"All these guys," Botelho continues, "they try to show off too much. That's what I can't stand. A lot of these guys are weekend warriors. They don't really ride that much, not that it makes them worse or better, but it's dangerous."
Botelho, 30, has been riding since he was 10 years old, starting on a dirt bike, moving to street bikes and now to a custom, self-made chopper with ape hangers (those high handlebars), a suicide shift (an old-school relic) and blue flames licking across the tank.
"I still love street bikes, but my friends and I were going out every night and riding wheelies and doing a lot more crazy stuff. I decided to just kick it down a notch and hang out and cruise more."
For Botelho, a professional welder, that meant building his own chopper, which he finished six months ago.
"I wanted this bike to not get lost in the crowd when I pull up. All these bikes are like people buy them off the showroom floor and out of catalogs."
Of all the biking subcultures, cruisers make up the biggest piece of the pie -- roughly 50%. As such, they have the most gripes, many of them directed at riders within their own cruiser community.
Harley-Davidson is, of course, the gold standard. For the old-schoolers, who've been riding them for decades, their scorn ranges from the garden-variety dislike of "rice rockets" (high-performance Japanese sport bikes) to disdain over "clones" (bikes that look like Harleys but aren't).
It's the old-school guys who have the most respect issues -- lacking any for the newbies who only ride on the weekends and who are content to leave their bikes "as is" off the showroom floor without swapping out at least a few parts.
Those would be the RUBs -- the middle-aged doctors, lawyers and businessmen who've been steadily co-opting the rebel culture that made motorcycling cool back in the day.
"If you look at most of the people here, 10 years ago they were afraid of me. Now they want to be me," said Bob "Reno" Christie, a bearded, 53-year-old member of the Vagos outlaw motorcycle club.
Reno will log 300 miles today on his green-trimmed, swing-arm FLH traveling the long way between Lancaster and Ojai.
"I've been doing this my whole life," he says. "I won't wear a leather jacket because of them. It's 90 degrees out, and they walk around here with chaps on. They put a leather jacket on, they think they're bad. This is me every day."
