CHAPTER 2: The Motorcycle Club and my First Real Crush.
This is what I remember as a kid growing up around the motorcycle club. This is how I remember it. The house on Addison Street is where I remember people being there all the time. I had no idea who any of them were. All I remember was that I kept seeing skeleton heads and pistons that looked like bones on the back of most of the guy’s vests and motorcycles all over the place. Later I learned that this was the club my mom was in. The Outlaws was one of the top two badass biker clubs in the 60s, 70s and 80s. The Chicago Outlaws were running the Midwest area. Once we moved to Romeoville, the club started hanging at that house also. I started to remember the names of the regulars who came over almost every day. Not all the people who came over or stayed over were in the club. There were a few people who were mean to us kids and my mom’s close club friends would protect us. Sometimes my mom’s friends weren’t around and at times my brothers would get hit with a hot wheel’s track from their toy cars and they got hit with a wire wig hairbrush. Scott and Jeff had holes in their ass cheeks from the wig brush. And of course, my mom was gone doing business for the club. She would always leave us kids and tell us she was going to the store, and she would be right back. A couple days later here she comes with no food or anything from the store. It didn’t take us long to know she was lying every time she left the house. We would cry and beg her not to leave us with the people at the house because they were mean to us, she left anyway. In the club, my mom was called the enforcer, she was the one who made sure the girls were doing their job, whatever that was to bring in money for the club. And this is again what I don’t understand. My mom had some balls, she would do anything for the club, but she wouldn’t stand up to the guys she lived with (boyfriends). #2 husband beat her a lot. He was eating dinner one day and she gave him the salt and pepper shakers and he didn’t like the way she put them on the table, so he spun around and grabbed her and was hitting her back and shoulder into the wall and made a big hole in the wall and she kept asking him, what did I do? She got away from him and ran out of the house as he ran after her. Our neighbors watched as he got her to the ground and sat on her chest, he was hitting her and then pulled her up by her hair and brought her back into the house. The four of us kids sat there and watched. Kirk was very little, maybe 2yrs, old and he was bawling his eyes out. I tried to keep him quiet, so we didn’t get it next. There were only 2 guys in her life that she was with that were so nice to her and us kids. They never hit her or us. but the club came above everything else, and I’m sure that’s why they didn’t stay around. The other guys she lived with or dated beat her a lot. One guy threw her across the living room because she didn’t pick up all the pine needles off the floor from the Christmas tree. Another guy had a gun and I had to stand in front of her, so he didn’t shoot her as she is telling him to go ahead and shoot her. I was able to get the gun away from him. He liked me and I think that was the only reason why she was still alive, and another boyfriend punched her in the face two times because they were out, and she hugged and kissed her guy friends on the cheek, she was saying hello. They come home and go right to her room, and I hear her crying from her room, I knock on the door and the boyfriend opens the door enough for me to see only him. I asked what was going on and he opens the door all the way so I could see my mom on the bed with her jaw pushed to the right side of her face. Blood was pouring out of her mouth like a waterfall. Blood was all over the bed. He tried to explain why he hit her. There was no reason in my mind that any man should ever hit a woman. I made him take her to the hospital and as she is trying to walk out of the house, she faints and she falls to the floor, he just looks at her and tells her to get up. This guy was a real dick.