Suns Set

Captains and non-commissioned officers aren't supposed to fraternize with one another, and especially not in a romantic way. The black man/white woman dynamic of their relationship made things even more difficult.

The Army next transferred Maxie to Virginia, where he was rejoined by Rose. But Judy followed him there, too.

Rose loved Virginia's countryside and beaches. Maxie bought his first motorcycle there and organized a social club, which had a snake for a logo. Rose was pregnant with Maxie's baby when she found out he'd been cheating. She left him and returned to New York.

On Valentine's Day 1970, Rose gave birth to a daughter named Kim. Maxie passed out cigars when he got the call from the Red Cross.

Soon after, Maxie and Judy were both honorably discharged from the Army. They moved to Denver, because Maxie had fond memories of all that open space in Colorado.

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At first the Suns of Darkness got kicked out of just about every bar they went to in Denver. The bikers were viewed as "black rednecks," Sugar remembers.

Once, they tried to get biscuits and gravy at the Jet Set nightclub on Colorado Boulevard, but management said that their biker attire was inappropriate. Several of the Suns went home and put on suits, but they were again refused service. They left again, and this time returned buck naked, to streak the joint.

When they lined up their bikes outside Pierre's Supper Club, dozens of girls would come to see the Suns, Sugar says. But then the bikers snuck in their own beverages and got 86ed from Pierre's.

The Suns got tossed out of other places, including Mr. A's, after Maxie showed up with one of his boa constrictors wrapped around his arm. A waitress carrying a tray of drinks complimented him on his bracelet, then realized it was really a snake. The drinks went flying as the waitress screamed "Snake!" all the way out the front door.

"Everybody thought bikers were like in the movies, that they'd come in and take over the town, rape the little girls," Sugar says. "But it wasn't like that."

If the Suns didn't feel welcome somewhere, they just moved on to the next party.

Although veteran cops knew better, rookies continued to be suspicious of the Suns, even after the group's first president, Bill Phillips, left the club and joined the Denver Police Department. That's when Maxie assumed the presidency. The club began meeting at his house, and one of his first orders of business became finding a place where the Suns of Darkness could party by their own rules.

He soon found a building at 2835 Welton Street that had served as a Black Panther headquarters. The Suns rented it as their clubhouse for $70 a month. The black-owned businesses in the Five Points area initially seemed a little paranoid about their new biker neighbors. But the Suns' partying all night long actually deterred crime in the area, Sugar says.

Family, job, religion, Suns of Darkness -- that was the club's suggested set of priorities, in that order. But members were free to live their lives as they chose, and some wound up doing time in prison for crimes they committed independent of the club. The Suns remained a purely social organization, however.

An organization that was growing fast. By the time William Vaden joined the club in 1972, it had grown to more than twenty members. He remembers his initiation as a frat-boy thing: getting pelted with eggs and oil, being fed spaghetti while blindfolded and told it was worms, swimming across the Cherry Creek Reservoir.

Vaden was known as "Dubby" from his football days at Manual High School, where he'd been a classmate of Sugar's. But Maxie soon changed that to "Doobee," even though Dubby hadn't smoked a doobie since the first time he tried pot at the age of twelve. Doobee's older brother, James "Pretty Eyes" Vaden, was an original member of the Suns, but Doobee had missed out on the club's first year because he was doing time in prison for forgery.

Some biker clubs required that a member's motorcycle be signed over to the group. Others made their members get tattoos or swear allegiance to the club above all else. The Suns of Darkness just required that a member's bike be at least 500cc so the crew could ride together as a pack.

In the tradition of Easy Rider, the Suns often hit the open road to see the country. "We went just to go," Sugar remembers. "You get on that highway, you meet a lot of beautiful people."

By 1973, Maxie and Sugar had both graduated to Harley-Davidsons. They used inner tubes, blankets, pillows or whatever they had to pad the hard seats during long, rough rides -- and the trip to Oakland that year was one of Sugar's favorites. Seven riders left Denver with a total of thirty bucks in their pockets. They took five days to get there, partying the whole time. They then stayed in Oakland for three weeks before finally coming back to town. They still had thirty bucks.