Russell Banks - Rule of the Bone

Around big dogs if you’re a kid you either learn to do the little dog or you book. Russ had trouble learning the little dog but he was stuck with the bikers due to his early friendship with Bruce and his job and the apartment, and I was stuck with Russ due to my home situation and being too young to get a job yet, so in a sense like Bruce said we were a family whether we wanted to be or not which is true of real families anyhow.

Of course like always things could’ve been worse and that’s why me and Russ didn’t complain or go anywhere else. The town of Au Sable was like our home base. It was where our parents lived and where we had once been little kids and had lived with them. Plus it was where the friends were. There and up at the mall in Plattsburgh.

All the bikers rode strictly Harleys or else were planning to get one soon. Everything else was Jap shit or Kraut shit or Brit shit. What they liked was American shit— softtails, shovelheads. Bruce used to say, Harleys are iron horses, man. Fucking iron horses. He liked to repeat himself, probably because he was used to talking to people who didn’t get it the first time. Due to his obsession with weightlifting he had given them the name Adirondack Iron which they had painted on their leathers and had gotten tattooed upside down under their left forearms so you could read it when they did a power salute, like they were an actual serious-minded motorcycle gang or one of those foreign skinhead bands. They looked more organized than they were. They talked like being a piece of Adirondack Iron was the whole point of their lives and maybe it was but some of them had wives and even kids someplace who they occasionally visited when they ran out of money.

Actually the Adirondack Iron and even to some degree Bruce were all assholes who couldn’t get real jobs so they mostly stayed drunk or high all night and slept off the days or just chilled on the back porch listening to Russ’s tapes or worked on their bikes in the yard. They were like dogs and Bruce was the lead dog, sort of a German shepherd or one of those big Alaskan huskies. He made decisions and gave orders and the other guys usually followed them or else carefully ignored him.

One of the guys, Roundhouse whose real name he once told me was Winston Whitehouse, was humongously fat and hadn’t had a haircut since the third grade he said and had never once shaved or cut his beard and he’d ended up looking like one of those Sasquatches. Roundhouse’s whole body from his eyes to his toenails, including his neck and shoulders down to his hands was covered like with a pelt and when he stood up you expected to see a tail. He was from New Hampshire or someplace like that where his uncle’d been a famous murderer and when he wasn’t bragging about his uncle all Roundhouse talked about was fucking and sucking like he couldn’t get enough of it. He had a bunch of stolen credit cards that he used strictly for phone sex with orientals, Dial-a-Jap he called it, his favorite recreational activity, but whenever there were any real females around he plugged his headphones into Russ’s box and got drunk and nodded out. He owned this truly cherry ‘67 Electra Glide though, much admired and he loved his bike and when he wasn’t on the phone in the john jerking off he was down in the yard taking his hog apart and putting it back together again. Basically he was harmless and good-natured and after Bruce who due to his muscles I kind of admired I liked Roundhouse the best.

There was this other guy though named Joker whose real name I never knew, a short square-bodied guy with a head like a shovel and tiny flattened blue eyes and many facial scars. He had a bleached white buzz-cut and all his tattoos were words, Megadeth and Terminator and Suck, and even a few complete sentences, like Eat Shit and Satan Lives. All the bikers had guns I think but Joker had the most guns and he liked to clean and polish and fondle them the way the other guys did their bikes which was natural I suppose since he was one of the bikers who didn’t have a hog of his own and was always thinking about buying one soon. He had a very cool little blue Smith & Wesson Ladysmith.38 which he called his pussy pistol and this huge single-shot.44 magnum Thompson with a sixteen-inch barrel that he said was his dick stick.

Generally though Joker showed very few signs of life and almost never talked to anyone least of all me but he was the one biker I was scared of all the time, even when he wasn’t whacked. His neck went straight from his ears to his shoulders and he wore a heavy chain choke-collar around it in case you didn’t get the point from the tattoos or the guns. Sometimes when Bruce was bored he’d grab Joker’s chain and yank on it hard and say, Back, Joker! Back! Release! Joker’d growl and snap and drool and pull against the chain until his face got red and he couldn’t hardly breathe and when Bruce let go he’d back off panting and whimpering like he’d been cruelly deprived of some primo meat-violence.

But I got through the winter okay because my stepfather probably thanks to my mom decided not to let the cops put me away for my Christmas shoplifting so long as I didn’t try to move back in with them again, which was funny since the cops’d signed me over to my parents in the first place only on condition that I move back with them and take eighth grade over. The new rule was basically don’t bother your parents and don’t bother the cops or one of them will sic the other on you. All I had to do was stay out of the way of both and not flag either by going back to school who didn’t want me anyhow. Which wasn’t hard because they both tended to look in the other direction when they saw me, my parents on account of my bad attitude and drug use plus my overall funky appearance, which made them permanently pissed and ashamed of me at least my mom, and the cops because as a criminal I was more trouble than I was worth, just another homeless stoned dropout dealing small-load boom to the locals.

But even the cops know that a little weed can’t hurt anybody. Most of them when they bust you are only trying to score for themselves anyhow and once they take your stash if you lick their boots and promise never to smoke refer again so long as you live and thank them for saving you from a life of drug addiction and criminality they keep your drugs and let you go. Unless they’re after you for something else you’re not worth the paperwork. I’ve learned that’s generally true of life, if you’re not worth the paperwork adults won’t hassle you. Except for the truly dumb and the nutcases of course, people who act on principle. They’ll hassle you.

It was early spring and the nights were still cold but the days were getting warmer and the old gray snowbanks were starting to shrink and thousands of frozen dog turds and months of garbage and paper trash and lost clothes were coming up thawed and soggy all over town but especially in our yard behind the Video Den.

Not my favorite season. In winter the snow keeps reality like clean and covered in white but in spring you see everything too much for what it is. When the packed ice finally melts it leaves all these deep potholes behind and cracks in the streets and sidewalks and the snowbanks make these huge puddles of black oily water. The frozen ground thaws and turns into deep muck and soppy dead grass.

Nights are okay though because you can’t see much and it’s cold so everything freezes up but during the days the sky is always this pale yellowish color like old mattress stuffing. It makes a strange light and the town looks like it’s been through this hundred-year-war and everybody’s forgotten what they were fighting about so it’s hard for them to get too excited now that it’s over.

On account of the long winter and still having to stay inside a lot I guess the bikers had lately been into slam-dancing. It was more slamming than dancing and they didn’t even need music to do it, they just lurched around the apartment like a bunch of Frankensteins and bounced off each other’s bodies and jumped against the floor with both feet which made a lot of likable noise because of their biker boots. Likable to them, I mean, and to me too although I myself didn’t get into it but only watched from the kitchen door and tried to stay out of their way and kept poised to sneak out if necessary.