Suns Set

Charles Garrett, a photographer who liked hanging around the Suns, didn't have a bike, so he followed the brothers in a truck on that trip. "It was fantastic," he says. "My world was completely opened up to the whole biker lifestyle. You had to be a certain person, you had to have a certain energy to even hang in the club. I dug the fact that they did what they wanted to do and went where they wanted to go. They exposed themselves to this country more than most people who live here."

Although Garrett wouldn't join the Suns for another sixteen years, he earned his nickname on that '73 trip. Following the Muslim dietary law, he didn't eat pork, and he seemed to preach about it every time he came around the Suns. But by the time they all arrived in Oakland, Garrett was so hungry he couldn't resist the swine ribs on the grill. That's when the Suns named him "Nopork."

Not only did Doobee make all of the Suns trips, but he cruised across the country for much of the next dozen years, earning the club's first Nomad patch and serving as a Suns of Darkness ambassador. "I was known everywhere," he says. "I just rode everywhere. I opened up a lot of doors."

While Doobee was building bridges across the country, the Suns were getting together with other Denver clubs. Another black crew, the Good Time Rollers, had formed, as had a chapter of the Chicago-based Hell's Lovers. And the Suns partied with white clubs, too.

"We rode as fast as they did, we rode as hard as they did, we rode as crazy as they did, we drank as much as they did, too," Sugar remembers. "But we didn't have to fight to be accepted."

Once, someone claiming to be a member of the Hell's Lovers called the Suns clubhouse and threatened to blow the place up. But since some Lovers were in the house at the time, the Suns kept the peace. "We wasn't trying to take over nobody," Sugar says. "We wasn't trying to run nobody."

"It would be nice if everyone in the world could get along. It would be nice of God," Maxie told a reporter in 1978. "All this Nazi stuff we wear is just tradition. What do you think Hitler would do if he knew a black man was wearing an Iron Cross?"

The head of the DPD's motorcycle-gang division told the same reporter that about a half-dozen of the thirty motorcycle clubs in Colorado were hard-core criminal operations. But the Suns wasn't one of them. "We don't consider the Suns a problem gang, although several individuals have extensive records and deserve watching," the detective said.

One Sun, "Saboo," did meet a violent death -- but he was murdered over a woman, not the club.

Women can't join the Suns. "Females seem to initiate shit," Sugar says. "You can take a building full of men and they get along, but put one female in there and you'll get wars going on."

Outside the club, the bikers didn't have much better luck with the women they married. "Motorcycle or me," Sugar remembers his wife telling him. "So I divorced my wife in 1972. I still got my bike. It went up in value, but my wife depreciated."

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Six-year-old Kim Maxie heard a rumbling that shook the walls like thunder. Motorcycle after motorcycle roared up as her cousins shouted, "It's Uncle Max!"

Kim looked up at her father. She'd seen him only a couple of times before, during visits to her aunt in Colorado Springs. But in 1976, Rose -- who didn't divorce Maxie until 1984 -- moved with Kim to the Springs, so that the girl could be closer to her father.

"Hey, baby," Maxie said.

Kim was bashful.

"Come here and give me a hug."

All Kim's cousins ran to hug her father, so Kim figured she might as well, too. Maxie sat her on his bike, and then they walked around the block together. They talked.

For the next six years, Kim would spend two weeks every year with her father in Denver. And even after she turned twelve and had a social life of her own, she would always call the clubhouse and find her father there. Sometimes when he put the phone down, Kim could hear the partying in the background. Maxie would often get back on the line quite a while later, apologizing for having made her wait.

Papa was a rolling stone, and after he broke up with Judy, he lived with a couple of different women. Sometimes the women were the breadwinners; sometimes Maxie worked security to bring in cash. But by the mid-'80s, he was living alone in his house on Clayton Street.