AS THE PRESIDENT OF THE SAN GABRIEL CHAPTER of the Vagos, Terry was on call 24/7. Too often the calls came in the middle of the night.

One night just a few months into 1978, when he still carried a cast on his left arm from being shot off his bike, Terry scrambled out of bed when the phone rang. It was 1:30 in the morning as the moon crept into the warm, smog-soaked sky above teeming Los Angeles city streets.

Black Beard sneered at him and lifted a long-barreled Bulldog .44 magnum, pointing it in Terry’s direction.

He heard Parts’s tentative voice on the phone. Parts said something about guns, so Terry loaded his 1968 Chevy Impala coupe with shotguns and revolvers and peeled across town for the notorious Denny’s all-night diner on Peck Road, the main artery through El Monte into Duarte. Terry recognized trouble as he pulled into the well-lit parking lot and spotted a lowered, jet-black El Camino. It contained a notorious black-haired thug with a full, black beard. It was Black Beard, a local tough guy who didn’t like the growing presence of Vagos in his town.

Terry jumped out of his coupe and strode over to Parts, who faced the short-haired El Camino driver with a stern look. The driver held a sawed-off shotgun in his lap. Terry stuffed a small, .38-caliber snub-nosed revolver in Parts’s rear denim pocket and walked around the front of the polished El Camino, sparkling in the asphalt parking lot. As he approached the passenger window, Black Beard sneered at him and lifted a long-barreled Bulldog .44 magnum, pointing it in Terry’s direction.

Terry stepped closer and grabbed the big, blued barrel, twisting it toward the dashboard. The cannon went off, taking out the windshield and knocking Terry to the pavement.

All hell broke loose. Parts yanked the snub-nosed revolver from his denims, backed up, and fired into the driver’s door. Terry drew and fired his .38, then scrambled to his feet and jumped into the bed of the truck, firing through the rear window. Jerry the Jew peeled into the parking lot in his ’57 Chevy and Terry ran around the custom car for cover while drawing fire from the El Camino’s cab. Jerry’s Chevy took twenty-seven rounds, although Jerry was unarmed and unharmed.

“Did you bring ammo?” Terry hollered at Jerry, who slipped him a quick load. The brothers continued to fire into the El Camino.

Within minutes, a police bullhorn barked from the parking lot across the street. The Vagos wiped their untraceable weapons clean and tossed them aside.

“Who fired the weapons?” officers demanded.

“What weapons?” Terry said. There were no witnesses. Brodie fell out of his side of the car into a pool of his own blood. When asked the identity of the man, Jerry kicked him in the head.

“Never saw him before,” he answered.

Terry spit on the wounded Black Beard when questioned. Because there were no witnesses, no charges were filed that night. The two wounded men were hauled to the county hospital, where they survived despite multiple gunshot wounds. A month later, while holding court at 1:00 in the morning at that same Denny’s, local law enforcement stormed the restaurant and arrested Terry and Parts, booking them for attempted murder.

When questioned in court, Terry said, “It was the worst case of attempted suicide I’ve ever run across.”

“He’s a hostile witness,” the district attorney complained to the judge.

All charges were eventually dropped, but the divide between the Vagos and the local authorities was widening.

“You need to find another girl to fool with,” he said, attitude written all over his slick, clean-shaven face. “She came with me.”

A year later, while Terry worked on his motorcycle in his garage, a dark figure emerged in the driveway. As the dim light from his garage illuminated the visitor’s face, Terry reached for a ball peen hammer and spun to meet Black Beard’s brother.

“It’s okay,” the kid said, raising his hands. “Why didn’t you kill him?”

Not long after the shootout, Terry found himself drinking at the Nashville Bar in El Monte on a Friday night. Friday was the most light-hearted night of the weekend. As weekends rolled on and the booze and Seconal flowed, attitudes reached a sharper edge.

Terry was feeling no pain as he started to mess with a new blonde babe at the bar. They danced to the jukebox-delivered country-western tunes and played grab-ass until a clean-cut drunk approached Terry.

“You need to find another girl to fool with,” he said, attitude written all over his slick, clean-shaven face. “She came with me.”

“Did you come with this idiot?” Terry asked the girl.

“No,” she said with a smirk.

“Looks like you’ve got a problem, punk,” Terry said, and the fight was on. Terry immediately sized his opponent up and tried to strike him in the neck, but this similar-sized man had training and blocked Terry’s initial blow. They fought across the bar and outside the restaurant into the parking lot. At one time, the man’s pistol came loose from his lower back holster and fell to the pavement. Terry looked for an inside shot below his ribs.

“A good body shot drops ’em every time,” Terry said.

Cops were called and Terry could hear sirens in the distance closing on the biker bar. A friend, Frenchie, peeled into the parking lot in his new silver 1980 Firebird and screamed, “Get in! The cops are coming!”

Terry jumped in the Firebird and Frenchie peeled north on Peck towards Garvey at more than 100 mph. They blew through an intersection where the road split and the car nearly rolled out of control.

“Slow down,” Terry said. “Are your trying to kill us?”

The cops were on their tail and there was nowhere to run in the foothills. Finally, Terry convinced the big Canadian to pull over, and cops immediately surrounded the car.

“You’re going down for this one,” the lead officer snapped at the driver.

“You can’t take Frenchie,” Terry said. “He was cool. I reached across and jammed his foot against the gas pedal.”

The cops cut Frenchie loose and the Tramp was booked at the El Monte Police department for assault on a police officer. Parts bailed him out with $250. The arresting officer approached Terry outside the El Monte courtroom.

“You know the guy you fought was a cop?” He said.

“So that’s why he could fight,” Terry said.

“Are you looking to die?” Terry asked.

Later that night, Terry and Parts sipped hot mugs of coffee at their Denny’s restaurant hangout. He pondered the new charge against his sour record. The coffee shop became more than his office. He often pulled cash from the till to bail out brothers.

“We always returned it,” Terry said.

Later that night, the cop he fought earlier entered the coffee shop.

“Are you looking to die?” Terry asked.

“I didn’t come to fight again,” the officer said. “It was just a fight, no hard feelings.”

“But I was arrested and it cost me $250 to get the hell out of jail,” Terry said.

“I’ll take care of it,” the officer said, paid him the $250, and the charges were dropped. Terry recognized solid cops, yet the rift between the Man and the growing number of Vagos in the city was widening, like bad blood in a family.