|
HELL'S ANGELS -- A STRANGE AND TERRIBLE SAGA OF THE OUTLAW MOTORCYCLE GANGS |
|
Chapter 13
That was the trouble with Porterville -- they had four thousand
people downtown watchin two
hundred of us. Our final purchase at the beer market was a dozen cans of horsemeat for Pete's big redbone hound. The dog had been on other runs and seemed to know the spirit. It ate constantly, never seemed to sleep and went into long fits of howling for no apparent reason. We drove back to camp very slowly. The car was so jammed with loose six-packs that I could barely move my arms to steer, and each bump in the road caused the springs to drag on the rear axle. When we got to the Willow Cove turnoff the car wouldn't climb the dirt hill that led into the pines ... so I backed off and made a fast run at it, driving the junker straight into the hill like a cannon ball. Our momentum took us over the hump, but the crash pushed the right fender back on the tire. The car lurched far enough down the trail to block it completely and stopped just short of crashing into a dozen bikes en route to the store. It took some rough work with a bumper jack to get it moving again, and just as we freed the front wheel a purple truck came grinding over the crest and rammed into my rear bumper. The rhythm of the week end was picking up ... a huge beer delivery, the rending of metal, greedy laughter and a rumble of excitement when Sonny told what had happened at Williams' store. We had been away about two hours, but the interim peace had been preserved by the arrival of several carloads of girls and beer. By six the whole clearing was ringed with cars and bikes. My car was in the middle, serving as a communal cooler. During Barger's absence, the other chapter presidents had seen to the gathering of wood for a bonfire. The task fell to the newest member in each chapter, a tradition that nobody questioned. After all, as Tiny has said, the Angels are like any other fraternity -- and like the others, they have a fine sense of ritual, hierarchy and organization. At the same time, they take pride in a certain uniqueness, a distinctive sort of life orientation that sets them apart from the Elks and Phi Delts. Inevitably, members of other fraternities have questioned the Angels' traditions -- calling them eccentric, or criminal. Among the most controversial are Rape, Assault and Body Odor. Another, not so repellent to the public, is the outlaws' powerful disdain for either home telephones or mailing addresses. With rare exceptions, they have assigned this aspect of reality to various wives, "mamas," girlfriends and friendly hustlers whose pads are always open, day or night, to anyone wearing the colors. The outlaws are very comfortable with their inaccessibility. It saves them a lot of trouble with bill collectors, revenge seekers and routine police harassment. They are as insulated from society as they want to be, but they have no trouble locating each other. When Sonny flies down to Los Angeles, Otto meets him at the airport. When Terry goes to Fresno, he quickly locates the chapter president, Ray -- who exists in some kind of mysterious limbo and can only be found by means of a secret phone number, which changes constantly. The Oakland Angels find it convenient to use Barger's number, checking now and then for messages. Some use various saloons where they are well known. An Angel who wants to be reached will make an appointment either to meet somewhere or to be at a certain phone at a designated time. One night I tried to arrange a contact with a young Angel named Rodger, a one-time disk jockey. It proved to be impossible. He had no idea where he might be from one day to the next. "They don't call me Rodger the Lodger for nothing," he said. "I just make it wherever I can. It's all the same. Once you start worrying about it, you get hung up -- and that's the end, man, you're finished." If he'd been killed that night he'd have left no footprints in life, no evidence and no personal effects but his bike -- which the others would have raffled off immediately. Hell's Angels don't find it necessary to leave wills, and their deaths don't require much paperwork ... A driver's license expires, a police record goes into the dead file, a motorcycle changes hands and usually a few "personal cards" will be taken out of wallets and dropped into wastebaskets. Because of their gypsy style of life, their network has to be functional. A lost message can lead to serious trouble. An Angel who might have fled will be arrested; a freshly stolen bike will never reach the buyer; a pound of marijuana might miss a crucial connection; or at the very least, a whole chapter will never get word of a run or a big party. The destination of a run is kept secret as long as possible -- hopefully, to keep the cops guessing. The chapter presidents will figure it out by long-distance telephone, then each will tell his people the night before the run, either at a meeting or by putting the word with a handful of bartenders, waitresses and plugged-in chicks who are known contacts. The system is highly efficient, but it has never been leakproof, and by 1966 the Angels had decided that the only hope was to keep the destination a secret until the run was actually under way. Barger tried it once, but the police were able to track the outlaws by radioing ahead from one point to another. Radio tracking is only a device to give the cops an edge, a sense of confidence and control. Which it does, as long as no lapses occur ... but it is safe to predict that on one of these crowded holidays a convoy of Angels is going to disappear like a blip shooting off the edge of a radar screen. All it will take is one of those rare gigs the outlaws are forever seeking: a ranch or big farm with a friendly owner, a piece of rural turf beyond the reach of the fuzz, where they can all get drunk and naked and fall on each other like goats in the rut, until they all pass out from exhaustion. It would be worth buying a police radio, just to hear the panic: "Group of eighty just passed through Sacramento, going north on U.S. Fifty, no violence, thought to be headed for Lake Tahoe area ..." Fifty miles north, in Placerville, the police chief gives his men a pep talk and deploys them with shotguns on both sides of the highway, south of the city limits. Two hours later they are still waiting and the dispatcher in Sacramento relays an impatient demand for a report on Placerville's handling of the crisis. The chief nervously, reports no contact and asks if his restless troops can go home and enjoy the holiday. The dispatcher, sitting in the radio room at Highway Patrol headquarters in Sacramento, says to sit tight while he checks around ... and moments later his voice squawks out of the speaker: "Schwein! You lie! Vere are dey?"' "Don't call me no swine," says the Placerville chief. "They never got here." The dispatcher checks all over northern California with no result. Police cars scream up and down the highways, checking every bar. Nothing. Eighty of the state's most vicious hoodlums are roaming around drunk somewhere between Sacramento and Reno, hungry for rape and pillage. It will be another embarrassment for California law enforcement ... to simply lose the buggers, a whole convoy, right out on a main highway ... heads will surely roll. By now, the outlaws are far up a private road, having left the highway at a sign saying: OWL FARM, NO VISITORS. They are beyond the reach of the law unless the owner complains. Meanwhile, another group of fifty disappears in the same vicinity. Police search parties stalk the highway, checking for traces of spittle, grime and blood. The dispatcher still rages over his mike; the duty officer's voice cracks as he answers urgent queries from radio newsmen in San Francisco and Los Angeles: "I'm sorry, that's all I can say. They seem to have ... ah ... our information is that they ... they disappeared, yes, they're gone." The only reason it hasn't happened is that the Hell's Angels have no access to private property in the boondocks. One or two claim to have relatives with farms, but there are no stories of the others being invited out for a picnic. The Angels don't have much contact with people who own land. They are city boys, economically and emotionally as well as physically. For at least one generation and sometimes two they come from people who never owned anything at all, not even a car. *** The Hell's Angels are very definitely a lower-class phenomenon, but their backgrounds are not necessarily poverty-stricken. Despite some grim moments, their parents seem to have had credit. Most of the outlaws are the sons of people who came to California either just before or during World War II. Many have lost contact with their families, and I have never met an Angel who claimed to have a hometown in any sense that people who use that term might understand it. Terry the Tramp, for instance, is "from" Detroit, Norfolk, Long Island, Los Angeles, Fresno and Sacramento. As a child, he lived all over the country, not in poverty but in total mobility. Like most of the others, he has no roots. He relates entirely to the present, the moment, the action. His longest bout with stability was a three-year hitch in the Coast Guard after finishing high school. Since then he has worked half-heartedly as a tree-trimmer, mechanic, bit actor, laborer and hustler of various commodities. He tried college for a few months but quit to get married. After two years, two children and numerous quarrels, the marriage ended in divorce. He had another child, by his second wife, but that union didn't last either. Now, after two hugely publicized rape arrests, he refers to himself as an "eligible bachelor." Despite his spectacular rap sheet, he estimates his total jail time at about six months -- ninety days for trespassing and the rest for traffic offenses. Terry is one of the most arrest-prone of all the Angels; cops are offended by the very sight of him. In one stretch, covering 1964 and '65, he paid roughly $2,500 to bail bondsmen, lawyers and traffic courts. Like most of the other Angels he blames "the cops" for making him a full-time outlaw." At least half the Hell's Angels are war babies, but that is a very broad term. There are also war babies in the Peace Corps, in corporate training programs, and fighting in Vietnam. World War n had a lot to do with the Hell's Angels' origins, but you have to stretch the war theory pretty thin to cover both Dirty Ed, in his early forties, and Clean Cut from Oakland, who is twenty years younger. Dirty Ed is old enough to be Clean Cut's father-which is not likely, though he's planted more seeds that he cares to remember. It is easy enough to trice the Hell's Angels' mystique -- and even their name and their emblems -- back to World War II and Hollywood. But their genes and real history go back a lot further. World War II was not the original California boom, but a rebirth of a thing that began in the thirties and was already tapering off when the war economy made California a new Valhalla. In 1937 Woody Guthrie wrote a song called "Do-Re-Mi. " The chorus goes like this:
California is a garden of Eden The song expressed the frustrated sentiments of more than a million Okies, Arkies and hillbillies who made a long trek to the Golden State and found it was just another hard dollar. By the time these gentlemen arrived, the Westward Movement was already beginning to solidify. The "California way of life" was the same old game of musical chairs, but it took a while for this news to filter back East, and meanwhile the Gold Rush continued. Once here, the newcomers hung on for a few years, breeding prolifically, until the war started. Then they either joined up or had their pick of jobs on a booming labor market. Either way, they were Californians when the war ended. The old way of life was scattered back along Route 66, and their children grew up in a new world. The Linkhorns had finally found a home. Nelson Algren wrote about them in A Walk on the Wild Side, but that story was told before they crossed the Rockies. Dove Linkhorn, son of crazy Fitz, went to hustle for his fortune in New Orleans. Ten years later he would have gone to Los Angeles. Algren's book opens with one of the best historical descriptions of American white trash ever written. [2] He traces the Linkhorn ancestry back to the first wave of bonded servants to arrive on these shores. These were the dregs of society from all over the British Isles -- misfits, criminals, debtors, social bankrupts of every type and description -- all of them willing to sign oppressive work contracts with future employers in exchange for ocean passage to the New World. Once here, they endured a form of slavery for a year or two-during which they were fed and sheltered by the boss -- and when their time of bondage ended, they were turned loose to make their own way. In theory and in the context of history the setup was mutually advantageous. Any man desperate enough to sell himself into bondage in the first place had pretty well shot his wad in the old country, so a chance for a foothold on a new continent was not to be taken lightly. After a period of hard labor and wretchedness he would then be free to seize whatever he might in a land of seemingly infinite natural wealth. Thousands of bonded servants came over, but by the time they earned their freedom the coastal strip was already settled. The unclaimed land was west, across the Alleghenies. So they drifted into the new states -- Kentucky and Tennessee; their sons drifted on to Missouri, Arkansas and Oklahoma. Drifting became a habit; with dead roots in the Old World and none in the New, the Linkhorns were not of a mind to dig in and cultivate things. Bondage too became a habit, but it was only the temporary kind. They were not pioneers, but sleazy rearguard camp followers of the original westward movement. By the time the Linkhorns arrived anywhere the land was already taken, so they worked for a while and moved on. Their world was a violent, boozing limbo between the pits of despair and the Big Rock Candy Mountain. They kept drifting west, chasing jobs, rumors, homestead grabs or the luck of some front-running kin. They lived off the surface of the land, like armyworms, stripping it of whatever they could before moving on. It was a day-to-day existence, and there was always more land to the west. Some stayed behind and their lineal descendants are still there -- in the Carolinas, Kentucky, West Virginia and Tennessee. There were dropouts all along the way: hillbillies, Okies, Arkies -- they're all the same people. Texas is a living monument to the breed. So is southern California. Algren called them "fierce craving boys" with "a feeling of having been cheated." Freebooters, armed and drunk -- a legion of gamblers, brawlers and whorehoppers. Blowing into town in a junk Model-A with bald tires, no muffler and one headlight ... looking for quick work, with no questions asked and preferably no tax deductions. Just get the cash, fill up at a cut-rate gas station and hit the road, with a pint on the seat and Eddy Arnold on the radio moaning good back-country tunes about home sweet home, that Bluegrass sweetheart still waitin, and roses on Mama's grave. Algren left the Linkhorns in Texas, but anyone who drives the Western highways knows they didn't stay there either. They kept moving until one day in the late 1930s they stood on the spine of a scrub-oak California hill and looked down on the Pacific Ocean -- the end of the road. Things were tough for a while, but no tougher than they were in a hundred other places. And then came the war -- fat city, big money even for Linkhorns. When the war ended, California was full of veterans looking for ways to spend their separation bonuses. Many decided to stay on the Coast, and while their new radios played hillbilly music they went out and bought big motorcycles -- not knowing exactly why, but in the booming, rootless atmosphere of those times, it seemed like the thing to do. They were not all Linkhorns, but the forced democracy of four war years had erased so many old distinctions that even Linkhorns were confused. Their pattern of intermarriage was shattered, their children mixed freely and without violence. By 1950 many Linkhorns were participating in the money economy; they owned decent cars, and even houses. Others, however, broke down under the strain of respectability and answered the call of the genes. There is a story about a Linkhorn who became a wealthy car dealer in Los Angeles. He married a beautiful Spanish actress and bought a mansion in Beverly Hills. But after a decade of opulence he suffered from soaking sweats and was unable to sleep at night. He began to sneak out of the house through the servants' entrance and run a few blocks to a gas station where he kept a hopped-up '37 Ford with no fenders ... and spend the rest of the night hanging around honky-tonk bars and truck stops, dressed in dirty overalls and a crusty green T-shirt with a Bardahl emblem on the back. He enjoyed cadging beers and belting whores around when they spurned his crude propositions. One night, after long haggling, he bought several mason jars full of home whiskey, which he drank while driving at high speed through the Beverly Hills area. When the old Ford finally threw a rod he abandoned it and called a taxi, which took him to his own automobile agency. He kicked down a side door, hot-wired a convertible waiting for tune-up and drove out to Highway 101, where he got in a drag race with some hoodlums from Pasadena. He lost, and it so enraged him that he followed the other car until it stopped for a traffic light -- where he rammed it from the rear at seventy miles an hour. The publicity ruined him, but influential friends kept him out of jail by paying a psychiatrist to call him insane. He spent a year in a rest home; and now, according to the stories, he has a motorcycle dealership near San Diego. People who know him say he's happy -- although his driver's license has been revoked for numerous violations, his business is verging on bankruptcy, and his new wife, a jaded ex-beauty queen from West Virginia, is a half-mad alcoholic. It would not be fair to say that all motorcycle outlaws carry Linkhorn genes, but nobody who has ever spent time among the inbred Anglo-Saxon tribes of Appalachia would need more than a few hours with the Hell's Angels to work up a very strong sense of deja vu. There is the same sulking hostility toward "outsiders," the same extremes of temper and action, and even the same names, sharp faces and long-boned bodies that never look quite natural unless they are leaning on something. Most of the Angels are obvious Anglo-Saxons, but the Linkhorn attitude is contagious. The few outlaws with Mexican or Italian names not only act like the others but somehow look like them. Even Chinese Mel from Frisco and Charley, a young Negro from Oakland, have the Linkhorn gait and mannerisms. _______________ Notes: 1. © Copyright 1961 and 1963, Ludlow Music Inc. New York. Used by permission. 2. A story called "Barn Burning," by William Faulkner, is another white-trash classic. It provides the dimension of humanity that Algren's description lacks.
|