The Chain Gang

It’s a breezy autumn afternoon at the unofficial Rat Patrol Nashville headquarters, a small rented house near Hillsboro Village where members of Nashville’s most active freak-bike gang congregate. Daniel, a lean 22-year-old with a handlebar mustache, is in the backyard, an elephant graveyard of bike parts and assorted debris. Bikes are recyclable, and Rat Patrol takes pride in using parts from bikes mangled or rusted beyond salvation.

He’s sizing up a length of bicycle chain he found in the brown grass to determine whether it’s suitable for his next improvised creation, a tall chopper he has already christened “Chopperocalypse.” He holds it up to his wrist to match its gauge against a pair of homemade bike chain bracelets. It’s good. It’ll work. He pokes around the tools scattered nearby to find the proper instrument to link it with another chain. He’ll need all the length he can get. The chain will have to run roughly twice as long as an ordinary chain to fit the engineering monstrosity he has in mind.

Not that he ever sat down and drew it all out. This is a freak bike, a marvel of counterintuitive engineering, and he’s drawing his inspiration from whatever is at hand. The resulting bikes are indeed freakish—intentionally so. They can be 10 feet tall, incorporate a workout bench into their frames or include a mounted boxing glove that punches riders in the face. And Rat Patrollers take special pleasure in building what they call “stupid bikes” or “silly bikes,” whose names alone should serve as some indicator of their efficiency. They’ll move if you pedal them, and that’s all that counts. After all, the only two parts a bike really needs are its steering mechanism and its chain. Once you’ve secured those two critical functions, the frame becomes a canvas.

“The cool thing about not knowing anything about bikes is, what you do know is how to take something that shouldn’t work at all and make it work,” Daniel says.

Yards away, another enthusiast joins two bike frames together in an unholy union with a welder. He holds a protective mask in one hand to shield himself from the blinding light, pausing on occasion to swig from the bottle of Evan Williams he keeps just out of range of the flying sparks.

“We never operate heavy machinery without being under the influence of alcohol,” Daniel says. While that may be a statement of spirit more than one of fact, the crushed, sun-bleached Pabst Blue Ribbon cans ground into the lawn stand as evidence that alcohol consumption and bike building are roughly coequal activities here—hence the Rat Patrol’s unofficial motto: “A drinking club with a biking problem.”

It’s a typical Sunday afternoon “build day” with the Rat Patrol. When the bikes are finished, they’ll take to the streets to test their creations. It’s an encouraging sign if the bike survives the night. You might have seen Rat Patrol kids careening down West End or up 21st Avenue. They’re pretty easy to identify—a group of five to 20 punk boys (and a few girls), typically between the ages of 15 and 25. Most of them wear self-made vests covered in homemade patches. They travel in packs and maintain average speeds of 10 to 15 mph. On tall bikes, they can stare down passersby from a vantage point roughly 10 feet in the air. Commuters seldom see these roving gangs of flamboyantly dressed youths as more than a traffic nuisance, and that’s the way most of these cyclists like it.

The Rats have been drinking and biking in Nashville for almost two years now, and after a few surges in membership, they’re rapidly earning recognition not only on Nashville’s busier thoroughfares, but in the loosely knit network of like-minded enthusiasts that spans the globe. The growing alternative biking community, a fringe culture that’s demonstrated impressively organic networking abilities, has been making itself increasingly and aggressively visible worldwide in recent years. Like clubs with names such as the Klunkers and the Smut Peddlers, the Rat Patrol takes its cues from the scrappy aesthetic and DIY ethos of the early punk movement—anti-consumerist, anti-establishment, anti-hygiene, but with an eco-friendly twist and a gearhead’s mechanical fetishism.

Only a cursory glance at the club’s smirking manifesto (viewable online at rat-patrol.org) is necessary to grasp its gutter punk principles: mainstream corporate America begets a culture of shallow entertainment and mass waste, bicycles are a liberating self-contained means of transportation. And, of course, shotgunning beers in alleyways is awesomely fun. Though some members are of the vegan, fossil fuel-eschewing variety, the Rat Patrol isn’t really about political theater or activism. The real point is to have a good time building and riding bikes together.