Hard Road

by Peter Edwards

  One summer afternoon, Forgette showed up in a cruiser outside Guindon’s Browning Avenue bungalow. According to Guindon, Forgette sucker-punched him and in response he immediately shifted into a fighting stance, popping him with three straight shots and then dropping to the ground on top of him. Forgette’s partner came to his rescue, pulling Guindon to his feet and handcuffing him. He spent the next three months in the Guelph jail that had once held Jack, serving an assault sentence. Upon his release, Guindon returned to work at GM, but the mood had soured considerably. Company executives didn’t like the way he rode his Harley to work instead of a GM car or how he wore his Satan’s Choice crest into the plant. They particularly didn’t like how some GM workers were finding their way into his club. Had they known that a Grande Parisienne headlamp lit the road for Guindon’s Wild Thing, they wouldn’t have liked that either. “They fired me and then they said they’d give me back my job, if I quit riding my bike to work. It was my only way of getting to work. I told them to stuff the job up their ass.”

  Contrary to the popular image of boozing bikers, Guindon defied his father’s example and remained a strict teetotaller. “When we were kids, we used to steal booze from my dad. I was a bad drunk. I knew at a very early age that booze and I don’t mix. I got drunk and stupid. Fighting. I always felt bad the next day,” he said, then hinted at the discipline that allowed him to stay on top of his unruly club: “If you want to get respect from people, you’ve got to respect yourself.”

  Boxing was another rebellion of sorts against his father, who kicked his way through many fights. Bernie never used his feet in a fight. His fists were enough, and he continued to get better with them. He rode the Wild Thing to gyms where greats like George Chuvalo, Clyde Gray and Muhammad Ali trained, such as the Lansdowne Boxing Club in west-end Toronto and Sully’s Boxing Gym at Dupont and Dufferin Streets, downtown.

  At Sully’s, visitors could expand their nostrils with the sweat of the greats and the not-so-greats, as the club didn’t have air conditioning or showers. The air at the Lansdowne Boxing Club wasn’t so pungent, thanks to several live-in cleaners. “There were a lot of old guys staying there overnight,” Guindon said. “They cleaned up.” A sign posted by the pay phone warned that police might be listening in on calls.

  Middleweight boxer Spider Jones had served a two-year stint for robbery at the Millbrook provincial jail, near Peterborough. While inside, he’d heard of Guindon’s tough reputation as a street fighter. “Bernie was a legend in the joint,” he said.

  Jones had an unsettling feeling the first time he saw Guindon ride up to Sully’s on the Wild Thing. He had had some nasty clashes with racist bikers while growing up in Windsor and East Detroit. “There was a lot of shit going on then, back in the 60s, racial stuff,” said Jones, who is black. “I used to fight bikers a lot.” Since getting out of jail, Jones had been living upstairs at the club. “I remember him coming in on his big chopper,” Jones said. “I didn’t know what to expect.”

  Jones was pleasantly surprised. “When I first met Bernie, we just hit it right off,” he said. “Bernie didn’t give a shit about your colour. He was a gentleman. I know he was a biker, but he was a gentleman.” Guindon didn’t fit with the bikers’ beer-swilling image, which Jones also appreciated. “I was a teetotaller too.”

  Sully’s was a pure boxing gym, not a fitness centre with a few punching bags, and Guindon loved it. “You knew you were in a club. It smelled like sweat. You knew there were guys working out in that club.”

  Guindon wanted tough, high-level sparring partners, and Jones was able to fill that role. He showed Guindon a different style of fighting that was becoming popular at the time. “He was totally different, like Muhammad Ali,” Guindon said. “Moved around.”

  Jones outweighed him by twenty pounds and was good enough to win three Golden Glove championships and eventually turn pro. Even with his size advantage, he felt he had to bring his A game into the ring with Guindon or suffer the consequences. “He was a tough guy, a helluva fighter,” Jones said. “He was very serious.” Most of the time, Guindon got the better of him, Jones said. “He was a natural fighter.”

  Jones considered him “a stone warrior” whose power belied his smallish stature. “He had a lot of power and he could wear you down. He liked to hit to the body. He would keep coming at you. He knew how to slip and slide and counter…Boy, he could bring it. He’d get in your kitchen big time. He’d make you feel like you had eaten some bad food.”

  Guindon also spent time in the ring with Clyde Gray, who was moving toward boxing’s top level. “When we used to spar, I hit him with some good shots,” Guindon said. “I didn’t hold my punches. He didn’t like that. He thought he should be the only guy to do the hitting. A lot of pros are like that…He was a jabber. Right hand. An all-round good fighter as far as I was concerned.”

  Long-time Canadian heavyweight champion George Chuvalo was considerably bigger than Guindon, so they didn’t get into the ring together. Still, Chuvalo liked what he saw when Guindon rode in to train. He called Guindon a “good stiff banger,” whose big punch was his left hook. Chuvalo already knew plenty about left hooks, since he possessed a tenderizing one of his own. They both also shared a no-nonsense, in-your-face style. “I don’t remember him going all over the ring like Muhammad Ali,” said Chuvalo, who fought Ali in two epic losses that went the full distance.

  Instead of dancing about, Guindon pressured forward with a non-stop, old-school attack. He was happy to trade punches, with the hope of finding chin space for his left hook. His right hand also had stopping power, but it was the left hook—showcasing a Satan’s Choice tattoo on the bicep—that routinely rendered opponents horizontal. Chuvalo recalled that Guindon sometimes livened things up with a leaping left hook. That punch seemed to come out of nowhere. “Sometimes you’d get lucky with it,” Guindon said. “Usually the other fighter isn’t looking at a left hook to be thrown at him from that distance. He’s sort of relaxed.” Chuvalo remembered the leaping left hook as being a genuine threat, since boxers are conditioned to expect their opponent to lead with a jab. “He landed it with some accuracy,” Chuvalo said. “It’s a rare punch.”

  Like Jones, Chuvalo was impressed that Guindon could be a ferocious competitor and then show genuine respect for his opponent once the punches stopped. Chuvalo maintained that was in the best tradition of his sport. “I think it’s the most dangerous sport,” he said. “There’s a very healthy respect for an opponent.”

  The heavyweight wasn’t impressed only with Guindon’s manner in the ring. “He was a decent guy,” he continued. “He wasn’t a wise guy.” Jones agreed: “He was a good mentor. He helped a lot of people.”

  Sometimes Guindon drove in from Oshawa with Jack, whose later memories were of the hits he took, rather than any he meted out. One particular blow to the midsection from his brother remained sharp in his mind decades later. “He hit me so hard I stood there in shock,” Jack said. “It was like putting your hand in an electrical socket. A shock went down your whole body.”

  When his workouts were over, Guindon often hung around with members of the Satan’s Choice at Webster’s all-night diner at 131 Avenue Road, on the fringes of the Yorkville hippie district. There was cheap food and edgy music like Bob Dylan’s “Gates of Eden” on the tabletop jukeboxes. “They [hippies] were well behaved. You never saw hippies looking for trouble.” On any given night, there was a good chance you’d find bikers from the Vagabonds, Para-Dice Riders and Black Diamond Riders. Often, some of the club leaders would be on hand. “You’d talk to the presidents and try to solve problems,” Guindon said. “If one of our guys was having a problem, you try to settle it before it gets out of hand.”

  Jones sometimes dropped by Webster’s too and said he didn’t have any trouble from the all-white motorcycle club members. “I stayed out of their business. Who am I to judge them?” Guindon, he observed, took a live and let live attitude in public. “He [Guindon] didn’t go around intimidating
people. As long as you didn’t mess with him.”

  One night, Jones was at a Yorkville hangout near Webster’s when half a dozen whites started giving him a rough time. Jones went over to Webster’s, where Guindon was talking with some club members. “I told him what was happening. Bernie came over with some of the guys.” Once they saw Guindon and his friends, the mood dramatically changed and the racist slurs suddenly stopped. “Bernie backed me up that time,” Jones said. “Those guys didn’t want to fight anymore.”

  “He didn’t go with the N-word shit,” Jones said. “Nigger calling. He didn’t like that shit…Bernie wasn’t no racist.”

  Despite his serious training, Guindon continued to smoke two packs of cigarettes a day. He had smoked from the time he was a kid, back when he could steal them from his father’s bootlegging customers. His father tried to force Bernie to stop by making him inhale until he threw up. Bernie refused to be bullied and his smoking continued.

  When smoking caused his fitness to lapse, he could often gut his way through his three- to five-round amateur bouts. If his left hook connected, as it often did, bouts were considerably shorter.

  He blamed a lack of sparring partners and not cigarettes for conditioning problems. “I never was in good shape. I didn’t have nobody to spar with.” Dragging his brother into the ring as a sparring partner was frustrating. “Jack would say, ‘Fuck you, I’m not going to go with you. Don’t hit me.’ [I would say,] ‘Jesus Christ, Jack, what do you think I’m here for? You’re in the ring.’ All I’d do is speed punches at him and he’d still get mad because I hit him.”

  On one trip into Toronto, Jack forgot his athletic cup and he warned Bernie about it before they stepped into the ring. The sparring set went well for a while, until Bernie lost himself in the action. “He came up with an uppercut and caught me square in the balls,” Jack recalled. “I must have laid there for twenty minutes before they took me to the dressing room. Bernie kept on sparring.” Jack was taken to a doctor in Oshawa, where he was given pills and a courtesy athletic supporter. He couldn’t recall his brother ever saying he was sorry but didn’t really expect it anyway. “I was kinda pissed off, but what can I do?”

  Guindon was still training with Monsignor Kelliher in Buffalo as well. One night, he and the priest were in Salt Lake City for a boxing tournament. Guindon was in his club colours and the priest was in his robes.

  “Come on, Bernie,” the priest said. “You’re wearing your colours. Don’t be wearing your colours.”

  “You wear your colours and I’ll wear my colours and we’ll get along just great,” Guindon replied.

  CHAPTER 8

  Pigpen

  I remember my mother saying, “Get under the bed. Dad’s got the shotgun again.”

  HOWARD DOYLE (PIGPEN) BERRY

  In the summer of 1967, Canada’s celebratory centennial year, a biker named Rod MacLeod rode north to Wasaga Beach and announced himself to the Ontario biker world. The resort town on Georgian Bay, a two-hour ride north of Toronto, was a favourite summer spot. Another was Grand Bend on Lake Huron, less than an hour northwest of London. Married bikers tended to keep their wives away from both locales. “A lot of the girls would be there for summer holidays, weekend holidays,” Guindon said. “You’d pick up all the girls and take them riding on your bike.”

  MacLeod impressed Guindon immediately for several reasons. There was his aura of leadership, easy sense of humour and willingness to scrap, even though he wasn’t much bigger than Guindon. His motorcycle chain wrapped around the front forks of his bike in a way that made it easy to detach and call into service—a biker had to be prepared to mix it up in MacLeod’s native Quebec, then home to some 350 clubs. The newcomer struck Guindon as the kind of guy he wanted beside him in a brawl. “He was solid,” Guindon said. “Didn’t take shit from nobody.”

  However, the qualities that Guindon admired in MacLeod weren’t what most bikers first noticed about him. “He was the only black guy I ever saw riding a bike in those days,” Guindon said. “He rode a motorcycle and he liked the idea of a motorcycle club. There were clubs in Montreal, but they wouldn’t let him go because he was black.” MacLeod had clearly been riding for a while and knew what he was doing atop a Harley. “He liked pulling wheelies. He rode a Sportster. Rod was a good rider.”

  MacLeod had a black friend from Montreal called “Jono.” Jono was a bank robber and an enthusiastic one at that. He once robbed two neigh-bouring banks on the same day. As investigators were checking out the first bank, Jono was just down the street, sticking up the second one.

  Guindon was amused when MacLeod would tear into Jono verbally. “He would say, ‘Shut up, you fucking nigger!’ He wasn’t joking.”

  MacLeod told Guindon that he wanted to start a Satan’s Choice chapter in Montreal, and Guindon thought he would be a good addition to the club. MacLeod brought with him twenty-five members who were black and white, French and English. Most of them were in their late teens and early twenties, and a few had jobs as electricians or truck drivers. Some of their girlfriends worked in factories or offices. For his part, MacLeod was an unemployed mechanic who lived in a garage with his dog, Satan.

  Up to that point, all outlaw biker gang members in Canada had been white, and several clubs had specific policies that barred anyone of colour. Guindon sensed an opportunity to scoop up some overlooked talent.

  Like other outlaw bike clubs, members of the Satan’s Choice often tattooed swastikas onto their flesh and wore Nazi helmets and Third Reich memorabilia like Iron Crosses. It wasn’t meant as a political comment. “We just wore that to blow peoples’ minds,” Guindon said. Some people, however, read a little more into the rude fashion statement. One was Martin Weiche, head of Canada’s National Socialist Party—or Nazis.

  Weiche was a wealthy London, Ontario, real estate developer, white supremacist and friend of the Ku Klux Klan, and he liked to burn crosses with like-minded friends. During his youth in Germany, he belonged to the National Socialist Power Drivers Corps, a Nazi bike gang. After fighting for Germany in World War II as a pilot and a soldier, he immigrated to Canada in 1951 and amassed a small fortune in real estate. That gave him the funds to offer Guindon’s Satan’s Choice ten acres of land in an undisclosed location, in exchange for acting as the Canadian Nazi party’s bodyguards.

  Guindon quickly squashed that idea. His Choice members might wear Nazi gear for shock value, but they still considered themselves Canadian patriots.

  —

  On Labour Day weekend in September 1967, Guindon decided to hold what he grandly billed as the first annual Satan’s Choice national convention. The event site was a ramshackle farmhouse in Markham, north of Toronto, and more than three hundred delegates rode in from the club’s chapters in Windsor, Montreal, Preston, Kingston, Ottawa, Peterborough, Hamilton, St. Catharines, Guelph and Oshawa. Guindon’s mother attended and danced with members along to the music of the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, Elvis and whatever else was filling the airwaves on popular radio.

  On the Saturday night of the convention, the Vagabonds rode in as guests of honour. The clubs had made plans for a football game to take place the next day in Toronto’s Riverdale Park. Then, shortly before midnight, a couple dozen Markham police officers stormed the farmhouse. Officers were punched, kicked, spat upon and hit with flying beer bottles. After a “tactical withdrawal,” Markham deputy police chief Robert Hood called on the Ontario Provincial Police (OPP) for reinforcements. Officers from Stouffville, Markham Village, Whitchurch, Vaughan, East Gwillimbury, Richmond Hill and Metro Toronto hastily assembled at the local police office in Buttonville. Then they drove down darkened country roads, with their lights out, to the farmhouse. Once assembled outside, Hood turned on his loudspeaker.

  “This is the police,” he announced. “You are surrounded. Come out with your hands in the air.”

  No one came out.

  Then officers smashed through the farmhouse’s front and rear doors. Bikers leapt through window
s to escape. One punched a cop hard and fled across a field. Others crawled on their bellies to freedom. Another curled up in an unlit basement furnace and waited for three hours until police left. Four bikers piled into a Cadillac before realizing that none of them had the keys. A cop coaxed them out by brandishing a tear gas grenade next to a cracked window and announcing, “Come out, or I’ll pull the pin and this comes in.” Other cops took billy clubs to bike lights and deliberately scraped custom paint jobs.

  The evening could have gone far worse for the Choice. Fewer than a hundred delegates were at the farmhouse when police arrived. “Most had driven to Yorkville to get something to eat and pick up some fresh girls,” a biker later told the Toronto Daily Star.

  Police confiscated marijuana, two hundred dollars and a hundred cases of beer, a sawed-off shotgun, baseball bats, spike-studded belts, bicycle and saw chains, axe handles, knives, brass knuckles, a whip, switchblades and a .32 revolver, which was found hidden inside a television console. They also scooped up a price list that stated potato chips and pop were fifteen cents, while beer and condoms cost twenty-five cents.

  Among those arrested were Guindon, then twenty-five, and his nineteen-year-old second wife, Barbara Ann. Also arrested were Reg Hawke, thirty-four, of Oshawa (he of the dangerous canes), and Howard Doyle Berry, twenty-six, of Peterborough. Berry would later become infamous under his biker name of “Pigpen.” In a world that celebrated uniqueness and living life on its own terms, Pigpen was already something of a legend.

  Few bikers knew that Pigpen had once been a successful Buddy Holly impersonator or that he had worked as a chef at Toronto’s posh Royal York hotel. Fewer still knew of his horrific upbringing. “I remember my mother saying, ‘Get under the bed. Dad’s got the shotgun again,’ ” he later said.

  Pigpen’s dad never did blow off anyone’s head, but his parents inflicted emotional damage on him that psychologists and psychiatrists would struggle to repair in later years. By the time he was five years old, his father had moved out of their Peterborough-area home, and for several years, Pigpen was the only boy in a family of girls and women with plenty of grudges against men. He was often confined to the basement, where he spent his nights in fear of demons that might discover and torture him. Real-life people weren’t much better. “I lived half the time in the basement on a dirt floor and a rubber sheet. I got scared that the bogeyman would get me. She [my mother] used to make me go to church all of the time. I used to piss the bed scared.”