In my first novel Blood Red Syrah I invented the Crushers, a crude California outlaw motorcycle club based in and around the self-absorbed beautiful people of Santa Barbara. My renegade imaginary club returned with a vengeance in my third novel Weed Wine Magic.

I’ve recently finished writing a collection of more than 50 short short-story vignettes called Up Shit Creek: Outlaw Tales of the Crushers Motorcycle Club. Outlaw editor Stephanie Bressler begins editing tomorrow. If all goes well, and we have no reason to think otherwise, outlaw Avventura Press will publish the more than 200-page book in September.

The eclectic collection presents a mixture of fact and fiction I call faction, a more than appropriate word since I earned a living for decades taking sides as a mainstream journalist. In the book I alternate hard-truth essays with some sawed-off fiction fired from both barrels of past and present contemporary reality.

All the tales share the same setting where I lived during my teenage years, a place called the Cove located five miles from the Appalachian Trail which runs down the middle of Market Street, Duncannon’s main street in a rural, white piece of Central Pennsylvania called Perry County.

In my stories the late Pagan’s Motorcycle Club regional chapter president Sonny Drake, my closest friend who lived in the trailer park next door during those years, occasionally interacts with a fictitious protagonist in the book. Sonny and fictitious Sarge become friends before Sonny dies. Until the end of the book Sonny’s spirit drifts in and out of the narrative like the warrior Pagan ghost he is.

Dope Ventura, the imaginary Crushers national president, comes east to collect the body parts of his brother who died in a Perry County vehicle accident and fire on his way to New York to drop off a U-Haul full of fentanyl-treated weed. Dope meets Sarge, a Marine who served in Afghanistan as a fire team leader. A few days after Dope anoints Sarge president of the first East Coast Crushers chapter, Dope disappears and the club’s sole West Coast chapter folds.

Sarge and 20 or so ragtag local bikers he rides with in and around Duncannon now have themselves a motorcycle club they don’t really know what to do with. Except for Sarge, who is more than a cut above the rest, the brothers are a combination of hard asses and half asses and mostly not up to standard to be recruited by the Pagan’s Appalachian Chapter with Sonny as the leader of that outlaw pack.

My story collection begins with a personal essay called “Up Shit Creek” about Sonny and me coming of age in houses that sat beside a seemingly endless trickling creek strewn with raw sewage. This true hardcore reflection sets the stage for make-believe stories about a jagged, ragged piece of backwater America, blue- collar heart, country-fried soul and Appalachian American struggle.

The fiction is grim, funny, sad, silly, violent and absurd. Not all my characters are rednecks or bikers or both, but they all share a sacred piece of community whether they like the hand life dealt them or not. My stories all describe untamed “Purry County” wildlife that helped make me the very human animal I am today. True or false, the stories are dirty, cracked mirrors reflecting slices of life in good times and in bad.

Near the end of the book Sonny asks Sarge if he might be interested in joining the Pagan’s, Sonny’s one-percenter club Sonny loves and with which Sarge always wanted to ride. I share some of Sonny’s deepest thoughts from a nonfiction column I wrote about him and me after he died, including personal material drawn from my decade-long formative years living in the Cove from ages 12 to 22.

 One of the last chapters appears as a true question and answer dialogue between Sonny and me that I wrote drawn from long talks he and I had before he died at 71. The Q&A documents his loyalty to the Pagan’s. Live Pagan. Die Pagan. One of Sonny’s club brothers read that piece at Sonny’s packed memorial gathering at the Pagan’s farm a few years ago.

A Marine and former American Legion commander, Sonny’s remains are interred at the Indiantown Gap National Cemetery in Lebanon County, a righteous place where I joined a crowd of mourners including about 75 Pagan’s brothers who rode in for Sonny’s 2023 funeral.

Sonny’s chronicle of his outlaw life raises awareness to the power of the Appalachian American spirit and the continuing influence of the Pagan’s Motorcycle Club in a fast-changing society. The book’s ending also helps keep Sonny Drake’s honorable legacy alive. My fact and fiction draw from sociology, anthropology, psychology with a touch of pathology and astrology tossed in for good measure.

From the 1953 movie The Wild One with Marlon Brando to the seven seasons of the FX series Sons of Anarchy from 2008 to 2014, America refuses to turn away from fascination with and fear of the iron horses and their masters stampeding across the land. As my friend of more than 50 years and former New York City Pagan’s chapter president John Hall says, the outlaw spirit thrives in those of us willing to go Riding on the Edge, the title of the published memoir he wrote about his life with the Pagan’s in the 1960s.

Up Shit Creek: Outlaw Tales of the Crushers Motorcycle Club drives a fearless reader to feel alive, edgy and ready to roll.