A Memphis Biker Died and His Will Said the Club Had to Let His Pit Bull Choose His Next Owner — When We Released the Dog Into the Circle of 15 Members, He Walked Past All of Us and Out to the Parking Lot

It said the following.

To my brothers in the Iron Saints Memphis chapter. I have three things to ask of you. The first two are easy. The third one I am asking you to do because I trust you to do it the way I want it done.

Number one. Take my colors — my full vest with my back patch — and burn it. I do not want it hanging on a wall. I do not want it in a box. I lived in that vest for twenty-three years. I want it released. Burn it on the riding day after my funeral. Pour out a beer on the ashes.

Number two. My remains — when the cremation is done — should be scattered on the section of Highway 64 between the towns of Bolivar and Selmer. That stretch of road has been my favorite stretch of road since 1986. I have ridden it more than a thousand times. I would like to be on it.

Number three. My dog Diesel.

I do not want any of you to fight over Diesel. I do not want anyone to feel obligated to take him. I do not want anyone to feel left out for not getting him. I want him to go to the brother he picks.

This is what I want you to do.

Set up fifteen folding chairs in a circle in the meeting room of the clubhouse. One chair for each full-patch member of our chapter. Sit in the chairs. Bring Diesel into the middle. Let him walk around. Let him sniff. Let him take as long as he needs.

Whichever brother Diesel goes to and lays down beside is the brother who will be his new person. That brother will take him home that day. That brother will love him for the rest of his life.

Do this on the Saturday after my funeral. Do not delay it. The dog needs to know who he belongs to.

I trust this dog more than I trust any of you to make this decision. He has ridden two hundred thousand miles with me. He knows who I would want him with. Let him pick.

If by some chance no one is chosen — if Diesel will not pick — figure it out among yourselves. Do not abandon him. Do not surrender him to a shelter. He is family. Whatever you decide, decide it together, and decide it the way I would have decided it.

I love every one of you brothers. I will see some of you again on the road I am asking to be scattered on. The rest of you I will see further down the highway.

Hollis Lee Briggs.

Lonnie Trout read it to us in our meeting room on the Saturday after the funeral. We listened in silence. When he was finished, our chapter sergeant-at-arms, a sixty-three-year-old retired Marine named Boom, stood up and walked outside without saying anything. He came back about twenty minutes later. His eyes were red. He sat back down.

We voted unanimously to honor every word of the will.

We burned Hollis’s vest the next morning at sunrise on the gravel pad behind the clubhouse. Forty bikers stood in a circle around the small fire. We poured out a Pabst Blue Ribbon — Hollis’s beer of choice for thirty-five years — onto the ashes when the fire died.

We rode out the following weekend, twenty-three of us in formation, and scattered Hollis’s ashes on the shoulder of Highway 64 between Bolivar and Selmer. Boom carried the urn. He emptied it slowly, in one continuous pour, riding pillion behind me at thirty-five miles per hour for half a mile. The wind took Hollis the rest of the way.

The Diesel ceremony was scheduled for the following Saturday at 2 p.m.

We set up fifteen folding chairs in the meeting room. We arranged them in a circle about twelve feet in diameter. We left a five-foot opening between two of the chairs facing the door. Lonnie had said this would be important — Diesel needed to be able to walk into the middle and walk out of the middle if he chose to.

The fifteen full-patch members of the Memphis chapter sat down at 1:55 p.m.

I sat in chair number four — the chair I had taken in our rotation for sixteen years. To my left was Boom. To my right was a brother named Tex. Across from me was a brother named Sully. Each of us had been a brother of Hollis for at least six years. Some of us, like me and Boom and Tex, had ridden with him for over fifteen.

Hollis’s seat in the rotation, at the head of our oval table — chair number one in our usual configuration — had been left empty. We had not moved it. We had simply sat down around the empty chair. The empty chair was part of the circle.

At 2:00 p.m., our prospect Robby walked into the meeting room with Diesel on a leash.

Diesel had been at our clubhouse every day since the funeral. He had been sleeping in our office on a folded blanket. We had been taking turns feeding him. He had been quiet but present. He had not eaten well the first three days. He had begun eating again on the fourth.

Robby walked Diesel to the opening between the chairs. He unclipped the leash.

He stepped back outside the circle.

Diesel stood at the edge of the circle.

He looked around.

He took two steps forward into the middle.

He stopped.

He sniffed the air.

He looked at each of us, one at a time, slowly, in the order that we had sat down.

He started to walk.

He walked clockwise around the inside of the circle. He stopped in front of chair number five — Tex. He sniffed Tex’s boot. He moved on. He stopped in front of chair number six — Sully. He sniffed Sully’s hand, which was extended palm up. He moved on. He stopped in front of every single chair, in order, sniffed the brother in it for between three and seven seconds, and moved on.

He completed one full circle.

He stopped in front of the empty chair where Hollis had always sat.

He sniffed the seat of the chair.

He sat down on the floor in front of it for a moment.

He looked up at the empty chair.

His tail did not wag.

He stood up.

He looked at all of us, one more time, slowly, around the circle.

Then he walked, in a straight line, between two chairs, out of the circle, out of the meeting room, down the back hallway of the clubhouse, through the open door of the garage — which we had left open for him because Lonnie had told us not to constrain his movements — across the garage floor, past the lift and past the parts shelves, out the open garage door, across the small back gravel lot, and to the back of the lot.

We followed at a distance of about thirty feet.

In the back of the lot, against the chain-link fence, was Hollis’s bike.

His 2003 Harley-Davidson Heritage Softail Classic. Cherry-red. The bike Hollis had ridden every single day for twenty-one years. Two hundred and seven thousand miles on the odometer. The custom dog seat — a leather-and-canvas saddle Hollis had built himself in 2017 — was bolted onto the rear fender behind the rider’s seat.

Nobody had touched the bike since Hollis died.

Diesel walked up to the bike.

He looked at the dog seat.

He gathered himself.

He jumped.

It took him three tries. He was eight years old, sixty-eight pounds, and the seat was high. On the third try he made it.

He sat down on the dog seat.

He turned around once.

He laid down on the seat.

He looked back at us.

He laid his head down on the leather.

He did not move.

Boom, beside me, said in a voice I had never heard him use before, “Cody. He chose.”

I said, “Boom. He didn’t choose any of us.”

Boom said, “No. He didn’t.”

We stood in that gravel lot in the back of our clubhouse on a Saturday afternoon in June and looked at a Pit Bull lying on the dog seat of a dead man’s Harley.

Nobody moved.

After about five minutes, Boom walked over to the bike. He stood next to it. He put one hand on the gas tank. He put the other hand on the back of Diesel’s neck. He said, very quietly, “Hey, brother.”

Diesel looked up at him.

He thumped his tail twice on the leather seat.

Boom turned to the rest of us.

He said, “Brothers. Diesel didn’t pick. He didn’t pick because his person isn’t sitting in our circle.”

He said, “His person is in his seat.”

He said, “We need to figure out how this dog is going to live.”

We held an emergency vote that afternoon in the meeting room.

We voted, fifteen to zero, to do something none of us had ever heard of any club doing.

Diesel would not be adopted by any one brother.

Diesel would live at the clubhouse. He would have a permanent dog bed in our office. He would have access to the garage at all times. He would have access to Hollis’s bike at all times. He would be fed, walked, vetted, and loved by all fifteen of us in rotation. We would build a written care schedule. Every brother would have at least one day a week with Diesel as primary handler. The rotation would be tracked on a whiteboard.

The Harley would not be sold. The Harley would not be ridden. The Harley would stay parked in the back of the clubhouse, next to a small wooden plaque the clubhouse builder Tex would build that week, in the place Diesel had chosen. The dog seat on the back would stay.

Diesel would have access to that seat any time he wanted.

Tex built the plaque that Tuesday. He carved it himself out of a piece of black walnut salvaged from the floor of Hollis’s old shop after Hollis’s family sold the building. The plaque is mounted on the back fence about three feet behind the bike. It says, in Tex’s careful block-letter carving:

HOLLIS LEE BRIGGS.

MEMPHIS CHAPTER PRESIDENT, 2013-2024.

RIDER. BROTHER. FATHER TO DIESEL.

DIESEL CHOSE THIS SPOT.

WE HONOR THE CHOICE.

Diesel sleeps on that dog seat almost every afternoon. He walks out to it in the morning. He stays on it for an hour or two. He walks back in. He sleeps in our office at night on a thick orthopedic bed Boom bought him with his own money. Some afternoons he comes back out and sleeps on the bike again. Some afternoons he doesn’t. He chooses every day.

He has lived this way for eleven months.

He has not been adopted.

He has not been alone.

He has been ours.

I asked Lonnie Trout, two weeks after the ceremony, if he had been surprised by what Diesel had done.

Lonnie was eighty-one. He had practiced law in Memphis for fifty-six years. He had drawn up the wills of over four hundred people. He had drawn up Hollis’s will himself in 2019 and updated it twice — once in 2021 and once in March of last year, just three months before Hollis died.

Lonnie said, “Cody. I was not surprised.”

I said, “Why not.”

He said, “Cody. The line in the will about if by some chance no one is chosen — Hollis added that in the March update.”

I said, “Wait.”

Lonnie said, “Three months before he passed.”

He said, “Cody. I asked him about it when I drafted the new language. I said, Hollis, why are we adding this contingency. He said to me, very quietly — sitting in my office on Madison Avenue at three o’clock on a Tuesday afternoon — Lonnie. I have a feeling Diesel isn’t going to pick.“

He said, “I asked him why he thought that.”

He said, “Hollis told me, Lonnie. He picked me when I picked him up off a porch in Coldwater Mississippi when he was six weeks old. He didn’t pick the litter mates. He didn’t pick the breeder. He came to me. He hasn’t been off my hip in seven years. He has slept on me, ridden with me, eaten beside me, every single day. He has chosen me already. He’s not going to choose somebody else just because I’m gone. He’s going to wait for me. He’s going to keep choosing me.“

He said, “And Lonnie, when he can’t choose me — because I won’t be there — I think he’s going to choose the things I left behind.“

Lonnie paused.

He said, “Cody. That is exactly what happened. Hollis knew.”

I sat in Lonnie’s office for a long time.

I went home that night and I put my hand on my own dog — a fourteen-year-old Lab named Rosie I have had since 2010 — and I sat on the floor of my living room and I thought about Hollis in Lonnie’s office in March, knowing.

He had known.

He had given Diesel an out.

He had made sure his dog would be taken care of in the only way Diesel was going to allow.

It has been eleven months.

Diesel is nine years old now. The vet — Dr. Burson at the Bartlett Animal Hospital who has been our club’s vet for fourteen years — says Diesel is healthy. His weight is good. His coat is glossy. His teeth are clean. He has occasional joint stiffness from twenty-one years of riding pillion. He gets a daily anti-inflammatory.

He sleeps on Hollis’s bike most afternoons.

He sleeps in our office most nights.

He has a written care schedule on a whiteboard in our kitchen. Each of fifteen brothers has at least one day a week. We pick him up for vet visits. We rotate his food bag. We rotate his walks. We have a group chat — with Diesel’s name in the chat title — that has had over four thousand messages in eleven months about absolutely nothing important and absolutely nothing more important.

He is the most loved dog in the state of Tennessee.

We had a small ceremony in March on the one-year anniversary of Hollis’s death. We rode out to the stretch of Highway 64 where we had scattered him. Twenty-three of us. Diesel rode in a sidecar Boom welded to his own Harley specifically so Diesel could come.

We pulled over at the spot. We stood in the gravel shoulder. We poured out fifteen Pabst Blue Ribbons in a long line on the road.

Diesel sat on the gravel and watched.

Boom said, “Hollis. Brother. Your dog is good. We are good. We are doing it the way you wanted us to.”

Diesel thumped his tail twice in the gravel.

We rode home.

He slept in his sidecar the whole way back.

Last Saturday I worked on a customer’s bike in the clubhouse garage all afternoon.

Diesel walked through the garage at 4 p.m., as he does most afternoons.

He walked past me. He walked past the parts shelves. He walked out the open garage door. He walked across the gravel lot to the back fence. He walked to Hollis’s bike.

He jumped onto the dog seat. It still takes him three tries.

He lay down.

He looked back at the garage.

I stood in the garage doorway and watched him for a long minute.

Then I walked out to the bike. I sat down on the gravel beside it.

I said, “Hey, buddy.”

Diesel thumped his tail twice on the leather seat.

I said, “Brother. He left you for us. We’re going to keep doing it right.”

Diesel looked at me with his root-beer eyes.

He laid his head down on the seat.

I sat in that gravel lot for the rest of the afternoon. I had a customer’s bike to finish. I did not finish it that day.

The bike Diesel was lying on did not start up. It will not start up again. It is parked there. It is going to stay parked.

Diesel knows this.

That is why he chose it.

He chose the only place his man was still going to be.

We are honoring the choice.

We are going to keep honoring it for as long as Diesel is alive.

If you want to read the rest of what happened — the three instructions Hollis Briggs left in his will, the Saturday ceremony where we set up fifteen folding chairs in a circle, the moment Diesel walked out of the clubhouse and across the gravel to a Harley nobody had touched, the wooden plaque Tex carved that week, and the conversation I had with Hollis’s eighty-one-year-old attorney Lonnie Trout two weeks later about a clause Hollis had added to his will three months before he died — I’ve shared the full story in the first comment below.