PART 2
I want to tell you who the brothers were before I tell you what they did.
The charter has been an independent in eastern South Dakota since 1981. There are twenty-six patched brothers as I write this. Twelve of them came over on Saturday. I am going to tell you about three of them specifically because the three of them are the men this story turns on.
Hutch — Wade Hutchinson, sixty-four, our President for the last twelve years — is a retired union pipefitter. He has been married to his wife Caroline for forty-one years. They have three daughters and seven grandchildren. He has thrown, by his own count, eleven granddaughter birthday parties in the last fifteen years. He knew, the second I called him at eleven thirty-eight that Tuesday night, exactly what a princess party involved. He had been to enough of them.
Reverend — real name Donovan Pike, fifty-eight, our Sergeant at Arms — is a high school auto-shop teacher at a vocational school on the north side of Sioux Falls. He has been married to his wife Pamela for twenty-nine years. They have one daughter named Eve, who is now thirty-one and a registered nurse in Rapid City. Reverend was the one who suggested, on the group text Hutch sent out that night, that they should each pick a princess from the Disney lineup and dress to match. He had, by his own statement on the group text, spent six birthdays as Prince Eric for Eve when she was four through nine.
Tank — Theodore Albrecht the Second, fifty-three, our charter’s road captain — is six foot four and weighs two hundred and ninety pounds. He works as a heavy-equipment operator at a construction company in Sioux Falls. He has been a patched brother for twenty-three years. He has been married to his wife Lorraine for thirty-one years. They have no children. They tried for fifteen years. It did not happen. Lorraine had a hysterectomy in 2014 after a long fight with endometrial cancer. They are still married. They are still happy. They have, by Tank’s own quiet count, attended forty-three other people’s children’s birthday parties as the godparents or honorary aunt and uncle, and Tank has, in fifty-three years on this earth, never once been to a children’s party in any role other than the guy who shows up at the door, gives the kid a card with two twenties in it, and leaves before the cake comes out.
He has never, by his own admission to me on my back patio at six p.m. on Saturday April 13th, 2024, been Prince Charming.
He had been waiting fifty-three years to be told it was his turn.
He did not know that until Saturday afternoon at three-fifteen.
PART 3
Saturday at one o’clock the doorbell rang.
I had Aspen in the living room in the pink princess dress my charter brother Reverend had sent his wife Pamela out to buy at the Target on West 41st Street that morning. Pamela had picked it herself. It was a size 4T pink tulle gown with a small embroidered Belle from Beauty and the Beast on the front bodice. Aspen had been wearing it for two hours. She had not, in those two hours, sat down. She had been spinning in the living room in front of the TV, which was playing the Beauty and the Beast DVD on loop. She had a small plastic tiara on her head that I had bought her at the Dollar Tree on Friday afternoon during my lunch break, which I had told her was the practice crown, honey, the real one is for the party.
I had not told her, because I did not know it myself, what the real one was going to be.
I opened the front door at one-oh-one.
Hutch was standing on my front porch. He was holding a brown paper grocery bag in his left hand. He was wearing his leather cut over a clean light blue Polo shirt that he had bought at Walmart that morning, dark jeans, his work boots, and — folded over his right forearm — a long royal-blue cape made of construction paper and duct tape that he had clearly cut out on Caroline’s kitchen table at six in the morning.
He had a small folded pink construction-paper crown clipped to the front of his cut next to his charter patch.
He looked at me. He said: “Brother. Step aside.”
Eleven other patched brothers were coming up the driveway behind him.
I want you to picture them.
Each of them was wearing his leather cut over a clean polo shirt — light blue, pale pink, lavender, mint green — that the brothers had bought that morning, in the men’s section, at the Walmart on Louise Avenue. The price tags were, by Hutch’s count later, between seven and nine dollars apiece. The brothers had pooled forty dollars for the shirts and another twenty for the construction paper, the duct tape, the foam stickers, the glitter glue, the paper plates, the napkins, the apple juice, the cake, the candles, the Beauty and the Beast napkins and tablecloth from the party aisle, two cans of pink streamers, one helium tank, twenty pink and blue balloons, a foam tiara that was bigger than the Dollar Tree one I had bought Friday, a pink tutu I had not asked for, and twelve construction-paper crowns that they had cut out — by their own admission — at Hutch’s kitchen table with three pairs of scissors and Reverend’s youngest daughter on a video call from Rapid City walking them through the proper crown shape.
Each crown had the brother’s name written on the inside in marker.
Tank’s crown said TANK in block letters in red Sharpie.
Tank was the tenth man up the driveway.
He was carrying, in both his enormous tattooed hands, a paper crown the size of a small dinner plate. It was pink. It had three large foam stars stuck to it in gold glitter. It had, around the headband, a small piece of pink ribbon Tank had tied himself, badly, while sitting on Hutch’s kitchen floor at eleven a.m. that morning because — by his own admission — he had not, in his entire life, ever tied a ribbon.
He looked up at me from the bottom of the driveway.
He said: “Brother. Don’t laugh.”
I said: “Tank. I am not gonna laugh.”
Aspen had heard the bikes coming up the road at twelve-fifty.
She had heard the doorbell at one.
She had come running into the entryway behind me in her pink tulle gown with the practice tiara on her head, and she had stopped dead in the entryway, with both her small hands pressed flat against her cheeks, and her four-year-old face had gone through three distinct expressions in approximately one and a half seconds.
The first expression was confusion.
The second expression was recognition.
The third expression was joy.
She let out a noise that I am, even fourteen months later, not going to attempt to describe in writing.
She ran past me.
She ran straight at Tank.
Tank — six foot four, two hundred and ninety pounds, road captain of an independent motorcycle charter for twelve years — Tank went down on one knee in my driveway with the paper crown held out in both his hands, and a four-year-old in a pink tulle gown ran into his chest at full speed, and his enormous tattooed arms came up around her, and he held her on one knee in my driveway for about six seconds.
Then he set the crown on her head.
It was too big.
He tied the pink ribbon under her chin with both his huge hands shaking, because the dexterity required to tie a ribbon under a four-year-old’s chin is dexterity that Tank — by his own account — had never been asked to develop.
The crown stayed on.
She looked up at him.
She said: “Are you a prince?”
Tank said, in a voice I did not recognize as his voice: “Honey. Today. I am.”
PART 4
I am going to tell you what happened in the next three hours mostly by listing the things, because the things are what I remember.
Hutch took over the kitchen and started laying out the Beauty and the Beast tablecloth.
Reverend put on the Beauty and the Beast soundtrack on a Bluetooth speaker he had brought from his car and started teaching Aspen, on my living room carpet, the small section of the ballroom-scene choreography that he had performed at his daughter Eve’s seventh birthday party in 1999.
A brother named Cooper — six foot, fifty-one, electrician, wearing a lavender polo — went out to the back patio and started inflating the pink and blue balloons with the helium tank.
A brother named Bishop — five eleven, sixty-two, retired Army sergeant first class, wearing a mint green polo — sat down at the kitchen table with the Beauty and the Beast napkins and started folding them, by his own description, in the way the cocktail-server class at Fort Bragg taught me to fold them in 1986.
A brother named Otis — six two, forty-eight, the chef who runs a barbecue place off Western Avenue, wearing a pale pink polo — took over the cake. The cake was a sheet cake that Otis had baked at his restaurant that morning at six a.m. and decorated, by hand, with white buttercream frosting in the shape of a small castle and the words HAPPY BIRTHDAY PRINCESS ASPEN in pink piping. He had carried it to my house on the back of his Harley in a custom-made wooden box he had built two nights before. The icing was not damaged.
A brother named Sully — five ten, fifty-five, accountant, wearing a light blue polo — sat down on the living room floor with Aspen and read her The Princess and the Pea twice in a row in three different voices.
A brother named Wheels — six foot, fifty-eight, master plumber, wearing a pale pink polo — let Aspen paint his nails. She painted his nails with pink Hello Kitty nail polish that Pamela the Reverend’s wife had sent over in the morning grocery run. Wheels did not wash it off for ten days afterward. Wheels has, by his wife Sandy’s report, been letting his three granddaughters paint his nails on Sundays since the previous Christmas, and his nails are, on any given day, some shade of pink or purple under his work gloves.
Tank stayed on his knees, or on the carpet, or seated on a small folding chair, for three hours straight.
He danced with Aspen.
He bowed when she handed him a plastic cup of apple juice.
He said Your Highness with absolute serious gravity every time he addressed her.
He let her stick a foam star on his beard.
He carried her on his shoulders around the living room to Be Our Guest for a full three minutes and twelve seconds, which Cooper timed on his phone.
I want to tell you what my four-year-old niece said at four-eleven p.m.
She had been awake since six-thirty in the morning. She had been at her own princess party for three hours and eleven minutes. She had eaten one slice of cake, two cookies, a small bag of goldfish crackers, and approximately six ounces of apple juice. She was sitting in Tank’s lap on the folding chair in our kitchen. The kitchen was full of pink balloons. The brothers were standing around the table eating cake off paper plates with plastic forks too small for their hands.
Aspen wiggled off Tank’s lap.
She climbed up onto the folding chair.
She stood up on it.
She lifted her small plastic cup of apple juice in the air.
She said, in her small clear four-year-old voice:
“Thank you, my princes.”
The kitchen went silent for about two seconds.
Then Hutch — at sixty-four, our President, the man who had patched me in 1997 — Hutch bent at the waist in a slow, deliberate bow.
Then Reverend bowed.
Then Cooper.
Then Bishop.
Then Otis.
Then Sully.
Then Wheels.
Then the four other brothers whose names I have not given you in this account because their wives have asked me not to.
Then Tank.
Tank bent at the waist with his enormous shoulders rolled forward and his eyes wet and his bearded mouth working, and he stayed bent at the waist for about three seconds longer than the rest of them.
Then he straightened up.
Aspen looked at all twelve of them.
She said: “You are my real princes.”
She took a sip of her apple juice.
She sat back down in Tank’s lap.
I want to be honest about what was happening in my kitchen at four-twelve p.m. on a Saturday afternoon in April.
Twelve patched brothers in leather cuts and pastel polo shirts and pink construction-paper crowns were standing around my kitchen table not making eye contact with each other.
Two of them — including Tank — had their hands on the back of folding chairs.
Bishop — sixty-two years old, retired Army sergeant first class, three combat tours, the kind of man who has not in fifty-five years let a stranger see him visibly affected — Bishop had to turn around and pretend to adjust the ribbon on a pink balloon for a full minute.
Aspen did not notice.
She was four.
She was eating cake.
PART 5
The party ended at five.
The brothers cleaned the kitchen. Otis took the cake plate. Cooper deflated the balloons. Bishop folded the Beauty and the Beast tablecloth into a small square the way the Army had taught him to fold a flag in 1986 and laid it on the counter. Sully washed the apple-juice cups by hand in my kitchen sink. Reverend gathered up the paper crowns and stacked them on the kitchen table next to the empty cake box.
He did not throw them away.
Hutch carried Aspen, asleep in her pink tulle gown with the paper crown still tied under her chin and a fistful of icing on her cheek, to her bedroom. He laid her on her small twin bed. He pulled her Beauty and the Beast comforter up to her shoulders. He left the paper crown on the dresser next to her bed.
He shut the door very quietly.
The brothers walked out to the driveway at five thirty-five.
They put on their cuts.
They straddled their Harleys.
They did not start the engines yet.
Tank stayed behind on the back patio.
He told the brothers he would catch up.
I walked out onto the patio at six p.m. with two cans of cold Dr. Pepper. Tank does not drink. Tank has been sober for nineteen years. I do not drink in front of Tank.
I sat down in the patio chair next to his.
I handed him a Dr. Pepper.
He took it.
He did not open it.
He sat there with the can in his enormous tattooed right hand, his cut back on over his pale pink polo shirt, his folded pink paper crown sitting on the small patio table between us, his enormous boots flat on the concrete.
He looked at the chain-link fence at the back of my yard.
He did not look at me.
He said, very quietly:
“Wade. I’m fifty-three years old. I have been a patched brother for twenty-three years. I have been Tank for thirty-nine. I have been a good husband for thirty-one. I have done a lot of things in my life I am proud of. I have done a few things I am not.”
He paused.
He said: “I have never been a prince. I have never been Prince Charming. Lorraine and I — we wanted kids. We tried for fifteen years. It didn’t happen. I have spent fifty-three years on this earth being the guy at the door with the card and the two twenties in it. I have never been the guy on the carpet.”
He took a sip of Dr. Pepper.
He said: “Today. I was Prince Charming. I bowed at the waist for a four-year-old. I let a kid stick a foam star to my beard. I carried a princess on my shoulders to Be Our Guest.”
He paused again.
He said the sentence I have not, in fourteen months, been able to forget.
He said: “Brother. I didn’t know that was what I was missing. Until today. I did not know.”
He took another sip of Dr. Pepper.
He said: “Wade. Thank you for asking.”
I said: “Tank. I asked Hutch. I didn’t ask you.”
Tank said: “Brother. You asked the charter. I am the charter. That counts.”
He stood up.
He picked up his pink paper crown off the patio table.
He folded it, very carefully, in half.
He tucked it into the inside front pocket of his cut.
He walked out to the driveway.
He started the bike.
PART 6
Aspen is five now.
The paper crowns are still on the kitchen table on a small wooden tray Reverend made me at his shop the next week. She wears one of them to bed every other night. She rotates through them. She knows which crown belongs to which prince. She has named them all.
Tank’s crown is the one she wears on the nights Carlene calls.
Carlene calls every other Sunday at seven p.m. from Pierre.
Aspen sits at the kitchen table.
She holds the phone in both small hands.
She wears Tank’s pink paper crown with the foam stars while she tells her mother about her week.
She does this every other Sunday.
She has done it now for fifty-two phone calls.
Carlene, by the third call after the party, had asked Aspen, Honey, why are you wearing a crown on the phone?
Aspen had said: “Mommy. So I can be a princess when I talk to you. So you can hear me being one.”
Carlene cries when Aspen says it.
I know because the phones at the Pierre Women’s Correctional Facility are bad and you can hear it through the receiver.
Tank knows.
Tank does not say anything about it.
Tank rides over on the third Sunday of every month. He sits on my back patio. He drinks Dr. Pepper. He listens through the open kitchen window while my niece tells her mother, who is two years and four months into a five-year sentence, about her week.
He has the second pink paper crown — a duplicate I made on the kitchen table that summer, with foam stars from the same craft pack — folded in the inside pocket of his cut.
He has carried it for fourteen months.
PART 7
Aspen turned five in April.
Twelve patched brothers came to the second party.
This time Tank brought his wife Lorraine.
Lorraine bowed at the waist when Aspen handed her a plastic cup of apple juice.
Aspen said: “My princess.”
Lorraine cried in my kitchen.
She had not cried at a party in eleven years.
Tank sat on the floor and let Aspen paint his nails pink.
He did not wash it off for two weeks.
Follow the page for more stories about the bikers America thinks it knows — and the paper crowns they fold into the inside pockets of their cuts.
