Fishnet jumper suit with about as much solid fabric as an eye patch? Chaps over hot pants? Fur-covered helmet with horns?

Although you could get a ticket from police, getting into a Main Street bar in any of these is no problem. But even in a place where it seems anything goes, one thing doesn't: a motorcycle club patch or insignia.

"Colors" and other motorcycle gang markings have been banned by most Main Street bars since the late 1980s. Whether it is Biketoberfest -- which ends Sunday -- Bike Week or any other day of the year, bar owners in the epicenter for biker parties don't want the trouble that has historically followed when biker club members spot their rivals.

But there is one exception:
Sebastian "Benny" Carvagno's Main Street Station. Carvagno, 71, said it doesn't matter what group a biker belongs to as long as they don't cause trouble at his bar.

"You think the jacket makes a difference?" Carvagno said. "They are the same . . . with or without the jacket."

And most of the bikers who frequent the bar are nice family guys who happen to be members of groups including the Outlaws Motorcycle Club, Carvagno said while sitting in his black leather recliner in the bar's office. The Outlaws even have a T-shirt vending table in the rear of his gas station-turned-biker bar.

"Support your local Outlaws" some of the black T-shirts read.

Other biker groups also come to the bar and there rarely is a problem, Carvagno said.

"Give people half a chance," Carvagno said. "If they goof it up then they lose the opportunity."

Other bars, including the once-infamous Boot Hill Saloon, don't want to take that chance. Instead those others have not-so-subtle signs at bar entrances reminding partyers to keep their colors out of sight. "No club colors" is printed on a sign of don'ts posted at the entrance to Froggy's Saloon. At the Boot Hill, a similar sign proclaims, "No Club Patches or Insignia."

Biker hot spots outside Daytona Beach, including the Iron Horse Saloon in Ormond Beach and Sopotnik's Cabbage Patch in Samsula, have also banned biker colors.

There is no law in Daytona Beach that forbids bikers from showing off their group affiliations. Nevertheless, bar owners and managers have decided it's best to keep them out.

"It's a choice," said Bobby Honeycutt, general manager of Froggy's Saloon. "When you get people drinking and you have people wearing colors it's cause for a bad situation. I don't want them in here."

Honeycutt said colors of any type, even those of the Christian Motorcycle Association or other seemingly innocuous groups, have been banned from Froggy's for more than a decade.

"We can't discriminate," he said. "If we let one color in we have to let them all in, and we're not going to discriminate."

Sam Edwards, a manager at the Boot Hill Saloon, said his bar has also banned colors since the late 1980s as a way to avoid problems. And besides, club colors tend to frighten faint-of-heart tourists hoping to enjoy a cold beer in a traditional biker hangout, Edwards said.

Daytona Beach police spokesman Sgt. Al Tolley said the ban on colors was welcomed by police. Without the influence of colors, Tolley said, police have one less trouble source during big biker parties.

"It limits the frequency of arguments over that issue," Tolley said.

And though Carvagno lets bikers show their colors, police haven't had to spend any more time at the Main Street Station than any of the other rowdy, raucous party spots, Tolley said.

Honeycutt said he doesn't think that a biker wearing club colors is by definition a bad guy. It's the minority of troublemakers that ruin it for the rest, he said.

"Ninety-nine percent of motorcycle people, and I am one of them, are good people," and it's the same for club members, Honeycutt said. "It's that 1 percent that makes it bad for the other people."

Orlando Sentinel
By Alicia A. Caldwell | Sentinel Staff Writer
Alicia A. Caldwell can be reached at acaldwell@orlandosentinel.com or 386-851-7924.