It’s Monday night at a Bucktown bar and the weekly ride of the Peddy Cash moped gang is starting out as always–late. “I have it in a text right here: 8 PM,” says Jackie Kilmer, holding up her phone as proof. It’s 8:27 and less than half the group is here: a handful lounging in the bar’s dark interior, the rest tinkering with their bikes outside. “Curt just texted and said, ‘Meet at 8:30, ride at 9,’” Lauren Walsh announces from her bar stool. “Which means we’ll be out of here at 9:45.”
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Peddy Cash has been an official branch of the Moped Army, a national community of moped enthusiasts, since 2003. With 35 members it’s Chicago’s largest moped gang and the third largest in the country by the Moped Army’s count. Peddy Cash’s founders–Cameruci, 25, who’s one half of Flosstradamus, and Pat Turner, 26, who co-owns the Warbux moped shop on Milwaukee in Logan Square–hail from the parent gang’s birthplace of Kalamazoo, Michigan.
Since opening earlier this spring Turner’s shop has become the ad hoc clubhouse for Peddy Cash’s ride-or-die nerds–designers, DJs, students, and a few folks Turner describes as “habitually unemployed.” Most are in their early to mid-20s.
Monday nights are usually set aside for an aimless ride, but tonight Peddy Cash has a specific purpose. Some 200 riders from around the midwest were expected for the group’s third annual BlingBQ rally, and Cameruci wanted to see if the Bunny Hutch putt-putt golf course in Lincolnwood would make a good destination.
After a while we cross back over Ashland and head up Lincoln. The peddy-kid adage “No one is friend to a moped”–cars hate mopeds, pedestrians hate mopeds, everyone hates mopeds–doesn’t hold when you’re riding in a pack. People on the street stop and give the gang their full attention; they yell “Woo-hoo!” or a fist-pumping “Yeah!” or simply “MOPEDS!” at full volume as Peddy Cash passes. The riders barely seem to notice–they’re too busy watching for each other, shouting directions, dropping back to shepherd the end of the pack.
