The Roadhouse

Sandra "Drama" Lynch is the last woman left in Los Pirados, the Central Texas motorcycle club she co-founded nine years ago with her husband, Michael, road name "Slide," and some of their friends who like to ride. In her most infamous photo, she's wearing an orange jumpsuit, her hair tied back, eyes pinched and radiating hate. Today she's in an orange M.C. T-shirt under a black leather vest bearing club patches, including one in the shape of a Harley that says: "I Support the Fat Mexican," and jeans. Other members of the club and one or two Ol' Ladies are similarly attired. When we meet, she's just stepped down the McClennan County courthouse steps, where she gave a speech to a couple dozen bikers to commemorate the noontime shooting three years ago at a Twin Peaks restaurant off I-35 that resulted in nine dead, 20 injured and nearly 200 arrested on identical charges. You missed it! she says to me by way of a greeting. I thought the event was from noon to 2? Yeah, well, it's hot, she says, and then slips a piece of printer paper folded up four times into my hand -- her speech. It was the first time we'd seen each other in almost three years, since I'd driven to her home the day she and her husband bailed out of jail. Where are you off to now? I ask. Going to get a beer. Mind if I tag along? She gestures for me to lean in, and whispers: Rocky's Roadhouse, and gives me the address before walking off to do an interview with local TV.  

I quickly scan the speech: "71 secs..that's how long it took law enforcement to take part in murdering 9 men and injuring 20 and forever seal the fate of 192 men and women.” The second section addresses the lame duck district attorney whom defense lawyers say hijacked the investigation from police, ordering everyone connected to the Bandidos and another biker club, the Cossacks, arrested. A McLennan County Justice of the Peace, a lawman without a law degree, set the bond for all 177 bikers at $1 million. “Abel Reyna,” she wrote, “stepping in like a Nazi war leader and threw us in jail taking away our voice our families our livelihood. And after 3 years hes not thru with us yet. He has brought out the shovel to bury us with. New charges of murder and rioting.” She pledged to "keep fighting until every last brother is cleared of this mess. I am still mad and I will never forget nor forgive.” She finishes: “God Bless the Republic” — the Republic of Texas, that is. 

Twenty minutes later, I pull my silver Nissan Sentra rental into the gravel driveway of a barn-like building painted black. The neon-green Rocky's Roadhouse sign features a 90s'-era clipart photo of four young white people holding what appear to be soft drinks, strikingly incongruous with the scene inside. Metal grates over the glass of the two front doors suggest a shielded soldier guarding the entrance. 

It takes a minute for my eyes to adjust to the darkness. I locate Sandra sitting at a small circular table in a dim patch of light cast by the cigarette machine. After introducing me to everyone, Sandra lets out a sigh. What a day, and it's only early afternoon. Less than an hour before the meeting at the courthouse, jurors in San Antonio handed down guilty verdicts to the former president and vice president of the Bandidos on all 13 counts, including racketeering and murder. The convictions are a blow to the Lynches and the cause of the #waco177 — they certainly don’t help the men charged with rioting and murder at Twin Peaks. And locking up the president -- a wealthy building contractor with a big house outside Houston -- could presage a new, and more violent era in the history of American bikers.

Los Pirados' respect and fealty lie with the Bandidos, much in the way a small-town softball league would the New York Yankees. Or, Sandra points out, the way Wacoans continue to support Baylor football, even with a good portion of the squad accused of rape, and coaches of covering it up. There's people bleed green and gold. The biggest sex scandal anyone's ever seen -- doesn't matter, she says. 

I'm eager to understand why women join notoriously misogynist motorcycle clubs, and why Sandra is the only woman left in hers. You know my road name, right? she says with a laugh. Drama. That's why. She says in 2011, the club changed its bylaws, preventing more women from joining. The women who were already members were grandfathered in.

Women just tend to cause too much drama, says Drama. All the knit-picking, all the...whatever women do. They argue and they fuss. I tell everybody, I’m a woman who lives in a man’s world. I tend to get along with men better.

Anyway, this is a tough life, she continues. Not all women can get on their motorcycle and ride 400 miles in one day. To be a patch member, you have to ride your own bike.

Men hate women, Sandra says. Bikers are no different. By way of an example, we return to the morning of the shooting. Sandra was there with a club brother, setting up a tarp for bike parking at Twin Peaks. She says Owen Reeves, a member of the Cossacks who goes by the name Big O, approached them with a few other Cossacks. He spit on me, called me a cunt 100 times, she says. She looks like she's tasting something bad as she tells the story. She's a grandmother, yes, but she hangs with tough men. She's taken abuse before, but this was different -- left her feeling dirty. I ask Mike how he feels when Sandra texts him what Big O had done to her. He explains he wasn't at Twin Peaks yet -- he was parked with other brothers at the Flyin' J gas station near the highway overpass. "Nothing I can do. He done the same to me at bike night," Mike says, referring to the last of a short-lived monthly biker gathering at the Waco Twin Peaks that ended the day of the shooting. "He come over to me -- and he's a big ol' boy -- starts calling me all sorts of names. I don't want to throw fuel on the fire. I just watch him run his mouth."

The conversation moves on as a man with scraggly long grey hair and a skin tag over his eyelid approaches our table. Rocky’s, despite its Waco address, is not in Waco but in neighboring Bellmead, where it's still legal to smoke inside, Sandra explains as she introduces the owner, a man they call Sambo. Sam is easily pushing 80, but his physical mannerisms, and his foul mouth, make him seem a younger man. He says his father, a World War II B-25 bomber pilot and Doolittle's Raider, just turned 102. Quite a party. Appreciating a new audience for old stories, it seems, Sambo overhears snatches of my conversation with Sandra, and says he's got dirt on the district attorney from prior days tending bar at Fred & Wallys. "I was always yelling at him not to snort cocaine off my damn bar!" he says, eliciting a peal of laughter from our table and the next. "How do you think a crook like me could run a bar across from a federal courthouse?" Apparently a rhetorical question, he takes a swig of beer and wanders off. When he's out of earshot, Sandra tells me he has 11 DWIs.  I ask what Sam will do when the district attorney leaves office later this year. "Oh, he doesn't do that anymore. His wife drives him everywhere now," she says with a perfectly straight face.