OFF THE WIRE
“We are definitely representative of the community we come from, that being New York. But the Bronx is home. The Bronx is mother,” said Willie Ching-a-Ling, a club member, who, following the Ching-a-Ling tradition, adopted the group’s name while speaking to the press.
Emerging from a Puerto Rican street gang, in the 1960s Bronx, the Ching-a-Lings have also gotten gray, and many of them, as Carlotta Zarattini’s photographs suggest, are passing through a natural transition: from raising hell to raising families. Getting close at a birthday party.
Discussing the Ching-a-Ling Nomads motorcycle club does not usually require mention of teddy bears or Lego sets or Hannah Montana dress-up dolls, but then again this is the first year the outlaw biker club has become involved in a holiday toy drive run by the Evangelical Lutheran Church of the Epiphany, on East 206th Street in the Bronx. Here, a Ching-a-Ling Nomad speeding through the Bronx.
They still spit beer at the graves of fallen colleagues (and adorn themselves with swastikas at times), but despite the group’s history of violence, drug abuse and disregard for traffic laws, increasingly there are quiet nights, not just noisy rallies. Here, hanging out in a Bronx backyard.
“Crazy Rabbit,” a Nomad for years.
For more than 20 years, the Ching-a-Lings lived in a clubhouse on 180th Street and Hughes Avenue in the Bronx, but these days their 100 or so members are scattered across the city, working at jobs at places ranging from tattoo parlors to social service agencies. Here, outside their memorial wall near the former clubhouse in the Bronx
As the images made by Ms. Zarattini attest, their rambling lives have reac
hed a domestic stasis. Here, the wife of a member taking a rest during a ride.
The Ching-a-Lings are a traditional One-Percenter club, which Willie defined — despite the phrase’s current use to describe the financial elite — as that part of the world that is “not the 99 percent who are drones.” Instead, he said, “We’re free spirits.” Here, Willie Ching-a-Ling works on a tattoo.
“Our sense of family has always been very strong, and like any family you have good times and bad times, good brothers and bad brothers,” said Willie. Here, at a barbecue in the Bronx.
Nomads honoring their dead members in their signature tradition of spitting beer on the graves. “We will do whatever is necessary to protect our brothers, but it’s not the way it used to be,” Willie said. “What good you gonna do your brothers if you’re locked up in jail?”
(pictures available at)
http://www.nytimes.com/slideshow/2011/12/04/nyregion/ching-a-ling-nomads-ss-7.html
