Bullies: A Friendship

A childhood antagonism becomes a complex appreciation among adults in a biker gang in this tragicomic exploration of male violence and bonding. Journalist Abramovich was bullied (as he remembers it) by Trevor Latham in elementary school. Upon reconnecting many years later, after Latham founded the East Bay Rats Motorcycle Club in Oakland, he gets along famously with his erstwhile nemesis. He steeps himself in the Rats’ goofy outlaw culture, with its fight parties (typical bill: two Jews vs. two Gentiles), heavy drinking, good-natured gunplay, and japes such as painting the club’s name on a beached whale. But he perceives a darker side—claustrophobic enmities, savage beatings of homeless people—and wonders whether Latham’s charisma might be a kind of sociopathy. Abramovich sets the story against a vivid portrait of a blighted, crime-ridden Oakland seething with warrior bands, including an organized-crime family associated with Your Black Muslim Bakery, Occupy Oakland militants, and the riot police they battled. (“I don’t care about the politics... I’m only here for the violence,” Latham exults after instigating one such confrontation.) Abramovich’s sharp-eyed, entertaining reportage unfolds like a mash-up of The Wild One, Fight Club, and Jackass; his examination of the Rats’ worldview is sympathetic and nuanced, but squarely faces the group’s dysfunctions and the troubling questions they raise about American society. Photos. (Mar.)