I just watched the George Clooney and Evan McGregor film, “Men who Stare at Goats.” It made no sense, but about a decade before the Iraq war, maybe two, I owned goats and was a member of the Hells Angels.
I lived on a half-acre in Sun Valley on the outskirts of the San Fernando Valley. I bought this little clapboard one bedroom in a bad part of town. It’s all I could afford at the time, but I needed to get back in the market or forever be grousing about not being able to own my own home. Not bad thinking for a grubby 26-year-old biker.
Even recently George Christie mentions one of the fights in his recent book, “Exile,” and claims that I started a war over a girl. That wasn’t the case at all, which I had to point out to Sonny Barger 10 years after I left the club. I was at the Great Western swap meet having a great time with my brothers and so many other guys I knew in the industry.
I bumped into a member of another club who turned and said something disparaging about the Hells Angels. I had no choice but to smack him and the fight was on. It was just a fight between young members of two clubs, not a war. But ultimately, the leadership turned it into a war. It changed everything. George’s rendition was more romantic and kept the book flowing. That’s an author’s prerogative.
Later I got out of the club and went back to working for Easyriders and being a grubby biker. I still had my club babe, Melanie, and we had a blast for a while until drugs and shit got in the way.
The house was small and the wooden garage leaned slightly and had a shed built onto the side of it. Melanie loved animals. Every time I bought a pad with land, I immediately had a 6-foot chain link fence constructed around the perimeter. I’d go to work and she stalked the classifieds for spare animals.
We ended up with several dogs, cats, rabbits, chickens, ducks, geese, and goats. Behind the country-like house was our patio area with a steel tubing clothesline system. I somehow lowered the clothesline metal poles and installed plywood on the top. We used it for our patio table and a ping-pong table.
We threw terrific barbecues, drank whiskey, smoked dope, made shit like custom buck knives, and played ping-pong all night long.
Previously, I had broken up with my folks. They didn’t like the grubby biker in their family and my dad, who worked in the oil fields and was tough as nails, was drunk one night when I rode over on my rat chopper. We could have gone to blows, but I walked out and didn’t see them for about three years, I believe. Just recently I heard a story about a young man who got lured into a drunken fight with his dad. During the fight his father encountered a heart attack and died. The kid would never live it down although he wasn’t charged.
The Thanksgiving, while I was still in the club, our relationship softened and I invited them for dinner. Melanie made a fantastic dinner and we had a good time, and my slightly high dad had changed.
He was once a John Wayne type, but as the ‘60s ended and the ‘70s came along, straights started to see the government for what it shouldn’t be. My dad said, “Fuck ‘em,” for the first time and decided to party. He wanted to smoke some weed.
We rolled a doobie and my dad learned the ropes. My mom was ready, but when faced with the smoldering herb she said, “I can’t lose control.” She never touched the stuff. But she was cool with it.
My folks would come up and spend weekends. My dad had a blast in the garage, making custom knives and tinkering with the bikes.
He also loved animals, but the damn goats would jump on the ping-pong table during lunch. We had a pit bull for a while, too. It tried to kill the chickens. When we had too many dogs, they would gang up on the ducks when we went on a run. Never a dull moment.
So one time, we hit the road for some goddamn bonfire and a fifth of Jack Daniels. Maybe a Modified Motorcycle Association run. When we returned, all the goats out back were dead.
It was a warm Sunday afternoon and the Hispanic family next door had an equally small house, but the old man roamed the neighborhood with a shopping cart, picking up any construction material he could find. He slowly added a large room onto the back of the house and invited new families from Mexico.
Once the family secured employment and a home, they would move out and another one moved in. It was a festive Sunday with a large gathering in front of their home celebrating something.
I’d just returned from some godforsaken party, fully bearded and covered in road grime. I stormed into the back and picked up each goat and tossed it over the fence. I knew their big dog had gotten over the fence in my absence and scared all my goats to death. Melanie screamed her support.
The next week I came out of the house to get in my all black Corvette to peel to work, when I spotted that damn dog in my yard heading for the chickens. I had a briefcase and opened it to retrieve a long-barreled .38 revolver, which I always carried. I leveled it over a waist high fence and took aim.
The dog smelled cold steel trouble and cut a dusty trail across the lot. I still winged him and to my left, the old man with his half-full shopping cart started to yell at me in Spanish from an elevated knoll. I started to put the revolver back in the case then stopped and looked up at him. The revolver started to show its blued surface to the sunlight once more. “You want some of this?” I said, and the old man scurried away.
The dog was only wounded but never returned to my yard. In fact, anytime I was in the yard, the big black mutt hid behind the building and peeked out once in awhile.
Another time I went on a weekend run, and when we returned, most of the ducks were dead on the front lawn, except for a couple who hid in the bushes and watched the dog attack. We quickly learned a lesson. Too many untrained dogs and we had an unscrupulous gang of mutts, who would entice each other to do bad shit. Two or three dogs at max worked fine. I currently have two black Labs.
For many years, I had a few mallards and muscovy ducks. The mallards were beautiful and the muscovy ducks were wide and low. Muscovy ducks hid under the wooden plank porch in Thousand Oaks and laid eggs. I had one old mallard with one wing who was never killed during dog assassination attempts. He always survived.
The animals came and went along with the women, but motorcycles and owning property always worked out and kept me going. I sold the Sun Valley ranch-styled joint and moved to a half-acre in Thousand Oaks. It would make for several wild stories. I’ll get there one of these days.
