Hordes of ecstatic, tattooed barbarians should have been leaping in a victory dance.

It was a cool, quiet Sunday afternoon at the Rock Store, beside a two-lane blacktop road deep in the Santa Monicas.

Ominously quiet, an outsider might have feared.

After all, hordes of ecstatic, tattooed barbarians should have been leaping and screaming in a victory dance with their tough, booted sluts, maddened by crude drugs and the throb of the tom-toms, licking the blood of the civilized losers from their bug-matted beards.

The Rock Store, a quaint country deli on Mulholland Highway to the unknowing, is the mother church, the Wailing Wall and Vatican, the Broadway and country club of the motorcycle world. And this was the first Sunday after Gov. George Deukmejian had vetoed the mandatory helmet law for motorcyclists.

By all that is holy in the bible of Stereotypes, there should have been celebratory riot and debauchery sufficient to drive Hunter Thompson into the Trappists, an explosion of pillage and volleys of gunfire.

Truth to tell, an informal seminar on motorcycle safety had convened on the steps of the little store. Just a quiet debate by people concerned about an issue close to them, with some knowledgeable opinions.

Most reporters probably would have called the group on the steps “the black leather and greasy denim crowd” or “booted easy riders” or something like that. The words “Hells Angels” would find their way into the story, somehow.

Bet on it.

Which is the kind of thing most motorcyclists accept with a sort of exasperated tolerance as beyond their remedy, the way blacks once let slide Amos ‘n’ Andy jokes.

In his funk over Deukmejian’s veto, Assemblyman Richard E. Floyd, the Democrat from Hawthorne who wrote the defeated helmet law, lashed out at “the unbathed, unshaven, tattooed people” he said had cowed the governor.

The Rock Store is one of the few places where the different breeds, tribes and social classes of motorcyclists, who probably all look alike to outsiders but differ widely among themselves, mingle harmoniously.

They range from the tattooed outlaws of Floyd’s nightmares to middle-aged suburban “dresser” riders atop massive two-wheeled homes with intercoms, tape decks and seats as extravagantly padded as their wives. There are “the yuppies”--as veteran riders with lower glamour quotients call the rock stars and actors who have latched onto motorcycles as one of the latest Hollywood status fads--and the “squids,” reckless teen-agers on Japanese land rockets fueled by a hair-raising combination of hormones and belief in their own immortality.

The crowd on the steps consisted of Daniel Flickinger, 48, a Chatsworth attorney; Dr. Steve Sapkin, 45, an Encino surgeon; Harvey Innerfeld, 39, a Pasadena auto dealer; Nelson Diaz, 40, a Thousand Oaks cabinetmaker; Ed Kirchner, 40, of Moorpark, an administrator at Camarillo State Hospital, and Toby (“just plain Toby”), 73, of West Los Angeles, a retired jewelry designer.

No one culled them from a crowd of psychopathic Neanderthals. They just sort of congealed in a conversational group, as happens at any cocktail party.

Floyd might have been surprised by the discussion. While they all opposed his bill, they had a wide range of reasons and alternatives.

Most of them had to do with treating riders differently by age or experience, through two-tiered licensing systems.

Flickinger, who said he spends three months a year at his other home in Switzerland (he invents electronic things and has to deal with international patents), said beginning riders there are limited to small, slow cycles for 18 months.

The cabinet maker advanced the common argument that all riders should wear helmets at all times, that it was coercion he was against, not helmets. The surgeon agreed but added that congested courts “need more time to deal with serious crime” and shouldn’t be further clogged with helmet violations.

Kirchner supported an age limit. “I should have a choice. My 17-year-old son shouldn’t.”

Only Toby, the senior citizen, was an absolutist, who not only doesn’t want to be told to wear a helmet, but refuses to do so on his own either, regarding them as a hindrance to his hearing, vision and sense of freedom.

Toby usually wears a beret and in 57 years on motorcycles, including some years as a racer, he has acquired two broken legs. “But no head injuries--see that’s the point, no head injuries,” he argued.

An activist in the anti-helmet drive, Toby stayed up until 2 a.m. the previous night, sewing an orange flag with the date of the governor’s veto under a “no helmet” drawing. Dangling from the roof of the store’s little cafe, it was one of only three visible signs of victory in the helmet fight.

Someone had tacked a piece of paper with the hand-written words “Thanks Duke” to the oak tree where motorcycle-for-sale notices are posted. Inside the store a letter of thanks to the governor had garnered about 120 signatures.

Thousands are expected eventually, but the crowd was small Sunday, only about one-fifth of the usual Sunday afternoon mob of 600 or so, reckoned Veronica Savko, who owns the store with her husband, Ed.

That always happens on Father’s Day, she observed, when 80% of the barbaric horde stay home with the kids.