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HELL'S ANGELS -- A STRANGE AND TERRIBLE SAGA OF THE OUTLAW MOTORCYCLE GANGS |
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Chapter 19 The Dope Cabala and a Wall of Fire
They get to drinking and smoking pot and popping them pills in
their mouths ... hell, absolutely
anything can happen. They get
into a kind of frenzy, like animals, and they'll tear you to bits,
with chains, knives, beer-can
openers, anything they can get
their hands on. Motorcycle outlaws have been accused of maintaining a dope network, a sinister web of sales and deliveries from one coast to the other. Federal narcotics agents say the Hell's Angels shipped more than $1,000,000 worth of marijuana from southern California to New York City between 1962 and '65, sending it by air freight in boxes labeled "motorcycle parts." That is a lot of grass, even at street-corner retail prices. The "network" was exposed in late 1965, when, according to the Los Angeles Times, "eight persons who identified themselves as members [of the Hell's Angels] pleaded guilty in a San Diego court to charges of smuggling 150 pounds of marijuana from Mexico into the United States at San Ysidro." The convicted smugglers had little if anything to do with the Angels, despite their alleged claims to membership. Three of the eight were from New York, and of the five from Los Angeles two were girls. That left only three who could possibly have been Angels, but the outlaws I talked to said they'd never heard of them. Perhaps they lied, but I doubt it; normally they are proud to be connected with anything that makes headlines. Which is beside the point, really, because 150 pounds of pot is only a fraction of what crosses the Mexican border every week despite the sharp-eyed zeal of U.S. customs officials. These gentlemen hate dope like they hate sin; and when they're after it they know who to grab: beatnik perverts and hairy sandal freaks. People with beards are shaken down thoroughly. I have crossed the border at Tijuana more than a dozen times, but the only time I was stopped and searched was after a week of skin-diving off the Baja California when three of us tried to get back into the States with a week's growth of hair on our faces. At the border we were asked the standard questions, gave the standard replies and were instantly seized. The customs agents took our truck, full of camping and Scuba gear, into a special shed and picked over it for an hour and a half. They found several bottles of liquor but no dope. They couldn't seem to believe it. They kept feeling the sleeping bags and groping under the chassis. Finally they let us go with a warning to "be more careful" in the future. Meanwhile, out on the highway, the big-volume dope runners were being waved through with a smile. They were wearing neckties and business suits, driving late-model rent-a-cars with electric-razor attachments. I didn't notice any outlaw motorcyclists roaring up to the border, but if any had appeared they'd have been jerked into the shed for a thorough shake-down. People who make a living smuggling narcotics into the States operate on the same principle as bad-check artists, who do not as a rule wear beards, earrings and swastikas. Because of the headwaiter mentality that prevails among customs officials, no commercial shipper of marijuana or anything else illegal would make the mistake of using Hell's Angels for runners. It would be like sending a car up to the border with "Opium Express" painted in red letters on both sides. If the God of the righteous could swoop down one night and char every Hell's Angel to ashes, marijuana traffic on the Mexican border would hardly be fazed. In February 1966 three men in a stolen truck passed through customs with more than a half ton of marijuana -- 1,050 pounds in one load. They got it all the way to Los Angeles, where they were arrested several days later on an anonymous tip -- which netted the tipster close to $100,000 in reward money. The Angels are too obvious for serious drug traffic. They don't even have enough capital to function as middlemen, so they end up buying most of their stuff in small lots at high prices. Three or four of them will nurse a joint until it is so short they have to hold it with alligator clips -- which many outlaws carry for exactly this purpose. People with real access to marijuana can afford to smoke it in big pipes and hookahs ... and if they have a serious commercial interest in the stuff they rarely smoke it at all except behind locked doors. A taste for pot is not part of the formula for success in a profit-oriented society. If Horatio Alger had been born near a field of locoweed his story might have been a lot different. He would have gone on unemployment and spent most of his time just standing around smiling at things, brushing off the protests of his friends and benefactors, saying, "Don't bug me, baby -- you'll never know." [1] The Angels insist there are no dope addicts in the club, and by legal or medical definitions this is true. Addicts are focused; the physical need for whatever they're hooked on forces them to be selective. But the Angels have no focus at all. They gobble drugs like victims of famine turned loose on a rare smorgasbord. They use anything available, and if the result is a screaming delirium then so be it. They smoke marijuana so openly that it's hard to understand why they're not all in jail for it. California's marijuana laws are among the most primitive manifestations of American politics. Two convictions for possession of a single joint -- or even a tenth of one -- will send a person to prison for a minimum of two years. A third conviction for possession means a minimum five years. The sentences are fixed by law, regardless of any circumstances a judge might find to be mitigating. Except for the risk, the marijuana situation in California is a lot like the booze situation in the 1920's. Pot is everywhere; thousands of people smoke it as often as they take aspirins. But the fact of illegality has bred a cultishness, a pot underground whose partisans are forced to skulk around like spies, convening in dark rooms to pass their criminal pleasure from hand to nervous hand. Many get high from the sheer risk. Few people can "turn on" without making a very spooky ordeal of it, but among those who do are the Hell's Angels -- who have done it for so long and so often that they no longer confuse the mystique with the real effects. Marijuana seems to relax them, but not much else. They refer to it as "weed" or "dope," shunning such hipster terminology as "grass" and "pot." Most just take it for granted, as they do beer and wine. If the stuff is available they'll smoke it, but they rarely spend money for it. When they have to pay for kicks, they prefer something with more velocity. At Bass Lake it was pills. Soon after dark on Saturday, I was standing with a group of Angels by the bonfire, talking about the Laconia riot, when somebody appeared with a big plastic bag and began passing out handfuls of whatever it contained. When my turn came I held out my hand and received about thirty small white pills. For a moment the talk ceased, while the outlaws gulped down their rations, chasing the pills with beer. I asked what they were and somebody beside me said, "Cartwheels, man. Bennies. Eat some, they'll keep you going." I asked him what they were in milligrams, but he didn't know. "Just take about ten," he advised. "And if that don't work, take more." I nodded and ate two. They looked to be about five milligrams each, which is enough Benzedrine to keep most people awake and jabbering for several hours. Ten pills, or fifty milligrams, will send anybody but a pill freak to a hospital with symptoms of acute delirium tremens. Later several Angels assured me that their bennies were indeed "fives" -- at least that's what they were paying for. They never quoted their wholesale price, but they once offered to give me a break on as many as I wanted at the rate of $53 a thousand, or about twice what the same pills would cost me in a drugstore, with a prescription. It turned out that they were not even "fives," but more like "ones." When I realized that the first two were having no effect, I took several more, and then more. By dawn I had eaten twelve -- which, if they'd been honest, would have caused me to gnaw down trees like a beaver. As it was, they only helped me to stay on my feet about four hours longer than I would have otherwise. The next day I told the outlaws they were being cheated, but they shrugged it off. "We got no choice," said one. "If you buy stuff on the black market you gotta take whatever you get. Who gives a damn anyway? If they're weak all you gotta do is take more. We're not gonna run out." Bennies ("cartwheels" or "whites") are basic to the outlaw diet -- like weed, beer and wine. But when they talk about "getting wasted," the action moves onto another level. The next step up the scale is Seconal ("reds" or "red devils"), a barbiturate normally used as a sedative, or tranquilizer. They also take Amytal ("blue heaven"), Nembutal ("yellow jackets") and Tuinal. But they prefer the reds -- which they take along with beer and bennies "to keep from getting sleepy." The combination brews up some hellish effects. Barbiturates and alcohol can be a fatal mixture, but the outlaws combine enough stimulants with their depressants to at least stay alive, if not rational. A righteous Angel loading up on a run will consume almost anything, and in any quantity combination or sequence. I recall a two-day party, many months after Bass Lake, at which Terry began the first day with beer, had a stick of the grass at noon, then more beer, and another joint before dinner, then to red wine and a handful of bennies to keep awake ... more grass in the middle of the evening, along with a red for some odd feeling, then all through the night more beer, wine, bennies and another red to get some rest ... before taking off again for another twenty hours, on the same diet, but this time with a pint of bourbon and five hundred micrograms of LSD to ward off any possibility of boredom setting in. This is a pretty extreme diet, and not all of the Angels can handle the whole spectrum of stimulation, depression, hallucinations, drunkenness and wiped-out fatigue for forty-eight hours at a time. Most try to stick with limited combinations -- such as beer, pot and Seconal; or gin, beer and bennies; or wine and LSD. But a few will go the whole route and on top of everything else shoot some methydrine or DMT and turn into total zombies for hours at a time. ________________ Notes: 1. The younger Angels -- especially those who joined after the great publicity rash -- are far more involved with the drug underground than the veterans. They are less cautious about the risks in selling and handling. The Angels have always been consumers, but in 1966 they were drifting toward a more businesslike involvement -- such as selling junk in large quantities.
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