Riding on the Edge by John Hall

Author:John Hall
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Motorbooks
Published: 2008-10-15T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 11

Let them call us barbarians,

We are barbarians,

It is an honorable title.

— Joseph Goebbels

When we got back to Maspeth after the aggravation in Jersey, I didn’t want to go any place where it would be easy to find me. So I stayed with the Gypsy. He was having trouble with his wife, and he was staying with his mother, who lived in a one-story building on the corner of 59th Place and Maspeth Avenue down in Polack Alley. The place had been a bar, then a store. So there was a large room where the Gypsy kept a couple of couches, chairs, tools, and his motorcycle; behind that there was a small apartment where his mother and uncle lived.

When we got there at dawn it was starting to snow, and we collapsed on the couches. But shortly after that his mother shoved her head in the door and began shouting in a voice loud enough to wake up the dead down the block in Mount Zion Cemetery: “Ant-a-ny, Ant-a-ny, get up and shovel the snow. Come on, get up, the people have to go to church.”

For Roman Catholics, New Year’s Day used to be a holy day of obligation. I believe that it was called the Feast of the Circumcision, for lack of a better excuse to wake up people with a hangover on the first day of the New Year and make them go to church.

So here was this large Polish woman waking up Tony the Gypsy, sergeant at arms of the Pagans Outlaw Motorcycle Club, on no sleep no less, and telling him to go out in the middle of winter and shovel snow. By the look on her face and the sound of her voice, I knew that the woman was not to be denied. And if I didn’t get up and help him, he would never let me hear the end of it. So here it was, New Year’s Day and the leader of the Long Island Pagans and his sergeant at arms were out in the cold, shoveling snow and nodding good-morning and trying to smile as we said, “Happy New Year,” to a bunch of old Polish women in babushkas and rubber boots as they made their way to St. Stanislaus Kostka Church. The New Year was not starting out well. And it did not get better.

For one thing, the club was splitting more than ever into two antagonistic factions. We had spent a year riding around drunk on motorcycles and getting in fights. We had the mob pissed off, we had the cops pissed off, we had every other biker on Long Island pissed off. Davy Supermouth and the Mortician argued, and somewhat persuasively at that, that this self-destructive behavior could not continue.

Then there was Flipout. He was having a problem with amphetamines. He never slept, and he was constantly getting arrested for chicken shit. His parents kept bailing him out, and they had gotten him a lawyer who postponed court dates. But

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