Chapter Three
Dax
“Your mother says you’re thinking about going back to school,” my dad said while lying next to the bike that he had propped up on blocks.
“Yeah,” I said, handing him the wrench he was holding his hand out for. “I gotta do something with my life, I guess.”
Dad lifted his head slightly and looked at me. He knew better than to tell me that I could come and work for him in the “family” business. He knew I was still pissed about giving up two years of my life for him and his club, even though he had never actually admitted it had a thing to do with him. When you figure that the felony convictions would follow me around forever I gave up a lot more than two years.
He also knew that my mom would be pissed if he tried to recruit me. She didn’t put her foot down about much with him, but when it came to the club and me, she always had. I’m pretty sure it’s what saved me…if you can call what my life has become “saved.” I sometimes wished she would have just left him and taken me with her when I was a kid.
“What is it you want to end up doing?” he asked me.
I shrugged. “I was majoring in business before I went inside. I finished my AA while I was in there, but you can’t really do anything with an AA in business. I’ll need to get a BA and maybe a master’s.”
“Hand me the torque,” he said. “And then do what with all that?”
I handed him the other wrench and answered, “I don’t know, a CPA or maybe even open my own business.”
“That would make your mother happy,” he said, sitting up and lighting a cigarette.
“What about you?” I asked him.
He looked at me long and hard and in true Bull fashion he said, “What about me? It ain’t my life, it’s yours. You have to figure it out.”
That’s what he had been telling me since I was twelve. He was the perfect example of parenting gone wrong. It wasn’t that he wanted to instill independence in me; it was that he really wasn’t all that interested. He didn’t want to be that involved in case it didn’t work out. It couldn’t come back on him. They should have used a portrait of him in parenting classes to tell people what not to do.
He stood up and as he did I heard his knees pop. He wasn’t a young man anymore. He looked down at the bike and asked, “You think you can put the rest of it back together?”
I looked at the bike. It was mine, a 2003 FXDX with an Arlen Ness fairing. For my sixteenth birthday in 2009, he had given it to me. It had been his and it was the first ride I could call my own. I had it painted at Olivia’s uncle’s shop, a color called “Mysterious Red.” Olivia didn’t live there at the time. She came to live with her aunt and uncle for college and that was when I had met her.
The bike also had black and chrome typhoon wheels and chrome pipes. It had a twin cam 98 which was outdated. My dad and the other guys were running theirs much hotter. It would work for me, for now. I had missed her while I was locked up and I was more than a little worried that he would sell her off or give her to one of the other guys.
As far as whether or not I could put it together myself, I had been putting bikes together since I was five. Terrance and I used to have one we would rebuild just for fun when we were kids. We wanted to be like our dads and the other guys when we grew up. It was sad to think about it. I looked at my dad. I wanted to be anyone but him.
“Yeah, dad, I got it,” I told him. I knew the psychology of thinking about him the way I did, yet spending all of my time there, was really jacked up. However, I didn’t have anything else to do.
“All right, Blake and I have got some business to handle this afternoon. Do you want to go for a ride with us?”
I knew full well that I should say no. That was exactly what put my ass in CDC’s care for the last two years. I had gone for a “ride” with some of my dad’s guys. We got stopped, I wasn’t worried and I wasn’t carrying anything…or so I thought.
My fucking saddle bags had been packed with ten “rocks” of pure heroin. They were wrapped in baggies and stuffed inside thick plastic baggies and wrapped in soft cloth and loaded five on a side into my bags underneath the stuff I normally kept in there. Each rock was 0.4 oz. so all together they got me with four ounces. It was enough to land me two felonies. One for transporting with the intent to sell and the other for intent to transfer across state lines. Drug trafficking at its finest.
We were headed into Nevada out of California at the time. It was just supposed to be a fun ride; at least that was what I had thought. I was so fucking stupid. I really believed that after I explained to the cops it wasn’t mine and they looked into my background and saw that I was an honor student with absolutely no record at all I would be let go. Yeah right.
My stupidity didn’t stop there though. The cop that handled the case knew in his gut this wasn’t me and I had to give the guy credit…he did everything he could to convince me to point the finger at my dad and his club. I wouldn’t do it though. There was the problem that although I had suspected my father dealt in drugs, I had never really seen any hard evidence of it.
I was actually even working under the delusion that my dad was going to step up at some point and try to save me. Maybe at the last minute but I just knew he would step up, especially if this had anything to do with him. He wouldn’t let me go to prison for something I didn’t do. He wouldn’t leave me there to rot if it was for something he was ultimately responsible for. There was nothing in my history with him to back up any of those delusions, but I was still hopeful…right up until the night they loaded me on that bus and gave me my brand new blue denim shirt and jeans that said CDC in bold yellow letters across the back and down the side.
Later on, as I sat in my brand new cell, I tried to convince myself that the drugs were put there by a rival club. Maybe my dad moved in on someone else’s territory and they were looking to get him back. But that made no sense. Even if they set up the stop, they lost a lot of money in drugs and my dad wasn’t the one who got arrested. He wasn’t even there.
Trying to shake it all off I set about putting the bike back together and getting ready for the ride. I would be sure to check my bags this time. I would never be made a scapegoat again, that’s for damn sure. It would be good for me to get out on the open road for a bit and get some fresh air. It had been too long.
About an hour later, my dad, a guy named Johnny that everyone calls “Johnny Red” because of his ruddy complexion, another guy called “Bo,” —I had no idea what the rest of his name was if he had one— and Terrance’s dad, Blake, came out of the clubhouse which was out behind the bar. There were two other guys that were always hanging around, wanting to be part of the club waiting outside. There was a garage attached to the clubhouse where they kept their bikes and worked on them. The equipment in the garage far outweighed the worth of the bar it was attached to. Eventually, my dad would have to put some of that money into the bar or his front would fall right down around him.
The business conducted in the clubhouse is the business that I had spent my life trying to stay out of. My mother would never come right out and tell me what it was my father did there, but she got her point across that I needed to stay far away from it.
Terrance and I used to sneak around and listen sometimes when they had their meetings. A lot of it we didn’t understand, but we heard enough to know that my mother was right. It was a shady business. I also knew the old man rarely went on just a ride with the entire club. When he went for a ride to clear his head, he took the bike up to the foothills and spent the day unaccompanied.
They were working on something or setting something up. A morbid sense of curiosity and an intense sense of boredom pressed me forward anyways. I put on my skull cap and my helmet and straddled the bike. It felt good; it had been a hell of a long time since I had rode, close to three years when you counted all the jail and trial time leading up to my two year stint. I was praying the old adage about it being like riding a bike applied to Harleys as well. Eating the pavement my first time out might be more than embarrassing.
I waited until the other guys were on their bikes and then I fired her up. She purred like she was happy to see me and as I eased her out of the garage and into the open road I realized that at least one thing still felt normal. I hadn’t forgotten how to ride, it was like second nature. I loved the feeling of the wind against my face and just the simple freedom being on a bike gave me. I guessed it was in my blood, even though I should have hated to admit that.
We rode along the highway for a while and through the foothills far out of town. We rode until we came to an old warehouse with a couple of nondescript cars parked out front and some unfriendly looking guys sitting in them. A wave of PTSD hit me and I started sweating, thinking they were undercover cops and I was about to be arrested again.
What the fuck was I doing there? How stupid was I? Really. I had talked to my parole officer in the morning. She was going to come by the house this week. Being at the warehouse was probably enough to put me back inside if something bad happened.
We parked the bikes along the side of the warehouse and everyone got off and some of us went inside. I guessed that the two prospects and Bo who had been beside me were outside to make sure the guys in the cars stayed there. Whatever was going down, it was much heavier than a few baggies of heroin in my saddlebags. I hadn’t met her yet, but I was convinced that my parole officer would definitely not approve.
There were wooden crates stacked up all over and I was pretty damn sure that I didn’t want to know what was inside them. Some of them were long and flat. Guns? Maybe. Some of them were more rectangular.
I stood back with the other guys and watched as my dad and Blake approached a couple of guys on the other side of the warehouse. They were looking into one of the crates and there was a large green duffle bag opened at one of their feet. One of the guys was dressed similar to us in blue jeans, T-shirt and leather vest. The other looked like he would be overly dressed for the Emmys in a suit that had to cost three or four grand. He was a tall, muscular guy with dark hair and gray at the temples and he wore a thin framed classy looking pair of glasses. He reminded me of the Grey Poupon guy from the old commercials and I wondered if he spoke with an accent.
I couldn’t hear anything that was being said, especially since Johnny Red was expounding about some red-haired girl he had picked up the last time he was in Vegas. He said she had called him the night before and wanted to come out and visit. I looked at Johnny and wondered how ugly or desperate she must have been if she needed to come all the way from another state to be with him. Johnny may not have been a bad-looking guy when he was…no, let’s face it; guys like Johnny were born ugly. He was about five-five and that was in his boots. His waist had to be about a forty-four wide and he had a gray beard that lay against his chest that looked like a heavily used Brillo pad. His hair was long and greasy and he was missing one of his eye teeth. But the worst thing about Johnny was how he smelled. I had spent almost a year in county jail and then two in prison and I still hadn’t come across anything that smelled like Johnny. I didn’t know what it was, but it’s just indescribable.
I looked back at Blake and my dad. They were shaking hands with the suit guy. The other one didn’t look like a guy who liked to be touched.
They strolled back over and Blake said, “All right, all taken care of.”
“Everything’s all set?” Johnny asked.
“Set up and good to go,” Blake told him.
“Let’s go have a cold one,” my dad said. It was ten a.m. I guess in MC time it was five o’clock somewhere.
I rode back to the bar, following the Smokin’ Jokers patch on my dad’s back and wondering what the hell I was a part of, but most importantly, after all I had been through I had to wonder why I was putting myself in this kind of situation at all.