Being a Roman Catholic school, we don’t choose Satan. We choose Jesus Christ.
PRINCIPAL at Harley Guindon’s school
Harley couldn’t understand why he was sent home from Holy Cross Catholic Elementary School in Grade 1 for wearing a black and orange T-shirt with “Harley-Davidson” written across the front. He tried to argue that it was just his name, but didn’t convince anyone. He faced another shirt-related drama when he was nine years old and in Grade 4. That time, he was sent home for wearing a black T-shirt celebrating the thirtieth anniversary of his father’s club with the message, “Support Your Local Choice.”
His father didn’t take the school’s reprimand lightly. He took his complaint to the Whitby This Week newspaper. “I can’t see anything wrong with the T-shirt,” Guindon told a reporter. “It was never meant to be offensive. We went out of our way to design the T-shirt to be socially acceptable. It doesn’t have the club’s emblem. It doesn’t have the word ‘Satan’ or anything like that. In my opinion, Harley was discriminated against because of who his father was, rather than the actual shirt.”
Guindon and Harley’s stepmother had met with the school’s principal, but nothing was resolved. “We pointed out Satan’s Choice was a motorcycle club,” Guindon told the newspaper. “We represent an alternative lifestyle, but we’re not a political or religious organization.”
Principal Tisi wasn’t impressed, calling it “inappropriate dress” that made an indirect reference to Satan. “Being a Roman Catholic school, we don’t choose Satan,” Tisi said. “We choose Jesus Christ.”
Guindon took his protest up a notch—in volume. He began taking Harley to school on his motorcycle. The Guindons lived on a school bus route, near where Guindon had grown up, but Harley often deliberately missed the bus to get a ride on the back of his father’s bike. “Most times when riding through the streets on our way to school, he would pop wheelies in front of my peers walking, leaving me holding on for dear life,” Harley recalled. “I never got used to it. The back rest didn’t give me that feeling of comfort one would expect. Every time he did it, even if I knew it was coming, it would still scare the shit out of me.”
Harley was a naturally energetic child, and Guindon refused to allow him to take any medication to calm him. Booze and pills of any sort were foreign to the Guindon household. “People believe that because my dad had a beard and rode a Harley, he must have been a party animal,” Harley said in 2016. “To this day, I have never witnessed my dad drink alcohol or do drugs or saw him under the influence.” Guindon extended his own abstention to his son, whether he could use the medicinal help or not.
Years later, it irritated Harley’s stepmother to hear people say that Harley was groomed to be an outlaw biker. She spoke instead of a birthday at Chuck E. Cheese’s and family photos taken at the front of the house, under the “family tree.” Another photo shows a grinning Harley in his Boy Scout uniform on a Santa Claus parade float. “He really wasn’t exposed to a lot of it when he was growing up.”
Harley was exposed to violence early, however. One day after school, he was getting ready to step off the school bus when he saw a man running up his driveway, carrying an axe.
“Fight!” kids screamed.
That’s not a fight, Harley thought. That’s someone trying to kill my father with an axe in front of twenty-five of my schoolmates.
Harley later recalled: “I can remember this as clear as day. The guy was…ready to cut his head off, and he [Guindon] slid like a boxer, throwing out a jab, and knocked the attacker out cold upon the lawn.”
Guindon was so focused on his attacker that he didn’t realize the school bus had stopped directly across the street. Harley and his friends stared as Guindon dragged the unconscious man from the lawn into the garage. Harley rode the bus for a few extra stops, giving his father appropriate time to dispose of the unconscious man. Then he walked home as if nothing had happened. “I didn’t lay eyes on him [Guindon] until dinner and didn’t even receive an explanation. Almost like I must have been dreaming.” The police never showed up at the door, despite the many little witnesses. “Not even the bus driver called the cops that day,” Harley said. “The kids at school used to tease me because my real name is Harley Davidson, but after that, things became much easier.”
Harley didn’t see much of his father’s rough side. “For the most part, I was sheltered,” Harley said. But when Guindon drove Harley around town, there was always a baseball glove, ball and bat on the back seat, even though they never went to the ballpark. “I’ve never seen him throw a baseball,” Harley said. The bat was for self-protection, and the glove and ball were to make the bat look less suspicious.
On some special days, Harley got to escort his dad to work on film sets. Guindon’s grizzled biker look was helping solve his employment problem by getting him work as an extra in movies and television shows such as Jungle Movie, My Date with the President’s Daughter, Kung Fu: The Legend Continues and Blues Brothers 2000, when he got to visit inside actor John Goodman’s trailer.
The most frightening sight Harley saw while growing up wasn’t the man with the axe, or a Molotov cocktail crashing through the front window of his home for reasons his father refused to explain. It was the change he occasionally saw deep in his father’s eyes, when they seemed to turn black with rage. Harley recounted a chilling pattern to his father’s anger. When he started to lose control, Guindon looked up to the left. Next, he crossed his hands, rubbed his neck and tilted his glasses down to the tip of his nose. Then he shook his head. The final and most horrifying part of this metamorphosis followed. “When my eyes go darker, I’m at my worst,” Guindon confessed.
Harley called the angry eyes “black death” and thought, Black eyes, it’s on. Harley didn’t remember the black death eyes from the many times he was suspended from school, although he did receive the occasional whupping for that. The pupils went black when someone challenged or disobeyed his dad. “The only person on this earth that can make me nervous is my father,” Harley later said. “When he is mad, you can see his pupils capture all colour flaring black before you, almost like you can see death behind his eyes. It doesn’t take much. The man lacks patience in a serious way.”
The black death eyes were almost exclusively reserved for adults, but one time, they were aimed directly at Harley. “That was because a school friend stole nearly two thousand dollars out of his drawer and he thought it was me,” Harley said. “There are countless times that man scared the shit out of me, but that day is etched into my mind forever.”
The black death eyes could also make an appearance at family cribbage games, when Harley’s uncle, Jack, dropped by to play a game or two. Cribbage was a game that Guindon mastered in prison and he didn’t take losing gently. Harley recalled games punctuated by bouts of “choking, yelling, punching, smacking and wrestling.”
“You would believe they despised one another, but there’s a genuine love somewhere under the exterior,” Harley said. “He’s never flew across the table at me, and we’ve played thousands of games together. Then again, I know better than to raise my voice and his blood pressure.”
During one game with his father, Harley was dealt a twenty-nine hand, the best one possible. “The odds are like a royal flush in poker,” Harley said. “He always told me if I got a twenty-nine hand he would give me five hundred dollars. The day I did, I moved our couch set to my room, and he purchased a new one. He bragged for months about it to basically every visitor. We lived with the cribbage board on the dining room table, which made it a constant reminder. He used to say I was the luckiest kid he’s ever met and I don’t just have a horseshoe up my ass, I have the whole horse.”
Whether they were watching the Toronto Maple Leafs on television or attending Scouting events, Harley got something his sisters never did: Bernie Guindon just being a dad. Harley was always working on a new badge to add to his Boy Scouts sash, but the most noticeable badge was the one his father gave him: his name. “I used to tell him to behave,” Guindon said. “They were teasing him all the time. ‘Harley, can I ride you?’ It’s hard.” Harley’s last name was tough to miss, too.
He was just a Beaver Scout when he approached his big sister Teresa. He was clearly upset about something.
“You’re my sister and you love me, right? Can I tell you a secret?”
Teresa told him that of course she loved him and of course he could confide in her. Harley explained how a police officer had approached him at Beaver Scouts.
“He came up and told me how bad my dad was and he was going to kill him,” Harley said.
“I said, ‘I’m going to pray,’ ” Teresa recalled. “He was scared to go to sleep after that. He thought they were going to kill his dad. He was traumatized. He was like five years old. He said, ‘My daddy’s a bad man and they’re going to kill him, and if I tell anybody, they’re going to hurt the family.’ ”
It was four or five years later when Guindon first took his son aside and spoke to him man-to-man. On a Wednesday evening, they stopped by a pizzeria before a Cub Scout meeting. Harley was nine or ten years old and not even tall enough to see over the counter. After getting their slices, the father and son walked out the door, and in an uncharacteristically grave tone, Guindon said he needed to speak to him. “That was different, and I knew from his demeanour that he was troubled and it couldn’t be good,” Harley said. “He gave me a real hug, not something I was accustomed to if I didn’t initiate it, and he said, ‘Harley, you know I love you. I may never be coming home again, but you will be looked after. Harley, when you’re older, you’ll understand that sometimes a man has to do what a man has to do, no matter the consequences.’ ”
Even at that age, Harley knew better than to ask questions. “It didn’t register immediately. I remember trying to concentrate at Cubs while everyone played ringette, but I remained teary-eyed on the sidelines, not wanting to play or speak to the leaders about why I was upset.” Harley just repeated to himself what his father had said, over and over until it was burned into the boy’s mind forever. He didn’t share a word of it with any of his friends.
Harley didn’t see his father for the next three days. Then Guindon reappeared and all was right in Harley’s world once more. Two decades later, Harley could vividly recall the raw emotion of running up and giving his father a hug and seeing the look of love in his dad’s eyes as he lifted him into the air. “We never spoke of this again,” Harley said. “It was a repressed memory until I had my son…When I close my eyes. I can relive that vision of the joy, when I wrapped my arms around my father with relief.”
Guindon’s recollection of the incident was less emotional. “Sometimes you had to fuck off and you never knew if you’re coming back.”
Guindon was back, and he and Harley celebrated by building a soapbox racing car from a block of wood. At the Boy Scouts derby, Harley placed second, only behind the scoutmaster’s son. Next, they tried something a little more complicated. Guindon and Harley ordered parts from California to build a kid-sized 1964 Harley-Davidson Pacer. It was a rare bike, and Harley used birthday money, allowances and whatever else he could to help pay for it. “I worked selling chocolate bars and used all my money and had the bike built by the time I turned twelve,” he recalled. The bike was painted a candy apple red when it was finally completed. “I would enter my bike into all the Ontario bike shows and won a few trophies along the way when my father would enter his bikes. It was something we did, father and son.” Guindon said he later wished they could have put the Pacer together quicker, so that Harley could have enjoyed it more when the bike was the right size for him to ride. “He was too big when he got it.”
Spending so much time with his father meant experiencing life as he lived it, including the persistent police attention. “I can recall being pulled over three times in twenty kilometres on a regular day.” Getting pulled over was such a constant that Guindon always had to factor it into his travel time when going anywhere, since he hated to be late. “He finally had enough one day and went into the cop shop and asked for the staff sergeant,” Harley recalled. Guindon suggested that day that he was willing to blow up the police station and himself along with it, if that’s what it took for them to halt what Harley called “the harassment and fake tickets.”
“After that, they left him alone, which was leaving me alone too, because we were always together.”
Even without the road stops, Guindon received enough police attention to turn it into a father-son game. “Our home phone was tapped regularly. Multiple times in the 1990s, he would get me to listen to the cops talking on the phone, clear as day.” Harley was amused by how his father could make it all seem funny, giving fake orders for people to go to certain places, leading police on wild goose chases.
“Living that life felt normal,” Harley said.
It seemed everyone in the south end of Oshawa had a story about Guindon. Shanan would hear men in bars talking of drinking with him and knew it was false since her father wasn’t a drinker. Once, she walked up to men bragging about sharing drinks with him and asked, “Tell me, what does Bernie Guindon drink?”
“I knew he would not pick these two sloths,” she later said. She also heard women talking of wild sex with him. She declined to ask them for details.
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When Angel and Guindon were finally done, she found a young new boyfriend named Scott, who was determined to do her proud. On the surface, Scott wasn’t much like Guindon. He was less than half Guindon’s age and appeared to be even younger than Angel. He didn’t have much money and he certainly wasn’t a fighter, but he was cute and soft-spoken and he clearly had something that appealed to Guindon’s fiery ex.
Angel wanted Scott to become a full-patch member of the Satan’s Choice. Scott had always done what he could to please her. He had trimmed off a little flab and bought a black chopper from Guindon, which he needed in order to become a striker for the Oshawa chapter of the Choice.
He was still a striker one evening in 1990, when Angel was visiting the home of her friend Maggie Pearce-O’Shea. Scott rode up on his chopper, and Angel and Pearce-O’Shea watched through the window as two full members of the Oshawa chapter suddenly appeared in the driveway. One stopped beside Scott and the other came up behind him. After a few harsh words, one of the Choice members caught Scott with a solid punch in the face. “I stopped watching after that,” Pearce-O’Shea said.
There wasn’t really much of a fight for her to see, but it was enough for Scott to realize he would not be getting his patch. There was a rule in the Choice that any striker who failed to make the grade and gain a full patch would forfeit his Harley-Davidson to the club. When the women finally mustered the courage to look outside again, Scott’s chopper was gone.
Guindon professed innocence when asked about the incident. “Probably he fucked up somewhere,” he speculated with a smile. “You had to fuck up bad. He wasn’t a happy camper, either. I don’t blame him. I didn’t do it [sell him the Harley] to make money out of it. Things happen. A lot of guys weren’t ready for the club. They thought they were ready, but they weren’t.”
Angel kept her cool and stepped outside to give her rejected man a hug, which Scott needed more for his pride than for his body.
“He and Angie disappeared from the scene after that,” reflected Pearce-O’Shea, signalling an end to one of the most confounding relationships in Guindon’s complicated love life.