On a warm summer night, my car pulled into the driveway of a big brick split level. The neighborhood was quiet, but not a menacing sort of quiet, a sort that as H.P. Lovecraft would describe as concealing a presence rather than indicating an absence. Considering how many cops lived here, that tranquility wasn’t going to be broken. All of this was good news for me as I was ready to knock on the door of “Ron” and “Beth,” a biker couple who contacted me an hour before. Despite having a decidedly mixed experience over the prior six months with a couple, they convinced me that I should at least meet them. They looked very rough, with a complete package of tattoos, beards, and studded leather, but were very polite and friendly, like the vast majority of bikers I’ve ever encountered.
Feeling the by now familiar and comfortable anxious knot in my stomach, I knocked on their door. A very large dog or a medium-sized dragon growled in response. Uh oh. As Ron welcomed me in, both my guesses as to what was waiting inside to either satiate its hunger for raw human flesh, or try it for the first time turned out to be wrong. There was no dragon in sight and not just one huge, muscular dog was eyeing me, but two. One was clearly a rottweiler, the other a fluffy, enormous mix of fur and teeth the size of a teenage bear. Ron scratched the rottweiler behind the ears.