Gods of Mischief (21 page)

I was clearing tree branches up in Orange County one day when I cut into a power line and electrocuted myself. Got zapped so hard my thumb nearly blew off. Doctors had to stick it back on using reconstructive surgery. Anyway, there was one black man on the work crew who I pointedly never spoke to unless it was to call him a nigger whenever he walked past. Got so bad the job foreman took me aside and warned he'd fire my ass if I didn't knock it off.

Turns out my heart had been weakened pretty good by that electrocution, not to mention all the coke and meth I'd been doing, because one day while on the job my ticker said “fuck you” and quit. I collapsed on the ground in cardiac arrest.

Only one man on that job site came to my aid.

Guess who?

He pumped my chest and gave me mouth-to-mouth. For all intents and purposes I was a dead man, but he brought me back to life again.

And I despised him for it.

Hard as it might be to fathom, I couldn't get past the fact he'd put his goddamn lips on mine. My first day back to work, the black man who had saved my life walked past.

I called him nigger.

And the depths of my unreasoned hatred didn't end there.

One summer night, when I was young, drunk and stupid, I got into a violent argument with a twenty-something black man outside a club in San Bernardino. I'd instigated the confrontation with some racist remark, and when he took offense I beat him down and knocked him straight out.

And then, in a life filled with shameful memories, I did the one thing I'm most ashamed of. I flipped that unconscious man onto his back, straddled his body, tore open his shirt and carved a Nazi swastika into his chest with my buck knife.

Oh, yes, I did.

I've never ended a human being's life. It's a goddamn miracle I haven't. But that night in San Bernardino I honestly thought I'd killed a man . . . and it didn't bother me in the least. I left him for dead in the parking lot and went on with my life. Yes, sir. I thought I was a real badass motherfucker after that. Even got me some double lightning bolts tattooed on my arm to commemorate the occasion—the Nazi symbol for the Aryan Brotherhood.

Christ Almighty, the things I did in hate's name. I still have nightmares . . . and not a million Our Fathers, Hail Marys or I'm sorrys will ever make them go away.

That Las Vegas match,
like most of my other fights on the circuit, didn't last long. I whipped that black cowboy, and Magnum and I walked out of that shit-strewn rodeo arena with thousands of dollars stuffed in our pockets. With that kind of cash coming my way, I put any thought of retirement on hold and signed on for another bout in Arizona, now as the heavy favorite.

Somewhere outside Phoenix, on a lawn manicured like a golf course fairway, I faced my next victim—a dude who was smaller than I was but built like a fireplug. Just seconds into the match, my opponent caught me with a blow to the jaw that shook me. I was surprised by the force behind that punch but figured I'd taken his best shot.

I figured wrong.

The fireplug followed with a left-right combination that I walked my cocky ass straight into. The first broke my jaw and scrambled my brain, the second knocked me down. I wasn't completely out, but I sure as hell couldn't go on. It was match over.

I'd lost my first fight.

A few months later my bareknuckle career ended in a hotel boxing ring in Tahoe. My opponent was an Asian dude who was just as good with his feet as I was. When I realized I was meeting my match, I did
something I'd never done before—I tried to take him out for good. I avoided a roundhouse kick, slipped inside, and struck the man with a concussive blow to the chest.

And it nearly killed him.

Fire Department EMTs rushed into the ring and put the paddles to him. A helicopter was called in, and they airlifted the man out. He didn't die, but he came damn close—and it scared the shit out of me.

Tahoe was my last fight. It just wasn't worth ending another human being for a few lousy bucks.

So that was the
opponent those unsuspecting Vagos prospects were lining up to battle one-on-one behind the Screaming Chicken Saloon. Big Roy and the Hemet crew knew about my brawling past, but no one else did . . . certainly not the poor bastards who were about to walk into an ambush.

Quickie John sent his first gladiator, one of the Norco boys, into the ring against Shotgun Rowe. I waited until he was close then . . . WHAP! WHAP! WHAP!

The other prospects had to help him off the ground.

The next challenger stepped forward looking more nervous than the last.

He went down even faster.

“Hey, Quickie John,” said Tramp, pulling out his wallet. “How 'bout me and you bet this next one.”

“Fuck you, Tramp,” Quickie shot back.

Everyone went quiet, wondering what Tramp would do next. What he did was cancel the rest of the show and slap Quickie John with a thousand-dollar fine for mouthing off.

As the crowd dispersed, a familiar voice called out, “Hey, prospect!”

I turned to find 37 wearing an ear-to-ear grin. Blackie stood next to him, smoking a joint and giving me a thumbs-up. I approached timidly,
wondering what wild-goose chase that old-timer was about to send me on next. But instead the forever brother laughed heartily and slapped my shoulder.

“Jesus, boy. Don't look so worried,” chuckled 37. “I ain't gonna fuck with you.”

“I wouldn't fuck with him either,” added Bubba as he joined the group. “You got some real fast hands there, brother.”

“He sure does,” agreed Blackie, then he shouted at Quickie John as he passed, “Don't this boy have fast hands, Quickie?”

The Norco P scowled and kept walking.

“How long you been prospecting?” Blackie asked me.

“Four or five months, I guess.”

“What's up with that? Most guys nowadays are patched in already.”

“Well, least he's coming in the right way,” offered Bubba, passing the joint along to Blackie.

“No doubt,” agreed Blackie before taking a long drag. “None of that backdoor shit. Man's paying his dues.”

I know it shouldn't have mattered, but I was flattered those boys had taken an interest in me. We talked a few minutes more until my eyes fell on Blackie's belt buckle. It was a large and impressive-looking thing, handcrafted in stamped silver and featuring Loki, the red devil himself, etched in the center between the words
Vagos
and
So. Cal.

“Great buckle, man,” I said to Blackie. “How can I get one like that?”

“You earn it, prospect.” He grinned.

Blackie was a great guy. He'd been a hell-raiser in his early days, going to war against rival clubs just like most of the old-timers had. But age had mellowed the man. He unbuckled his belt and handed it to me for a closer look. There were three names scratched into the buckle's backside: Gator, Gargoyle and Harpo.

“Previous owners,” explained Blackie. “That buckle's been handed down from one Vago to the next.”

“No shit. Very cool.”

“Only five like it in the world,” Blackie said proudly.

“I'm gonna get me one just like this,” I told him, handing it back.

“Hell, prospect,” laughed the forever brother as he threaded the belt back around his waist, “just keep doing what you're doing and maybe someday you'll have mine.”

T
he months I spent as a prospect with the Hemet chapter were some of the most humiliating and frustrating of my life. Talk about miserable. I was over forty years old and I had a bunch of assholes calling me for stupid shit all hours of the day and night just because those patches on their backs said they could.

I washed their bikes. Did their errands. Lent money that never came back. Had my company employees mowing their lawns free of charge. Hell, once I even scooped dog shit out of Big Roy's yard. Whenever the Vagos called, whatever they wanted, I was expected to immediately drop what I was doing and get on it. Jenna was all over my case about it too.

“Big Roy called. He wants his dick sucked” was one of her favorite lines.

I was being run ragged, and my tree-trimming business was suffering. It was goddamn ridiculous. But the height of absurdity was the day Big Roy had a hankering for pizza and wanted me to pick one up for him.

In Oregon.

I figured Roy was just busting my balls, that he would never actually make me ride two thousand miles to fetch a pizza. But no. The motherfucker was serious.

“Put on your cape and ride, Superman,” Jenna sniped as I threw on my cut and headed out the door.

I climbed aboard the Harley and took off on an epic pizza delivery. Up the Pacific Coast, through the day and into the night I rode. Sometime after midnight, saddle sore and dog tired, I pulled up at an address way out in East Bumfuck, Oregon.

I knocked. A Vago answered.

“I'm here to pick up a pizza for Big Roy,” I said, as if that somehow made perfect sense.

“You George?” he wanted to know.

No, shit-for-brains. I'm the other asshole who just rode sixteen hours for a fucking pizza.

But I didn't say that.

“Yeah, that would be me,” was the response I chose instead.

“Well, Big Roy don't want pizza no more,” the Vago said. “Now he wants a Monster drink.”

I could've murdered the sonofabitch.

But I didn't. I spared his miserable life, grabbed the can and rode back through the night and into the following afternoon to deliver Big Roy his fucking energy drink. And once I'd finished that fool's errand, I took a long, hard look in the mirror and asked myself if this undercover gig was really worth the bullshit that came with it.

I wasn't so sure. Not anymore.

That night I phoned Uncle Johnny Law and vented.

“I really don't know how much more of this I can take,” I told him. “They're never gonna give me that goddamn patch.”

“Don't fixate on the patch,” John warned. “Keep your focus on the evidence.”

But I was burning out, going through what John called “patch fever.” Prospecting was such a grind that all you wanted to do was make it
stop, and the only way to make it stop was to get patched. But there was danger in that mind-set. Informants suffering from the fever often lost focus, concentrating so hard on getting the patch that the mission became almost secondary.

“John, I'm telling you I can't do this. I'm busted, man. I've got no life. They've got me doing these stupid-ass errands, and I'm sick of it.”

“I've been there,” he replied. “I understand it's hard. But it won't last forever. You're tired right now, but you'll get through this phase, and once you do they'll ease up.”

“I don't know, man,” I said, discouraged. “These assholes might not ever let me out of this fuckin' phase. It's too good a deal. Todd's been withdrawing money from my wallet like I'm Wells Fuckin' Fargo.”

The nightmare continued a few weeks later when Terry the Tramp decreed another Vagos run to Buffalo Bill's Casino in Primm, this time to celebrate His Royal Highness's birthday. It was mid-July and the temperature was cresting one hundred degrees on that desert highway to State Line, cooking the landscape in a redbrick oven. The pack of Harleys, which included bikers from several Vagos chapters outside Hemet, pulled off the road at one point so everyone could take a water break and stretch their legs. As I'm leaning against my Touring Classic, squinting down the shimmering highway, I noticed a stumpy little mirage coming my way.

Big Doug Brown.

It was Quickie John, the Norco P.

Man, I couldn't stomach that roly-poly bastard, and I'm pretty sure the bastard felt the same way about me. I'd clocked his vice president's nephew, beat up one of his hang-arounds and cost the man a
thousand bucks in fines, and now he was dogging my ass every chance he got.

“Hey, prospect!” Quickie barked at me from his chubby pie hole.

“What's up, Quickie John?”

He gestured toward his motorcycle.

“My bike needs washing.”

That asshole had pulled this same stunt a few weeks earlier, and Big Roy had taken me aside and laid down the law.

“My P doesn't want me washing any bikes but Hemet's,” I told him.

“Fuck your fuckin' P,” barked Quickie. “I told you to wash my bike. Now get to it.”

Quickie John was big on getting respect. He wasn't so hot on dishing it out. But I kept my mouth shut and went looking for water in the middle of the fucking desert. After scrounging it from a few sympathetic Vagos, I returned with a full bottle and wiped the road grime from Quickie's Harley. After I'd finished, and before I could get away, the sonofabitch called me back.

“Where the fuck you going?! You ain't done yet!”

Quickie took the bottle of soda he'd been drinking and slowly dumped it over his gas tank.