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Narrated by Alex Abramovich
Alex AbramovichUnabridged — 6 hours, 15 minutes
Narrated by Alex Abramovich
Alex AbramovichUnabridged — 6 hours, 15 minutes
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Bullies is a punchy piece of reporting with a wicked hook: The author and the book's central character, Trevor Latham, attend the same Long Island elementary school, beat each other up regularly and savagely, then disappear from each other's lives…Latham makes for a charming and chilling figurehead…the book is at its brightest in its big set pieces, when [Abramovich] steps forward to drink in the Rats' mayhem.
★ 11/30/2015
A childhood antagonism becomes a complex appreciation among adults in a biker gang in this tragicomic exploration of male violence and bonding. Journalist Abramovich was bullied (as he remembers it) by Trevor Latham in elementary school. Upon reconnecting many years later, after Latham founded the East Bay Rats Motorcycle Club in Oakland, he gets along famously with his erstwhile nemesis. He steeps himself in the Rats’ goofy outlaw culture, with its fight parties (typical bill: two Jews vs. two Gentiles), heavy drinking, good-natured gunplay, and japes such as painting the club’s name on a beached whale. But he perceives a darker side—claustrophobic enmities, savage beatings of homeless people—and wonders whether Latham’s charisma might be a kind of sociopathy. Abramovich sets the story against a vivid portrait of a blighted, crime-ridden Oakland seething with warrior bands, including an organized-crime family associated with Your Black Muslim Bakery, Occupy Oakland militants, and the riot police they battled. (“I don’t care about the politics... I’m only here for the violence,” Latham exults after instigating one such confrontation.) Abramovich’s sharp-eyed, entertaining reportage unfolds like a mash-up of The Wild One, Fight Club, and Jackass; his examination of the Rats’ worldview is sympathetic and nuanced, but squarely faces the group’s dysfunctions and the troubling questions they raise about American society. Photos. (Mar.)
A terrific book: fast and furious.”
—The Boston Globe
“A punchy piece of reporting with a wicked hook.”
—New York Times Book Review
“Abramovich’s narrative persona is artfully restrained.... He has in common with Geoff Dyer — another writer expert at mixing memoir, history, reportage, and cultural criticism — an impeccable instinct for his best material."
—New York Magazine
"Bullies begins with bikers and beat-downs, but quickly becomes something bigger: a portrait of a group of men, in America's most radical city, that is at once honest, soulful, original, brutal, and just plain beautiful."
—Jonathan Mahler, author of Ladies and Gentlemen, the Bronx Is Burning
"Alex Abramovich's Bullies, a great book about the prickly subject of masculinity, is also a woozy parable about America today. Which is to say that it's about coming to terms with flaws and failures and watching as the ground—Oakland, in this case—shifts under your feet. It's clear-eyed, unlyrically lyrical, and never shies from the truth."
—Luc Sante, author of Low Life
“Alex Abramovich is a true original and his first book, Bullies, is the real deal: A brutal, hilarious, deeply provocative look at our twisted American moment.”
—Sam Lipsyte, author of The Ask
“A sharp-eyed, fearlessly reported tale of personal and institutional violence.”
—Jenny Offill, author of Dept. of Speculation
“Haunting.”
—San Francisco Chronicle
"Bullies is many things at once...in format, Bullies feels to me...like a series of linked vignettes, in the mold of Joan Didion’s “The White Album”...what the book makes clear is that violence begets violence: Just as Abramovich and Latham were products of broken, unhappy childhoods, the East Bay Rats, in their embrace of systematic violence, are the product of a place where systematic violence has long been a way of life."
—Vogue
"Thought-provoking and fearless, Bullies offers sharp insight into violence, masculinity, and the history and future of one of America’s most dangerous cities."
—Buzzfeed, The 27 Most Exciting New Books Of 2016
"A tragicomic exploration of male violence and bonding...Abramovich’s sharp-eyed, entertaining reportage unfolds like a mash-up of The Wild One, Fight Club, and Jackass; his examination of the Rats’ worldview is sympathetic and nuanced, but squarely faces the group’s dysfunctions and the troubling questions they raise about American society."
—Publishers Weekly, starred review
"Thoughtful and engaging...A sharp, provocative memoir of an unlikely friendship."
—Kirkus Review
“This essential memoir... could have been twice as long and remained as fascinating.”
—Library Journal
“Alex Abramovich's Bullies: A Friendship begins as memoir but ends as witness testimony to an era in American history…Bullies is the story of two men's journey to put the demons of their childhood to rest. Along the way, it also manages to become a portrait of a city and a country locked in a struggle with some of those same demons."
—Chicago Tribune
04/01/2016
Abramovich is a journalist who grew up on Long Island. In the early 1980s, when he was in fourth grade, he was bullied by a boy named Trevor Latham. In 2006, Abramovich happened to learn that Latham had become a bouncer and had started a motorcycle club, the East Bay Rats, in Oakland. Intrigued, Abramovich pitched the story of Latham and the Rats to GQ and headed for Oakland to meet Latham for the first time in more than 20 years. Ultimately, Abramovich moved there for several years and wrote this book, which isn't so much about Latham or bullying as it is about Oakland, the motorcycle club culture, masculinity, violence, and the meaning of family and friendship. The story is brutal at times—the Rats sponsored regular "fight nights" and lived in a part of town where crimes were many and police were few—but also funny, touching, and occasionally ludicrous. The Rats referred to Abramovich as their "embedded" journalist, and while he resisted the phrase, he certainly got to know them and their community, which was, in fact, at times very much like a war zone. VERDICT Urban teens in particular may find much to connect with in this gritty tale of a changing city and some of the men who struggled to find a place in it.—Sarah Flowers, formerly with Santa Clara County (CA) Library
2015-11-29
A journalist's account of his friendship with a man who was not only president of a motorcycle group, but also the boy who bullied him during childhood. Abramovich met Trevor Latham, president of the East Bay Rats Motorcycle Club, when the two were fourth-graders growing up on Long Island. They often fought in the schoolyard, but as children from dysfunctional, single-parent homes, both boys also had a deep affinity for each other. Their contact ended when Abramovich moved with his often jobless father in sixth grade. It was not until years later that he reconnected with Trevor, who now lived in Oakland. On an assignment for GQ to do a story about their friendship, the author traveled from New York to experience Trevor's blue-collar world of motorcycles and "systemized" violence. Once back in New York, however, the story would not let him go. So Abramovich returned to Oakland to work on a book about Trevor and the Rats, and a six-month visit eventually turned into a four-year stay. His investigations led him to explore Oakland's history, from its origins as bucolic California land grant territory to its evolution into one of the most crime-infested cities in America. He also learned about the tortured history of the Rats and witnessed the bloody infighting that threatened to tear the group apart. Research eventually revealed that before films like Stanley Kramer's The Wild One (1953) celebrated an underground subculture of leather and machismo, motorcycle associations in America had been called "sweater clubs" and had attracted the likes of Clark Gable and Barbara Stanwyck. Thoughtful and engaging, Abramovich's book suggests an intricate connection between an especially violent city and the "cracked, broken homes" that constitute them. Those homes ultimately give rise to "cracked, broken" children—like the author and Trevor—who seek makeshift families like the Rats or other gangs and take a "casual acceptance of bloodshed" as the status quo. A sharp, provocative memoir of an unlikely friendship.
| BN ID: | 2940169091281 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Penguin Random House |
| Publication date: | 03/08/2016 |
| Edition description: | Unabridged |
The only pictures I tacked up over my desk, or anywhere else in the house during my first year in Oakland, were old black-and-white photographs of Abdo Allen's decommissioned Sherman tank. After a few months, I photocopied three of the photos, folded the copies up, and tucked them into my wallet. That way, if some out-of-town friend were to ask me, "How did Oakland get to be so fucked up?" I could start with some history, show them some pictures.
The question came up a lot that year, which was also the year of Cairo's Tahrir Square and New York's Zuccotti Park, and the first time in decades that Oakland, a working-class city on San Francisco Bay, became a fixture in the national news cycle. It was the year of Occupy Oakland, and the Black Muslim Bakery murder trials, the year that Harold Camping's Oakland-based Family Radio ministry predicted the end of the world, twice, while Oakland's murder rate (already one of the nation's highest) ticked upward, and the year that the New York Timespicked Oakland to be the world's fifth most desirable place to visit (something about "upscale cocktail bars, turning once-gritty Oakland into an increasingly appealing place to be after dark"), placing it higher on the list than Glasgow, Moscow, and Florence. This was news to the city's residents — though Oakland did have good bars, and the local cops were so overwhelmed that, if you steered clear of the highway patrol, it was almost impossible to get a DUI there. But two days later, the Times published a follow-up: "Shootings Soar in Oakland," the headline read. "Children Often the Victims."
"How did Oakland get to be so fucked up?"
I'd fumble around for my wallet.
The first photo I'd tucked away there was taken by an AP stringer in the summer of 1960. It showed the tank from behind as it ripped through a house in West Oakland. The second photograph showed the tank from the front, covered in the rubble of a lot it had already cleared. Both photographs looked like they could have belonged in a History Channel documentary about World War II. But the third photograph showed the tank in full profile. You could see the words "ABDO S. ALLEN Co." hand-painted across its hull, the dust coming off of its treads, the two-story home that it was about to plow into. The home was an American home. The story this photograph told was an American story — about urban renewal, industrial decay, brute force, and bullying. But the machine was not a metaphor. In some other city — Detroit, or Baltimore, or even New York — you might have looked at a blasted-out neighborhood and thought, "It's as if they'd driven a tank through it." In Oakland, they had used an actual tank.
* * *
If you've spent any time in Oakland, there's a good chance you've heard of the East Bay Rats Motorcycle Club, which has its clubhouse near the corner of Thirtieth Street and San Pablo Avenue in West Oakland.
The EBRMC is not an especially old club; the Rats formed with just a few members in 1994. But they made a quick impression, getting into barroom brawls and backroom gangbangs, and leaving tread marks — the gummy residue of burnouts, spinouts, and other cool motorcycle moves — up and down the length of San Pablo Avenue. The Rats installed a boxing ring behind their clubhouse, and hosted fight parties that drew thousands of people. They became known for their Fourth of July fireworks displays, which eclipsed Oakland's own, and for shooting guns, smashing cars, setting motor scooters on fire, and blowing propane tanks up in public. The Rats burned sofas, old pianos — whatever they could get their hands on — out on the San Pablo median strip. Once, they'd dragged a full-size fighter jet engine out into the avenue, angled it upward, and used it to incinerate the neighborhood lampposts. And in 2001, the Rats did something that the Bay Area's residents still haven't forgiven them for. That summer, a gray whale beached itself on the San Francisco shoreline. "It had the shape of whale, flukes, rising backbone, long, tapering head and bird-beak upper jaw resting on the wider yoke of the lower jaw," the journal of the California Academy of Sciences had reported. "During the night, someone had climbed on top of it and painted in large yellow letters, 'East Bay Rats Motorcycle Club.'"
The Rats went on to tag more whales. They added more members and continued to attract attention. In 2005, the audience of a cable show called Only in America watched the show's host, a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist named Charlie LeDuff, fight a three-hundred-pound Rat named Big Mike, and lose. Four years later, Gavin McInnes fought Meathead Eric in back of the clubhouse. Eric was a mixed martial artist. McInnes, a cofounder of Vice magazine, was filming the pilot for a reality show called The Immersionist. Eric beat him senseless in less time than it would have taken them to have watched a TV commercial, and The Immersionist was not picked up for distribution.
The Rats were hard to pin down, gather up, or control for any length of time. They wore black leather, broke people's bones. They had mixed feelings about the cameras. And they'd formed in response to conditions — economic collapse, real devastation wrought by the crack epidemic — that did not fold themselves neatly into the narrative arcs of half-hour reality shows. In some strange way, the Rats were like Allen's tank, personified and projected fifty years into the future: they did not belong on the city streets. The club would have been a natural starting point for anyone who wanted a deeper understanding of the place that tolerated, even celebrated its presence. But my interest in the EBRMC was more personal — and my interest in the club's president, Trevor Latham, was more personal still.
CHAPTER 2I first met Trevor in the fourth grade, at an elementary school in Huntington Station, Long Island. I was eight, Trevor was a year older, but I still remember the way his house looked, in that first year of Ronald Reagan's first administration: with its two unkempt stories and lawn full of weeds, it looked almost exactly like my house.
Like me, Trevor lived alone with his dad. Like my dad, Trevor's was an aeronautics engineer in one of the nearby military-industrial mills. Our dads had both been athletes, once. In their youth, both of them had raced motorcycles. Now time had caught up with them, twisted a knife. Trevor and I felt the weight of their burdens at home and pushed our own weight around in the school yard. We were nowhere near puberty. But well into adulthood, my memories of Trevor involved punching and kicking, biting, blind fear, and sheer, animal rage.
Why did Trevor pick on me? Because I was the new kid in school — a perpetual new kid, I'd moved several times already. Or, it was because I was young for my grade and small for my age, bookish, and sad. My parents had split up a few years before then, and I'd gone to live with my mother in Pittsburgh. Then my mother died and I went to live with my father, near Boston. Then my dad lost one job, and then another, and we moved again, and again, tumbling through the American dream before ending up out on Long Island. I know now that Trevor had had his own sorrows. But back then, I was too young to register them. To me, Trevor was simply a bully: someone who would wait for me, out by the schoolhouse door every morning, and threaten me with the things he would do to me once school got out. The threats were not idle: I'd come home bruised, sometimes covered in dog shit, and if the next day was a school day, I'd wake up expecting more of the same. By the end of fourth grade, I'd begun to play hooky. By the end of fifth grade, I was flunking my classes. At the end of sixth grade, my dad and I moved yet again — a move that was followed by still other moves, until, five years later, I dropped out of high school and moved, one last time, to New York. By then my bully had turned into a shadow, and then just a name, which I'd remembered because "Trevor Latham" was such a good name for a bully. The truth is that, by our late teens, neither one of us would have recognized the other.
* * *
Decades passed. Then, one day in 2006, I came across Trevor's alumni note (Walt Whitman High School, Class of 1990): "I moved to California, became a bouncer, and started a motorcycle club," it read. To me, this made sense: my grade-school nemesis had become a professional bully. Nevertheless, it was startling.
Trevor's club had a website — a no-frills affair with a splash page that read:
EAST BAY RATS MC Support Your Local Ratbike
Clicking through, I saw scans of old fight-party flyers, advertisements for pole-dancing contests, and photographs of wild pigs, or boars, that the Rats had hunted and gutted and laid in a line. Below them, there was a photo of a man who'd posed with his back to the camera. A massive tattoo of the East Bay Rats' logo, a stylized rat skull, took up the whole of his back. The caption read, "Trevor and his new Tattoo." But I couldn't see Trevor's face in the photo, and there wasn't that much more to go on. The Rats hosted bands at the clubhouse and charged ten dollars for boxing lessons. They sold swag — support stickers, and sweatshirts that read:
EAST BAY FIGHT NIGHT Support Consensual Bloodshed
The website's "buy" link still worked, but others went nowhere or led to pages that said, "Coming Soon." But there, on the home page, I saw one more photo, of two men fighting in front of a crowd. The first man was throwing a punch — a right cross. The second man had thrown his hands up, defensively. He had dark, curly hair, a face streaked with blood, an alarmed expression. He looked, a little, like me. But it was the first man I couldn't stop looking at. He was light-skinned and shirtless, in black jeans and boxing gloves, and he was squinting, which made it harder to make out his features. Still, the punch he was throwing was one I remembered from childhood.
Could this man have been Trevor?
I got up and went to the kitchen, where I drank one beer, and then another, and smoked the first cigarette I'd had in months. Back at my desk, I enlarged the photo, again and again, until I was staring at pixels.
I thought it was Trevor.
I couldn't be sure.
But I felt an old shudder and knew then that I would call him, write him, or, perhaps, write about him.
* * *
That week, Trevor was all that I talked about. "You'll have to go out there and fight him," friends said, and I got the sense they were only half-joking. But I wore glasses, wrote book reviews then, and worked as an adjunct professor. Trevor was a biker, a bouncer, a boxing instructor. He taught where the organs were, how to hurt people.
"I've fought him already," I said.
I did not want to fight him again. But I did want the story to tell. His story, mine — whatever it was that had tied us together, back then, and carried us into the now. One night, I worked up a pitch, which I sent to a friend of a friend who worked at Gentleman's Quarterly. Then I dialed the number on Trevor's website.
It turned out to be Trevor's number.
He was out at a bar when I reached him. A grumble of voices crowded the line and I had a moment to wonder: would Trevor remember me now? For all I knew, he was brain-damaged, crazy — all of the fights that he'd been in, the blows to the head. I didn't know quite what to picture or say.
"Hello?" said Trevor.
"We knew each other in grade school," I said.
There was a pause. Then I heard my own name.
"Alex?"
"Trevor?"
"I was just talking about you," he said. "Yesterday, telling a friend all about you. My friend told me, 'One day, you'll walk down some dark alley. At the end, you'll meet Alex Abramovich.'"
I was taken aback. Trevor didn't sound damaged, or crazy, or even surprised. He spoke slowly, carefully, assigning equal weight to each word.
"My friends all say I should fight you," I told him.
"What do you think?"
"That they're being ridiculous."
Trevor laughed. Then he asked where I was, and I told him that I was at home, in my apartment in Queens. He asked what I did for a living. I told him that, too. Then he took down my number and said that he'd call me back after he'd closed up the bar.
He never did. I tried him again, calling and texting in the days that followed. There was no response. Then I heard from GQ and texted again: "I pitched our story to GQ," I wrote. "They're interested."
This time he replied right away. "If you want to be Hunter S. Thompson about it," said Trevor, "you can stay at the clubhouse, ride a bike, and live the life for a while."
I told him that I'd book a ticket that night.
CHAPTER 3Two weeks later I landed in San Francisco. It was past midnight, on a crisp night in early October. I was worn out from the flight. But Trevor had texted and asked me to meet him at work, so I picked up the rental car GQ had paid for and crossed the Bay Bridge into Oakland.
The city's downtown was deserted and spooky, with abandoned buildings and dark parking lots. The traffic lights all blinked yellow. But when I pulled up to the bar I heard music — a muffled roar coming up from the inside. A sandwich board on the sidewalk read: THE RUBY ROOM. Beneath it, someone had written in chalk: COME DROWN YOUR SORROWS IN BEER.
I parked a few feet in back of some motorcycles, put on my jacket, and pulled out my phone. I was texting Trevor when the bar door swung open and five or six bikers spilled out. They wore black leather vests over black leather jackets, with the East Bay Rats' logo — flanked top and bottom by the club's name — sewn on the backs of their vests. The men were enormous, with furrowed brows, slicked-back hair, and tattoos. They were smiling, high-fiving — visibly happy, visibly drunk. They looked like twenty-first-century Vikings, and when I got out of the car they ignored me.
"Trevor?" I said.
One of the Vikings turned toward me, and let a few beats go by before answering.
"Trevor's inside," said the man. "Who are you?"
I told him, and found that he knew me already.
"He's the writer," another Rat said.
"This is the kid Trevor bullied?"
"The way Trevor remembers, this guy bullied him."
I smiled at the thought, and then the Rats smiled, started laughing, and formed a huddle around me. Joking and jostling, they hustled me into the bar.
* * *
The Ruby Room's walls were done in red velvet. Red lightbulbs hung from the ceiling and off to our left a long, wooden counter with red padding around its edges stretched, several yards, toward the back of the bar. To our right there was a wooden partition, into which the image of a blindfolded woman had been carved. The Ruby Room had once been a courthouse bar for lawyers and prosecutors who worked around the corner at the Alameda County courthouse. Lady Justice, in her blindfold, was all that was left of that history now. But there was a bar stool behind the partition, and a vitrine above it with photos and newspaper articles, some of which dated back to the middle of the previous century. The most recent clip, from the East Bay Express, was an award citation that read: BEST OF THE EAST BAY, 2006.
BEST MOTORCYCLE CLUB
East Bay Rats
Most wrathful things
on two wheels
The bar was packed with punk rockers, women in baby-doll dresses, bikers, and tough guys who might have been boxers or thugs. Some off-duty cops were set up in a booth by the door — the Rats introduced me — and the cops, who were friendly enough, bought a round, then two rounds, then three. As I drank them, I almost forgot about Trevor. At some point, a scuffle broke out in the back of the bar. The Rats kept on joking and jostling each other. The cops didn't even look up. But way in the back the crowd parted and there, in the center, I saw him.
Trevor was dressed, like the rest of the Rats, in black leather. Like the other Rats, he was enormous — almost twice the size of the man he was holding, with a clenched fist, up against the bar's back wall. He had closely cropped hair, a goatee, almond-shaped eyes, and an aquiline nose. There was nothing familiar about him, I thought. And yet, I knew him immediately.
Excerpted from Bullies by Alex Abramovich. Copyright © 2016 Alex Abramovich. Excerpted by permission of Henry Holt and Company.
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