I’m sorry. I was a young dad. I didn’t have the patience. You don’t know how I grew up.
BERNIE GUINDON apologizes to his daughter
Ever since Guindon left General Motors, earning a legitimate living was complicated. His daughter Shanan said his resumé was marked by “great ideas, lousy partners.”
There was his brief career as a barber after his second prison stint, when he worked for a time with a friend in Ajax, between Oshawa and Toronto. He had apprenticed at the trade while behind bars, but not all of that experience had been positive. He once accidentally gave an inmate a nasty two-inch gash while shaving him with a straight razor. “I wasn’t bad. It’s just it wasn’t my cup of tea. I didn’t feel comfortable.”
On the outside, he practised on Harley. Little Harley sat relatively still for a variety of haircuts from his father, most of them of the pompadour variety. It was fun naming the haircuts his father gave him, but not so enjoyable actually getting them. “I never went to a barber until I was fifteen,” Harley said. “I had the Rat Tail, the Step.” Still, the price was right and it was an adventure. There was sometimes a lineup of neighbourhood kids at the house, waiting for haircuts that included “the Bowl” and “the Staircase.”
Guindon also tried cutting Shanan’s hair when she was eleven. At first she was happy for the one-on-one attention from her father, but then she became afraid as her hair kept hitting the floor. “It was lopsided, severely lopsided…I said, ‘Okay, that’s short enough.’ He kept trying to straighten it up. I would have been bald if I let him keep going.”
Guindon also did some work fixing transport trailers, but making custom motorcycles seemed more of a fit. This too presented challenges. Guindon was a perfectionist and not particularly businesslike, and many of his customers wanted Easy Rider magic on a moped budget. “A lot of people expected miracles,” Guindon said. “They didn’t want to give you the money to build a bike. They didn’t realize the work and the money that goes into that.”
There wasn’t much money in leatherwork, as good as he was, since Guindon’s craft was time-consuming and could be roughly imitated with cheap machinery. Few people want to pay a hundred dollars for a wallet, however well made it might be.
Guindon had plenty of other ideas for making an honest living. One particularly ambitious project was a fertilizer business run from a verdant property in tiny Baltimore, Ontario, north of Cobourg. Called Nature’s Magic, the organic plant food was made by burning off silt and mixing in leaves and a special substance. The product was sold in bottles, and its makers believed it was so potent, it could grow crops on the desert sand. “We were convinced we were going to feed all of the poor people across the globe,” Harley’s stepmother said. “We spent day and night on that thing.”
There were plenty of biker-related issues taking up Guindon’s time in the early 1990s, and it was common for Guindon to answer his phone with “What’s wrong?” That’s how he answered it when his daughter Teresa called one night in a panic. She was unable to get into the room of her three-year-old son, Devin.
Guindon rushed over and took Devin’s door off its hinges. Once inside, they frantically scanned the room but couldn’t find the toddler. Devin wasn’t on the bed or under the bed or in the closet. The boy had medical problems, so there was no time to spare. Could he have been abducted? Could someone have come in through the window? Guindon had always feared that his enemies might come after Harley to get at him. Had they targeted his grandson?
Finally, they found the boy, wedged between his mattress and headboard, curled up and sound asleep. What Teresa saw next was something she hadn’t seen before and she wouldn’t ever see again.
Her father was crying.
“Wow, that’s a first,” she said. “I’ve never seen you cry before.”
“Well, I am human.”
“Really? News to me.”
“What do you mean by that?”
“You weren’t the best dad in the world.”
Perhaps the horrors of his own childhood flooded back to him as he said, “I’m sorry. I was a young dad. I didn’t have the patience. You don’t know how I grew up.”
“I have an issue with men crying,” Teresa later said. “I always look at them like they’re wimpy or something. My dad was tough. I had never seen a gentle side of him.”
She wasn’t pleasant with her father as he shed tears over the thought of losing Devin to his enemies. “I wasn’t being sweet and nice. I was being a bitch, basically. I was throwing in a dig.
“He cried and said, ‘Teresa, I’m sorry.’ I cried too. I said, ‘I forgive you.’ ”