Sliding his business card across the table, Sonny Drake stares at me and awaits my response.
These words are printed in bold letters on the card: “Appalachian Chapter” and “Pagan’s MC.” At the middle of the card Norse fire god Surt or Sutar (the way some club members spell the name), depicted at the center of the one-percenter motorcycle club’s patch, crouches with a flaming sword.
Overhead lights shine off Sonny’s smooth shaved head as he strokes his trimmed white goatee and asks, “How do you feel about this?”
I look up and meet the sparkling eyes I know so well.
The Pagan’s Motorcycle Club came up in conversation only after I told Sonny I had written some newspaper columns about outlaw bikers in California during the five years I lived and worked on the West Coast.
Although we hadn’t shared a beer together in 50 years, Sonny and I go way back, growing up close as next door neighbors and living our teenage lives next to a narrow, trickling stream littered with raw sewage we called Shit Creek.
We’re sitting with my wife Stephanie and Sonny‘s wife Margie at our 50th Susquenita High School reunion. Weeks earlier I told Sonny I’d only go if he did. He said the same. So we went. I told him to save me a seat. So he did.
I pick up the business card.
“How do I feel about the Pagan’s?”
Sonny waits patiently.
I grin and say he and I share a Pagan’s brother, John Hall, my close friend of more than 50 years who led a Pagan’s chapter in New York in the 1960s. A few years ago John wrote a book that received rave reviews nationwide about his personal reflections about the club John and Sonny both revere.
“You should read John’s book,” I say to Sonny.
“I already read the book three times,” he says. “John Hall and I have never met but I hope one day we do.”
We laugh like we did on steamy summer days when we pounded the sweat out of each other as 15-year-olds, mixing it up with boxing gloves by the coal ash pile beside Shit Creek in the Cove in rural Perry County, Pennsylvania.
We laugh like we did playing football together in 10th and 11th grade even after I quit the team as a senior because I decided I deserved more respect from coaches who hated my off-field anti-establishment attitude and the long hair starting to grow and show under the back of my helmet.
We laugh like we did when Sonny came home from Marine boot camp at Parris Island and told me about winning his dress blues at the top of his recruit class. We stopped laughing that day when he told me how his hardcore drill instructors acted during basic training. A recruit cut his wrists, Sonny said, and the DI made him get a bucket to hold under his arms to keep from dripping blood on the newly mopped floor. The DI told him to cut more zigzags in his wrists the next time he tried to kill himself to do a better job because he was a Marine and Marines do it right.
In subsequent years Sonny went deeper into the Corps.
As always, I went my own way.
All these years later, Sonny’s retired from a federal government military security job and serves as president of the Pagan’s Appalachian Chapter. I’m out of the newspaper and radio business, writing wild-in-the-street novels about real-life cultural dysfunction. And we’re back together again, picking up where we left off so long ago to confide in each other on the phone as we do until Sonny dies at 71 on September 14, 2023, after moving to Florida and getting sick.
Sadly, Sonny and John Hall, 78, never got a chance to meet.
My new book Avventura Press and publisher Lee Sebastiani will release later this month, Up Shit Creek: Confessions of the Crushers Motorcycle Club and Other Stories, brings Sonny and me together one more time. All 66 very short stories are set in Perry County where the Appalachian Trail runs down the main street in Duncannon just a few miles from where Sonny lived in a trailer and I lived in a rented one-story red brick house.
I call my unique collection of fact and fiction “faction.” A faction is a side. Sonny and I always took sides. Defending righteous honor is always worth fighting for.
Sonny plays a crucial role in a few of my true stories. I also inserted him as the Pagan‘s Appalachian Chapter president, what the club calls a diamond, into a few important make-believe tales that stress his leadership and loyalty.
Hard truth lives in all my stories. Contemporary human behavior defines who we are for better or worse. Our lives and the lives of future generations depend on how we treat each other and how we handle ourselves.
I learned from Sonny. Sonny learned from me. Mutual respect and love is why I carry in my wallet the same business card Sonny slid across the table at our reunion.
Sonny signed off in his last email to me with the initials PFFP which mean Pagan Forever Forever Pagan.
So I’ll sign off on this column with the initials FFFF.
Friends Forever.
Forever Friends.
