Devil's Advocate

A Royal Enfield Indian disruptor from J. Shia’s Madhouse

- MORGAN GALES

Hiding from the rain, smoking a cigarette outside a bar in Milwaukee, J. Shia’s eyes flicker and dart as she talks about the pull-start BSA she had brought to the Mama Tried Show that year. The passion in her words is curling her shoulders forward and bursting from her fingertips as she speaks.

“This bike reminds me of Brad Pitt from Fight Club,” Shia says of her BSA custom—the first member of the dysfunctional motor cycle family she is building. “This little, scrappy street-fighter kid, soccer-player kid. The pull-start is so aggressive. I was like, I wonder what his mom would be like…”

Shia continues, half remembering her concept and half creating it as she goes: “He’s an assh—e, but his mom would be this mean, old, chain-smoking, back-alley, London cobblestone b—h. I’m like, I need to build his mom. So the bike I built is his mother.” And so, Devil’s Advocate, bad mother to a street-fighting kid, was built.