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HELL'S ANGELS -- A STRANGE AND TERRIBLE SAGA OF THE OUTLAW MOTORCYCLE GANGS |
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Chapter 12
Everyone knows our horsemen
are invincible. They fight because
they're hungry. Our empire is
surrounded by enemies. Our history is written in blood, not wine. Wine is what we drink to toast our victories. Bass Lake is not really a town, but a resort area -- a string of small settlements around a narrow, picture- postcard lake that is seven miles long and less than a mile wide at any point. The post office is on the north side of the lake in a cluster of stores and buildings all owned by a man named Williams. This was the Angels' rendezvous point ... but the local sheriff, a giant of a man named Tiny Baxter, had decided to keep them out of this area by means of a second roadblock about a half mile from the center of downtown. It was Baxter's decision and he backed it with his three-man force and a half dozen local forest rangers. By the time I got there the outlaws were stopped along both sides of the highway, and Barger was striding forth to meet Baxter. The sheriff explained to the Angel chieftain and his Praetorian Guard that a spacious camp site had been carefully reserved for them up on the mountain above town, where they wouldn't "be bothered." Baxter is six-foot-six and built like a defensive end for the Baltimore Colts. Barger is barely six feet, but not one of his followers had the slightest doubt that he would swing on the sheriff if things suddenly came down to the hard nub. I don't think the sheriff doubted it either, and certainly I didn't. There is a steely, thoughtful quality about Barger, an instinctive restraint that leads outsiders to feel they can reason with him. But there is also a quiet menace, an egocentric fanaticism tempered by eight years at the helm of a legion of outcasts who, on that sweaty afternoon, were measuring the sheriff purely by his size, his weapon and the handful of young rangers who backed him up. There was no question about who would win the initial encounter, but it was up to Barger to decide just what that victory would be worth. He decided to go up the mountain, and his legion followed without question or bitterness. The ranger who pointed out the route made it sound like a ten-minute drive up a nearby dirt road. I watched the outlaw horde boom off m that direction, then talked for a while with two of the rangers who stayed to man the roadblock. They seemed a little tense but smiled when I asked if they were afraid the Hell's Angels might take over the town. They had shotguns in the cab of their truck, but during the confrontation the guns had remained out of sight. Both were in their early twenties, and they seemed very cool, considering the much-publicized threat they had just met and sidetracked. I chalked it up later to the influence of Tiny Baxter, the only cop I've ever seen put Sonny Barger on the defensive. It was about 3:30 P.M. when I started up the dirt road to the designated Angel campground. Thirty minutes later I was still following motorcycle tracks up a fresh bulldozer cut that looked like something hacked out of a Philippine jungle. The angle was low gear all the way, it zigzagged like a deer trail and the campsite itself was so high that when I finally arrived it seemed that only a heavy ground fog lay between us and a clear view of Manhattan Island, at the other end of the continent. There was no trace of water, and by this time the Angels had worked up a serious thirst. They had been shunted off to a parched meadow nine or ten thousand feet up in the Sierras and it was obviously a bum trip. They hadn't minded the climb, but now they felt deceived and they wanted to retaliate. The prevailing ugly mood was shared by Barger, who felt the sheriff had duped him. The campsite was fit only for camels and mountain goats. The view was excellent, but a camp without water on a California Fourth of July is as useless as an empty beer can. I listened to the war talk and shouting for a while, then hustled down the mountain to call a Washington newspaper I was writing for at the time, to say I was ready to send one of the great riot stories of the decade. On the way down the road I passed outlaw bikes coming the other way. They'd been stopped at the Bass Lake roadblock and pointed up to the campsite. The Frisco swastika truck came by in first gear, with two bikes in the back and a third trailing twenty feet behind at the end of a long rope in a cloud of dust. Its rider was hanging on grimly behind green goggles and a handkerchief tied over his nose and mouth. Following the truck was a red Plymouth that erupted with shouts and horn blasts as I passed. I stopped, not recognizing the car, and backed up. It was Larry, Pete and Puff, the new president of the Frisco chapter. I hadn't seen them since the night of the meeting at the DePau. Pete, the drag racer, was working as a messenger in the city, and Larry was carving totem poles out of tree stumps in other Angels' front yards. They had broken down on the freeway near Modesto and been picked up by three pretty young girls who stopped to offer help. This was the Plymouth, and now the girls were part of the act. One was sitting on Pete's lap in the back seat, half undressed and smiling distractedly, while I explained the problem of the campsite. They decided to push on, and I said I'd see them later in town ... or somewhere, and at that point I thought it would probably be in jail. A very bad scene was building up. Soon the Angels would be coming down the mountain en masse, and in no mood for reasonable talk. In the Carolinas they say "hill people" are different from "flatlands people," and as a native Kentuckian with more mountain than flatlands blood, I'm inclined to agree. This was one of the theories I'd been nursing all the way from San Francisco. Unlike Porterville or Hollister, Bass Lake was a mountain community ... and if the old Appalachian pattern held, the people would be much slower to anger or panic, but absolutely without reason or mercy once the fat was in the fire. Like the Angels, they would tend to fall back in an emergency on their own native sense of justice -- which bears only a primitive resemblance to anything written in law books. I thought the mountain types would be far more tolerant of the Angels' noisy showboating, but -- compared to their flatlands cousins -- much quicker to retaliate in kind at the first evidence of physical insult or abuse. On the way down the mountain I heard another Monitor newscast, saying the Hell's Angels were heading for Bass Lake and big trouble. There was also mention of a Los Angeles detective who had shot one of the suspects rounded up for questioning about the rape of his daughter the day before. The sight of the suspect being led through the hall of the police station was too much for the detective, who suddenly lost control and began firing point blank. The victim was said to be a Hell's Angel, and newspapers on sale in Bass Lake that afternoon were headlined: HELL'S ANGEL SHOT IN RAPE CASE. (The suspect, who survived, was a twenty-one-year-old drifter. He was later absolved of any connection with either the Angels of the rape of the detective's daughter ... who had been selling cookbooks, door to door, when she was lured into a house known to be frequented by dragsters and hot-rod types. The detective admitted losing his head and shooting the wrong man; he later pleaded temporary insanity and was acquitted of all charges by a Los Angeles grand jury.) It took several days, however, for the press to separate the rape-shooting from the Hell's Angels, and in the meantime the headlines added fuel to the fire. On top of the Laconia stories, including the one in Life, the radio bulletins and all the frightening predictions in the daily press, now this, a Hell's Angels rape in Los Angeles, and just in time for the July 3 papers. Given all these fiery ingredients, I didn't feel a trace of alarmist guilt when I finally got a Bass Lake-Washington connection and began outlining what was about to happen. I was standing in a glass phone booth in downtown Bass Lake, which consists of a small post office, a big grocery, a bar and cocktail lounge, and several other picturesque redwood establishments that look very combustible. While I was talking, Don Mohr pulled up on his bike -- having breached the roadblock with his press credentials -- and indicated that he was in a hurry to call the Tribune. My editor in Washington was telling me how and when to file, but I was not to do so until the riot was running under its own power, with significant hurt to both flesh and property ... and then I was to send no more than an arty variation of the standard wire-service news blurb: Who, What, When, Where and Why. I was still on the phone when I saw a big burr-haired lad with a pistol on his belt walk over to Mohr and tell him to get out of town. I couldn't hear much of what was going on, but I saw Mohr produce a packet of credentials, stringing them out like a card shark with a funny deck. I could see that he needed the phone, so I agreed with my man in Washington that first things would always come first, and hung up. Mohr immediately occupied the booth, leaving me to deal with the crowd that had gathered. Luckily, my garb was too bastard for definition. I was wearing Levis, Wellington boots from L. L. Bean in Maine, and a Montana sheepherder's jacket over a white tennis shirt. The burr-haired honcho asked me who I was. I gave him my card and asked why he had that big pistol on his belt. "You know why," he said. "The first one of these sonsofbitches that gives me any lip I'm gonna shoot right in the belly. That's the only language they understand." He nodded toward Mohr in the phone booth, and there was nothing in his tone to make me think I was exempted. I could see that his pistol was a short-barreled Smith & Wesson .357 Magnum -- powerful enough to blow holes in Mohr's BSA cylinder head, if necessary -- but at arm's length it hardly mattered. The gun was a killer at any range up to a hundred yards, and far beyond that in the hands of a man who worked at it. He was wearing it in a police-type holster on the belt that held up his khaki pants, high on his right hip and in an awkward position for getting at it quickly. But he was very conscious of having the gun and I knew he was capable of raising bloody hell if he started waving it around. I asked him if he was a deputy sheriff. "No I'm workin for Mr. Williams," he said, still studying my card. Then he looked up. "What are you doin with this motorcycle crowd?" I explained that I was only a journalist trying to do an honest day's work. He nodded, still fondling my card. I said he could keep it, which seemed to please him. He dropped it in the pocket of his khaki shirt, then tucked his thumbs in his belt and asked me what I wanted to know. The tone of the question implied that I had about sixty seconds to get the story. I shrugged. "Oh, I don't know. I just thought I'd look around a bit, maybe write a few things." He chuckled knowingly. "Yeah? Well, you can write that we're ready for em. We'll give em all they want." The dusty street was so crowded with tourists that I hadn't noticed the singular nature of the group that surrounded us. They weren't tourists at all; I was standing in the midst of about a hundred vigilantes. There were five or six others wearing khaki shirts and pistols. At a glance they looked like any bunch of country boys at any rustic hamlet in the Sierras. But as I looked around I saw that many carried wooden clubs and others had hunting knives on their belts. They didn't seem mean, but they were obviously keyed up and ready to bust some heads. The merchant Williams had hired a few private gunmen to protect his lakefront investment; the rest were volunteer toughs who'd been waiting all day for a fight with a bunch of hairy city boys who wore chains for belts and stank of human grease. I remembered the mood of the Angels up on the mountain and I expected at any moment to hear the first of the bikes coming down the hill into town. The scene had all the makings of a king-hell brawl, and except for the pistols it looked pretty even. Just then the door of the phone booth opened behind me, and Mohr stepped out. He looked curiously at the mob, then raised his camera and took a picture of them. He did it as casually as any press photographer covering an American Legion picnic. Then he straddled his bike, kicked it to life and roared up the hill toward the roadblock. Burr-head seemed confused and I took the opportunity to stroll off toward my car. Nobody said anything and I didn't look back, but at any instant I expected to be whacked on the kidneys with a big stick. Despite the press credentials, both Mohr and I had been firmly identified with the outlaws. We were city boys, intruders, and under these circumstances the only neutrals were the tourists, who were easily identifiable. On my way out of town I wondered if anybody in Bass Lake might take one of my aspen-leaf checks for a fluorescent Hawaiian beach suit and some stylish sandals. The scene at the roadblock was surprisingly peaceful. The bikes were again parked along both sides of the highway, and Barger was talking to the sheriff. With them was the chief forest ranger for the area, who was explaining cheerfully that another campsite had been set aside for the Angels ... Willow Cove, about two miles down the main road and right on the edge of the lake. It sounded too good to be true, but Barger signaled his people to follow the rangers' jeep and check it out. The strange procession moved slowly down the highway, then veered into the pines on a narrow jeep trail that led to the campsite. There were no complaints this time. Willow Cove lacked only a free-beer machine to make it perfect. A dozen of the Angels leaped off their bikes and rushed into the lake fully clothed. I parked under a tree and got out to look around. We were on a small peninsula jutting into Bass Lake and cut off from the highway by a half mile of pine forest. It was an idyllic kind of setting and a very unlikely place to be put aside for an orgy. But it was, and the outlaws set about occupying it like a victorious army. Sheriff Baxter and the head ranger explained to Barger that there were only two conditions on their use of the site: (1) that they would leave it as clean and unlittered as they found it and (2) that they would keep to themselves and not menace the campgrounds on the other side of the lake, which were full of tourists. Sonny agreed, and the weekend's first crisis was over. The outlaw clan, which now numbered about two hundred, was agreeably settled in a private kingdom, with nothing of substance to bitch about. Beyond that, the Maximum Angel was committed to the task of keeping his people under control. It was an unnatural situation for Barger to find himself in. Instead of spending the weekend rallying his boozy legion from one piece of unfriendly turf to another, beset at all times by a cruel authority wearing guns and badges, he now found his people in a pleasant cul-de-sac ... a state of rare equality with the rest of humanity, which they could only disturb by committing some deliberate outrage, by violating an agreement that the Prez had honored with his word. The transaction had been carried out in Hollywood Indian style. There was a childlike simplicity in the dialogue between Barger and the lawmen: "If you play straight with us, Sonny, we'll play straight with you. We don't want any trouble and we know you guys have as much right to camp on this lake as anybody else. But the minute you cause trouble for us or anyone else, we're gonna come down on you hard, it's gonna be powder valley for your whole gang." Barger nods, seeming to understand. "We didn't come here for trouble, Sheriff. The way we heard it, you had trouble waitin for us." "Well, what did you expect? We heard you were coming in for a rumble, to tear things up." Baxter forces a smile. "But there's no reason why you can't enjoy yourselves here like everybody else. You guys know what you're doing. There's nothing wrong with you. We know that." Then Barger smiles, very faintly, but he smiles so seldom that even a grimace means he thinks something is very funny. "Come off it, Sheriff. You know we're all fuck-ups or we wouldn't be here." The sheriff shrugged and walked back to his car, but one of the deputies picked up the conversation and soon found himself telling five or six grinning Angels what basically decent fellows they were. Barger went off to get a beer kitty going. He stood in the middle of the big clearing and called for donations. We had been there about half an hour and by this time I'd suffered a fatal run on my own stock. Puff had spotted the cooler in my car. I hadn't planned to roll into camp and instantly dispose of my beer supply for the weekend, but under the circumstances I had little choice. There was no hint of intimidation, but neither was there any question in anyone's mind that I'd brought the beer for any other purpose than to share it at this crucial, bone-dry time. As it happened, I had barely enough money for gas back to San Francisco. Once my two cases were gone I couldn't buy a single can all weekend without cashing a check, and that was out of the question. Beyond that, I was -- and might still be -- the only journalist the Angels had ever seen who didn't have an expense account, so I was a little worried at their reaction when I'd be forced to plead poverty and start drinking out of the kitty. My own taste for the hops is very powerful, and I had no intention of spending a beerless weekend in the withering sun. In retrospect this seems like a small point, but it didn't at the time. It was an ill-chosen moment to cast my bread on the waters ... the suck-tide was running. Somewhere in the cacophony of foaming and hissing that followed the discovery of my cache, I recall saying, to nobody in particular: "All right, goddamnit, this thing had better work both ways." But there was no reason to believe it would. At that stage of their infamy the Angels equated all reporters with Time and Newsweek. Only a few of them knew me, and the others were not going to be happy when I began lurking around the beer supply, draining one can after another in a feverish effort to even the score. Many hours later, after the beer crisis had passed, I felt a little foolish for having worried. The outlaws gave it no thought. To them it was just as natural for me to have their beer as for them to have mine. By the end of the weekend I'd consumed three or four times as much as I'd brought with me ... and even now, looking back on nearly a year of drinking with the Angels, I think I came out ahead. But that isn't the way they balance the books. Despite their swastika fetish, the fiscal relationship between Angels is close to pure communism: "from each according to his abilities and to each according to his needs." The timing and the spirit of the exchange are just as important as the volume. Much as they claim to admire the free enterprise system, they can't afford it among themselves. Their working ethic is more on the order of "He who has, shares." There is nothing verbal or dogmatic about it; they just couldn't make it any other way. But none of this was apparent that afternoon in Bass Lake as I watched my stock disappear while Barger called for funds. Although Sheriff Baxter had left, six deputies had attached themselves to the camp on what appeared to be a permanent basis. I was talking to one of them when Barger joined us with a handful of money. "The sheriff said that place by the post office will sell us all the beer we want," he said. "How about using your car? There's likely to be trouble if we take one of the trucks." I didn't mind and the deputy said it was a socko idea, so we counted out the money on the hood of the car. It came to $120 in bills and roughly $15 in change. Then, to my astonishment, Sonny handed me the whole bundle and wished me well. "Try to hustle," he said. "Everybody's pretty thirsty." I insisted that somebody come with me to help load the beer in the car ... but my real reason for not wanting to go alone had nothing to do with loading problems. I knew all the outlaws lived in cities, where the price of a six-pack ranges from $.79 to $1.25. But we were nowhere near a city, and I also knew, from long experience, that small stores in remote areas sometimes get their pricing Policy from The Gouger's Handbook. Once, near the Utah-Nevada border, I had to pay $3.00 for a six-pack, and if that was going to be the case at Bass Lake, I wanted a reliable witness -- like Barger himself. At normal city prices, $135 would fetch about thirty cases of beer, but up in the Sierras it would only cover twenty, or maybe fifteen if the merchants were putting up a solid front. The Angels were in no position to do any comparison shopping, and if they were about to be taught a harsh lesson in socioeconomics, I figured they'd be more receptive to the bad news if it came from one of their own people. There was also the fact that sending a penniless writer to get $135 worth of beer was -- as Khrushchev said of Nixon -- "like sending a goat to tend the cabbage." I mentioned this on the way to town, after Sonny and Pete had agreed to come with me. "You'd of come back with it," Sonny said. "A person would have to be awful stupid to run off with our beer money." Pete laughed. "Hell, we even know where you live. And Frenchy says you got a boss-lookin old lady, too." He said it jokingly, but I noted that raping my wife was the first form of retaliation that came to his mind. Barger, like the politician he is, hastened to change the subject. "I read that article you wrote about us," he said. "It was okay." The article had appeared a month or so earlier, and I remembered a night in my apartment when one of the Frisco Angels had said, with a beery smile, that if they didn't like what I wrote they'd come over some night to kick down my door, throw gasoline into the hall and then put a match to it. We were all in good spirits at the time, and I recall pointing to the loaded double-barreled shotgun on my wall and replying, with a smile, that I would croak at least two of them before they got away. But none of this violence had come to pass, so I assumed they either hadn't read the article or had managed to live with what it said. Nonetheless, I was leery of having it mentioned, and especially by Barger, whose opinions automatically become the Hell's Angels' official line. I had written the piece with the idea that I would never again have any contact with motorcycle outlaws, whom I'd referred to as "losers," "ignorant thugs" and "mean hoodlums." None of these were terms I looked forward to explaining while surrounded at a remote Sierra campsite by two hundred boozing outlaws. "What are you doin now?" Barger asked. "Are you writin somethin else?" "Yeah," I said. "A book." He shrugged. "Well, we don't ask for nothin but the truth. [1] Like I say, there's not much good you can write about us, but I don't see where that gives people the right to just make up stuff ... all this bullshit, hell, ain't the truth bad enough for em?" We were almost to Williams' store, and I suddenly remembered my burr-haired inquisitor with his high- powered language barrier. We made the turn at the bottom of the hill and I parked the car as inconspicuously as possible about thirty yards from the store. According to the deputy at the campsite, the sale was already arranged. All we had to do was pay, load the beer and leave. Sonny had the cash, and as far as I was concerned, I was just the chauffeur. It took about fifteen seconds to understand that something had boggled the plan. As we stepped out of the car the vigilantes began moving toward us. It was very hot and quiet, and I could taste the dust that hung over the parking area. A Madera County paddy wagon was parked at the other end of the shopping center, with two cops in the front seat. The mob stopped short of the car and formed a bristling human wall on the boardwalk outside the store. Apparently they hadn't been informed of the pending transaction. I opened the trunk of my car, thinking that Sonny and Pete would go in for the beer. If things got serious I could jump into the trunk and lock it behind me, then kick out the back seat and drive away when it was all over. Neither Angel made a move toward the store. Traffic had stopped and the tourists were standing off at a safe distance, watching. The scene reeked of Hollywood: the showdown, High Noon, Rio Bravo. But without cameras or background music it didn't seem quite the same. After a long moment of silence the burr-haired fellow took a few steps forward and shouted, "You better get your asses out of here. You don't have a chance." I walked over to talk with him, thinking to explain the beer agreement. I wasn't particularly opposed to the idea of a riot, but I didn't want it to happen right then, with my car in the middle and me a participant. It would have been ugly: two Hell's Angels and a writer against a hundred country toughs on a dusty street in the Sierras. Burr-head listened to my reasoning, then shook his head. "Mr. Williams changed his mind," he said. And then I heard Sonny's voice right behind me: "Well, fuck that! We can change our minds too." He and Pete had walked out to join the argument, and now the vigilantes moved forward to support Burr-head, who didn't look at all worried. Well, I thought, here we go. The two cops in the paddy wagon hadn't moved; they were in no hurry to break the thing up. Getting beaten by a mob is a very frightening experience ... like being caught in a bad surf: there is not much you can do except try to survive. It has happened to me twice, in New York and San Juan, and it came within seconds of happening again at Bass Lake. All that prevented it was the suspiciously timely arrival of Tiny Baxter. The crowd parted to make room for his big car with the flashing red light on top. "I thought I told you to stay out of town," he snapped. "We came for the beer," Sonny replied. Baxter shook his head. "No, Williams says he's running low. You gotta go over to the market on the other side of the lake. They have plenty." We left instantly. Like the first campsite, the first beer contact had all the signs of a calculated botch. Baxter may or may not have known what he was doing, but if he did he deserves credit for coming up with a subtle and ingenious strategy. He made a limited number of appearances during that weekend, but each one came at a critical moment and he always arrived with a solution. After the fixing of the beer crisis the Angels began to view him as a secret sympathizer, and by midnight of the first day Barger had been made to feel almost personally responsible for the welfare of everybody in Bass Lake. Each time Baxter fixed something he put the Angels more in his debt. The strange burden eventually ruined Barger's holiday. The vagaries of the restraining order and the numerous agreements he'd made with the sheriff caused him to worry constantly. One of his few pleasures was the knowledge that Baxter wasn't getting any sleep either. On the way around the lake we speculated about what sort of mob might be waiting at the next store. "Those bastards were gonna stomp us," said Pete. "Yeah, and that would have been it," Sonny muttered. "That sheriff don't know how close he was to havin a war on his hands." I didn't take his remark very seriously, but by the time the weekend was over I knew he hadn't been kidding. If Barger had been stomped by a mob of locals, nothing short of a company of armed militia could have kept the main body of outlaws from swarming into town for vengeance. An attack on the Prez would have been bad enough, but under those circumstances -- a police-planned beer run -- it would have been evidence of the foulest treachery, a double cross, and the Angels would have done exactly what they all came to Bass Lake expecting to do. Most would have finished the weekend in jail or the hospital, but they were expecting that too. It would have been a good riot, but looking back, I no longer think the initial clash would have been evenly matched. Many of the vigilantes would have lost their taste for the fight the moment they realized that their opponents meant to inflict serious injury on anybody they could reach. Big Frank from Frisco, [2] for instance, is a black belt in karate who goes into any fight with the idea of jerking people's eyeballs out of their sockets. It is a traditional karate move and not difficult for anyone who knows what he's doing ... although it is not taught in "self-defense" classes for housewives, businessmen and hot-tempered clerks who can't tolerate bullies kicking sand in their faces. The intent is to demoralize your opponent, not blind him. "You don't really jerk out the eyeball," Big Frank explained. "You just sorta spring it, so it pops outta the socket. It hurts so much that most guys just faint." Red-blooded American boys don't normally fight this way. Nor do they swing heavy chains on people whose backs are turned ... and when they find themselves in a brawl where things like this are happening, they have good reason to feel at a disadvantage. It is one thing to get punched in the nose, and quite another to have your eyeball sprung or your teeth shattered with a wrench. So if there had been a full-strength fight that afternoon, the locals would probably have been routed after the first clash. But it would have taken a while for the police to muster enough strength to prevail, and in the meantime the outlaws would have wreaked all manner of destruction on the merchant Williams' property -- breaking windows, looting beer coolers and probably rifling some cash registers. A few would have been shot by Burr-head and his crew, but most would have tried to flee at the first sign of serious police action. This would have led to wild chases and skirmishing, but Bass Lake is a long way from Angel turf and not many of them could have made it all the way home without being captured at roadblocks. Barger knew this and he didn't want it to happen. But he also knew that it was not a sense of hospitality or concern for social justice that had got them a campsite. Tiny Baxter had a bomb on his hands, and he had to tread carefully to keep it from going off. This was Barger's leverage -- the certainty that his people would behave like wild beasts if they were pushed too far. But it would last only as long as things stayed quiet. John Foster Dulles might have called it a "balance of terror," a volatile standoff which neither side wanted to upset. Whether this was a just or desirable situation for a woodsy American community to find itself in is, again, pretty much beside the point. As weird and unreal as the Bass Lake confrontation might have sounded to radio listeners in New York or Chicago, nobody on the scene had any doubt about what they were seeing. Right or wrong, it was happening, and by the time the Angels were settled at Willow Cove, even the locally made restraining order was irrelevant. The outlaws simply had to be dealt with in terms of moment-to-moment reality. I hadn't planned to get physically involved, but after the narrow escape at Williams' store I was so firmly identified with the Angels that I saw no point in trying to edge back to neutrality. Barger and Pete seemed to take me for granted. As we drove around the lake they tried earnestly to explain the importance of the colors. Pete seemed puzzled that the question had ever come up. "Hell," he said, "that's what it's all about." The other market was in the center of the main tourist area, and when we got there the crowd was so dense that the only place to park was between the gas pump and the side door. If trouble broke out we'd be hopelessly penned in. At a glance the scene looked even worse than the one we'd just been rescued from. But this was a different crowd. They'd apparently been waiting for hours to see the Angels in action, and now, as the two stepped out of the car, a murmur of gratification went up. These were not locals, but tourists -- city people, from the valley and the coast. The store was full of newspapers featuring the Hell's Angels rape in Los Angeles, but nobody looked frightened. A curious crowd gathered as the outlaws bargained with the owner, a short moon-faced man who kept saying, "Sure thing, boys -- I'll take care of you." He was aggressively friendly, even to the point of putting his arm around Pete's grimy shoulders as they made their way to the beer vault. I bought a paper and went to the bar and lunch counter at the far end of the store. While I was reading the rape story I heard a little girl behind me ask, "Where are they, Mommy? You said we were going to see them." I turned to look at the child, a bandy-legged pixie just getting her permanent teeth, and felt thankful once again that my only issue is male. I glanced at the mother and wondered what strange grooves her mind had been fitted to in these wonderfully prosperous times. She was a downbeat thirty-five, with short blond hair and a sleeveless blouse only half tucked into her tight bermuda shorts. It was a vivid Pepsi Generation tableau ... on a hot California afternoon a sag-bellied woman wearing St. Tropez sunglasses is hanging around a resort-area market, trailing her grade-school daughter and waiting in the midst of an eager crowd for the arrival of The Hoodlum Circus, as advertised in Life. I remembered the previous spring, when I was driving one night from San Francisco to Big Sur and heard a radio bulletin about a tidal wave due to strike the California coast around midnight. Shortly before eleven I got to Hot Springs Lodge -- which sits on a cliff just above the ocean -- and rushed inside to sound the alarm. It was a slow night, and the only people still awake were a half dozen locals sitting around a redwood table with some bottles of wine. They had already heard the warnings and were waiting for the thing to hit. A tidal wave was a sight worth waiting up for. That same night, according to anguished police reports, more than ten thousand people flocked to Ocean Beach in San Francisco, creating a night-long traffic jam on the Coast Highway. They too were curious, and if the wave had come up on schedule most of them would have been killed. Luckily it petered out somewhere between Honolulu and the West Coast ... A crowd of about fifty people gathered to watch us load the beer. Several teen-agers got up the nerve to help. A man wearing madras shorts and black business socks kept asking Pete and Sonny to pose while he backed off for panoramic sequences with his home-movie camera. Another man, also wearing bermudas, sidled up to me and asked quietly, "Say, are you guys really Nazis?" "Not me," I said. "I'm Kiwanis." He nodded wisely, as if he had known all along. "Then what's all this stuff you read?" he asked. "You know, this stuff about swastikas." I called to Sonny, who was showing our helpers how to stack the cases in the back seat. "Hey, this man wants to know if you're a Nazi." I expected him to laugh, but he didn't. He made the usual disclaimers regarding the swastikas and Iron Crosses ("That don't mean nothin, we buy that stuff in dime stores"), but just about the time the man seemed satisfied that it was all a rude put-on, Barger unloaded one of those jarring ad libs that have made him a favorite among Bay area newsmen. "But there's a lot about that country we admire," he said, referring to pre-war Germany. "They had discipline. There was nothing chickenshit about em. They might not of had all the right ideas, but at least they respected their leaders and they could depend on each other." The audience seemed to want to mull this over, and in the meantime I suggested we get back to Willow Cove. At any moment I expected somebody to start yelling about Dachau and then to see some furious Jew lay Barger out with a campstool. But there was no sign of anything like that. The atmosphere was so congenial that we soon found ourselves back inside the store, eating hamburgers and sipping draft beer. I was beginning to feel almost relaxed when we heard motorcycles outside and saw the crowd surge toward the door. Seconds later, Skip from Richmond appeared, saying he'd waited as long as he could for the beer and had finally decided to seek it on his own. Several more Angels arrived, for the same reason, and the owner scurried around behind the bar, serving up the mugs with a nice enthusiasm: "Drink up, boys, and take it easy -- I bet you're thirsty as hell after that long ride, eh?" The man's attitude was very odd. As we left he stood by the car and told us to come back real soon, "with the other fellas." Considering the circumstances, I listened closely for a telltale lilt of craziness in his voice. Maybe he's not even the owner, I thought ... Maybe the owner had fled with his family to Nevada, leaving the village loony to mind the store and deal with the savages in his own way. Whoever he was, the eager little person had just sold eighty-eight six-packs of beer at $1.50 each and guaranteed himself a booming trade for the rest of the weekend ... Without spending a penny, he'd landed the West Coast's top animal act, a sure-fire crowd-pleaser that would put the traditional lakeside fireworks display in deep shade. All he had to worry about was the good possibility that the act might go haywire at any moment, destroying both the profits and the customers in a brutal eruption which the next day's newspapers would describe as: THE RAPE OF BASS LAKE: FIRE AND PANIC IN MOUNTAIN RESORT; COPS BATTLE HELL'S ANGELS AS RESIDENTS FLEE The locals seemed resigned to it, and it was no surprise to find them armed and surly. Nor was it strange to find the police unusually tense. This was the first major rally since Monterey, and the vast publicity surrounding it was a factor that neither the outlaws nor the police had ever had to contend with. Things like roadblocks and restraining orders were new problems for both sides. The idea of a carefully reserved campsite had been tried before, but it had never been effective except late at night, when the outlaws were not likely to move around anyway. The real shocker, however, was the beer situation. The Angels have always prided themselves on the one contribution they inevitably make to any community they visit. In spite of the terror they inspire, they leave many dollars in local taverns. Because of this, they found it unthinkable that anyone would refuse to sell them beer -- and especially without fair warning, which would have caused them to bring a whole truck load from the city. But Bass Lake was a different scene. The locals had had nearly a week to work themselves into a swivet, and by Saturday morning they were braced for the worst. Among the safety measures they were counting on was the knowledge that the hoodlums would be much less dangerous if denied large quantities of drink. This was evident to everyone concerned -- even the beer-sellers -- and besides it was going to be a bad money weekend anyway, since the rotten publicity would cause large numbers of vacationers to go elsewhere. What manner of man would bring his family to camp on a battleground, a place almost certain to be invaded by an army of vicious rabble? The question still pertains, but it doesn't alter the fact that people came from all over California that weekend to enjoy the rustic pleasures of Bass Lake. When they were turned away from motels or regular campsites they slept in roadside turn-outs and dirty ravines. By Monday rooming the lakefront looked like the White House lawn after Andrew Jackson's inaugural ball. [NL-1] The crowd was abnormal even for a big summer holiday. Californians are known to be enthusiastic outdoorsmen; in 1964, near Los Angeles, thousands of weekend campers had to be restrained by barriers from moving into an area that had just been gutted by a forest fire. When it was under control and the barriers were opened, the blackened campsite quickly filled to capacity. A reporter on the scene said the campers were "pitching their tents among smoking stumps." One man who had brought his family explained that there was "no place else to go, and we only have two days." As a pathetic comment, it made a pathetic kind of sense. But nothing that simple and tangible could explain the capacity crowd at Bass Lake. Anybody who really wanted no part of the outlaws had plenty of time to find a safer vacation spot. Police reports of possible "Hell's Angels strikes" had Bass Lake near the top of every list. So it must have been a giddy revelation for the Bass Lake Chamber of Commerce to discover that the Hell's Angels' presence -- far from being a plague -- was in fact a great boon to the tourist trade. It is eerie to consider the meaning of it. If the Hell's Angels draw standing room only, any half-hip chamber-of-commerce entertainment chairman should see the logical follow-up; next year, bring in two fighting gangs from Watts and pit them against each other on one of the main beaches ... with fireworks overhead while the local high school band plays Bolero and "They Call the Wind Maria." _________________ Notes: 1. Several months later they decided that truth was not enough. There would have to be money too. This created tension, which blossomed into resentment and finally violence. 2. Or Frank Number Two -- not legendary Frank, ex-outlaw and president. Librarian's Comment: [LC-1] PBS.org wrote:
The election of Andrew Jackson was seen by many as a
victory for the common citizen in much the same way as Jefferson brought
an end to the Federalist aristocracy. He was the first president elected
from a state that was not one of the original thirteen colonies, and he
represented the interests of the rural western frontier rather than the
industrial northeast.
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