Heavy Duty People: The Brethren MC Trilogy book 1 (3 page)

‘
He has balls coming in here like that.’

‘
He was pretty cool about it.’

‘
You’ve got to admire his balls, walking into our clubhouse to deliver a message like that.’

We broke up that night without any formal decision being taken. I hadn
’t expected it would be. We were a strangely democratic group in many ways; we were brothers and we tended to naturally seek to reach a consensus. With most things Tiny would take soundings, discuss the offer with small groups, and gradually we would come to a view as to what we, as a club, would decide to do.

*

It was a crisp cold night under an inky black sky filled with millions of brilliant white stars and the ride home from the clubhouse took twenty minutes or so.

I loved riding
on my own at night.

There was something about the blackness, the cold wind biting my face, the streaming smear of light on the road ahead, the howling solitude, the unthinking
way that I followed the road, long grooved with memories, testing each familiar curve just one more time, that made me feel as though I was riding towards the end of the world; by myself in my own private bubble of time and space.

Alone in a dream I roared
up and across the high empty moors. Then the dry stone walls started to close in on either side of the road’s curves as I left the high ground behind and descended through the curves into the rolling foothills with their fields and occasional yellow-windowed dales farms.

Down here, t
he road home was along a mix of straight old Roman roads that just begged me to gun the motor, the wind whipping past my ears singing the strange music, and sudden twisting curves familiar through years of instinctive riding, requiring fierce braking at the last possible moment, the bike drifting, using all of the available road to get the right positioning to hustle through them, the bike heeled over to maintain the speed and set me up for the acceleration that pulled me upright again as I set up for the next bend. Before the glow of the first streetlight ahead signalled the start of the final drop down the long straight into the valley, the lights of the town opening up before me as the machine and I roared out of the dark.

It was the
type of riding I always enjoyed. It was very Zen somehow. The speeding solitude, with just the sound of the wind, and the mix of unthinking instinct, and fierce full mind and body concentration required on the here and now of the riding freed my mind to wander, it gave me time to think.

But tonight
was different.

It had been fascinating, sitting back to hear and see
Tiny our pres, and Dazza theirs, in operation, and to mull over the difference.

All clubs are either dictatorships
, run by a single dominant individual until such time as someone successfully usurped their rule, or democracies, run on the basis of consensus. They always have been and always will be.

We
in The Legion were a democracy, certainly the ex-Reivers’ part was, some other cohorts less so. That was why Tiny had called the meeting tonight. If there was something important to be said, we all needed to hear about it if we were to decide what we as a club were to do.

Dazza
by contrast ruled his charter with a rod of iron. A bit like Butcher did with his boys down in Maccamland. I’d never been surprised that those two got on so well.

It was gone eleven when
, bike locked up around the side, I walked in through the back door and parked my lid on the table.

‘
How did it go? What’s up? Can you tell me?’

Sha
ron was an old school old lady. She knew that club business was club business and that sometimes I couldn’t tell her everything.

I hadn
’t yet decided how much I would tell her. But I had to say something.

‘
In a word? Trouble. With a capital F!’

PART
2

1983
– 1994

Some clubs are old, with long established rules, some clubs are new.

Damage 2008

2              THE KID

I was
just a pretty much fucked up kid of twenty when I first got involved that night back at the Golden Lion.

I
’d dropped out after my first year at uni, doing history. It was a pity in some ways. I really liked history, I still do, and I’d cruised through A levels just doing enough to get by, but I just couldn’t hack student life, which was pretty much the final straw as far as my folks were concerned. Looking back I can’t really blame them, what with the booze and the dope that had got me my nickname of Brain Damage, usually shortened to Damage by my mates, although I did at the time.

I think I was probably about as low as you get at that stage at that age.
I say I’d dropped out, the reality was that I just couldn’t cope.

As I say, pretty much a fucked up kid, living in a fucked up shared flat
with Billy, one of the guys I’d known from school who was also into bikes and heavy metal, riding a fucked up GS250T rat, a strange bodge of a mini custom with a 2 into 1 Neta exhaust and a pair of ace bars in place of the touring ones Mr Suzuki had intended. They say your bike reflects who you are which I guess is true. I sort of think I was inspired by the black café racer Harley sportster that they had out, but really it was a bit of a mess.

Billy was away
that evening, out somewhere on his flash RD250LC, can’t remember where now, and none of the other guys were around or wanted to go out. So as I sat there smoking in my room I had a choice. I had a bit of cash so I could get some beers at the offie and stay in staring at the walls while I got tanked up until I passed out. Or I could go out and at least have the blast there and back.

A suicidally reckless death ride into
town suddenly felt a hell of a lot less self-destructive than sitting in my room so with a ‘Fuck it,’ I stubbed out my Silk Cut and reached for my lid.

Whenever I was on the bike, I just always had to ride as fast as I could. That was all there was to it. I just had to do it.
Had to fly. Every ride was, and still is to a degree, a potential street race where I need to push it, to prove myself against the odds just one more time.

Riding fast was a way of
continually testing myself. When I was on the bike there was the exhilaration of being free, being solely in control of my own life, and yet and yet, at some level I actually lived for those moments when things went out of control, those terrifying seconds of extreme calm, when my heart leapt into my mouth, and when everything hung in the balance.

T
he moment when the tyre chirps and starts to drift on a slew of gravel across a corner and you think in that instant – Is this it? Is this the one?

And when it does
.

The peaceful
inevitableness of the feeling of the bike sliding away from underneath you.

             
The way time slows so that you can watch and admire all the details at a quiet distance.

T
here’s no pain on hitting the deck.

It always happens in complete silence.

And the images stay with you in your mind forever.

T
he sparks of the steel scraping along the road.

T
he petrol spilling out from the filler cap as you slide towards it.

T
he first wondering realisation aren’t bus wheels big from down here?

But not tonight
.

Tonight the instinctive life force was too strong. A
s I felt the bike start to slip on a slew of gravel across the apex of a bend, with an instinctive reaction I kicked down hard onto the road with my left leg, brutally wrenching the throttle open at the same time, the engine snarling as I booted the bike back upright just enough to make it back onto the clear tarmac and then engine roaring as with a wave of adrenaline I screwed it open, feeling the bike wrenching beneath me as the tyre grabbed traction and the bike picked up its head, clawing its way up and out of the corner, the acceleration pushing me back down and into the seat.

As it said in
a joke I’d read in one of the bike mags, ‘Slide, don’t roll – and don’t do it in front of steamrollers.’

The
Golden Lion was a bit of a dive. It was a small pub set back from the town’s main drag, with a function room behind that was a heavy metal disco every Friday night. As I pulled into the car park it was filled with bikes and I found a space in the far corner to chain mine up.

The back of my hand stamped
, I walked on into the pounding gloom lightning lit by the flashing orange and green lights of the DJ’s sound system. As my eyes adjusted to the dark I could see it was the usual black tour T-shirt, denim and leather clad crowd. Dinosaur Heavy Metal never really dies, but back then the NWOBHM
[3]
was having a brief moment of fashionable success and so a lot of the crowd my age were really just pimply heavy metal kids, into the music and the image before jumping into their Mum’s borrowed Mini to drive home again after an evening of headbanging and posing to Whitesnake.

Then there were
those like me, the ones who were seriously into bikes.

I resented
the heavy metal kids in their black leather jackets who never rode, seeing them as poseurs trading off our image and the risks we took. We bikers were the ones who took the danger. We were the ones who gave black leather jackets the edge of glamour. Testing made us different, what did they ever do?

Of course resentment of h
eavy metal kids was nothing to the degree to which I despised the disco kids with their smart clothes and happy songs. What were they doing that was dangerous?

A
nd then there was a mix of older rockers and hardcore bikers.

My mates hadn
’t come and I’d never got to know anyone else there to go and sit with, so grabbing a pint of lager above the wailing guitars of Boston’s
More Than a Feeling,
I found an empty table in the black shadows of the back at which to hide, watching the groups of people talking together, the knots of friends, the gangs of mates, the friendly scrum at the bar; and knowing that I wasn’t part of it.

The local
bike gang had their spot in the far corner, everyone knew where they sat and you left their tables to them if you didn’t want any trouble.

They were older guys,
mostly in their late twenties or early thirties, some possibly more. Back then they weren’t a patch club as such, but they clearly already had the BTL/FTW
[4]
mentality. I came in from out at Enderdale then, about 10 miles up into the hills outside town, so I’d been to secondary school down in town and knew some of the heavy metal kids from there. But these guys were strangers to me. Other than that I’d seen a couple of them working in the bike shops in town, and that the same faces were always there every Friday, apart from Gyppo, I didn’t really know any of them.

Every
club is made up of two kinds of guys; those who are open to talking with outsiders, and those who aren’t. Gyppo had got his nickname from his Zorro like appearance which of course he then played up to. A slim swarthy guy, about 25, with straight dark medium length hair, thick gold hoop band earrings, a drooping moustache and usually a bandana, he dealt a little dope and was always happy to say hi and let us score.

You
’ve got to remember that this was back in the 80s, not like now when skunk’s all around. For us kids out in the sticks getting hold of a bit of blow, usually some Lebanese black, was a bit of a big deal.

Gyppo was OK
. He was approachable, he had a sense of humour and you could make a joke with him, like when he asked us to sponsor a parachute jump and we offered him 2p a mile, without worrying that he was going to drag you outside and fill your face in. He wasn’t like some of the really heavy hostile guys, the ones that gave off an aura of being unexploded bombs just looking for an excuse to go off at any second. While you had to respect him, you instinctively felt that Gyppo drew a distinction between some friendly banter and a deliberate insult that called to be dealt with.

I sat there alone in the darkness, nursing my beer, not speaking to anyone.

The temporary high of the ride had worn off and the downer of reality had sunk in again. Why had I bothered, I wondered to myself? Why am I here? What had I thought I would achieve by coming out tonight?

I
had always been alone, been different from others, been conscious of being an outsider, wanting to belong but somehow never knowing how, unable to make friends.

And it was something that fed
on itself. I pretended to myself that I didn’t care, that I didn’t need people. That people would have to like me for myself.

So that to
then test people to make the effort I made myself as obnoxious as I could.