Gods of Mischief (2 page)

This one broke my arm.

Had my old man been alive, I know how he would have handled things. When my uncle back in the San Fernando Valley gave me a black eye, dad gave him two. When a perfect stranger in a Burbank mall slapped me upside the head for mouthing off, my father lifted him up and dropped him on his skull.

“Son,” he said as he knelt before me, “don't ever let anyone push you around.”

Later in life I took Dad's advice to heart, but when you're an eleven-year-old
getting pounded by a grown man, it's easier said than done. For now my best defense against my adoptive father was vaulting the six-foot backyard fence whenever he was after me.

“That boy sure can jump,” Pat would boast to his drinking buddies.

Tough as he was, though, my new dad was no match for his 250-pound wife. Pat might have worn the pants in the family, but no one messed with Mama Cass—that's what I called her when she was safely out of earshot. Pat came through the door shitfaced one night and mouthed off as his wife was in the middle of ironing. Big mistake. Dodi pinned him to the wall and ironed her hubby's chest. Swear to God, that woman had a heart as big as her appetite, but piss her off and you'd best run for cover. Whatever Dodi had in her hands you'd get clobbered with. Garden tools, spatulas, skillets—you name it, she'd wing it. I saw more spaghetti on the walls than in the pots.

In the back bedroom of the house, my alcoholic mother was shacking up with Pat's brother, John, the town drunk with a heart of gold. Down the hall lived my little sister, Lin Ann, and my older sister, Carol, fifteen years old, knocked up and soon to be married. In the basement slept my adoptive brother, Keith, a machinist in town who was good friends with a couple of biker brothers from the neighborhood—one who rode with the Vagos Motorcycle Club, and the other a patched member of the Hells Angels, named Freight Train. Vagos and Angels mix like oil and water, but in the brothers' case blood was thicker than club loyalty.

Keith's half brother, Gary, the only family member missing from that Hemet nuthouse, was a twenty-four-year-old roughneck who'd lost his foot in a Texas oil field accident. As gangrene crept in, the doctors chased the infection up his leg, amputating it one chunk at a time. Wasn't long before the poor bastard lost that entire limb, followed by his wife and kids. Homesick and depressed, Gary came limping home on a prosthetic leg, rented a house with Freight Train and got busy drinking himself to death.

Freight Train had earned his road name with the Hells Angels for
good reason. The man was a four-hundred-pound behemoth with hands the size of baseball mitts. His hair was long, his beard wild, and he had a silver-plated front tooth that gleamed when he smiled. And when Freight Train smiled, it meant someone was about to get hurt.

God's truth, I once saw that man-mountain flip a police cruiser on its top—with the cop still inside. Another time he took on a platoon's worth of shitfaced marines outside a bar in Winchester, California. Ol' Freight Train was outnumbered and surrounded, but then came that slow smile, out popped the silver tooth, and down went nine of those jarheads. It took a pool stick punched through his gut to finally derail him, but by then the damage was done. For his one-man assault on the United States Marine Corps the government charged Freight Train with—I shit you not—destruction of federal property . . . a charge they later dismissed.

I earned a few bucks mowing Gary's lawn back then, and watched as motorcycle outlaws from across the valley come thundering in on their Harley-Davidsons to raise a little hell. These were tough mothers—many of them Vietnam War vets searching for the same camaraderie they'd found in the service.

They wore patches on their backs with club names like Mescaleros, Hessians and Hangmen, and boasted of being “one percenters,” the outlaw's badge of honor since 1947. That was the year a bunch of shitfaced bikers “rioted” at a motorcycle rally in Hollister, California—an event made famous by Marlon Brando in the 1953 biker flick
The Wild One
—then got slammed in the press as “the deviant one percent” of an otherwise law-abiding motorcycling public.

Over in San Bernardino, the Hells Angels took that as a backhanded compliment and began wearing a “1%” patch on their jackets, identifying themselves as outsiders who followed nobody's rules but their own. Many of the bikers who hung at my brother's place wore that diamond-shaped badge of honor, and it wasn't long before I was ditching the lawn mower and sneaking inside to be nearer those larger-than-life characters.

Sure, they sometimes got pissed off and ran my scrawny ass down the road, but I'd always worm my way back in. Eventually I was adopted as a kid brother and came to know their ironclad code of loyalty and commitment, which placed the brotherhood above all else: above jobs, above friends . . . even above their own families. To me those bikers were modern-day musketeers, saluting each other with bottles of beer while shouting, “Fuck with one, you fuck with all!”

FW1-UFWA: the universal battle cry of the motorcycle outlaw.

But by the late 1970s, the beer-guzzling, gang-brawling characters I'd grown up with were a vanishing breed in the San Jacinto Valley. Tired of the life and increasing pressure from law enforcement, outlaws like Freight Train had become more interested in raising families than raising hell. Of course, turf-pissing contests were still fought over the patches on their backs, but with the old dogs slowing down and the young pups lying low, the roar of straight pipes quieted in the valley, and a biker flying his colors became a rare sight on the streets of Hemet for almost two decades.

Then the century turned and a new, more aggressive generation of outlaw rolled into town, one pumped on steroids, fueled by testosterone and always looking for a brawl.

J
ohnny's Restaurant was a bar and steak joint fronting Florida Avenue, also known as California Highway 74, which cuts through the heart of downtown Hemet. To enter Johnny's you parked at the rear of the building and came in through the back door. There were no street-side windows, so it took a moment for your eyes to adjust to the dim interior.

Wasn't much to see, though. Once you squeezed past the narrow bar, the room widened into a dining area of worn carpet and ripped cushions. Sitting down was an adventure; you never knew when a spring might poke you in the ass. But despite its seedy appearance and musty smell, Johnny's was popular with the locals. Cheap beer and thick steaks had a lot to do with that.

A few weeks before he vanished forever, an old friend of mine was at the restaurant to celebrate. I'd known David back at Hemet High right up until my junior year, when I dropped out of school. Through the years we kept in touch, catching up on old news whenever we bumped into each other around town. He was a family man with two young kids
and a pregnant wife, and that night at Johnny's the couple had gathered with friends and family for a baby shower.

It would be the last time many of them would see David alive.

Vagos logo.

After gifts were opened, the father-to-be headed for the empty pool table and grabbed a cue stick. And that's where he was, mucking around and minding his business, when four outlaw bikers entered through the restaurant's back door. They wore sleeveless denim vests called “cuts,” with the devil-like image of Loki, the Norse god of mischief, sewn on the back. Beneath Loki was a bottom rocker that read CALIFORNIA, while above, in bold letters, was the name VAGOS. These full-patch outlaws were flying the colors of the Vagos Motorcycle Club, a gang known throughout California as “Green Nation.”

In the early 1960s, around the time I was still crapping my diapers, a group of biker misfits calling themselves the Psychos spread from Southern California's Temescal Canyon into the city of Riverside and beyond. With balls fit for a wheelbarrow, they even took root in San Bernardino, right in the Hells Angels' own backyard, sparking a turf feud that continues to this day.

As membership multiplied, the Psychos adopted a new name—Los Vagos, Spanish for “The Vagabonds” or “The Tramps”—and took green as their signature color. By the time Green Nation spread into Hemet, chapters had been established in Nevada, Arizona, Hawaii and Mexico, and the Vagos had become the largest and one of the most violent of California's biker gangs—a grab bag of weekend rebels, gearheads, ex-cons and violent sociopaths engaged in a whole laundry
list of criminal activities, from gun and drug trafficking to assault and murder.

Leading his posse into Johnny's Restaurant that night was Big Roy Compton, a thirty-four-year-old tattoo artist with a muscular frame covered in ink, from the VAGOS MC on the back of his shaved and goateed head down to his steel-toed riding boots.

The president, or “P,” of the Hemet chapter, was a convicted felon who once made his living transporting illegals, picking up Mexicans after they'd crossed the border and running them as far as Arizona. He and his old lady used some of those profits to bankroll a tattoo parlor in Hemet called the Lady Luck, which they opened right next door to a Baskin-Robbins. Little tykes would be licking ice cream cones on the sidewalk while large tattooed men stood nearby cutting farts and smoking weed.

Big Roy first hooked up with the Vagos in the nearby city of Corona, where the chapter was led by Mumbles, a wild man who could fling a knife into a knothole at fifty paces. But Roy had bigger ambitions. He wanted a Vagos franchise of his own. According to club bylaws, that required at least five warm bodies and the blessing of the Vagos international president, a potbellied gnome named Terry the Tramp, who, for sixteen years, had lorded over Green Nation from his home in Southern California's High Desert.

Johnny's Restaurant (since renamed) on Florida Avenue.

With Tramp's benediction, and using the Lady Luck as his base of operations, Big Roy got busy recruiting. First to come aboard as chapter vice president was Todd Brown, a man Roy had befriended during a stint in rehab. Big Todd was a juicer who'd slammed so many steroids in his thirty-six years that he looked like Captain Fuckin' America, all jacked up and cruising Hemet aboard a $30,000 Harley-Davidson—every nut and bolt of it stolen.

I never liked Big Roy and his amped-up bad-boy act, but I really detested his dirtbag sidekick Todd. Besides being one of the sneakiest sucker-punchers I've ever met, Big Todd was a backstabber who took pride in fucking a brother's old lady, then bragging about it. Hell, that sonofabitch would slip his dick in a rattlesnake if you held its head.

The other two Vagos in Big Roy's entourage that night were Todd's older brother, Doug, and a tough little Mexican from Northern California named Iron Mike. Big Doug was a loose cannon, usually spun out of his bald-headed gourd on crank. Even his closest buddies walked on eggshells whenever Doug was tweaking. You never knew what that scary fuck might do. Just as tough as Doug but nowhere near as crazy, Iron Mike had earned his cred with Chicano street gangs. That little hombre was a true outlaw, always down for the club. If Green Nation needed a volunteer to pop a bullet in someone's head, Mike would be first in line asking, “Which ear?”

From the moment Terry the Tramp granted Big Roy his club charter, the Hemet Vagos were off and pissing on their hometown like dogs marking turf. The way Roy had it figured, the city was Green Nation property now, and any objections would be overruled by brute force. Through fear and intimidation, the Hemet chapter demanded respect for that Loki patch on their backs, making life miserable for everyone in town. Young or old, male or female, didn't matter. When the Vagos appeared, the locals would lower their eyes and turn heads, afraid to make eye contact.

Just a few weeks before the baby shower, some of the Hemet boys
were getting hammered at the bar when a mentally disabled young man with a hunched back accidentally bumped Big Todd on the way to the bathroom. Without waiting for an apology, the Vago spun and shoved the kid hard into the wall.