Our club is located about forty miles west of Philadelphia. Technically, we are situated in the township of Honey Brook on Birdell Road which intersects Route 322 which is known as Horseshoe Pike.
The town was founded as Waynesburg in 1815 but another Waynesburg already existed in western Pennsylvania and its mail and freight was being delivered in incorrectly. The town changed its name to Honey Brook. The 2000 census totaled our population at nearly 1,287.
This is Pennsylvania farmland at its best. Amish, Mennonite and few Protestant farmers raise award winning big money crops of corn, soy beans, peaches, tobacco, melons and potatoes. Every farmer has a large garden with squash, cucumbers, tomatoes, beans, peas, cabbage and lettuce. They also raise perennial and annual flowers. They sell the excess from their gardens and fields in farm stands.
Route 322 is home to about twenty farm stands and antique shops where couples from Philadelphia drive out to buy fresh produce and flowers and browse for funky old stuff. The rolling hills and scenic farms are a great short trip for relaxation and remembering how things used to be. The city folks believe they are getting a bargain and the freshest produce. Inevitably, they buy too much and throw out the spoiled uneaten produce.
Our club headquarters is a 1920’s two-story frame farmhouse, a dilapidated barn and ramshackle farm equipment shed. It seems beat up to us but artists are forever stopping to paint the house or the barn or the silos. They come in all seasons even in the dead of winter with two feet of snow pack. Many of these city artists set up their easels and paint all day.
Most of the farms are Amish orderly. Perfect gardens.
Perfect corn rows.
Perfectly painted white houses.
Even the graveyards are manicured and every headstone is modest and points straight to the heavens.
Black buggies shine ebony black and are perfectly maintained. Maybe that’s the appeal of our club farm. Nothing is perfect. We ain’t mowed the weeds in several years. We tramp around a lot and that keeps the weeds down.
The enclave sits back about 200 yards from a narrow two lane state maintained road. The asphalt hasn’t been resurfaced for several years and some recent severe Pennsylvania winters had resulted in many large and deep pot holes. Some of the pot holes are three feet across and a half a foot deep. Several autos and farm trucks were totaled when drivers failed to avoid the gaping holes, lost control and would up in the ditch.
Amish families who live nearby have developed alternate routes and have stopped using the road after their horses suffered broken legs and one mare had to be put down.
Abandoned rusted farm equipment is parked randomly near the barn. The tractors, plows and harvesters are covered with vines and are partially hidden among large healthy weeds.
A forlorn and skeletal 1950s John Deere combine is a memorial to Bill Tempers failed attempt to grow wheat and rye in 1963. The finance company was supposed to repossess the combine but Bill ran them off with a shotgun and the repo men just gave up.
Two concrete block silos are empty and leaning precariously near the barn. One leans east and the other leans west and they form a huge victory sign.
Both silos feature primitive graffiti. Phrases like, “Glenda sux dix”, “For a good fuck call Mona (484) 879-1994” and “Kill Herman Jenkins” are crudely painted and often misspelled around both silos.
All of this real estate is the property of our club. It was willed to William E. “Snakebite” Tempers by his grandmother, Evangeline Claudette Tempers when she died in 1994.
The Snake has devoted his lifetime to seeking some shred of human approval, any approval. When he’s had a few shots, he pleads for, “Jes a liddel respeck”.
He tried to buy some love when he formerly deeded the 41 acre farm to the club, presently known as Satan’s Saints, but also known as the Raunchy Reptiles.
Six members of the club have refused to be known as Satan’s Saints for religious reasons. Piss Ant Morris objected when his boss at the sign company, a part-time Pentecostal preacher, told him that using Satan and Saints in the same breath was blasphemous. That was good enough for Piss Ant and five other members who all held some hope of going to heaven. The other eighteen members are “Satan’s Saints” while the other five insist on the “Reptiles” designation sewn on the back of their colors.
But both names will change. They always do. I try to stay out these name change debates.
The confusion over our identity along with our many felonious failures has made the club the joke of other outlaw motorcycle clubs. Many of the club’s failures have been well documented and laughed at in various biker newsletters, web sites and magazines.
In short we are the laughing stock of outlaw biker clubs and local and state police. They don’t even take much pleasure in busting us anymore.
Many one “per centers” manufacture and distribute methamphetamine. It is also their preferred recreational drug. The dollars that meth generate support club activities; parties, fuel, bike repair, weapons and road trips.
Used to be, fifteen years ago, that all the East Coast clubs made their own meth. Then you could buy it for $400 an ounce. Now it comes from the West Coast, California and Mexico and it sells for four thousand an ounce.
Satan’s Saints have never produced a saleable batch of meth. Each attempt to formulate the drug resulted in an explosion or a fire or a chemical compound that sickened the users. In one instance, an explosion killed Hootie Swearingen.
We’ve tried so hard so many times. We’ve used different recipes. We’ve tried with one club member reading the recipe slowly to another club member who was being observed by another club member reading from a copy of the same recipe. Each time has been failure. We have lost all self confidence.
One of explosions and the resulting fire flattened and totally destroyed the mobile home lab we had hidden deep in the woods. We hadn’t kept up the trailer insurance premiums so we were shit out of luck.
Hootie Swearingen had convinced us to buy a used trailer and hide it in the woods.
Hootie had sworn, “We’ll make thousands makin’ meth”. And, Hootie added, “We can grow weed next to the trailer. We can keep it watered and fertilized. We’ll take turns sleepin’ out there to guard the meth and the weed”.
I was working with Hootie in the trailer one hot humid August afternoon. It musta been nearly 100o. We were trying to cook up a batch of meth.
Hootie was a fanatic and thought of himself to be a chemist or scientist or somethin’. He kept notes on every formula he tried. He was frenetic and worked agitated and sweatin’ heavy. The trailer had no working air conditioning and was at least 10o to 15o hotter’n outside.
This batch of meth was bubbling and I was getting high off the fumes. All of a sudden the liquid began bubbling harder and splashes were popping out of the pot. Several red hot bubbles hit Hootie’s forearms and he screamed, “Sonofabitch! I’m goddamned burned. Oh, fuck!”
“Hold on! I’ll get some cold water running. Or better yet I’ll pour some cold beer on your arms.”
Hootie had been almost crying it hurt so bad. When I poured the beer he got immediate relief.
“Damn! That feels so good. Thanks, man. Pour some more on me. And give me a swig of Yukon. “
I popped another can and poured its contents on his forearms. “Does that feel better?”
“Yeah. But look at my arms. My tattoos are washing away. I’ve lost that one of Marlene. She’s gone. I didn’t think there was any way to remove a tattoo.”
“Yeah. What the fuck? Your tattoos are washing away wherever I poured the beer. Well anyway you’ve got no more pain and your arms are not even blistered or burned. That’s fuckin’ amazing!”
Hootie and I drank the bottle of Yukon Jack and washed it down a six pack each and he forgot about his arms, the bubbling meth and his missing tattoos.
I carried his notes up to the clubhouse and put them in my locker so’s I could study them later.
The next day Hootie went back in the woods to the trailer and tried again.
Hootie was lost that day when the trailer exploded. The EMC people and police only found parts of Hootie. The fire burned about twenty acres including the marijuana patch. . The casket was closed at the funeral.
Not one of our minute market stickups had ever yielded more than $173. Several stickups were thwarted by well-trained counter clerks who said something like, “Hell no, I ain’t givin’ you no money. Get the fuck out of here.”
Our guys would be dumbfounded and run out of the store.
A couple of times one of the guys would try to stickup a convenience store with a realistic water pistol. The clerk recognized the fake and pushed the automatic lock in button. Heckle and Jeckle cut their hands bad trying to break out of the store by smashing to door glass. This incident was videotaped and entertained millions of viewers on America’s Dumbest Criminals television show.
Police throughout southeastern Pennsylvania take great pleasure watching the store videos of my brothers poorly disguised as hip hop gangstas wearing black face. Or posing as stick-up bandits in sweat shirt hoodies. Or other times they have disguised themselves as Arab terrorists in fake beards, robes and turbans. The Saints attempts at Arab accents or home boy ebonics evoke laughter among the police and some episodes have been used by the Cops television shows.
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