From a distance, I thought he was a chick.
BERNIE GUINDON on the young Bob Dylan
For all the politics of club life, Guindon was a biker at heart and enjoyed nothing more than the freedom of the open road. One day in the late 1960s, he decided to ride to the Maritimes on his Harley Panhead, which was a definite step up from the old Knuckleheads. “The Knuckleheads used to leak like a sonofabitch.” Whatever the model, he was a Harley man, and Harley men need to be on the road, moving, listening to the motor rumble and watching the scenery blow by. “There’s just something about them. The old ones at least. When you’re growing up with them.”
Hydraulics hadn’t advanced to the point that riding a Harley was anywhere near comfortable. “You hit a bump, you can just feel your back going crunch.” But that wasn’t the point. There was something both primal and soothing about the sound of a Harley’s short-stroke V-twin engine between your legs that made up for the jarring ride. All it took was a flip of the wrists and a working-class kid from Oshawa could feel like a snob, a modern-day knight atop the best, loudest bike money could buy. So distinctive was the Harley sound that the company would actually try decades later to patent it.
On Guindon’s way to the East Coast, the romance of Harley and highway didn’t hold up. His Panhead sputtered to a stop in Montreal, where he was told it would take a couple days to get the parts to fix it. While passing time at the Montreal clubhouse, he heard that Rod MacLeod and a few Choice members were headed for New York City to check out the hippie scene in Greenwich Village.
“Can I come?” Guindon asked.
They obliged and Guindon hopped a ride on the back of the 1959 Decker of the club’s road captain, a suburban Italian named Tony. Also along for the ride were the Kitchener chapter president and vice-president and MacLeod’s friend Jono, the serial bank robber. Across the border, they tried camping on a rocky ridge by the side of the highway but were rousted by highway cops and told that no one camps by the side of the road in New York.
When Guindon saw the police, he wondered if his little crew had brought hashish with them. Chances were good that they had. It was fairly easy to hide it in a bike’s handlebars or under the seat. Borders didn’t really scare them then, in the more relaxed days before 9/11. “That’s life,” Guindon said. “You take your chance. You win or you lose.” On that night, they won and kept riding.
When they got to New York City, MacLeod took the lead, even though Tony was officially road captain. “It’s my territory,” MacLeod explained. “They’re all black here.”
That sounded good to Guindon. “I got to see parts of New York that I didn’t see before,” he reflected.
At 42nd and Broadway, in the heart of Manhattan, the throttle stuck on Tony’s bike and it crashed onto a crowded sidewalk. Tent poles on the bike smashed a shop window, and soon police were on the scene. Tony escaped with a warning and an order to immediately pay for the window.
After covering the cost of the damage, the bikers slipped from poor to broke and headed off to a blood bank to raise money for food and gas. Guindon was proud that his Rh-negative blood was relatively rare and fetched seven dollars—two dollars more than the blood of each of the others. That meant he was able to buy a hot dog for fifty cents and gas up the tank.
That night, they pitched their tents in Central Park but kept getting moved on by the police. Through the darkness, they could see a woman who recognized MacLeod and Jono from a visit a few months earlier. She was hard to miss since she was stoned, topless and running hard toward them. Her Hells Angel boyfriend was chasing her down, and he caught her before there could be any reunion with the Canadian bikers.
After pitching their tents, Guindon and his friends went to Greenwich Village to see an outdoor concert. Guindon found the curly-haired singer alluring in an unconventional way. He considered making an approach but was uncharacteristically shy. Later, he discovered that this was just as well. The guitar-playing folk singer was actually a man and a famous one at that: Bob Dylan. “He sounded like a female in those days. I wasn’t into the folk art in those days. I was into the country and the rock. From a distance, I thought he was a chick.” Guindon was more partial to the music of Johnny Cash, Buddy Holly and Merle Haggard.
That wasn’t the only time Guindon experienced a gender-related surprise. Hippy recalled a time in Toronto when they were in a second-floor nightclub at Avenue and Webster Avenues, across from Webster’s diner: “There were about ten of us there getting drunk and having a great time. Bernie had his eye on one gal there that looked super sexy. We all kept bugging him to go and have a dance with her…Bernie started dancing with her. He was really into her and they were dancing up close in a slow dance, kind of grinding away if you know what I mean.”
Guindon’s buddies realized his dance partner was a man, although Hippy considered him the “best damn good-looking man I ever saw!” Guindon, however, didn’t notice.
“We were laughing hysterically, but nobody was man enough to tell Bernie. Bernie was a tough guy and could knock you out with one punch. It took a long time for us to tell him. I don’t think I have ever laughed like that in my life. In the end, Bernie was okay with it.”