Punches thrown
In 2006, Alex Abramovich learns that Trevor Latham, the kid who used to terrorize him on a Long Island gradeschool playground, has become a “professional bully” on the other side of the country — founder of an Oakland motorcycle club called the East Bay R
Abramovich is driven to follow this narrative into the present day, so he pitches the story to Gentlemen’s Quarterly. His resulting immersion in a world of drunken brawls, brutal fight parties and, to quote the Rats, “consensual bloodshed,” triggers panic attacks about the childhood fights he’s tried his best to forget.
And yet Abramovich experiences a kind of kinship with Latham, not just because they both grew up with abusive single fathers, but also because he’s fascinated by the Rats’ world. And so, four years after the GQ story, Abramovich decides on a temporary move from New York City to Oakland. He ends up staying four years, and this forms the basis of “Bullies: A Friendship,” a fusion of journalism and memoir as haunting as Abramovich’s childhood memories.
The East Bay Rats are a motorcycle club consisting of about 35 members, almost all of them white men (Abramovich mentions one black member, and one Mexican American). The Rats are quite cozy with the cops, who, Abramovich says, leave them free to terrorize anyone with less power than themselves. Many of the Rats are ex-military, and their behavior in a historically black neighborhood in the midst of a gentrification crisis is eerily similar to U.S. soldiers gone rogue.
In perhaps the most harrowing scene in the book, Abramovich describes two of the Rats kicking and punching a random bystander (a “recycler” who is collecting discarded beer cans outside the clubhouse). They drag him into the street, knock him over until he crawls onto the median strip to escape, and then another Rat guns the engine of his motorcycle. Abramovich turns away as the motorcycle is about to run this man over, and “when I turned back, I expected to see something terrible. But there was nothing to see. The recycler was gone. The street was empty.”
Strangely, in a book filled with gory detail, Abramovich doesn’t mention for how long he turned away. Nor does he speculate on where this man could have gone. We’re left with the ramifications of senseless violence that no one else seems to care about.
The Rats repeatedly describe Abramovich as an “embedded” journalist, and while he resists this term (Oakland is not, after all, a war zone), his allegiance, like embedded journalists, is unquestionably with his subjects. Abramovich befriends many of the Rats, whom he interviews in detail, as well as at least one ex-police officer, but he never quotes anyone else — no women, no uninvolved neighbors, none of the “crack- heads” routinely denigrated by the Rats (Latham, for example, finds a guy urinating on his front doorstep one night, and runs out with a shovel to break the guy’s arm. He tells this story with pride).
It’s not that Abramovich doesn’t do his research — he spends entire days at the Oakland Public Library, devouring any information he can get about local history. And yet his allegiance to the Rats blunts his critical engagement.
Abramovich devotes only one paragraph to the notorious Oakland Riders case, where four Oakland police officers were accused of kidnapping, beating and framing 119 black residents of Oakland, resulting in civil rights lawsuits ending in a settlement with the city, and federal supervision of the Oakland Police Department (in 2003). Abramovich shows more interest in the Oakland police than the black residents allegedly tortured and terrorized by the Riders. He places this one brief mention of a critical news story with long-term ramifications in the midst of an in-depth interview with a former OPD officer who laments that morale has “plummeted,” and now irate citizens are ganging up on the police department by filing unfounded complaints.
“I don’t care about the politics. … I’m only here for the violence,” Latham tells Abramovich, toward the end of “Bullies.” He’s talking about the emergence of Occupy Oakland in 2011. But he could also be talking about this book.