Part 2: I Followed the Scariest Biker in My Club Every Tuesday Night for a Month — What I Found Him Doing in a Hello Kitty Apron Broke My Whole Idea of Manhood
You do not become Reaper without earning it.
Michael Garrison was born on May 11th, 1976, in a Catholic hospital in Pueblo. His mother was nineteen, unmarried, and a heroin addict. His father is on his birth certificate as Unknown. The hospital social worker placed him in the custody of Pueblo County Social Services on the day of his discharge.
He spent the first three months of his life in a county-run infant care facility. At three months, he was placed at the Sangre de Cristo Children’s Home — a small Catholic-affiliated orphanage on the western edge of Pueblo, run by a religious order until 1989 and by a non-profit board ever since.
He stayed there until he was sixteen.
His mother visited him three times in those sixteen years. The last time, when he was eight, she brought him a small toy fire truck. He kept it under his pillow for the next seven years until he aged out of the home.
She did not visit again. She died in 1994 of an overdose in a motel room in Cheyenne.
He never met his father.
Michael was — by every account in the staff records I would later see, with permission — a quiet kid. Smart. Withdrawn. Anger problems. Big for his age. Always hungry. The home was, in the 1980s and early 1990s, chronically underfunded. The staff loved the kids and did the best they could. But there were nights, Michael told me later, when dinner was a single slice of bread and a tablespoon of peanut butter and a glass of powdered milk, and he would lie on his cot in his small shared room and cry from the hollow feeling in his stomach.
He did not cry where the other boys could see him.
He cried into his pillow. With the toy fire truck under his cheek.
He learned, by twelve, how to fall asleep with a stomachache.
He aged out at sixteen, two months before his seventeenth birthday, when a foster family in nearby Avondale agreed to take him on a temporary placement that lasted ten weeks before he ran away.
He spent the next four years on the road.
He fell in with the wrong people. He did time — eleven months in a Colorado state facility for assault, in 1996. He came out angrier than he went in. He drifted through clubs and odd jobs and small-time work in the sort of places men work when they have aged out of foster care with nothing.
In 1998, at the age of twenty-two, he started working at an auto-body shop in Pueblo run by a man named Sam Ortega. Sam was a gruff, kind, fair employer who saw something in Michael and gave him a chance. Michael has worked there ever since. He is now a co-owner. Sam is seventy-three and mostly retired but still comes in on Saturdays.
In 2002, Michael was patched into Cinder Hills MC.
In 2010, he was elected Sergeant-at-Arms.
He has held the position for fifteen years.
He earned the road name Reaper at a clubhouse in Pueblo in 2002, after an incident involving three men in a parking lot that I will not describe except to say that Michael ended it without a single blow being thrown, simply by walking up to the largest man and saying, very quietly, “You’re done here tonight.” The man went home.
He has been Reaper ever since.
He has also, as it turns out, been Chef Mike at Sangre de Cristo Children’s Home every Tuesday night since 2010.
Fifteen years.
Nobody at the home knew.
And nobody at the club knew either — until I parked in that Walgreens.
At 4:42 p.m. on March 5th, Reaper walked into the front entrance of Sangre de Cristo Children’s Home.
He was wearing a regular black hoodie over jeans. No leather cut. No patches. He had left the cut in the saddlebag of his Road King.
He was carrying two large paper grocery bags.
I sat in my truck across the road and watched the building.
I waited.
At 5:14 p.m., I saw him through the front lobby window — visible from the street if you knew where to look — walk past wearing a yellow apron with a small white kitten and a pink bow on the front. Hello Kitty.
I did a double-take.
I sat up.
I rubbed my eyes.
I am twenty-six years old. I have been around bikers since I was fifteen. I have seen a lot of strange things.
I had not seen a man who could clear a bar in three seconds wearing a Hello Kitty apron.
I sat in that Walgreens parking lot for the next two hours and forty-nine minutes. I did not move.
Through the lobby window I could see — far away, but visible — a long folding-table dining room next to a small open-counter kitchen. About thirty kids ranging in age from about five to about fifteen sat at the tables. Two staff members helped serve. And behind the counter — for two and a half hours straight — Reaper, in the Hello Kitty apron, stirred two enormous pots of mac and cheese, plated thirty servings, walked plates out to the tables one by one, and refilled drinks.
After dinner, I watched him bus tables.
I watched him wash dishes.
I watched him sit at the table next to a small boy of maybe six who was crying and put one enormous tattooed hand gently on the kid’s back and not move it for ten minutes.
At 7:51 p.m., he walked out the front door.
He had taken off the apron.
He was carrying the empty paper grocery bags.
He stopped on the front steps of the home.
He turned his head.
He looked directly across the road at my truck in the Walgreens parking lot.
He had known I was there.
I do not know for how long.
He started walking toward me.
I rolled the window down.
Reaper walked up. He did not look angry. He looked tired.
He stopped beside the truck, put one hand on the door frame, and said:
“Trevor. Did Hatch send you?”
I said, “Yes, sir.”
He nodded, slowly.
He said, “Get out. Walk with me.”
I got out of the truck.
We walked across the road and around the side of the orphanage, behind the building, where there was a small fenced playground with two swings and a slide. The sun was setting. Reaper sat down on one of the swings.
The chains creaked.
He looked too big for it.
He pointed to the second swing.
I sat down.
He said, “Trevor. I’m not gonna ask you to lie to Hatch. You’re gonna go back tomorrow morning and you’re gonna tell him exactly what you saw. You with me?”
I said, “Yes, sir.”
He said, “But I’m gonna tell you why first. So you tell it right.”
He took a long breath.
He said, “I grew up here, son.”
I did not say anything.
He said, “My mama left me here when I was three months old. I lived in this building until I was sixteen years old. I aged out in 1992. I cried myself to sleep in the room that is now this kitchen on a hundred and seventeen separate nights between the ages of six and twelve. I counted, Trevor. I counted because I was a kid, and counting was something I could control.”
He paused.
He said, “In 2010, after I made Sergeant-at-Arms and the shop started doing better, I came back here. I drove out one Sunday afternoon, no plan, just to look at the building. I sat in my truck out there in that parking lot for an hour. Then I went inside and I asked the director if they needed help with anything.”
He paused again.
He said, “She asked me if I could cook.”
He laughed once, very small.
He said, “I told her I could make mac and cheese. That was it. That’s the only thing I knew how to make from twenty years of living in the kitchen of an auto-body shop. I told her, ma’am, I can make a pot of mac and cheese big enough for thirty kids. She said, son, we have Tuesday nights wide open.”
He looked down at his enormous tattooed hands on the chains of the swing.
He said, “That was fifteen years ago. I have not missed a Tuesday.”
He looked up at me.
He said, “Nobody at the home knows my road name. Nobody at the home knows about the club. They call me Chef Mike. I told them my last name was Garrison and that I worked at an auto shop. That’s it.”
He paused.
He said, “And I never told the club because, Trevor, the second this thing becomes a thing — the second the brothers know about it, the second somebody posts about it, the second a reporter calls — it stops being about those kids. It starts being about me. About the club. About what people think of me. And the kids will become the audience for somebody else’s image.”
He looked back across the playground at the building.
He said, “That ain’t right. I cook here because I know what hungry feels like. Not because I want anybody to think I’m a good man.”
He stood up.
He said, “Tell Hatch the truth. He’ll understand.”
He started to walk back toward the parking lot.
Then he stopped.
He turned around.
He said, very quietly, “Trevor. There’s a black-and-white photograph in the back hallway of this building. Group shot. 1985. Boys’ wing. Front row, third from the left. That’s me. I was nine. Look at it sometime. You’ll understand why I never asked anyone for a thing.”
Then he walked to his Road King and rode home.
I drove to the clubhouse the next morning.
I told Hatch the entire thing.
Hatch — sixty-one, a retired iron worker, gray ponytail, three grandkids — listened without interrupting. When I was done, he sat for a long minute.
Then he said: “Trevor. Don’t ever do that again. To any brother. You understand?”
I said, “Yes, sir.”
He said, “Good. Now sit down. I owe you an apology.”
He poured me coffee. He poured himself coffee. We sat at the long folding table at the clubhouse and drank it and did not speak for about ten minutes.
Then Hatch stood up.
He said, “Come with me.”
He walked out to his Road Glide.
I followed.
He said, “We’re going to that orphanage. Now.”
We rode out together. Two bikes. Forty minutes.
We did not knock on the front door.
We walked around the side of the building.
There was a side gate. We let ourselves into the playground area where Reaper and I had sat the night before.
There was a back door to the kitchen.
Hatch knocked once.
A woman in her sixties opened the door — a woman I would later know as Sister Beatrice, retired nun, head cook on the Wednesday-Sunday rotation, the woman who had been working with Reaper for fifteen years.
Hatch said, “Ma’am. I’m sorry to bother you. I’m a friend of Mike Garrison’s. I just wanted to come see the place.”
Sister Beatrice looked at us — two men in leather cuts, tattooed, gray-bearded — and said, “Of course. Come in.”
She did not flinch.
She did not ask questions.
She walked us through the kitchen, then through the dining hall, then down the back hallway.
She stopped halfway down the hallway in front of a row of framed black-and-white photographs.
She said, “These are the boys’ wing photos from over the years. We have one from every year going back to 1962.”
Hatch and I stood there for about thirty seconds.
Then Hatch said, “Sister. Could you give us a minute?”
She nodded and walked back to the kitchen.
We found 1985.
Group shot. Boys’ wing. Maybe twenty kids. Different ages.
Front row, third from the left.
A skinny nine-year-old kid with a shaved head, dark eyes, a t-shirt two sizes too big, and a face that had already learned not to ask anyone for anything.
Hatch put his hand on the glass.
He stood there for a long time.
He did not say anything.
When he finally turned around, his eyes were wet, and he wiped them on the back of his leather glove and we walked out of the building without speaking another word to anyone.
In the parking lot, before he got on his bike, Hatch said one sentence to me.
He said, “Trevor. We never tell the club. You hear me? We never tell.”
I said, “Yes, sir.”
He said, “Reaper does this his way. We do not take it from him.”
He swung his leg over the Road Glide.
He started the engine.
He rode home.
I have been showing up at Sangre de Cristo Children’s Home every Tuesday night for the last seven months.
I asked Reaper if I could.
He said, “You can. Three rules. One — you wear no cut. Two — you tell nobody. Three — when those kids look at you, they see a guy in an apron who came to feed them. Not a biker. Not a story. A guy in an apron. That’s all.”
I said, “Yes, sir.”
I wear a plain black apron.
I help him stir the pots.
I plate.
I bus tables.
I wash dishes.
I sit with the little kids while they eat.
There is a six-year-old boy named Lewis who has been at the home for ten months. His mother is in prison. His father is unknown. He has not spoken much in the time he has been there.
Last Tuesday, Lewis sat next to Reaper at the table and ate three plates of mac and cheese and asked him if he could come back next week.
Reaper said, “Buddy. I have been coming back every week for fifteen years. I’ll be here next week.”
Lewis said, “Promise?”
Reaper said, “Promise.”
Lewis nodded.
He went back to eating.
Reaper looked over the top of Lewis’s head at me across the kitchen.
He did not smile.
He did not nod.
He just looked at me for a second.
Then he stood up to refill Lewis’s milk.
I am going to get my full patch in Cinder Hills MC at our annual run in May. I have done my time as a prospect.
When I get the patch, I will sew it onto my own cut.
But I am also going to sew one other small patch into the inside lining over my heart.
A small patch I made in November, with a piece of yellow felt and a bit of pink ribbon I bought at a craft store.
It is shaped, badly, like a Hello Kitty bow.
I have not told Reaper. I have not told Hatch. I have not told anybody.
Maybe I will. Maybe I won’t.
The kids at Sangre de Cristo do not know my road name.
They call me Chef Trevor.
I am okay with that.
If this story moved you — follow the page. There are more bikers out there like Reaper. More aprons. More empty paper grocery bags. More black-and-white photographs in back hallways. There are more stories the world doesn’t see — and I will keep telling them as long as someone keeps reading.
