Palm Beach Florida Weekly

BIKES UP GUNS DOWN

On teenage angst, wheelies, and the biker boys of West Palm Beach



 

 

Because it is Sunday afternoon at Phipps Park and because all of the biker boys are wearing pink (and also because everyone knows the vibe), no one talks about cops. The biker boys dap each other up and trade Stig flavors while lining single file for the swerve contest against a city of West Palm Beach Solid Waste Authority trash can. Rap music spills from trucks circling round the meetup, legs and wheels dangling out of windows and boys shedding pink for wife beaters in the pre-fall heat. Between mangles of bike parts and screws and pumps, there’s a merchandise shop — a table under a sandy pavilion selling shirts or Gatorades by the mothers. Some spin out against the trash can and scrape elbows, but most chill until 4 p.m., line up and watch wheelies or post on Snapchat or gape at the boy with only a back wheel who is only destined to wheelie.

Even before Steeezy’s rideout, it smells like sweat and grass and blueberry smoke, and the biker boys only talk about cops when they are ready to ride. Three months before Steeezy’s breast cancer rideout, I sat on a mowed lawn, waiting for two boys to show me what street biking looked like.

A boy performs a move in the middle of the intersection of Olive Avenue and Clematis Street in downtown West Palm Beach. KAJA ANDRIC / SPECIAL TO FLORIDA WEEKLY

A boy performs a move in the middle of the intersection of Olive Avenue and Clematis Street in downtown West Palm Beach. KAJA ANDRIC / SPECIAL TO FLORIDA WEEKLY

When they came out of the house wearing fresh shirts and slicked hair, in the dead heat of Florida in late July, we walked to what must be their “destroy mowed lawns and crash bingo gettys” hideout: The neighborhood electrical compounds.

The biker boys gazed on, Adidas swinging. “What are your names?”

“Alex.” “Michael.”

The interview began.

“Sometimes it’d be funny seeing people react,” Alex said, breaking into a smile about swerving cars. “People get mad. It can be stupid. But it’s also more like, ‘Can I get away with it, and what’s going to happen if I do or don’t get away?’”

These boys, who like raising their bikes in an arched taunt against cars, who spend their Friday nights in rowdy packs cycling Flagler Drive, who wheelie and swerve and screw with suburbia, who horrify middle-aged white people in middle-class white picket fenced neighborhoods, who flick off the almighty stop sign to put on a show, know they are destroying order. It’s part of the appeal.

Boys gather at Phipps Park in West Palm Beach for Steeezy’s breast cancer rideout in 2020. KAJA ANDRIC / SPECIAL TO FLORIDA WEEKLY

Boys gather at Phipps Park in West Palm Beach for Steeezy’s breast cancer rideout in 2020. KAJA ANDRIC / SPECIAL TO FLORIDA WEEKLY

“We’re not smashing windows, right?” Alex reasons. “We’re just swerving cars and getting in their way — a little bit.”

Getting swerved by a biker boy, I realize in the neighborhood electrical compounds, is to have the pack barrel toward your car in the opposite direction and turn at the very last second. Getting swerved by a biker boy is also a lot of things: cool, annoying, terrifying. My initial guess is that the 17-year-old in us makes swerving not seem so crazy (suburbia is just wilding).

When I meet Mateo — the third member of Alex and Michael ’s suburban crew — he refuses to be photographed. It is only after I let him swerve my camera and ride on his pegs, that he trusts me. Sort of.

To fully understand biker boys is to fully understand their bikes. Alex, Michael and Mateo exclusively ride SE Bikes, as most every biker boy does. They’re shiny, electric and expensive (most every biker boy has pegs, which, once screwed onto an SE Bike, breaks its warranty).

SE Bikes was founded by Scot Breithaup in the early ’70s, in Long Beach, California, for the new sport of BMX racing. Though BMX racing requires tracks and teams, BMX street biking utilizes more of the setting that cityscape provides. Both styles of riding wear team jerseys, where fashion is an integral facet of street bike culture. (The disruption to suburban function now becomes a show, and a fashion one at that.)

Notedly, the street bike movement also has a presence online. Instagram and Snapchat and TikTok run rampant with biker boy content — biker boys swerving cars, falling off bikes, biker boys popping wheelies to Lil Uzi Vert or Pop Smoke. My feed showed rideouts down Flagler Drive (which meant that there were more biker boys outside of suburbia).

It proved easy to find these city biker boys. Their Instagrams are all the same — either oneway.theirname or bikelife.theirname or jrzy.theirname (which stand for bike groups who use social media to post edits of tricks and rideouts).

So I DM’d them. And waited.

My hopes ran high that one of the 25 biker boys I contacted would answer. But my DM’s sat on seen, or delivered, or got an “igh” but no follow-through.

It was just when I had given up re-messaging that oneway.tony answered my DM, agreed to let me ride, and met up with me at 2 p.m. on a Saturday.

“If you guys are gonna post this everywhere,” Tony tells me — and by the angsty “you,” I think he means everyone in the world — “I want to make sure all the West Palm Police Department (sees). They harass us.” He sighs as we bike onto safe territory, past the Rosemary Square downtown from which a few of the biker boys (including him) are “banned.”

As we pass Publix and CVS and Mandel Public Library, high-rises popping up means construction tra c to swerve. Tony rides next to me while explaining his standing with West Palm Beach law enforcement.

“He’s only 9,” Tony says, pointing to Isaac, who clarifies he is actually 10. “He’s still young. And they fingerprinted us.”

All the biker boys laugh. Tony doesn’t.

“They fingerprinted a 10-year-old. So that’s a little messed up to me.”

Jordin — who had just meddled with passersby holding American flags by yelling “Kanye 2020!” and who enjoys flashing his gold chain during wheelies — tries to reason with local law enforcement (even though Jordin swerves cars the most. He recognizes the irony).

“We’re tryna stay off the streets and not sell drugs, not be in crimes. We’re kind of trying to put kids toward bikes so that way they have something.”

Tony interrupts while looking at Isaac. “It’s like we’re older siblings.”

“But the cops still target us, which we don’t understand,” Jordin says. “We tell them all the time — how come you aren’t out here fighting crimes, but you’re stopping us on bikes?”

There are claims of criminal reports filed against the biker boys on the neighborhood social network, Next- Door — from foul language to hitting car windows while swerving — which public records requests have failed to confirm.

When I run into a person from my neighborhood who asked to remain anonymous and whose street is outspoken about the biker boys online, their response is succinct.

“It’s a shame,” they tell me in a hushed whisper, mentioning “a big group” that is the biker boys dividing the community. “They’re what we see with Trump and the rioters. They think they can do anything they want and get away with it.”

I mean to tell them that ironically, the SE Bike motto is “We ride as one.” The second they see another neighbor, though, they swiftly switch the topic.

So, I log onto NextDoor, where reading the not-so-succinct threats takes hours.

“I can assure their parents that when it comes to a vehicle versus bike, vehicle wins,” user Adam Konesey said. “When they are unruly and causing trouble,” other user Marilyn Jordan suggested, “the cops should take their bikes away. That might slow down the little punks.” But among the most memorable responses is that of a user on a post that has since been deleted. “One word,” they said. “Taser.”

Undoubtedly, NextDoor user Adam Konesey isn’t wrong that a car will always beat a bike physically. Bicycles also are considered vehicles in Florida. So if someone does get hurt, it’s the biker boys who put themselves and the drivers in danger.

Yet, the threats don’t strike me as coherent when staring at these pubescent boys who talk about crushes and music as much as they talk about getting stopped by law enforcement, who “run up” each other’s Instagram posts and sing out loud to their favorite rap songs.

Back with Tony and Jordin, while sitting beneath an oak tree detaching spare bike parts, they say that despite these challenges, the West Palm Beach street biking scene is big. So are their rideouts.

It is between Clematis Street bars that the biker boys show me their tricks. Bear (Jordin’s little brother) stands at the corner of the four-way Clematis/ Olive intersection near Duffy’s Sports Bar and Grease Burger Bar. He yells when cars are turning so that others know when to swerve. James practices his wheelies around a parked white Lexus. Santa rides a bike with no pegs. Isaac has the thickest wheels and the biggest bike but the smallest body (which I later learn is good for stability), and he competes with the older boys who hop from peg to peg and twist their ankles and release their hands and grind rubber against concrete. The sounds of the abrupt stops, mixed with the honking of cars, makes those drinking Starbucks jolt mid-sip. Pedestrians stop and stare — I run into a classmate and she asks me what’s going on. Where do I start? Jordin is tilting his bike almost vertically toward the sky, his palm skidding against the road, while a white Jeep Wrangler tries to get by him. He chases the car until it turns the corner, and then he pops another wheelie, spinning his front tire and handlebars counterclockwise. Tony’s red bike is gliding forward while he does a trick I am briefly familiar with from the street biker Instagram scene — surfing — where the biker boy puts his front foot on the handlebars and his back foot on the seat. Tony rides straight into the green light, Bear warning him not to veer left, while Isaac and James and Jordin are yelling “Surf! Surf!”

Street biking is, clearly, a team sport.

Sticking with their crew, Jordin admits that “if it wasn’t for bikes, this guy right here? I would have no idea who he is.” And he slings his arm around Tony while laughing at him.

On the way to my last stop with the city crew, a lady flicks us off and honks. It is my fault — I’ve never ridden on the street before — but the biker boys are in uproar. (Tony screams, “What are you gonna do? Hit her?”)

When we get to the Royal Park Bridge to Palm Beach, the only sounds are car engines revving and braking.

Tony walks his bike up the bridge, puts his feet on his seat, stands up against the wind, curses the clouds and the traffic, and holds his knees steady against the speed of the decline. For a moment, Tony seems completely free — the tiny shadows racing to follow — and lets his wheel fly.

The number of tickets and stops and scorn from suburbia, for the biker boys, is hard to count. But there is one name that comes to mind, and it is this: West Palm Beach Police Officer Christopher Fisher. The second I hear about him, everything changes.

Officer Fisher keeps coming up in Snapchats among the bike boys, again and again. I see it on Instagram in a viral video. I read it in reposts, in comments, in the wisps of wind from West Palm Beach patrol cars (but that just might be paranoia).

And though, initially, I cannot pinpoint the start of Officer Fisher this and Officer Fisher that nor the damning statements from angry biker boys, I can watch the viral video in which he arrests oneway_ stephan, a Pennsylvania-based street biker with over 125,000 Instagram followers while visiting West Palm Beach. It plays out something like this:

“Did I tell you to stop?” Officer Fisher asks, grabbing oneway_ stephan by his arm even though he is standing on the sidewalk, motionless.

“What the f–k,” oneway_ stephan says. “This is dumb.” He is seated on the curb while a passerby walks her dog. “What did he do?” the boy off camera asks.

“Fled, when I told him to stop.”

“I stopped. Right on the f–king sidewalk,” oneway_ stephan says. “When I told you the first time?”

“Yes. And I slowed down. Did I stop? Yes. Oh, my God.” Officer Fisher turns to the boy off camera.

“Have a nice day.”

“No, I want to wait for him,” he says.

“Either have a nice day or you can be in the same boat with him.”

“Where do you want me to go? He’s my friend.”

“I don’t care. Have a nice day.”

And Officer Fisher handcuffs oneway_ stephan, who later tells me he gave Officer Fisher a fake ID to avoid four tickets (after finding two of the reports in a police record log, I see his fake identity includes a misspelled first name, but because most biker boys avoid the use of a surname, the latter’s veracity cannot be confirmed).

Tony said it was personally “embarrassing.” To them, Stephan is a guest.

On a Friday in late September, I go to the West Palm Beach Police Department after school with my backpack still on and a plan (find Officer Fisher) scribbled onto sticky notes. A woman answers the intercom, asks what I need, gives me a 10-digit number to dial (His sergeant, she said), and doesn’t let me in.

Officer Fisher’s sergeant never called me back.

It was on an evening walk the next week, after seeing a few biker boys pass Rocco’s Tacos, asking two West Palm cops whether they knew Officer Fisher to test my luck, waiting for him to answer their calls, and telling me he’d be here in five minutes, that I’d finally reached Officer Fisher.

“What’s going on?” he said.

I stuttered through a speech about a project. “What’s the story about?”

“Um. Biker boys. You know, the boys who ride bicycles and do tricks? Wheelies, I mean.” “You have to talk to my PIO.”

“PIO?”

“You have to talk to my PIO.” “Sorry, but what is a PIO?”

“Public Information Officer.”

“Oh. So, you’re not willing to give me a quote?

“No, I’m not allowed to.”

He told me the interaction must be moderated through a PIO.

The next day, when contacted through the West Palm Beach Police Department’s PIO, his PIO bantered with the topic of biker boys. “What a headache,” he said. And Officer Fisher declined to be interviewed.

As much as the biker boys are infatuated with Officer Fisher, they are crazy about Steeezy. In 13 minutes of recorded conversation, Alex declares, “If Steeezyfilmz is at a rideout, everyone’s going to that rideout.” Bear says, “Steeezy’s like that brother you wish you had,” that “he’s like family,” upon the mention of his name. And with an influx of biker boy Instagram follows thanks to Tony tagging me, my feed became reposts of Steeezy’s videos over and over again.

Who even is Steeezy?

It takes me two days to find him. He’s wearing an Uber Eats backpack and riding a white-and-blue-and-pink SE Miami Ripper. Because of his social media presence, I know him exactly when I see him.

On the same street where Tony and Jordin showed me their tricks and where brunch with mimosas saw little noise, following Steeezy nearly becomes a race. A fight breaks out at a sushi restaurant and a homeless man challenges three girls with beers in their hands to a push-up challenge. Cars are blaring their horns and patrol cars are in nearly every alley. The scene on Clematis is starkly different.

Steeezy texts, “Can you meet me on Flagler by the docks” and at 7:30, we meet to talk on his route delivering to the Palm Beach Atlantic University campus.

Steeezy — who goes by Steeezy only and is 20 years old — went to Forest Hill High and has been street biking since he was 7. He grew up riding with Jordin, Tony and Isaac’s older brother.

“They do look up to me and I look after them,” Steeezy says. “If I’m there and I see them doing something dumb, they know I’m like — yo, chill out. There was times where West Palm Beach police are trying to chase them down. And I’m like, you know what, y’all just do this, then they’ll leave you alone, and they learn from that.”

“They’re my little brothers,” he adds, before explaining that whenever there are police encounters, he never bikes away and always pays the ticket.

And when I mention Officer Fisher, Steeezy laughs.

“We go way back with Fisher,” Steeezy says of the officer who worked in neighboring town of Lake Clarke Shores, in which eight of the 12 reports I found occurred. “Fisher was known as the helmet cop, always giving kids on bikes tickets for no helmets. He didn’t have nothing better to do and that’s what really made us grow a hatred.”

Steeezy insists that he has no issue with the West Palm Beach Police Department, though, but that Officer Fisher “does make some of them look bad.”

Steeezy counts his sponsors for me on his fingers and has to backtrack two times. His sponsors (some bike shops, some not) provide him with decals, clothing apparel, and sometimes, payment. His Youtube channel, Steeezy Filmz, has over 30,000 subscribers, and his Instagram 40,000 followers.

Somewhere between the time Breithaup and Perry Kramer made the PK Ripper bike and Steeezy pops wheelies for me, it became the biggest sensation of a BMX bike known to the industry.

Bob Haro, who also grew up in California and used his bicycle skills for odd-job stunts in ET (the movie) is considered a revolutionary in his efforts to bring the sport to the street and skateparks for televised events (like the Olympics and X-Games), creating a source of income. Because of Haro, biker boys could be biker boys by occupation (like Steeezy).

Team riders for SE Bikes are famous for swerving next to police cars in videos, but also for handing out bikes to kids on the street, randomly. Steeezy says SE Bikes has not sponsored him “yet,” and he alludes to the future (In January, he becomes an SE Bikes team rider).

As much as biking is a source of income, it is also a big part of Steeezy’s being.

“I used to deal with a lot of anxiety. Riding my bike would really help with that,” Steeezy says in front of the PBAU sign. “I’ve been riding since I was a kid and that’s all I could ever do. I came from a rough, rough neighborhood.”

I try to ask more about this (as well as later, over Instagram DMs), but Steeezy remains reserved. He mentions that he grew up with his mom, and struggled, though she was always supportive. He doesn’t tell me his real name and mentions nothing past the words “rough” or “dangerous.”

When I press to learn more (about his coming of age, biker boy tale) Steeezy shrugs it off. Akin to the other biker boys, it feels like we are riding in circles.

“Riding bikes was all I could do,” he says, and leaves it at that.

After he pops some wheelies for me, Steeezy asks if my bike lights are working. “It gets crazy out there,” he says, pointing to Clematis in the dark. “Be safe.”

The indie summer moments with pegs and bridges and riding, wouldn’t last me long. I could tell as soon as I had the biker boys on Snapchat.

My feed went from watching my girlfriends stress about the latest physics test, to boys swerving cars in traffic. The biker boys tagged me in their stories. I reposted bike surfing with the proper emojis. I had almost become a biker boy — girl — myself.

And the problem lies in almost. As much as I try to pry, the biker boys swerve most of my questions. Expertly, too. My attempts at getting to know them (j curious, where do u work?) feel like two steps forward (Mateo is typing…) and three steps back (lol). It doesn’t take a genius. The biker boys have a line that I cannot cross unless I’m on their pegs.

I don’t know who is allowed to go to the rideouts or what the rules are, but I do know I am the only girl riding with them. (Out of 12 team riders on the SE Bike website, two are girls.) I kid with Steeezy that I should get an SE Bike, and he tells me, “I mean, why not? You’ll probably be the only girl doing it in West Palm Beach.”

Despite this, my friends are hesitant. Maybe it’s the bike-versus-car barrier, or maybe the no-ticket track record, but most people I text vehemently don’t want to go to the rideouts with me.

But the funny thing is, the biker boys compare to my friends more so than any other clique. They hug each other and have sleepovers before rideouts and love posting on social media. In many ways, I’m friends with the biker boys just as much as with my own friends, except that we’re on bikes.

In early September, Steeezy sends me a confidential flier for his upcoming rideout. Everyone’s invited. There’s just one catch for which Steeezy’s friends will kick any biker boy out: Not wearing pink for breast cancer awareness. (Though, unaffliated with an actual breast cancer organization, it is just a lot of biker boys wearing pink.)

On Oct. 25, all of the biker boys wear pink. Some of them show up two, three, four hours early to set up with Steeezy. Tony and I snap the night before (we discuss fits, bikes, and, well, Steeezy). Rideouts see all types of crews. Here, there must be hundreds.

Steeezy and Jordin stand on the roof of the truck trading cameras to film the swerve contest, promising winners T-shirts or 25 bucks. Jordin’s dad has Jordin’s name tattooed on one hand and his little brother’s, Bear, tattooed on the other. Both are etched in cursive.

There’s a little boy with them, also, and Jordin pats his shoulder, introducing him to the older boys.

I run into Tony, wearing a Steeezy- Filmz shirt and beanie, rather quickly. He is visibly flustered with the sheer vastness of biker boys. He tells me he’ll be at the front of the pack, but “I’ll look out for you either way.” He bikes off to find his little brother.

Before we leave, there’s a boy there who wipes out swerving — his name is Robert — and his face looks covered in paint more so than blood. He wakes up in a truck only after the pack comes back from the rideout, and later gets a cast on his hand.

I’d tell you the front of the pack is like the eye of a hurricane, what with all the tricks and speed and odd serenity of wheeling against a sea breeze. Or at least that the more up front you get, the more wheels are flying. Almost like a biker boy mosh pit.

But as soon as the pack crosses Dixie and turns onto Olive, I am the last biker in the pack. They’re just fast.

In fact, until the pack crosses Clematis, where Tony hitches a boost on the UHaul truck — a friend of Steezy’s, no doubt — and Brandon pops wheelies, I don’t talk to anybody.

The two boys left behind with me are Brandon and Oscar, who both drove down from Miami ro the rideout. It’s Oscar’s first rideout, he says, and they wheelie while we reach South Ocean Boulevard seven minutes behind everybody.

“The ’trol’s here!”

Bear is biking opposite of where the pack is headed, with a boy named Jayden. “The ’trol!”

“What?”

“The puh-trol,” Bear enunciates between heaves. “They’ve surrounded them.” I’ve never seen the biker boys panicked.

Jayden is spinning around looking for lights. Oscar is arranging for transportation on his phone. Bear is screaming to follow him on a side street off Worth Avenue, to escape the Gucci and Pucci and Tiffany foot traffic. Whatever street describes itself as “an enchanting resort destination [of] European sophistication and inimitable style and grace,” it is there that biker boys find it inherently hard to hide fluorescent SE Bikes.

By the time we pass Worth Avenue, we’re left with one question — how does a biker boy plot an escape off an island whose main bridge is lined with police?

Oscar’s ’99 Ford F-150, it turns out, is the escape vehicle. If we move fast enough.

Bear and Jayden load bikes into the truck — Oscar’s dad revs the engine — while Brandon hoists me up. My mom’s so going to kill me for sitting in a random truck bed. Naturally, I don’t hesitate.

Bear offers us his rideout Ibuprofen supply and Oscar tosses us frozen waters while Jayden is sending photos of the situation to girls (Why isn’t Kids in America playing?).

We duck between lights where Palm Beach cop cars might be. Oscar opens the back window and is directing his parents in Spanish. “La puente! La puente!” until the ’99 Ford F150 crosses the Flagler Memorial Bridge.

Here, the biker boys hold onto their bikes.

Once everyone meets back from Palm Beach, but before the 6:58 p.m. TriRail train to Miami, which Palm Beach Daily News will tell you was a “cavalcade” and “small army” of biker boys who were “utterly disrespectful” and with “no identified leader,” Steeezy buys everyone pizza and chips.

I meet oneway_ stephan, who signs boys’ shirts and bikes. He laughs when I mention Officer Fisher.

In time for school, I slap a Riot Rides sticker onto my phone half-haphazardly. It’s red, white and blue, with little stars and block letters and says YKTFV. “You know the f–king vibe,” leader of Riot Rides Shane says, “is what all the kids are saying. So, I put it on our political sticker.”

On a rainy Thursday afternoon one week earlier, I get a phone notification.

@oneway.jordin has followed you on Instagram. His bio reads, “BIKES UP GUNS DOWN.” It’s ironic because the BY CYCLE Boynton Beach bike shop that carries SE Bikes is right next to a gun store. It’s also ironic because so many people — Next Door users, Officer Fisher, Officer Fisher’s PIO, my friends — all suggest that the biker boys are violent. But the biker boys are nothing like that at all.

When I ask Jordin and Bear about this, they tell me that when they’re on their bikes, they are brothers to themselves but also to Steeezy and Tony and the crew. They tell me that they ride as one, like the SE Bike motto. And, really, that they’re just boys on bikes, staying out of trouble. ¦

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