Read Online Heavy Duty Attitude by Iain Parke - Free Book Online Page A

really big bash of the weekend, the point to which the club’s premier party of the year was supposed to be building.
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    And so it was around noon by the time I managed to talk to Wibble. We camped out at a trestle table with yet more coffees and some more half decent bacon rolls.
‘Well how’d you get on?’ he asked, ‘Speak to the guys?’
     
‘OK I guess, but your blokes didn’t really seem in the mood to be chatty this morning. I tried to quiz those two kids I rode in with for a while yesterday.’
    ‘Oh yeah?’ he said sounding genuinely interested, ‘so how did that go?’ ‘Well Danny’s OK, he was happy to talk. But the other one, Jesus.’ ‘What, Charlie?’
‘Yeah, I think that’s his name. That kid’s a natural for you guys though isn’t he? Christ, what an attitude.’
     
Wibble grinned, ‘Yeah well, I guess it’s just in the blood.’
     
I was tempted to ask him what he meant but decided I’d leave that for the moment. It didn’t seem that important. Instead I’d get on with the interview. We sat and talked for about an hour and for some of it I got what I regarded as the standard biker pitch.
     
Looking at my notes, to start with it was all very much the usual stuff I was expecting to hear.
     
We’re just bikers and we do our own thing. People have always got a downer on us because we live by our own rules.
Sure there’s punch ups, sometimes people have a go, and we have to defend ourselves .
     
It was funny. According to The Brethren it always someone else’s fault that the violence started. As they saw it, they were always the provoked ones.
    Sure some of the guys have done time. It doesn’t mean the club’s a criminal outfit.
We get a bit tired of the cops talking about us like we’re some kind of international organised crime mafia. We ride around with patches on our backs so we stand up for who and what we are, we’ve got websites up with our photographs on it, we do events like this. How much more fucking visible could we be? We stand out from Joe citizen a mile. Is that really what organised criminals would do?
    Sure we’ve got some tough guys; sure we’ve got a bad rep. But individuals aren’t the club. Look at the cops. How many bent cops are there? But whenever there’s a bent cop people don’t say that the cops ought to be disbanded? Well mostly no one.
    Look at what’s happened recently. You haven’t seen any of our guys on film killing some newspaper seller by clubbing him to the ground from behind for no reason have you? Let me ask you what would have happened if that had been one of us that shoved that bloke Tomlinson after that demo in London and not a cop? What would have happened then?
    It was when I asked him the ‘why?’ question that he got serious. As he spoke over the next few minutes, even though I recognised in what he was saying a philosophy that Damage had espoused from time to time, I felt as if I had touched, almost for the first time, the heart of it. What it meant to be a Brethren.
    The government, the cops, the status quo, they don’t like us. Most people are scared and the government likes to keep it that way. The government says do this, do that, or don’t do this, don’t do that, or we’ll punish you, or society will disapprove.
Well fuck the government and fuck society. What right has anyone got to tell me how to live my life?’
    I caught a glimpse in what he was saying of a fundamental rage lurking under the surface, a fury against any sensation of powerlessness driving a fierce elemental rejection of ever, ever, allowing that to happen.
And people do run scared, they knuckle under, they obey the rules, they live their lives within the boundaries that the system has set for them. Well not us. No fucking way.
We’re the ones who won’t just knuckle under, we’re the ones who won’t just go along, and we’re the ones who won’t just obey.
And that’s the reason that they all hate us.
Because we stand up for ourselves.