This life of salvage
Rise of the rat bikers.

By Duncan Scott Davidson

'IN ACCORDANCE WITH Oakland's Ukendra Johnson Act of 2002, ABSOLUTELY NO BURNOUTS."

The words are printed in boldface on the reverse side of a flyer advertising the seventh annual West Oakland Riot in early June. The prohibition refers to a motorcycle trick involving judicious applications of both brake and gas to achieve much smoke and the tasty smell of burnt rubber. The image on the front – a flying rat on a motorcycle engulfed in flames and black smoke – is one of several factors that make it hard to know how seriously to take this particular warning.

Starting on Magnolia Street in the industrial nether regions of West O, the West Oakland Riot's motorcycle ride – which this year includes some 200 bikers and their backseat companions – roars through Tilden Park and the East Bay hills to sleepy biker hamlet Port Costa. Four hours later the scraggy caravan returns home for a block party featuring bands, barbecue, and free beer. Bikers plus free beer pretty much always equals burnouts.

"One year we had so many bikes doing doughnuts that you couldn't see down the block," says Aaron "Reverend Slick" Nasberg, whose birthday celebration seven years ago unexpectedly occasioned the first West Oakland Riot. Like many past and present members of the motorcycle club the East Bay Rats, Slick is an ordained minister (via mail order) in the Universal Life Church. For some reason the "reverend" appellation just stuck to Slick. He has performed marriages and, recently, makeshift last rites on a friend who was hit by a bus.

"At one point," Slick continues, "Mott [a fellow biker] was on his DR-Z lightin' the tire, and all the sudden the sky was going red around him. And we realized there was a fire truck looming up through the smoke. We were like, 'What are you guys doing here?' "

" 'We got a call from the ghetto bird that the block was on fire.'

" 'No man, we're just having a little fun.'

"They said, 'OK, cool,' and they took off. They were really cool about it."

Last year the Oakland police were somewhat less convivial when visiting the block party in response to reports of another fire. They visited the Oakland Industrial Center – the converted warehouse complex on Magnolia where Slick and a few other bikers live – three times that day. The third time, they threatened to shut down the party for not having a live-music permit but were dissuaded at the last minute. "We gave them our word we weren't going to fuck around," Slick says. "They were like, 'You guys at least aren't selling crack; you're not shooting each other. Go ahead and have your fun. Just no more burnouts.' "

But before the last squad car had a chance to round the corner, Slick says, "someone jumped on a bike and lit a doughnut." The cops came after partyers in full riot gear, brandishing billy clubs and ordering all riders to get their bikes off the street immediately or face impoundment and arrest. That's a predicament if you've been drinking free beer in the summer sun all day, with the idea of sleeping it off on the floor. Bikes were pushed into Oakland Industrial willy-nilly, those who were confident in their ability to pass a Breathalyzer zipped off into the night, and miraculously no one got arrested.

I have some trepidation about this year's ride. California legislators passed the Ukendra Johnson Act last year because a 22-year-old Oakland woman was killed by a car at a "sideshow," an impromptu gathering of people spinning doughnuts, usually in hot rods of the four-wheeled variety. The legislation allows police to impound vehicles involved in alleged sideshows for 30 days, levy fines of up to $1,500, and arrest spectators as well as participants. Couple this new law with the riot squad action at last year's ride and the Oakland Police Department's penchant for "less-lethals" like tear gas, beanbag shotgun rounds, and wooden dowel projectiles (as tested on protesters at the Port of Oakland protest April 7), and the situation definitely has the potential to get interesting.

The beauty of the rat

If you ask a person on the street what a biker is, he or she will inevitably describe a guy sporting a ZZ Top beard and beer gut, riding a chromed-out Harley chopper. Or this person might offer a portrait of sportbikers, guys on high-performance Japanese bikes with cryptic alphanumeric designations wrapped in cocoons of bright plastic, often wearing shorts and tennies. Somewhere between these two extremes, though, a new urban motorcycle culture has formed, and at its center is the rat bike.

"A rat bike generally means any motorcycle that is in a shitty order of repair but is still being ridden by some broke fuck," says Paul, a biker from San Francisco via England, New York City, Arizona, and parts in between. "It's got to be kind of dirty and old and decrepit. It could be your girlfriend's CB 750, covered in stickers and paint, with mismatching bodywork. It could be your buddy's F2 ex-race bike – 'Only raced once, guv'ner, honest' – with no bodywork and so many scratches and dings on it that [you can tell] he hasn't got loads of money."

To me, the rat bike will always be associated with the Lower Haight in the early '90s, when I moved to the city and first started riding. Here were these people, guys and girls alike, with Mohawks and dreadlocks, tattoos and piercings – not the jocky sportbikers or Father Time Harley guys. Freaks like Me, the book might be called. They were mounted on clapped-out sportbikes, usually at least a year or two old, if not a decade, but sometimes nearly new, bought off a salvage yard on the cheap, the plastic disintegrated from some suburbanite's Mr. Toad's Wild Ride into a tree. The bikes in this year's Riot have that same LoHa feel – they're probably some of the same bikes. There's a road-cone orange '80s GSXR with no plastic covering up its engine guts, black-and-yellow hazard tape all over it, a sticker proclaiming, "YOU'RE NOT FROM THE GHETTO, WHITE BOY" on the tank; there's a camouflage Kawasaki KLR dual sport with ammo cans for side bags; there's a matte black Honda Hawk with chrome spikes, normally reserved for leather jackets, bristling on the front fender.

These bikes are rolling resurrections, often put back on the road through sheer force of will. Musing on the aesthetics of the rat bike, Uncle Ted, a mechanic at Precision Cycle Salvage in San Francisco, points to my friend Monkey's bare-assed CBR. It's a shiny black gas tank on top of what looks like the innards of a washing machine, black rubber bleeder tubes hanging down underneath, like the tendrils of a mechanical anemone. Without the plastic fairing on the outside, it seems naked. "[Manufacturers] wrap it in plastic to make it look good to sell to the public," Uncle Ted says. But, he explains, most people on the street don't need the fairing's aerodynamics – they're strictly for racers or for show. Drop the bike once and this plastic pops off as though it were peanut brittle.

Ten minutes outside San Francisco and Oakland are the burbs where the seeds of rat bikes are planted for future harvest. Plastic is omnipresent. You get the feeling that if the guys buying these things could return to the days when all beefed-up, steroidal Japanese bikes came in compensatory wussy colors like purple, orange, and – God save us all – teal, they would. Usually they make up for the slightly more subtle contemporary paint schemes by polishing the frames, swingarms, and wheels and wearing especially bright shorts and sunglasses.

A few days before the Riot, I'm sitting in Motorcycle Madness, my friend Marcus's San Bruno shop, hanging out while he works on my bike. My friend Kwadwo is flipping through girlie magazines, making detailed nipple comparisons.

Kwadwo bought his black 900RR, sans fairing yet complete with the scratched-up remnants of purple and bright yellow accents, from Marcus, who bought it off some guy whose story goes like this: There are a group of fine women riding mongo sportbikes on the peninsula. They are fast, they have skills, and most of them look like Lucy Liu in tight leather pants. In order to get in good with these vixens and impress them at the local Starbucks where they hang (really), our hero chooses, for his first bike, a brand-new 900RR, the two-wheeled version of the Bell X-1 that took Chuck Yeager beyond the speed of sound for the first time. Of course, he bails out on the freeway doing a mild 70, which this thing will do in first gear. Wearing shorts, of course. Finding the bike not so pretty anymore, and also rather hard to sit on with burger legs, he has it written off as salvage. One man's skin graft is another man's bargain.

"People don't want to accept the fact that most of the hardcore people that fight and drink and ride are riding fucked-up bikes," says Little Matt, road captain of the Riot for the last three years. "Everybody gets their bikes from some crashed squid motherfucker." Translation: rats are scavengers, living off the superfluity of the wasteful classes, surviving at street level on their wits.

"The whole symbology of the Rats was kind of a religion for me," Slick says. "Here's this life of salvage that we've made. Nothing was good enough for anyone else, but it was always good enough for us to fix, then beat the shit out of until it's gone, so it doesn't last anymore, then step up and get the next good thing, you know? You may never be on top, you may never be the guy buying the brand-new Ducati or Ferrari or whatever, but you can make the best of what you have."

Out of this scavenger culture came the first local rat bike club, the East Bay Rats. "I didn't associate with any other clubs that were out there," says club president Trevor, a tall, soft-spoken guy with a buzz cut and a stiff walk from being hit by a drunk driver and breaking both his legs. "All those guys up at the Wall [a meeting spot for racer types in Tilden] had full leathers and bright sportbikes, and all the Harley guys were racist backwards hicks. But all my friends rode motorcycles, and we all had our own style of motorcycles, which was to paint 'em flat black and trick 'em out the way we do. Not putting money into anything to make 'em look fancy, just putting money into souping them up, otherwise letting them go to hell. Always repairing things with JB Weld and duct tape. Baling wire. And from there it just escalated."

It escalated to include "car parties," a tension-relieving activity in which a group of bikers, harried by taxi cabs and soccer moms all week, gathered to destroy a perfectly good car. Well, maybe not "perfectly good," but usually running well enough to drive off the junkyard lot for a few hundred or less. The hapless four-wheeler would be laid into with bats, hatchets, pry bars, sledgehammers, perhaps a chainsaw or low-level explosive: basically it would be made to pay for the car-inflicted slights against bikers everywhere. Two guys broke a hand at the last Eat Bay Rats car party. One was surfing behind the wreck, Trevor says. "It was all smashed up, but it was still running. He held on until about 40, then he biffed and broke his hand. Another guy was hanging on the back when they were dragging the carcass after it was all done, and when it hit the train tracks, he popped off." Both were taken to the local emergency room, hours apart, with the story that they'd dropped an engine on their hand. Two guys, both wearing East Bay Rats colors, both dropped an engine on their hand in the same night. What are the chances? The emergency room personnel must've thought they were having a rousing game of engine toss.

Rat history

The rat has some far-flung influences. For Paul, the concept originated with the early-1980s movie The Road Warrior, which, in his words, "had as much impact on the modern motorcycling scene ... as the movie The Wild One did back in the '50s." Up until that point, bikers fell into one of two categories: clean-cut sporty types, or fat, greasy longhairs. "Then this movie comes out of Australia, supposedly set in the future. It's about an outlaw gang of sorts. They're badasses. They're mean. They look cool; they look tough. They're not fat, beer bellies, vests, Harleys, and chaps, and they're definitely not mom-and-pop types, and they don't look like Marlon Brando. What they look like is basically the cast of The Hills Have Eyes mixed in with a bunch of low-life punks. So people immediately related to that visual concept, and the next thing you know, four-cylinder sportbikes and more performance-oriented motorcycles were being stripped down, lightened, painted all kinds of crazy color schemes." This type of bike became known as a "streetfighter" in England because of its battle-ready look.

Then came the continental European "super motard," a kind of race bike based on the high-ground-clearance dirt bike design but with street tires – called Super TT in the States. This design might have been the impetus for Ducati's original, non-flat black Monster. The manufacturers followed these proto-rat bike trends and gave the public the "standard," a sanitized name for a streetfighter, which simply means a sportbike with no fairing, often with retro-'80s superbike styling and a single, round headlight.

But unlike streetfighters, super motards, and standards, a rat isn't pretty. At least not in a conventional way: it has a face only a mother can love, the vehicular equivalent of a droopy-jowled bulldog or clipped-eared pit bull. The true rat was born of economics: if you're a bar back or motorcycle messenger, living in a city with one of the highest rent rates in the world, what can you do to keep your bike on the road? You may not be from the ghetto, white boy, but you live there now, and the bike under your haunches is a testament to urban survival. The craze for flat-black paint, as far as I'm concerned, can be traced straight to the Lower Haight. It's hilarious to imagine a bunch of Italian corporate execs – let alone the button-down types at Honda, makers of the new, Krylon-black 919 – thinking about what the guy drinking at the Toronado is riding these days. But they are. "Some sport riders prefer their bikes to be pure – pared down to the true essentials," the Honda Web site says of the 919, which lists for a buck under eight grand. "That's what the naked street bike is all about."

The popularity of factory flat-black bikes is testament to the salability of the rat bike look, or a reasonable facsimile thereof, in the city where it originated. This mainstreaming of a homegrown antistyle is no different, really, than what happened when the outlaw biker image was picked up and repackaged by Harley as "factory customs" like the Fat Boy, retailing at just above $16K.

Marlene, a machinist who markets her own line of custom parts, including spiked handlebar ends designed to shred the paint off SUVs, cites Ducati's rat bike rip-off Monster Dark as the first sign of a sea change. "It used to be that flat black was the spray paint color that looked OK when you bought a bike that somebody else had bought for full price and crashed," she says. "You got it cheap, because that was the only way you could ride a bike of that level of technology on no fuckin' money, 'cause you've got some crappy-ass job."

"We're usually the end of the road for these things," says Zeke, a machinist and sidecar racer with Elvis chops and "666" on his number plates who spends most of the day up on one wheel of his bike or the other. "There's no market for us really. We feed on people's crashed bikes, salvaged titles and everything. It's funny, because Ducati came out with a flat-black rat bike they sell for $8,000."

Payback

Also known as the Gemini Ride, the West Oakland Riot is a birthday celebration for Slick and three other bikers, Mikey, Little Matt, and Marlene the machinist. It also marks the anniversary of Slick's joining the East Bay Rats, whose black vests with white rat faces are ubiquitous among the crowd of bikers clogging the street as they wait for the ride to start.

For Slick, who turned 31 this year, the ride and the party have become a way to express his gratitude to those who've helped him out over the years. "I know that anybody I consider a friend, they could call me in 10 years, and if they needed something, I would give it to them, no questions asked," he says, sitting in the living-room area of the warehouse, where hand-built walls and the carcasses of crashed bikes outnumber pieces of actual furniture. "That's what it's about to me. It's about saying thank-you ... to all the girlfriends who've come to pick me up from overnighters in the drunk tank, to people who have machined me special parts to get my bike back on the road, to people who have given me honest insight about my life."

He leans back, takes a pull off his smoke, and pets the cat.

Port Costa, the ostensible destination for the ride, is more of a turnaround point than anything. Due to its location at the end of some nice, twisty roads, a good many rides, organized or not, end up in this quiet, oak-filled town backed up against the water where the bay merges with the delta. Riding into it with a couple hundred other bikes, I feel like I'm in a '60s biker exploitation flick in which the moto-mounted Huns ride into the unassuming village, rape anything that moves, and burn the rest. Except for the fact that the locals seem to be in on the script. Far from running scared, they're not even mildly curious. Most seem to be bikers themselves.

We gather at the Warehouse Café for a panoramic photo, some free chili and clam chowder, some barbecue, and according to a sign outside the warehouse café, "450 beers from all over the world," to be sipped in the cool, dark interior or out in the blaring sun, where everyone can check out each other's bike. A blues band does a respectable cover of "Honky Tonk Women." A sign hanging outside reads, "Please Respect Our Speed Limit into and out of This Town." With that in mind, most people are chill until they hit the interstate. Then it's Death Race 2003 back to Magnolia Street, where the real party happens. The lead group passes two cops on the freeway while doing 130 miles an hour.

Back in Oaktown, they're selling Riot shirts with the phrase "It Takes Four Wheels to Make a Sideshow" on the back. Does it really? I ask Slick if the Ukendra Johnson Act is somehow car specific. "It's just a slogan," he says. "The law definitely does not dictate that you need four wheels to sideshow. But there's a statement behind that about the spirit of the thing, 'cause this is really just a party. People doing wheelies and stoppies [front wheelies] and things like that, it's really no different from guys arm wrestling. When we're all fat and old ZZ Top bikers, we'll probably be doing wet T-shirt contests and hot dog catches. For now, we're all young and crazy enough that we like to test our skill a little bit."

The kegs, provided gratis by Acme Bar, are tapped, meat is thrown on the grills, and the Secret Order of Tusk (formerly Gamera) hit the plywood stage at an ungodly volume. The tests of skill, as Slick calls them, begin in earnest. I sit back and wait for the two inevitables: crashes and cops.

It only takes a half an hour or so for the first wreck. Little Matt and Limey Rob are doing wheelies up and down the street when Rob decides he wants to get a cup of coffee. At least that's what he tells Matt. Instead he decides to make another pass on the back wheel, standing up on the pegs this time, right behind Matt, who's doing a more conventional sit-down wheelie. When his front wheel drops, Matt decides to stop. Right there. Which quickly becomes a problem for Rob, who is peering over the windscreen of his Super Hawk at a stationary object. He hits the brakes, drops the front wheel, and courteously refrains from riding up Matt's back.

In Matt's words, "I was wheelie-ing along, and I stopped, and I felt someone crashing into me, so I kept going. I feel bad for Rob, but shit happens." Rob loses some skin on his knee, but his bike is sorely hurting: the engine cases crack and dump hot oil all over the street, and the formerly pristine fairing and headlight assembly get trashed, putting it on the road to rat-bikehood. A sticker on it reads, "I'D RATHER RIDE IT THAN CLEAN IT."

Meanwhile, Slick's new band is about to hit the stage. Slick has grown out the do from whence his nickname originated. ("I feel so disenfranchised without my pompadour," he once told me at a Swingin' Utters show.) He used to promote and DJ the psychobilly-garage rock club She Said at Cat's Alley, so I'm not the only one who's surprised when he gets onstage in a wife-beater, his long locks sticking out of a bandanna with a fedora over it, sort of cholo Sinatra, and starts rapping. For Slick, the worlds of rat bikers and rappers aren't so far apart: "We get garbage wagons, we chop 'em; we get sportbikes, we streetfighter 'em. Hip-hop for me is the same thing. We take old grooves and ... we write our own music about it."

While the crowd gets drunker, the wheelies and rolling stoppies continue. Darius, a stunt rider from Walnut Creek, shows up with his tricked-out CBR 929RR and wheelies in circles around people, sometimes seated on the gas tank with his legs straight out. As the Black Lips hit the stage, the fireworks begin in earnest, enough rapid-fire pops to rival the sound of a firefight at Khe Sanh, punctuated by what sound like mortar blasts. Someone gets on the mic and says, "The really loud bangs are a good way to get fuckin' OPD here, so whoever's doin' it, fuck off!" The expletive is nearly drowned out by another loud bang.

Shot down in flames

The day is surprisingly burnout free. Darius and his buddy light up a couple, and Zeke can't resist following suit, but they're talked into stopping. The OPD arrives at 8:22 p.m., on a noise complaint about firecrackers. Trying to be reporterly, I walk up to where the three carloads of officers are standing – close enough to get the lowdown, but not so close as to be a pain in the ass. J.T. from the Rats, drunk on a day's worth of free beer, is already there, chatting away.

"Hey Mikey!" David King, founder of the goth club Death Guild and a former Rat, is hailing Slick's roomie, one third of the Geminis being celebrated today. He flicks his head toward J.T., whom he thinks is digging himself into a drunken hole with the Man. "Wanna play fetch?" It's unnecessary, however. Turns out J.T. and a cop, a salt-and-pepper gray guy with a slight paunch, are talking bikes. Stephanie, a petite brunette in charge of the lighting for the bands and whose signature is on all of the permits for the party, arrives with the requisite paperwork. When I ask Mikey how she got to be the police liaison, he tells me, "She's an old friend. She's just responsible."

Just how far this responsibility extends is the question on the officer's mind. "You're really saying that you're personally responsible for all these people?" the cop asks. Nearby, one Rat has lit another's pants on fire. They smolder dully, like cardboard before it catches. He runs around, trying to evade the cups of beer people are pouring on him as fire relief.

"Yes," she says.

"You really think you can control all these people?"

"Yes," she says, smiling. "What do you need?"

"Well, they need to get out of the street."

"All right," she yells, "Everybody out of the street!"

The message gets relayed up the block, and soon everyone but the band is standing on the sidewalk. The Rat allows his pants to be doused, once he's sure the beer being poured on him isn't his own. His cup is in his hand, but apparently there was some confusion.

"Anything else?"

"No more fireworks."

"I want those fuckin' fireworks to stop or I'm kicking someone's ass," she yells. "Anything else?"

"No, that's it."

J.T. and the cop resume their talk about bikes and walk across the street to check out Zeke's DR-Z. Big Dave, another member of the crew, walks up behind me and whispers in my ear, "Sam and I just went over to the warehouse" – referring to another warehouse in town – "and got a backpack flamethrower unit. Then we drove around the corner and there are three OPD cars. Maybe it's not the right time."

Something tells me a flamethrower would be a bit more aggravating to the authorities than smoking tires, punk rock, and firecrackers. "It's a weed incinerator," Sam says. "A very high-powered weed incinerator." We join the cops in checking out the bikes. Turns out Big Dave and Salt and Pepper know each other.

I ask one of the other officers, H. Nguyen, what he thinks about the Riot. "I think it's cool, man. I'm into bikes." It's the fireworks that are troublesome: "Everyone thinks they're gunshots. And you know how it is around here." He pauses. "Can I ask you a question?"

"Sure, go ahead."

He points to Trevor's GSXR, pretty much the epitome of the rat bike aesthetic: flat-black tank, not a bit of plastic, tubes and wires poking out everywhere. There's something indecently honest about it, something that makes you feel like you're witnessing something you shouldn't, like you've caught a robot with its pants down, or a Westworld android without its faceplate.

"How come you guys take off the fairings?"

Duncan Scott Davidson has recently taken the three minutes necessary to become a Universal Life Church minister online. He would like to offer his services, at a bargain rate, for marriages, baptisms, and funerals. For more pictures of this year's West Oakland Riot and Riots past go to www.oaklandindustrial.com and www.zoenaumanphotographic.com. .