I don’t think any of us girls had a cakewalk of a life.
Bernie Guindon’s daughter SHANAN
For a long time, Guindon hadn’t expected to hear anything positive at parole board hearings, but he could at least hope for a few laughs. Once, he attended one with a tape deck and played a few bars of Johnny Paycheck’s country hit “Take This Job and Shove It” before he was dismissed and ordered back to his cell. Even if he had gotten paroled that day, he figured he wouldn’t have lasted long on the streets. With his reputation, he would’ve been scooped up by police for associating with criminals. “What’s the sense of getting out if they’re only going to get me for association or thinking of association?”
In time, he became more optimistic and his behaviour followed suit. In the fall of 1984, Guindon was granted parole. On November 19, his forty-second birthday, Suzanne Blais picked him up from a halfway house in Toronto’s Parkdale district. She was sitting in a limo with a bottle of champagne and a green-iced birthday cake shaped like a frog. Guindon wasn’t a drinker and he wasn’t supposed to consume alcohol on parole anyways, but at least he could enjoy the cake.
Suzanne was still married, but that didn’t bother her as she took him to a Burton Cummings concert at the Imperial Room in the Royal York hotel, a venue so ritzy that Bob Dylan was once refused entry because he wasn’t wearing a tie. Guindon marvelled at the sight of the CN Tower a couple blocks away on Front Street. The world’s tallest free-standing structure stood for eight years before Guindon saw it. “It was brand new. It was to me.”
Guindon felt as warmly toward Blais as when they had shared their first dinner together almost thirty years earlier, but wondered how long she’d feel the same. “We had a great time, and he was really surprised,” Blais remembered. “I felt it was the least I could do for all of the encouragement and support he had given me all those early years.”
Much had changed in the decade Guindon had spent locked up. The old, seedy Yonge Street strip had been flushed away in the aftermath of the August 1977 sex murder of twelve-year-old shoeshine boy Emanuel Jaques. His body was found on the roof of Charlie’s Angels body-rub parlour at 245 Yonge Street, across from the current Eaton Centre and a stone’s throw from the old Venus Spa, where Guindon used to work.
Upon their former leader’s release from prison, club members supplied Guindon with a Harley, and he used it to reconnect with his daughters. He hadn’t been around to protect them, and now there was plenty of damage he wanted to repair. Estimates varied of just how many children he had fathered. Guesses began at eleven, and at least two of them were in the care of Children’s Aid. “I think that it bothered him that a lot of his kids were in a lot of horrible life-changing situations that he couldn’t take care of,” his daughter Shanan said. She was just ten when he was freed, but most of Guindon’s kids had grown up before he had gotten out of jail. “I don’t think any of us girls had a cakewalk of a life.”
Guindon climbed on the bike and took some long rides down some hard roads, seeking out his daughters and trying to find a place for himself in their lives. There were no sons, as far as he knew. “He basically had to go around the country, one by one, and collect them,” Shanan said. “I remember going into a strip club with my dad to check on one of my sisters.”
It wasn’t easy growing up in Oshawa as Bernie Guindon’s daughter. “I thought if I acted really tough, he would accept me,” Teresa said. “It brings you in circles you don’t want to be in…A lot of kids get in trouble because it’s attention. It’s not good attention but it’s attention.” She felt she was doomed to be rejected by her father because she was a girl. “My dad didn’t want a daughter. He wanted a son.”
Teresa worried that as long as she lived in Oshawa, she would never escape the taboo of her last name. Parents wouldn’t let her play with their children. Boys seemed afraid to ask her out, for fear of what might happen to them if things went wrong. Employers were reluctant to hire her. “I was taboo, taboo. You go out with her and make a mistake, you end up in the river,” she said. “My dad’s reputation followed me.”
Life seemed stacked against her from birth. “My whole life, I was living behind my dad’s shadow and it wasn’t good…My mother was young…I was told that I was a mistake. Nobody wanted me.” Teresa thought seriously of changing her last name. “I almost did and then I thought, Should I be ashamed of who I am? I thought no, no.”
Guindon didn’t want to force a relationship on his daughters, but he needed them to know that he was around now and that he cared about them always. His message was “I’m here if you need me,” and it was painful to deliver. “I’m sure it wasn’t any fun,” Shanan said.
Aside from the girls’ emotional reactions to their long-absent father, he struggled just to keep track of all his daughters. Each had a different mother except for the two from his second wife, Barbara Ann. Another two were born to different mothers in the same year. But Guindon took to the job with a newfound commitment, lecturing Shanan when he learned that the thirteen-year-old dropped acid on Canada Day. “This is going to lead to this and this and this,” he said, lifting his nose like he was snorting something and jabbing at his arm as if sticking a needle into a vein.
Having returned to Oshawa, Guindon also took it upon himself to sort out the lives of friends and acquaintances in the biker world. “Every second knock on the door was usually drama,” Shanan recalled. “He would complain he was stressed, but he couldn’t turn away a knock at the door. They expected him to sort out the bullshit. Stripper bullshit. Boyfriend bullshit.” At times, she would get frustrated and tell him, “You’re spending your time with the wrong people.” With time, her tone softened: “Now that I’m older, I understand.”
Teresa was already grown up by the time her father was paroled. She had married an ex-con whom Guindon knew from behind bars, though he didn’t know his new son-in-law’s offence. To ask while behind bars would have been considered poor form.
Teresa found work in palliative care, easing the pain of terminal patients. Then she became a professional clown, to bring joy to children. She also wrote a children’s book called My Gentle Giant, which tells the story of a little girl whose love transforms a cruel giant into someone lovable, despite the barriers put in place by villagers. It was easy to imagine what the little girl in her story wanted. “That was my dream,” Teresa said. “That my dad would lose the club. Become a better person. Have a happy life. Have a normal life.”
When she was thirty, Teresa suffered a stroke and was no longer able to write well enough to put together a grocery list, let alone write more books. “I thought, My life is over.” Rage finally consumed her. “I got really mad at God, and I decided that I wanted to end my life. Commit suicide.” She planned to use a cocktail of prescription pills but wondered if swallowing them would keep her out of heaven. She also wondered about the consequences of having a father who led the Satan’s Choice. “I thought I might not get in because of my dad.”
She started reading a bible that had been given to her by her maternal grandfather, and she marvelled as the paralysis began to leave her body. She also found that she had lost the need for approval from her birth father, who had never been there anyway. To Teresa’s mind, he wasn’t the father who had saved her. She felt cleansed and finally freed. “God healed me.”
—
Guindon got a phone call from his old friend George Chuvalo in 1985, asking for a special favour. The boxing champ’s son was in trouble.
Guindon suspected it hadn’t been easy to live in the shadow of a famous father whose very name called to mind toughness and courage. Certainly, that’s what he was hearing from his own kids. Jesse Chuvalo’s drug problems began at the age of twenty, shortly after he lost a kneecap in a motorcycle accident. The pain from the injury lingered and he turned to heroin to fight it. Soon, he was an addict, and his father, so indomitable in the ring, was worried and lost.
“Would you mind coming over and having a talk?” Chuvalo asked.
Guindon didn’t hesitate, as his respect for Chuvalo ran deep. “He was always a nice guy. He’s a gentleman.”
Guindon tried to scare Jesse, just like he had tried to scare Shanan after she used acid. He did his best to explain to Jesse that drug users often end up in prison and there’s no joy in that life. “I told him the truth. You don’t want to go to jail. You ruin your life. You’ll never get a job.”
Guindon left the meeting thinking he had gotten through to Jesse. It was a good, hopeful feeling. “I talked to him a good hour. He seemed like a good kid. He listened. Two months later, he was dead.”
Jesse shot himself in the mouth in his bedroom on February 18, 1985. Chuvalo said he appreciated Guindon’s support throughout that horrible time, before and after the death: “He was very sympathetic. He was a kind guy. He was a nice guy. He would lend his support.”
Guindon thought of his friend Davey Hilton and his sons. Hilton had been a high-level boxer, with a knee-buckling left hook, and he had close associates that included Montreal mobster Frank Cotroni. Hilton’s sons had fallen into trouble, and Guindon suspected they were going through the same troubles as Jesse Chuvalo. “He [Hilton] was a good guy, good boxer,” said Guindon. “The boys had to grow up in the old man’s history.”
Chuvalo and Hilton were tough men—Chuvalo famously so. But neither shared the kind of infamy that comes with being the leader of the Satan’s Choice. Guindon wondered to what degree his history would continue to haunt his own family.