Omni: Does the RUB have anything in common with the outlaw biker?

Wolf: He’s looking for the same thing: a machine in which he can express himself. The bike is a very mystical experience for both riders, a way to extend their souls. The so-called “weekend warrior” may actually need the bike more than the traditional biker. He wants to regain the image of the frontier hero. You can use a bike to express any kind of emotion you want. It can be fits of rage. You can just roar down a highway, feel the wind hitting your eyeballs at a hundred miles per hour. It vents your rage for you. Or, on a romantic evening, you can ride with your ol’ lady and chase the moon through the clouds. A constant, pounding vibration changes how the brain processes information; the message maintains its emotional charge. This is what happens when a person who’s been listening to chanting for a period of time feels at one with the universe. A bike will do that. You have the continual rhythmic chanting of the engines, and you feel this intuitive wholeness. It’s an altered state of consciousness.

Omni: Some bikers say they can’t stand the high rev and vibration of the Japanese bikes. It makes them nervous.

Wolf: Exactly. It can be annoying. Our consciousness is merely different sets of neurons in different brain areas firing at different times, creating this sense of self-awareness. Memory is just the refiring of established patterns of neurons. And symbols express that. We can use symbols to bring back familiar patterns — the feelings, emotions.

Omni: Is it true most outlaw club chapters don’t go above about thirty members?

Wolf: They really can’t. The club’s strength is interpersonal commitment. When they’re fighting club wars, they’d rather haver fewer individuals and know them than have twenty unknown people. This is where an established club has an advantage over an unestablished one. An unestablished club will try to compensate by taking in more members, but I’ve rarely seen that work.

Omni: By your count, there are only 900 clubs, with about 30 members per club. That’s only 27,000 outlaw bikers, tops, in North America.

Wolf: If it weren’t for the highly territorial nature of clubs, there’d be a lot more. If any new clubs emerge, the established clubs would put them away very quickly, very effectively. You see, clubs like the Rebels and the Grim Reapers, which control Edmonton, can define the relationship between the clubs and the police. If something goes wrong involving bikers, the cops immediately go to the president of the club and say, “Are you doing this? If you are, we’re going to raise shit.” The club wants to have a degree of predictability. But if there are ten other clubs in the city, they can create havoc, have wars, and the Rebels and Grim Reapers won’t be able to do anything about it.

Omni: Do you see any parallels between relations between rival bike clubs and, say, corporate takeovers on Wall Street?

Wolf: Well, in the biker world hostile takeover don’t exactly work. The Angels on the West Coast can never come into Edmonton and take over the Rebels, even though they have the resources and they’re a national organization with a tremendous amount of firepower. You can’t just take over twelve people and say, “You are now Angels, like it or not.” That’s not the kind of club you can depend on. What the Angels usually do is incorporate full clubs. These clubs will vote on whether to become Angels. Once they vote to become Angels, the Angels can apply pressure on the club and say, “All right, these six members meet our qualifications; those five don’t.” It’s downsizing.

The Rebels would have a meeting every year, and this Angel business would come up and they’d always vote it down. Although it would give them the prestige of being an Angel, it would get rid of their local autonomy, because the Angels oversee decision-making. And you’re going to get more attention from the police, because you’re now a part of an organization that’s been investigated and prosecuted under the RICO (Racketeer-Influenced and Corrupt Organizations) statute.

Omni: Is it fun being an outlaw biker?

Wolf: Sure, and very childlike. There are lots of shenanigans. During one club run, a game of keep-away football broke out, and the team getting the worst of it grabbed the football, some beer, wine, and a hash pipe, and retreated up a tree. Then the members on the ground felt those in the tree were being “elitist assholes” and decided to bring them down. When throwing branches didn’t work, they got hold of some axes and started to chop down the tree. The men in the tree defended their position by throwing empties at the axmen. The members on the ground then went to the club trailer, got emergency flares, and started shooting them into the tree. While the tree members were able to dodge the flares themselves, the flare started a grass fire under the tree. And so the weekend went. I remember later Tom began singing his version of Indian war chants while pounding a rock on a garbage can. The next morning Steve got even by handcuffing Tom to a barbed-wire fence and urinating on him. These hedonistic practices express the outlaw biker’s principle of laidback freedom and pleasure as opposed to the establishment’s social tenet of maintaining structure through rigid control.

Omni: Don’t some critics see this as just an excuse for not growing up?

Wolf: They can see it that way if they want to. When a patch holder would talk to me of the differences between his world and that of the straight citizen, he’d always talk about issues of intensity and emotionality. Bikers often perceive straight society as a theater of deception — back-stabbing disguised by a thin veil of respectability. Straight society is seen as polite but lacking in meaningful commitment and emotional depth. When the patch holders are on a run, they create a world of risk taking and thrill chasing, and this leads to bonds of brotherhood that are “blood true.”

Omni: Why is brotherhood so intense?

Wolf: Because it’s all-encompassing. It extends beyond the walls of formal club events as “being a brother” comes to dominate the striker’s social world. A year after a biker begins striking for a club, he can’t remember half the people he knew outside the club.

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