Wimminz – celebrating skank ho's everywhere

Further to a comment by Hans on the last post.

Back when I were a lad and 1% clubs were 1%, eg largely outlaw, I never had the slightest inclination to join, though I was asked several times if I wanted to prospect.

For me at least I did not see a patch, I saw a target that made me even easier to identify, and I didn’t see a band of brothers, I saw extra rules.

Back then the term for bikers like me as “lone wolf” which always sounded a bit pretentious, if asked I’d always say I was a loner.

Typically I was always on good friends terms with the local patch club(s) wherever I was, usually the older more senior guys, I guess from their perspective I wasn’t one of them, but I wasn’t one of the straights either.

This doesn’t mean it was all roses and mutual respect either, with *some* clubs for some places, there was an ethos that if you weren’t in the club you weren’t shit, and I could sit here and relate factual stories about people who are now respected old club greybeards, who I still remember from my youth as nothing more than dirty motorcycle thieves.

Like everything else, not all clubs were equal, and not all chapters were equal, and back then there was a bit of a recruiting drive so there was a bit of competition.

A lot of my attitudes hold over from back then, I  don’t mention clubs or chapters (regional areas of clubs) by name, I don’t talk about club business or members even if I know it, and a lot of this came from mutual respect from the best of them, even though that is a thing that has largely passed, 1% clubs in the 201x’s have little in common with 1% clubs in the 70’s, it stands to reason, the technology of the po-po has moved on.

It should also be stated for clarity that speaking entirely personally, I did not consider club members to be bikers, a biker rides where he wants when he wants and answers to no one, a club member riding into another club’s territory needed to observe the protocols, which wasn’t for me.

But, all that aside, part of the prospecting period went on getting you a decent set of wheels and getting you so you could ride it well and maintain it yourself, this was often done by building a bike from a scrap / crashed donor, in some clubs some times from a stolen donor, but the build process and the money you earned and put into it were part of the process, which was finished off with a hand engraved plaque stating property of etc.

Earning the money was something the club helped with, if you didn’t have a trade they’d find work for you, if necessary work that was illegal like drugs, but either way you worked enough to run a decent set of wheels and to pay your club dues.

Riding skills were taught too, you had to be able to keep with the pack and not wipe out and take out six other riders at the same time, and you also had to avoid breakdowns or accidents with cagers or attracting extra unwanted attention from the pigs.

Behaviour skills were taught too, if the club goes out for a ride and ends up talking to the po-po or the pub landlord etc, well, one guy had that job and that was pre-selected position, may or may not have been called a road captain, nobody else spoke and nobody else dealt, it has upsides, you pumped your own gas but never paid for it, so the man paid for it all, ensuring nobody rode off without paying, ensuring the citizen in the gas station had no issues with the club…

… of course there were other roles within the club to enforce adherence to all these behaviours, and if you’ve watched naff bikers films or worse still Sons of Arthritis (never seen it) you’ll be familiar with titles like enforcer, sergeant at arms, president, and so on.

So, while they were not in my terms “bikers like me” they were motorcycle clubs, and it was very very very true to say that a club coming to town and parking up was a lot like a mini custom motorcycle show all by itself, very very very few people were like me, in that I could park my bikes next to theirs and they would blend in, and if there had been an actual all comers custom motorcycle event, the club bikes would have been voted 1st, 2nd, 3rd, all the way down the line, not because “I’ll kill ya if ya vote for anything else” but because they were the best.

But they were NOT Sons of Arthritis shit, they were all pretty much hand made and built, and they all handled reasonably well, and everyone in the club could ride reasonably well, and these were matters of club pride. eg taken very very very fucking seriously indeed.

Fuck off great apes that you hung off might have been fine if you were a member of an informal motorcycle club like the national chopper club, if you were patch they got ripped out for some short flat bars and the rest of the bike suspension and steering got a work over too.

Invariably the patch club only ran the best and most expensive and most sticky and wore out fastest tyres.

I need to make this point very clearly, even the most ardent detractors of the 1% patch club scene, those that dismissed them as being not bikers, or being a criminal organisation or being a bunch of guys who sought safety in numbers, all agreed on one thing, the motorcycles defined the club, and everyone by the time they finished prospecting and got the full patch had a bike that was the envy of most, and could ride and maintain it better than most.

This was non negotiable.

Back in the 70’s when you were 200 miles from home and the oil bag split and started leaking on your old BSA chop you headed towards town and the nearest pub with all the patch bikers outside, someone there could hook you up with someone who had some brazing kit, it would cost you a few beers and you could buy some weed and you’d get the job done for about the same as a traditional motorcycle mechanic if they had been open, or you could get a wheel re-laced or any other running repairs you needed.

However I do know what Hans is talking about, and while the turkistan bike club with zero bikes but any drugs or whore you want is an extreme example, it’s not a million fucking miles from the truth either.

I remember an except from last summer, I’m at this indy bike mechanic and there is a guy there from a patch club, as we’d say back in the early 80’s if you looked at him he was “straight outta easyriders magazine” and we’re talking and he keeps looking at me, you see, I’m not paying him, or more importantly the patch, the respect he feels it deserves, I’m just talking like he is some guy, and he is looking at me wondering who this guy is.

I’m not intimidated, *I* don’t have a fucking target on my back, and respect is fucking earned, and the days of the patch club are numbered, you’re already “less” than you used to be, and that is not your fault, you can only recruit from the general population, and the raw material just ain’t there.

When I was a young man you couldn’t ride 100 miles without tripping over your dick and seeing some patch guys out for a ride (often the ride would have some purpose that involved money) but the last time I saw a group or gang out was about three years ago at a service station in wales, and I look and watch, sure enough some nice bikes, but nobody standing around watching everyone is behaving, everyone paid for their own fuel, and I really really hate to use the terms or invoke this, but there was no quasi military feel to the whole thing, and that is what has changed in 40 years.

In the 80’s the prospects would have stepped up to the pumps (only one row, leaving the rest of the station free) and been gas monkey for everyone else, someone else would have taken munchie and drinks orders and done that, someone else would stand over the filled and parked bikes while people made toilet breaks, and maybe two out of the 40 or 50 would actually have gone into the gas station.

Then someone would be going over everyone and their bike after fuelling, you good to go? tyre pressures ok? oil ok? gassed up? everyone here? (something the original mad max got almost right, where’s johnny the boy… prospect if ever there was one) does everyone know where the next stop is, and the A and B alternates if shit hits the fan?

These guys in wales, if I had *wanted* to talk to them, I had no idea who to walk up to, because *nobody* was running perimeter security, and I’m sorry, but if you ain’t even got that shit right, then you’re just a bunch of guys, and you just threw away the one thing that made patch life attractive, blood is thicker than water.

I see this too, the new breed, they’re walking around hyper, looking for offence to take, the old school, sweet fuck all to prove to anyone, the patch was the definitive evidence that they had already done all the proving they ever needed to do, much like an old school british para, he didn’t care if you’d had 11 pints and your mates had convinced you that you could be as hard as him, yeah, you’re probably right son, why you fucking with an old guy like me instead of feeling up that beautiful girl you walked in with?

Today people look at me, kick ass harley and I’m not out every opportunity riding it, and when I do like yesterday it’s a 30/40 mile solo ride just to blow the cobwebs out and keep the motor used, and can’t understand why I’m not doing more of this or that or the other.

I already done it all son, and back when the doing was good, not like today where it all sucks, and everything is not what it used to be or says on the tin, where the primary descriptor of a motorcycle club is everyone rides decent bikes well.

Back then it really was a way of life (AWOL) and literally everything else in your life hung off or was subservient to the fact that you rode a motorcycle, a good motorcycle, that you rode well and ate miles on.

I don’t bemoan the clubs of 2017 for not being like the clubs in the 70’s, it simply isn’t possible, technological changes makes that true, if everyone had been walking around with smartphone cameras and gps triangulation google location history and CCTV and ANPR and the po-po having data at their instant fingertips 24/7 and on and on and on and on, hell, 99.9% at least of what I did back then was undetected, today I’d be real lucky to achieve 50%, so the shit i’d get caught for would go from 0.1% to 50% which is 500 times as much.

And it wasn’t all trivial motoring shit either.

You see a bunch of local white guys riding around in their sons of arthritis patches, well, even if they have a corrupt inside line on the po-po and do the po-po’s dirty work on the side, they aren’t much, they can’t be, in the information age it ain’t possible (all those welsh guys used their own plastic to pay for their own fuel, that and google maps and phone records and triangulation etc.. bang to rights bro…) which does leave the exception that Hans speaks about, those who aren’t in the system or those who the system studiously ignored because to do otherwise would be rayciss or against state political ethos…. not many controls on them…

And because they aren’t old school, no in club enforcers to make them toe the line and not bring shit down on the club and no wildcatting and no individual entrepreneurship and none of that jazz.

Whatever nuanced or biased shit you wanted to say about and against old school 1% patch clubs, they were at the least MOTORCYCLE clubs at heart, nobody would deny that, and that brought with it a certain level of discipline and character and limitations, not that Joe Public would agree that any of these were good characteristics, but they were there.

Take away the pre-requisite for a first class hand built bike that you could ride and maintain yourself, well, and you dilute it, by the time you get down to the point that a stolen twist and go scooter and some guy on the back with a hatchet is all it takes, you’ve taken away all the internal discipline and all the inherent limitations.

What you have left is animals who may or may not use two wheels as an ocassional form of transport… when those animals are off the radar and off the computer system rapefugees and sand niggers and orks… well…

This does not mean the old 1% clubs are gone, there are still some out there that try to stay true to the old ways, that try to stay true to the old standards, but like all of us they have also learned the survival value of being much lower profile, but the flip side of that is the old lifestyle that was part and parcel of the whole thing, whether that was being hardcore 1% patch club member or an independent lone biker, is long gone, and it ain’t coming back, ever.

For me the worrying thing about comments like Hans’ is this, the label on the tin no longer matches what is in the tin, what used to be in the tin pretty much stayed in the tin, if you don’t want you hand chewed off don’t stick it in the tin, nowadays what’s in the tin is toxic and it wants to get out, and none of the old or new checks and balances are in place.

In the old days in case of a zombie apocalypse I wouldn’t have headed to town or the army base or anywhere else, I’d have headed for the nearest genuine old school 1% patch club, 95% of them would have been ex military and the club was basically the military without any generals to send them over the top, so inside their compound is as safe as it gets, and in the old days I’d have been allowed in too…lol

Nowadays I’m out of the loop, so I literally have no idea if it would still be a good strategy, I suspect not, in any event, I’m outta the loop so I wouldn’t be welcome… perhaps more tellingly they just don’t have the numbers any more, and in the days of google earth and digital comms there are no more “off the radar” remote farms that nobody knows about except club members and very close associates, so I’d probably be eaten by the zombies while fruitlessly searching for them, which makes any question of them being sanctuary moot.

Back in the 70’s, the 1% outlaw patch clubs weren’t so much outlaws, as people who had had enough of the shit and hypocrisy of society, usually after having served abroad in the armed forces, and then returning home to be thrown on the scrap heap and ostracised by everyone for what they did abroad in the name of everyone back home, so they were not outlaws so much as people trying to live outside the laws, if they could do that without breaking laws so be it, they never cares about YOU adhering to YOUR laws, or even YOu adhering to THEIR rules, the two were different, and live and let live would have suited them fine.

The fact is that even back then society was so controlled that living by their laws meant breaking some of “ours”, so they did attract po-po attention, and of course some individuals went further than that, which tarred everyone with the same brush, anyone with a set of old hand made leathers on a hard tail chop was a “Hell’s Angel” to Joe Public the minute the po-po or press started talking about them…

Today those levels of control are a fond and distant memory.

Today simply being a “prepper” or “french first in france” is enough to be targeted by the state, try and be an old school outlaw biker and shortly you’ll be behind bars for a very long time, meanwhile those who the system will not track, the rapefugees and orks, are given free rein.

They don’t have the same attitude to the straights and Joe Public as the old school 1%ers did, they don’t even have the same attitude as the worst of the outlaw club scene did that preyed on certain members of Joe Public and society, the very worst of the old school outlaw bikers would be ridiculed by the new non motorcycling crew who ride around on twist and go mopeds with hatchets and battery power disk grinders under all the CCTV and everything else helping themselves to whatever they want from whoever they want, and if you dare to say anything about it, not only will they target you next, so will your own state, for being a rayciss asshole.