Whatever you do, don’t eat a frog and a toad. Gross.
HOWARD (PIGPEN) BERRY
Within six months of joining the Satan’s Choice, Pigpen Berry was a man transformed. Long gone was his clean-shaven, campus hootenanny look, although he still wore his dark-rimmed Buddy Holly glasses. He had grabbed onto the image of a boorish outlaw biker and ridden it to dizzying, stomach-turning, eye-watering extremes.
While some bikers sought out women at parties, Pigpen craved shock and disgust. In biker terminology, to truly unnerve someone by grossing them out was called “showing class” or giving a “high one,” and no one did it better than Pigpen.
At one biker get-together, he put a live starling in a hot dog bun and bit through it, then offered a nibble to visiting members of the Outlaws. They passed. There are worse snacks, Pigpen later said. “I’ve ate mouse lots of times. A bird. Doo-doo. Heavy on the doo-doo. Whatever you do, don’t eat a frog and a toad. Gross.”
The Vagabonds routinely brought Pigpen food, marijuana and beer at parties, on the condition that he consume them at a distance. “They’d say, ‘Have this and stay away from us,’ ” Pigpen recalled. Rather than be offended, he took this as a well-earned compliment.
Pigpen viewed his vomiting on new members’ vests as a rite of passage. He managed to be creative as well as revolting. On one particularly memorable day, Pigpen saw a dead skunk in the middle of a road and pulled over to pick it up. He pinned it onto his Choice vest, wearing it like he once wore a boutonniere on his suit jacket back when he sang Buddy Holly songs. “I went from a corsage to a skunk in a couple of years,” he said.
“I walked in the clubhouse,” he later recalled. “Cleared it out. They sent in some strikers. I cleared them out. They hung me up off the tree upside down.” When he was finally lowered to the ground, he dispatched a striker to retrieve the skunk carcass, and then Pigpen pinned it back on his vest as if nothing had happened. “What did it smell like wearing a skunk? Stunk. It makes your eyes tear. It’s really hard on your eyes.”
Pigpen appeared impervious to physical pain or pleas to be less disgusting. Revulsion was like oxygen for him, but it also seemed to unleash his rampant paranoia. The more disgustingly he behaved, the more paranoid he became. He yanked his own teeth to be sure there weren’t hearing devices inserted in them. He smeared himself with his own feces while in a police holding cell to avoid being brought into court. Other bikers debated whether he was truly nuts. Pigpen thought his behaviour was more a product of discipline than craziness. “It was just a gross-out thing,” Pigpen later said. “I just put my mind into space. It’s mind over matter. If you don’t mind, it don’t matter.”
The longer Guindon knew Pigpen, the more the gross-out artist amused and confused him. “A couple of times, I had to turn around because I had to get away from him. I remember it [vomit] coming up to my throat twice.” Pigpen gave him plenty to think about, if he wanted to let his mind go in that direction. Here was a trained chef who would drink a glass full of chewing tobacco spit or publicly eat his own feces; a sometimes painfully shy man who could be a revolting exhibitionist or yank out a strange woman’s earrings. “I always liked Howard. The first time, I couldn’t believe it. A college guy coming around? Glasses. Straitlaced,” Guindon said. He chalked up a lot of Berry’s Pigpen act to competitiveness. “He always wanted to be number one. He couldn’t be number one as the head of the club, but he was number one as entertainment. He blew a lot of minds, that fucking guy.”
Guindon also considered Pigpen’s repulsive behaviour to be a defence mechanism, like a porcupine’s quills or a skunk’s terrible smell. “He’d do things just to blow your lights and get a reputation so people would leave him alone…He wasn’t crazy. He was just acting crazy.”
For those who truly knew Pigpen, he was at his most horrifying not when he was munching on a bird or a mouse or feces, but when he was dressing up in a jacket and tie and combing his hair perfectly into place, just like in his Buddy Holly impersonator days. He looked like a husky choirmaster, not an outlaw biker. If you didn’t know him, he would look quite normal. Those were the days he was planning something truly fearsome.
“Nobody would recognize me,” Pigpen later said. “Then I went to the dark side of town.”