ABOUT THE NOTORIOUS AND IDIOTIC
IRON CROSS MOTORCYCLE CLUB
The world of the motorcycle outlaw is one which few citizens
understand and most fear. It is made up of a breed of thugs whose only
aim in life seems to be to shock and disturb straight people.
A stripped down Harley-Davidson ridden by a filthy, psychotic
brute will cause any man to shudder with fear, rage, and surprisingly,
envy. For when the outlaw gets off his bike and goes into a bar the straight
people step all over each other getting out of his way. And if four or
five straight punks should sound him out on why he smells so bad he will
take them all on with a screech of joyous rage.
One against five is showing class. And whatever the motorcycle
outlaw lacks in social grace and refinement, he more than makes up for
in class.
Class, to some outlaws, is taking on impossible odds in
a fight and winning. To others it might be ganging up on a motorist and
destroying his car with chains at speeds up to 100 mph. But whatever class
is among the different clubs it is always violent and usually shocking.
Class is also partly what keeps the individual clubs together.
Each member tries to show more class than the other members. If he gets
in over his head, the other members are obliged to bail him out. From this
came the rule that if an outlaw gets into a fight with a straight person,
no matter what the reason, the whole club pitches in to help and stomps
the poor straight bastard into the ground. This makes for a corps spirit
you cannot find anywhere else. One man becomes ten, twenty, thirty. No
matter what kind of a loser he was before he joined the club, he is a lion
now. So it is pretty easy for a lone outlaw to beat five straight people.
His club’s reputation has them so scared they are half way running just
at the sight of him.
Every outlaw club has its own image. But although the
images might make the various clubs seem as different worlds, all outlaws
are alike in their fierce love for their machines.
All motorcycle outlaws respect their machines like they
respect no person. Out of this respect grows a love few of them can articulate
and few non-cyclists can appreciate. Their heavy cycles are, without exception,
powerful, dangerous and a challenge to control. Once the outlaw masters
his machine, he has a status with himself and among his fellows that makes
him contemptuous of all not so endowed.
Disdaining all but the most formidable machines, their
stock bike is the Harley-Davidson 74. The 74 applies to the engine which
is 74 cubic inches. This is nearly twice the size of most other big bike
engines and the most powerful in the motorcycle line.
The 74 is the kind of motorcycle the police ride. But
the lawman’s over- encumbered “trash wagon” arouses nothing but contempt.
To the average outlaw, a cop’s bike is fit for nothing but to steal. Once
stolen, the cop’s or anyone else’s Harley 74 is stripped down to the bare
frame. The bike is then built up from the frame, using only the barest
essentials.
Its weight is reduced from 600 to about 450 pounds. The
large seat and gas tank are replaced with half-size styles and when finished
the “chopper” is as sleek and trim as a race horse. A truly beautiful machine!
While driving through a Mexican section of Phoenix, Arizona,
I spotted five such beautiful machines parked outside a run-down bar. Nearly
every club allows individually decorated bikes but these were all shiny
black and chrome.
Their sameness caused me to stop and check them out. Their
riders were inside and I figured that would be as good a place to meet
them as any.
It was dark in there and it took a minute to make things
out. I sat at the bar and ordered a dollar pitcher of beer. Two hulking
cyclists sat a few seats down arguing heatedly, but in low voices, about
the merits of the shotgun over the automatic carbine.
I could see the back of one. He was wearing a sleeveless
denim jacket. Across it was sewn “IRON CROSS M.C.” Underneath was the kind
of cross the Germans painted on their tanks in World War II. Under that
was “CALIFORNIA”.
The other three were in back of me in a booth. They were
talking about the run they had made to Phoenix and about some sort of trouble
they were having with some other cyclists. I was trying to overhear them
but a drunken baseball fan beside me was drowning them out with his praise
of the Mets.
He was one of those obnoxious types who think they have
everyone interested when, in fact, everyone wishes they would leave. He
was annoying the bikers in the booth and I heard one of them say, “I can’t
stand that creep. Let’s stomp him.” Another one said, “No, let’s put him
down, instead.”
One of them left the booth and came to the bar and ordered
another pitcher. I later learned he was Paranoid George. He was short and
chunky with long stringy black hair and the wildest eyes I have seen outside
a nuthouse. He had a skull and crossbones sewn on the front of his colors.
Beside that was a patch reading “Paranoid”.
The two left in the booth were Samson and Pinocchio. They
were both giants. Samson had long blonde hair and Pinocchio was more clean
cut. As they drank their beer out of the large pitchers they looked like
Vikings who would think nothing of destroying everyone around them.
While the bartender was drawing another pitcher of beer,
the baseball fan was telling him, “Now, you see, the National League has
the Mets…”
Paranoid George interrupted him, “Hey, Mister, what’s
the Mets? Is it like the clap or something?”
The baseball fan answered, “Why, the Mets are a baseball
team. The best team there is. I’ve followed the Mets since they were organized.”
One of the bikers at the bar got up and said, “My mom
followed troop trains during the war. She wore army shoes. Do you wear
baseball shoes?”
Before the baseball fan could answer, Paranoid George
said, “Mister, I still think the Mets is some kind of disgusting disease.
Are you sure you ain’t just putting me on because I’m ignorant and been
deprived?”
The biker on the stool nearest me, known as Gargantua,
said, “No, Paranoid, the Mets are a baseball team. People like William
Ehrens root for them.”
This encouraged the baseball fan and he said, “Yes, some
of the best people root for the Mets. By the way, pard, who is William
Ehrens?”
Gargantua answered, “William Ehrens was convicted of the
rape-slaying of a six year old girl in Chicago.”
While the baseball fan was sorting this out Gargantua
moved over a couple seats and sat beside him. Then he said, confidentially,
“You being a fan of the Mets, maybe you can clear up a rumor about them.
You know the one about how they carry on in the showers. Tell me, are any
of them normal?”
The baseball fan looked like he was going to start slugging.
He said, “Why you must be crazy, man. The Mets are as normal as you are.”
“Oh, I’m just so glad,” said Gargantua and leaned over
and gave the baseball fan a sloppy kiss on the mouth.
The baseball fan jumped up off the bar stool and left,
shuddering with rage and embarrassment. All the bikers had a good laugh
over the put-down and spirits were high.
The two bikers at the bar went back to the end of the
room to play the bowling game and I struck up a conversation with Paranoid
George, still at the bar. I said, “You guys did a beautiful job on the
bore. He was driving everybody nuts.”
He answered, “Yeah, Samson wanted to stomp him but I figured
it would be better to put him down. That’s more fun a lot of times because
you take a guy like that and you really blow his mind and he remembers
it longer than if you just thumped on him. Besides, we’re partying and
in a good mood anyway.”
I ordered two pitchers of beer and he accepted one. I
asked him about the state of the motorcycle clubs in California after the
publicity and the Hell’s Angel movies and all.
He said, “Well, most of the stuff they wrote about the
Angels was lies. They never had as many guys as the papers said and all
that rape stuff was crap. A lot of it was to sell papers and a lot was
to make the politicians look good. They thumped the Angels pretty much
out of sight.”
“We’re not exactly like they were, though. We dig bikes
and guns and partying. We like the life a lot.”
“I figured you for a political group,” I said, “Like,
your bikes, all black and your hard line looking colors. I write and you
people look like you’d be good subjects for a story.”
He said, “I don’t know about political. I voted once and
I didn’t like it. As far as stories are concerned, we guys don’t give interviews.
If you want to write about us you better talk to our president, Big Mike
Brown. We’re staying on the other side of town. We made a run here from
L.A. for a party. Big Mike can give you a real story and maybe someone’ll
get killed ’cause some of the guys want to take over the club and they
think the Phoenix guys and some of us’ll go against Big Mike.”
He rambled on about plots and mutinies until he finished
his pitcher and then we all went outside. The guys started their scooters
and peeled on out of the lot and I followed them in my car. We got across
town without incident and I was ushered into a middle class home packed
with the most raunchy assortment of savages I had ever seen.
There were a least a dozen in the front room. They were
all drinking beer and most of them had pistols in their belts or rifles
within arm’s reach. There was no tension in the air. It was just as if
they were always this way. I later learned that they were usually armed
for what they thought were emergencies.
They were laughing at some joke we had missed and paid
no attention to us as Paranoid George led me through the mob to a bedroom.
Here were Big Mike Brown and his lieutenant, Noah, a bearded monster who
was a dead ringer for Al Capp’s Earthquake McGoon. They were talking to
Mike Murray, a clean cut young Honda rider and owner of the house. In a
corner of the bedroom was a young girl having hysterics.
From what I heard and found out later, Big Mike told Murray:
“These guys are asking for a shootout and some of them are your friends
and we don’t know which side you’re on. So if you’re with them we’ll leave
and go across the street and open up on everybody. But if you’re for us,
we’ll stay here and let’em have it when they show.”
With that the hysterical girl began to squall louder.
Murray answered that he was for Brown’s faction but his wife (the one who
was wailing) was only eighteen and pregnant and quite nervous and upset
and had not seen so many hoodlums in one room and you really can’t blame
her for not wanting all these strangers having gunfights and maybe stabbings
in her home.
Big Mike, being more mannerly than a regular hoodlum,
gave Murray his promise that he would not go killing or beating anybody
in their home and that it would be a neutral territory.
No sooner had he promised this than in walked Fat Jim,
one of the opposing faction. He took a seat on the couch in the front room
and apologized to all concerned for his lack of faith in their fearless
leader. He blamed all the trouble on Raffles.
Raffles was a doped up psycho who had gotten in with the
Iron Cross when his own little scooter group disbanded. I was told he stole
a couple of their motorcycles and various sums of money. Why they had not
wasted him before was a mystery. Apparently they just had not gotten around
to it.
Being a smooth talker, Raffles had won over several of
Mike Murray’s punks and through some sort of idiot logic he thought he
had most of Big Mike’s people on his side.
A few minutes after Fat Jim arrived somebody said, “Hey,
here he comes.”
Noah asked, “Who?’
“Here comes Raffles.”
Noah said, “Let me get him.”
Then Noah went to the door and threw a thug called “Pigpen”
a Walther P-38 and told him to back him up in case Raffles got the drop
on him and if he did get the drop on him, then Pigpen was to waste him.
Noah then went out the door to meet Raffles. Raffles immediately
pulled a knife and threatened to gut Noah “like a goddam hawg.” Noah then
pulled a 14 shot Browning pistol and shoved it up to Raffles stomach. Raffles
was high on acid and laughed and said, “Oh, put that stupid thing away.
You won’t do nothin’.”
There was then a scuffle in which Noah took away the knife
and threw Big Mike the Browning and confiscated Raffles’ 45 which he had
not drawn from his belt.
Raffles was then dragged into the house and questioned.
He was out of his gourd on acid and seemed to think he was a North African
oil potentate and needed a mediator. After listening to him babble for
a few minutes, they beat him up a little bit and threw him out.
Later that afternoon a character they called “Shotgun”
arrived from Northern California. He had gone from one outlaw club to another
for years looking for the one that fit his ideals.
He cast motorcycle outlaws in the same mold as the old
western outlaws. To Shotgun, the Iron Cross members were all socially disinherited
heroes creating their own justice.
Shotgun heard about the trouble with Raffles but still
considered him an insane friend, not having been stung by him personally.
That evening he was out in the yard and quite drunk when Raffles, still
stoned, drove up in a jeep. He got out yelling that he wanted his 45 back
and Shotgun welcomed him like a long-lost friend and tried to get him to
get back into his jeep and drive to the nearest bar.
Raffles was willing but before they could get to the jeep
they were blocked by the Mad Hatter. He ran the Napa, California chapter
and had hated Raffles long before Big Mike had let him into the club.
As Shotgun tried to get Raffles past the Mad Hatter to
the jeep, the Mad Hatter was working himself into a screaming rage. “You’re
a cop!” he yelled at Raffles. “You’re a damn police plant!” Then he started
punching Raffles while screaming, “Fight, you bastard, fight!”
When it penetrated Raffles’ fogged brain that he was being
attacked, he started slugging. Then the Mad Hatter stepped back and drew
a pistol. After first theatening to shoot Raffles, he began pistol-whipping
him. After losing a lot of blood and a dime-sized piece of his skull, Raffles
retreated to the jeep and drove off to a hospital. Shotgun, now in a drunken
rage, went storming into the house screaming, “Damn, I don’t never get
to talk to nobody.”
With all this going on, I waited for the Phoenix police
to mob the place. But no fuzz showed at all.
By the time the party inside settled down to a dull roar,
I went looking for Big Mike for that interview. But he had ducked out and
was on the town burning credit cards at Phoenix’s better watering places.
Paranoid George emerged from the john dressed in a neat
sweater and slacks and looking like a Berkeley college professor. He invited
me for a night on the town with him and a 270 pound weight lifter and black
belt Karate man from Dallas called “Brogan”. Also to go was Shotgun, who
was pretty sober by now.
Brogan had a string of credit cards as long as his arm
and took us to a very nice restaurant in a Phoenix hotel. He explained
the simplicity of getting the credit cards and using them with no intention
of ever paying, which he called “burning” them.
He would rent a room for a few weeks and write to various
credit card distributors such as gasoline companies, restaurant chains
and others. Most companies would send the cards on trust. Then Brogan would
move and use the credit cards until their expiration dates ran out.
While the cards were still good, the Iron Crosses lived
like kings. Each meal was a banquet and this was no exception. Paranoid
George ordered Lobster Newburg, I ordered Crab Louie, Shotgun ordered a
double order of German sausage and Brogan two filet mignon steaks. During
the course of the meal, Brogan ate both steaks with all the side orders
and drank five Zombies. Shotgun drank five double tequilas and neither
he nor Brogan seemed more than a little tipsy.
It struck me then that these people could get staggering
drunk at a party after only a few beers but be hardly affected by lots
of hard liquor in public.
The dinner went on for hours as my three hosts told me
about how great it was to be a member of the Iron Cross Motorcycle Club.
The way Paranoid George and Brogan talked, they were a combination of the
French Foreign Legion and Africa’s white mercenaries.
Shotgun explained that with the breakdown of society,
the rugged individual could once again come into his own. He painted a
picture of the armed biker becoming the Jesse James of the future.
They all seemed to have dreams of becoming folk heroes
in the best Zane Gray tradition. As they went on to tell me how they would
snuff all their enemies, anyone who tried to keep them down, I was beginning
to believe them.
After several stories of their club’s ferocity, they went
to girls and I learned Brogan was going with Paranoid George’s sister.
I met her later. She was passing pretty and a little silly but not so crazy
as her brother.
Paranoid George did not have a steady girl at the time.
Shotgun joshed him about his fat wife who he had recently driven to her
mother’s and thrown out onto a trash pile.
Paranoid George did not mind the kidding. He seemed to
take his women as he found them. He told me, “I like women who are dirty
and mean and vicious, ’cause that’s the only kind there is.”
When the party ended Paranoid George was fast asleep.
Brogan cuffed him a few times but a simple beating would not wake him.
We thought we would have to carry him out but Shotgun solved the problem
by reaching over and pouring a pot of scalding coffee in his lap.
I had not checked into a hotel that day, so after the
blast Brogan used his credit cards again. He booked Shotgun and me into
a deluxe motel double and he shared one with Paranoid George. Shotgun went
to sleep as soon as he hit the bed. I tossed in mine for what seemed hours,
dreaming or imagining thousands of enraged motorcycle bandits roaring into
sheep-like masses of “enemies”.
It came to me that they were not just a bunch of hoodlums
on shiny Harley-Davidsons. They were a private army, well armed, disciplined,
able to prey on the merchant class for their needs and with hangers on
all over the Southwest where they could get together for rest and recreation.
It then occurred to me that even their drinking habits
revealed them. I had noted before that they became quite drunk when at
a party among their own. But they maintained an unconscious control, although
drinking much more, when among strangers. This is a trait of professionals;
always wary when among possible enemies.
Another ominous aspect of their otherwise clownish natures
was their cold hatred toward those they considered enemies. Somewhere in
my dreams there were Vikings on motorcycles splitting people’s heads open
with battle axes.