Fringe Florida: Travels Among Mud Boggers, Furries, Ufologists, Nudists, and Other Lovers of Unconventional Lifestyles by Lynn Waddell Page B

pasture campground. A farmer, no doubt, has found
    bikers more lucrative tenants than cows for the week.
    I glimpse patches on the backs of the men’s vests. Before I can make
    out the club names, they zoom past on rumbling Harleys toward the
    epicenter of mayhem—Daytona Beach’s Main Street—and leave be-
    hind a cloudy trail of exhaust and testosterone.
    Could they be one-percenters (1%ers), as outlaw bikers call them-
    selves? Or are they merely posers? This being Florida, it could go either
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    way.
    You see, in the male biker world there are clubs of weekend motor-
    cycle enthusiasts with spit-shined $20,000 motors, sometimes referred
    to as Plastics (bikers who bought the look with one swipe of a credit
    card) or RUBs (rich urban bikers). There are daredevil professional rac-
    ers with corporate sponsors. There are “Power Rangers,” whose cloth-
    ing and helmets match their Japanese sports bikes. And then there are
    the true rebels—the 1%ers. This nihilistic minority proudly lives on the
    fringe and relishes in shredding societal norms.
    One-percenter clubs embraced the term long ago after a newspaper
    reported that 99 percent of motorcyclists are law-abiding, while 1 per-
    cent are deviants, outlaws. They are the Hell’s Angels, the Outlaws, the
    Mongols, and other clubs of assorted vicious names indicating they are
    badass bad. They inspired the Marlon Brando black-and-white classic
    The Wild Ones and modern Technicolor fictions such as the AMC cable
    series Sons of Anarchy . Daytona Bike Week is their mecca, and Florida,
    a favored home address.
    I’m heading in the opposite direction of the questionable male biker
    herd, bound for an annual gathering of the Leather & Lace Motorcycle
    Club, a group of women bikers. But I’m not sure the scene will be any
    tamer than the machismo one in Daytona.
    Lace’s founder and president, Jennifer “Jenn” Chaffin, has danced in
    proof
    and around the gritty 1%er world since she was sixteen. Her first hus-
    band was chapter boss of the local Warlocks Motorcycle Club, an MC.
    He was assassinated in their garage by members of a rival motorcycle
    club in 1991.
    Her second husband is the chapter boss of the local Mongols, an MC
    that the U.S. Justice Department considers so dangerous that it tried
    to ban their name and emblem—a stoned-looking Asian man in biker
    uniform kicked back on a chopper. His head is shaven with a spit of a
    topknot as to remotely resemble Genghis Khan’s warriors, who wore
    helmets plumed with horsetail hair.
    I discovered Jenn and her club on the National Geographic Channel.
    lee
    The documentary Biker Chicks portrayed them as thrill-seeking women
    ts
    who ride in the shadows of a dangerous world of crusty biker gangs
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    that treat women like property and pee on new members’ patched
    sr
    vests as part of the initiation ritual.
    ets
    Jenn laughed about that fabled ritual when I reached her by phone.
    is
    “I don’t know where they got that.” Her voice is like a smoldering
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    campfire, smoky and steady. She talked candidly about her club and
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    her late husband’s murder. She chuckled about how her late husband’s
    1%er brothers picked on her when she rode with them, situations that
    would make most people, male or female, weep in self-pity or crack
    with anger.
    Despite Jenn’s candor, I still didn’t understand why women would
    subject themselves to the sexist world of hard-core motorcycle clubs,
    much less a woman who had lost her first husband to its brutality. I
    wanted to learn more.
    She invited me to join her and about fifty Lace members who are
    camping at her house during Bike Week. She added that only officers
    are allowed to sleep inside the house. In other words, I’ll have to sleep
    in the yard with the other members and the yet-to-be-initiated, the
    prospects.
    I packed my sleeping bag and made a hotel reservation just in case
    there was a random police raid.
    Tending Farms and Killing Fish
    Jenn lives about