned into heroin and died when his heart quit. Now Billy was following in his old man’s footsteps.
I pulled over, hopped from the truck and walked back to say hello. When I got to the car, I recognized the girl sitting in the passenger’s seat. She was the Hemet fire chief’s daughter, a twenty-year-old beauty on her way to an early grave. I’d seen her around town from time to time; we had mutual friends, and I knew she was the mother of Billy’s year-old baby girl. I also knew another poorly kept secret: the girl was a hard-core heroin addict. In fact, with the exception of a few timeouts for detox, she’d been slamming the shit since age sixteen—every single day, four years straight.
“How you doing, Jenna?” I asked her.
“I’m okay, George,” she said cheerlessly. But that pretty young thing didn’t look okay—and she wasn’t looking so pretty that day either. You can tell an addict by their pinpoint pupils and those dark circles under the eyes from dehydration. The sucked-up cheeks told me Jenna was also a heavy meth user. Scabs on her skin and the faded, yellowish bruises told me something else.
That girl was being abused.
We soon parted company, and I was on my way to the Lady Luck again. A few days later Billy would be locked behind bars at the Southwest Detention Center in Temecula, charged with assault and battery. I wouldn’t bother mentioning any of this if not for the fact that the young lady who put him there—that beautiful young heroin addict—was about to impact my life in ways I could never imagine . . . and for years to come.
That night at Johnny’s Restaurant I was drinking with Christie when some long-haired dude with a shitty disposition began making noise at the same pool table where my friend David had made his fatal mistake months before. This gum-flapping twenty-something was drinking hard and running his mouth harder, boasting loudly that no one should mess with him because his uncle was vice president of Green Nation’s Norco chapter.
The Norco Vagos, based an hour’s drive northwest in the territory known as Horsetown USA, billed themselves as the clean and sober chapter. Members were expected to say no to drugs and alcohol at all times, which was a joke, because Quickie John, the P of that group, later got nailed with a pound of dope.
I was familiar with Quickie and his reputation as a man who could move forty bucks out of your wallet faster than you could blink, but I’d never met his second-in-command, the Norco vice president and uncle of this asshole who was talking trash that night at Johnny’s. I decided to ignore the kid and let him run his mouth, but when my girlfriend got fed up and told him to shut the fuck up, things got heated in a hurry.
“Fuck you, cunt,” he snapped at her from the pool table.
Well, that’s all that woman needed to hear. Christie was a biker’s child, wilder than I was, and h
ad a hair-trigger temper to boot. That girl didn’t take shit from anyone.
The two of them started blasting verbal broadsides at each other across the restaurant, each one nastier than the last. As a hang-around I wasn’t supposed to throw down with anyone unless I was given the go-ahead from a patched member. There were a handful of patches in Johnny’s that night, but not one of those boys had the least bit of interest in defending my girlfriend, so I took it upon myself to silence that loud-mouthed punk.
Here’s something you should know about me. The only time I remember crying tears of sorrow was the day my old man keeled over and died on my lap. I was ten years old. From that day on, if there were tears in my eyes it meant just one thing: somebody was about to get hurt. Guess you might say it was the equivalent of Freight Train’s silver tooth.
I was blinking back tears as I crossed to the pool table and stood watching that long-haired sonofabitch line up his next pool shot. Just before he struck the cue ball, I snatched it away.
“What the fuck?” he growled, bolting upright.
“What’d you call my old lady?” I said to him.
“You mean the cunt?” he spat, gesturing toward Christie.
POW! I hit him in the head with my arm cast. The kid staggered but didn’t fall.
“Motherfucker!” he screamed. “Do you know who I am?!”
BAM! I plastered him again, and this one finally shut him up. Whoever the fuck he was.
To the casual observer, hitting an opponent upside the head with hard plaster might have seemed a bit unsportsmanlike, but when you were confronting an angry drunk wielding a cue stick and you only had one good hand, you used what you had.
It was a lesson learned through years of hard and painful experience. This was not my first rodeo. I fought near a hundred men as both a street brawler and underground bareknuckle fighter—and I was in all kinds of battles against all kinds of opponents. When I wasn’t wearing an arm cast, I was an open-handed fighter, quicker than most. Striking open-handed kept the muscles loose and covered more area on a headshot than a clenched fist did. This was a technique used by Freight Train to great effect, but I’d learned the principles much earlier from a gentleman my dad had befriended during the Korean War then brought over to the States fourteen years later.
His name was Mr. Lee, and after my old man divorced Mother, that Korean followed us up to the California Cascades to teach me what he described as “kung fu”—sort of a Karate Kid, Mr. Miyagi wax on–wax off kind of deal.
From age five to nine, I studied with the master right up until he got booted out of the country for a long-expired visa. Every day I walked over to his house or he came over to mine, and we’d practice for two hours. Those four years of instruction, financed by my terminally ill father, were just one more way the old man prepared me for a future without him.
Mr. Lee drilled me relentlessly in the martial arts, and, man, I really hated it. And who could have blamed me? I was a kid living in paradise with a dirt bike to ride, woods to hunt and lakes to fish, and I was being forced to endure endless pushups and repetitive moves with some middle-aged Korean dude. What I failed to understand at the time was how much all that instruction would later come into play as I fought my way through life.
And believe me, I fought plenty.
Over the following days word spread through the Vagos that I was in serious shit with the Norco chapter for bashing their VP’s nephew with my cast. And it wasn’t like I could avoid those fuckers either. Big Roy was throwing a coming-out party that very same weekend—Hemet’s first sponsored club run in the town of Winchester. Norco was planning to be there, as was the uncle of the punk I’d knocked senseless.
I don’t mind saying I was concerned. I figured there was a better-than-even chance the Norco boys were planning to jump my ass, especially since I was still a Vagos hang-around waiting for an invitation to prospect. My gut instincts were shouting “Run, motherfucka, run!” and my instincts were seldom wrong. They’d served me pretty well through the years, warning me away from some pretty hairy situations. But this time I was ignoring those urgent whispers . . . mainly because I felt I had no choice.
“I’ve got some bad vibes about this, partner,” I told Old Joe as we worked a tree-trimming job the day before the run. “Just feels like something’s coming.”
“What do you want me to tell you?” said Joe, who’d been giving me the silent treatment ever since I’d shared the big secret. “This is what you wanted, isn’t it?”
I could see Joe’s cold shoulder wasn’t the one to cry on, so I shut up and began strapping the climbing gaffs to my calves.
“Alright, you want my advice?” blurted Joe just as I was about to start up the tree. “It’s pretty simple. Get out while you can. You don’t have to do this.”
He was right, of course. I could have walked away and saved myself a lifetime of headaches, but that wasn’t who I was—it wasn’t how I was wired. I was raised never to quit a fight, and I didn’t intend to start now. It’s like my adoptive father, Pat, used to say; “Boy, if you come home from school with your ass whipped, I’m gonna whip yours.”
That was the kind of sage advice that made me a little hellion as a kid and kept me fighting through high school and beyond. It didn’t help that I was a scrawny little bastard either. Before a late growth spurt, I was the smallest kid at Hemet High. Combine my height insecurities with the fact I could barely read or write and you had yourself an illiterate punk with a me-against-the-world mentality, a little-man Napoleon complex and four years of instruction from a Korean kung fu master.
Bottom line was, little Georgie didn’t play well with others, and if you didn’t like it, fuck you.
I was already volatile anyway, constantly picking fights with my classmates, but my anger kicked up another notch when I was separated from the rest of the student body and thrown into something called Opportunity Class, widely considered a classroom for “retards.”
In those days the principal of Hemet High School hated my guts—understandable, given my antisocial behavior—and it seemed Mr. Vanderwater was hauling me into his office to suspend my ass every other week.
I was suspended for blowing up a lavatory toilet with a cherry bomb (not guilty, Your Honor), for screwing a senior girl in a second-floor stairwell (guilty as charged) and twice for smoking pot on school grounds (which never happened). It was true I hung out with the potheads—I preferred hanging with those laid-back dudes—but toking weed made me sick to my stomach, so I stuck with cigarettes and screwed my lungs instead.
Principal Vanderwater couldn’t have cared less. The man wanted me expelled and was willing to do just about anything to make it happen, even if it meant bending the truth for the greater good. Twice he lied to Pat and Dodi, telling them I was smoking pot during school hours, and twice Pat punished me for those lies with a beating. To make sure I stayed out of trouble, he’d drop by the school during lunch period to keep an eye on me.
One afternoon while doing his usual lunchtime surveillance, Pat’s pager went off. When he dialed back the number he found himself talking to Principal Vanderwater, who told him I’d just been caught smoking weed again.
It was more bullshit from the principal, and now Pat knew he was being lied to.
Furious, he stormed into the school yard, grabbed me by the scruff of the neck and headed straight for the school office with a bunch of my classmates in tow. They’d heard Pat’s marching orders; “Either you kick that bastard’s lying ass or I’ll kick yours.”
I couldn’t believe my ears. I’d been given the green light to waylay Principal Vanderwater. We turned into the office, leaving my classmates outside in the hall gawking through the glass, then waited at the counter for Vanderwater to appear. When he finally did, he got the surprise of the school year when I hit him with every bit of strength I could muster.
As you can imagine, that was the punch heard round the halls of Hemet High for a long time. The police were called and Principal Van
derwater threatened to have me prosecuted. Must have changed his mind, though, because he took the matter to the school board and got me thrown out of Hemet High instead. A year later, sometime during junior year, I dropped out of school for good. That had to be a glorious day for Vanderwater. Man must’ve thrown himself one helluva party.
There would be many anxious moments during my time undercover, moments when I honestly wondered if I’d ever come home again. Countless times I thought of walking away, or bent the ear of the Man upstairs, asking Him to keep me safe. But heading for Winchester that day for the Hemet chapter’s first annual run was the first time I’d felt a real sense of danger and self-doubt.
Despite those feelings, I wasn’t about to bail on my commitment to Hemet, the ATF and myself . . . I wasn’t going home with my ass whipped. Because the hard truth was, I was a forty-two-year-old sinner who’d never done a damn thing he was particularly proud of in life. And I saw that mission as my once-in-a-lifetime chance to finally succeed at something worthwhile . . . something I actually believed in.
I had to keep going no matter what.
So there I was in the parking lot of a Winchester biker bar, helping set up folding chairs for the big Vagos bash, when the Norco chapter came rumbling in on their Harley-Davidsons. You could always spot those Norco boys, man. The patches sewn on their cuts, awarded in recognition of services rendered to the club, always looked brand-new and ready to wear. That’s because Quickie John, the Norco P, handed them out for practically any occasion. He thought they made his chapter look cool.
Perfect church attendance? Get a patch.
Eat all your vegetables? Get a patch.
Wipe your ass properly? Sure, here’s a patch for that too.
As soon as those Vagos dismounted they approached Big Todd, who pointed in my direction. I kept unfolding chairs but watched them coming from the corner of my eye—maybe six or seven of them, trailed by that smart-mouthed punk I’d popped at Johnny’s. I figured this was it. I was about to get gang jumped.
“You George Rowe?” said the patched Vagos leading the group.