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HELL'S ANGELS -- A STRANGE AND TERRIBLE SAGA OF THE OUTLAW MOTORCYCLE GANGS |
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Chapter 21
Lies! You're lying! You're all lying against my boys! By late summer of 1965 the Angels had become a factor to be reckoned with in the social, intellectual and political life of northern California. They were quoted almost daily in the press, and no half-bohemian party made the grade unless there were strong rumors -- circulated by the host --that the Hell's Angels would also attend. I was vaguely afflicted by this syndrome, since my name was becoming associated with the Angels and there was a feeling in the air that I could produce them whenever I felt like it. This was never true, though I did what I could to put the outlaws onto as much free booze and action as seemed advisable. At the same time I was loath to be responsible for their behavior. Their pre-eminence on so many guest lists made it inevitable that a certain amount of looting, assault and rapine would occur if they took the social whirl at full gallop. I recall one party at which I was badgered by children and young mothers because the Angels didn't show up. Most of the guests were respectable Berkeley intellectuals, whose idea of motorcycle outlaws was not consistent with reality. I told the Angels about the party and gave them the address, a quiet residential street in the East Bay, but I hoped they wouldn't come. The setting was guaranteed trouble: heaping tubs of beer, wild music and several dozen young girls looking for excitement while their husbands and varied escorts wanted to talk about "alienation" and "a generation in revolt;" Even a half dozen Angels would have quickly reduced the scene to an intolerable common denominator: Who will get fucked? It was Bass Lake all over again, but with a different breed of voyeur: this time it was the Bay Area's hip establishment, who adopted the Angels just as eagerly as any crowd of tourists at a scraggy Sierra beer market. [1] The outlaws were very much the rage. They were big, dirty and titillating ... Unlike the Beatles, who were small, clean and much too popular to be fashionable. As the Beatles drifted Out, they created a vacuum that sucked the Hell's Angels In. And right behind the outlaws came Roth saying, "They're the last American heroes we have, man." Roth was so interested in the Angels that he began producing icons to commemorate their existence -- plastic replicas of Nazi helmets with swinging slogans ("Christ was a Hype") and Iron Crosses, which he sold on the teen-age market from coast to coast. The only problem with the Angels' new image was that the outlaws themselves didn't understand it. It puzzled them to be treated as symbolic heroes by people with whom they had almost nothing in common. Yet they were gaining access to a whole reservoir of women, booze, drugs and new action -- which they were eager to get their hands on, and symbolism be damned. But they could never get the hang of the role they were expected to play, and insisted on ad-libbing the lines. This fouled their channels of communication, which made them nervous ... and after a brief whirl on the hipster party circuit, all but a few decided it was both cheaper and easier, in the long run, to buy their own booze and hustle a less complicated breed of pussy. The only really successful connection I made for the Angels was with Ken Kesey, a young novelist [2] living in the woods near La Honda, south of San Francisco. During 1965 and '66 Kesey was arrested twice for possession of marijuana and finally had to flee the country to avoid a long prison term. His association with the Hell's Angels was not calculated to calm his relationship with the forces of law and decency, but he pursued it nonetheless, and with overweening zeal. I met Kesey one afternoon in August at the studios of KQED, the educational TV station in San Francisco. We had a few beers at a nearby tavern, but I was forced to leave early because I had a Brazilian drum record to take out to Frenchy at the Box Shop. Kesey said he'd come along, and when we got there he made a great hit with the four or five Angels still on the job. After several hours of eating, drinking and the symbolic sharing of herbs, Kesey invited the Frisco chapter down to La Honda for a party on the coming weekend. He and his band of Pranksters had about six acres, with a deep creek between the house and the highway, and a general, over-crowded madness in the private sector. As it happened, nine marijuana charges against the Kesey menagerie were dropped on Friday; this was duly noted in the Saturday papers, which appeared in La Honda just about the time Kesey was posting a sign on his gate saying: THE MERRY PRANKSTERS WELCOME THE HELL'S ANGELS. The sign, in red, white and blue, was fifteen feet long and three feet high. It had a bad effect on the neighbors. When I got there, in the middle of the afternoon, five San Mateo County sheriffs' cars were parked on the highway in front of Kesey's property. About ten Angels had already arrived and were safely inside the gate; twenty others were said to be en route. The pot was boiling nicely. I had brought my wife and small son along, and we wanted to go down to the beach for a short meal before joining the festivities. Several miles down the road I stopped at the general store in San Gregorio, a crossroads community with no real population but which serves as a center for the surrounding farms. The store was quiet back around the tool, produce and harness sections, but up front at the bar, things were loud and edgy. The folks were not happy about the goings-on up the road. "That goddamn dope addict," said a middle-aged farmer. "First it's marywanna, now it's Hell's Angels. Christ alive, he's just pushin our faces in the dirt!" "Beatniks!" said somebody else. "Not worth a pound of piss." There was talk of divvying up the ax handles in the store and "goin up there to clean the place out." But somebody said the cops were already on the job: "Gonna put em in jail for good this time, every damn one of em ..." So the ax handles stayed in the rack. By nightfall Kesey's enclave was full of people, music and multi-colored lights. The police added a nice touch by parking along the highway with their own lights flashing ... red and orange blips lighting up the trees and the sheer dirt cliff across the road. Earlier that spring the Kesey estate had been raided by seventeen cops and a half dozen dogs, led by a notorious federal narcotics agent named Willie Wong. Kesey and twelve of his friends were arrested on marijuana charges, but most of these had to be dropped due to peculiarities in the search warrant. Shortly after the raid Agent Wong was transferred out of the district; and the local police made no further attempts to breach the gates. They contented themselves with lurking on the highway across the creek and checking out all those coming and going. Local sheriff's deputies stopped and questioned a steady stream of college professors, vagrants, lawyers, students, psychologists and high-style hippies. There was not much the police could do except run radio checks for unpaid traffic citations, but they did this with unflagging determination. Now and then they would roust an obvious drunk or somebody completely stoned, but during several months of intense vigil their only actual arrests netted less than a half dozen traffic fugitives. Meanwhile, the parties grew wilder and louder. There was very little marijuana, but plenty of LSD, which was then legal. The cops stood out on the highway and looked across the creek at a scene that must have tortured the very roots of their understanding. Here were all these people running wild, bellowing and dancing half naked to rock-'n'-roll sounds piped out through the trees from massive amplifiers, reeling and stumbling in a maze of psychedelic lights ... WILD, by God, and with no law to stop them. Then, with the arrival of the Hell's Angels, the cops finally got a handle -- a raison d'etre, as it were -- and they quickly tripled the guard. Kesey had finally gone over the line. A bunch of beatniks and college types eating some kind of invisible drug was a hard thing to deal with, but a gang of rotten thugs on motorcycles was as tangible a menace as the law could hope for. [3] The first party, featuring only the Frisco chapter, was a roaring success. Sometime around midnight, Pete, the drag racer, grinned as he rummaged through a beer tub and said, "Man, this is nothin but a goddamn wonderful scene. We didn't know what to expect when we came, but it turned out just fine. This time it's all ha-ha, not thump-thump." Most of the Angels were posed and defensive until they got thoroughly drunk, and a few never got over the idea that they were going to be challenged and whipped on at any moment ... but as a group, they seemed to realize that if they wanted any tension they were going to have to work pretty hard to create it on their own. Kesey's people were too busy getting out of their heads to worry about anything so raw and realistic as the Hell's Angels. Other luminaries wandered through the party (notably, poet Allen Ginsberg and Richard Alpert, the LSD guru), and although the Angels didn't know them, they were put a bit off balance by having to share the spotlight. This was Ginsberg's first encounter with the Angels, and he quickly became an aficionado. Sometime late in the evening, when it became apparent that everyone leaving the party was being grabbed by the police, Ginsberg and I drove out to see what it meant. A Volkswagen which left just ahead of us had been pulled over about a half mile down the highway, and the occupants were taken out for grilling. Our idea was to arrive on the capture scene with a tape recorder, but I barely got out of first gear before we were pulled over by another sheriff's car. I stepped out with the microphone in my hand and asked what the trouble was. The sight of the mike caused the deputies to stand mute except for the bare essentials. One asked to see my license while the other tried to ignore Ginsberg, who inquired very pleasantly and repeatedly why everyone who left the party was being seized. The cop stood with his feet apart, hands clasped behind his back and his face frozen in a dumb stare. Ginsberg continued to question him while the other deputy ran a check on my license. I enjoy listening to that encounter on tape. It sounds as if Ginsberg and I are flapping rhetorical questions at each other, with a police radio chattering in the background. Every few moments a different voice comes in with a monosyllabic utterance, but our questions are never answered. For several moments there is no talk at all --only the sound of Ginsberg humming a Near Eastern raga, backed up now and then by the spastic crackling of the Voice from Headquarters. The scene was so ridiculous that even the cops began smiling after a while. Their refusal to speak amounted to an unlikely reversal of roles, starkly emphasized by our amusement. The deputy who'd been left to deal with us was staring curiously at Ginsberg. Suddenly he asked, "How long did it take you to grow that beard?" Ginsberg stopped humming, gave the question some thought, and replied, "About two years -- no, I think it was eighteen months." The cop nodded thoughtfully ... as if he meant to grow one himself, but might not be able to invest all that time; twelve months okay, but eighteen -- well, the chief might wonder. The conversation lagged again until the radio deputy came back to report that I was clean of outstanding warrants. At this point I said I'd turn off the tape recorder if they'd engage in even the most limited conversation. They agreed, and we talked for a while. It was the Hell's Angels they were watching, they said, not Kesey. Sooner or later the hoodlums would cause bad trouble, and what the hell were they doing there anyway? They were curious about how I'd managed to find out enough to write about them. "How do you get em to talk?" said one. "You've never been beat up? They let you hang around? What's with em anyway? Are they really as bad as we hear?" I said the Angels were probably worse than they'd heard, but that they'd never given me trouble. The deputies said they didn't know anything more about the outlaws than what they'd read in the papers. We parted on good terms except for the citation they eventually got around to giving me -- for having cracked taillight lenses. Ginsberg asked why the driver of the Volkswagen had been taken away in a police car. After several minutes the radio came back with an answer: he'd failed to pay a traffic citation several months back, and the original $20 fine had grown, as fines will in California, to a current figure of $57 -- which would have to be paid in cash before the fugitive could be released. Neither Ginsberg nor I had $57, so we got the victim's name, thinking to send one of his friends after him when we got back to Kesey's. But it turned out that nobody knew him, and for all I know he is still in the Redwood City jail. The party continued for two days and nights, but the only other crisis came when the worldly inspiration [4] for the protagonist of several recent novels stood naked on the private side of the creek and screamed off a long, brutal diatribe against the cops only twenty yards away. He was swaying and yelling in the bright glare of a light from the porch, holding a beer bottle in one hand and shaking his fist at the objects of his scorn: "You sneaky motherfuckers! What the fuck's wrong with you? Come on over here and see what you get ... goddamn your shit-filled souls anyway!" Then he would laugh and wave his beer around. "Don't fuck with me, you sons of shitlovers. Come on over. You'll get every fucking thing you deserve." Luckily, somebody pulled him back to the party, still naked and yelling. His drunken challenge to the cops might have kicked off a real disaster. In California and most other states the police cannot legally invade private property without a search warrant unless (1) they are reasonably certain a crime is being committed or (2) they are "invited" by the owner or occupant of the property. His performance could have been interpreted either way if the cops had been in the mood, and at that stage in the evening a raiding party could not have made it across the bridge without violence. The Angels were in no mood to be rounded up quietly and they were too drunk to care about consequences. It didn't take long for tales of La Honda to circulate among other Angel chapters. A scouting party from Oakland checked it out and came back with such glowing reports that La Honda quickly became a mecca for Angels from all over northern California. They would arrive unannounced, usually in groups of five to fifteen, and stay until they got bored or ran out of LSD, which only a few had ever tried prior to the Kesey hookup. Long before the outlaws discovered La Honda, Kesey's freewheeling parties were already cause for alarm among respectable LSD buffs -- scientists, psychiatrists, and others in the behavioral-science fields who felt the drug should only be taken in "controlled experiment" situations, featuring carefully screened subjects under constant observation by experienced "guides." Such precautions are thought to be insurance against bad trips. Any potential flip-out who leaks through the screening process can be quickly stuffed with tranquilizers the moment he shows signs of blood lust or attempts to wrench off his own head to get a better look inside it. [5] The controlled-experiment people felt that public LSD orgies would lead to disaster for their own research. There was little optimism about what might happen when the Angels -- worshiping violence, rape and swastikas -- found themselves in a crowd of intellectual hipsters, Marxist radicals and pacifist peace marchers. It was a nervous thing to consider even if everybody could be expected to keep a straight head ... but of course that was out of the question. With everyone drunk, stoned and loaded, there was nobody capable of taking objective notes, no guides to soothe the flip-outs, no rational spectator to put out fires or hide the butcher knives ... no control at all. People who regularly attended Kesey's parties were not so worried as those who'd only heard about them. The enclave was public only in the sense that anyone who felt like it could walk through the gate on the bridge. But once inside, a man who didn't speak the language was made to feel very self-conscious. Acid freaks are not given to voluble hospitality; they stare fixedly at strangers, or look right through them. Many guests were made fearful, and never came back. Those who stayed were mainly the bohemian refugee element, whose sense of interdependence led them to spare each other the focus of their personal hostilities. For that there was always the cops, across the creek, who might come crashing in at any moment. [6] But even among the Pranksters there was enough uncertainty about the Angels that the first party was noticeably light on LSD. Then, once the threat of violence seemed to fade, there was acid in great profusion. The Angels used it cautiously at first, never bringing their own, but it didn't take them long to cultivate sources on their own turf ... so that any run to La Honda was preceded by a general mustering of the capsules, which they would take down to Kesey's and distribute, for money or otherwise. Once the outlaws accepted LSD as a righteous thing, they handled it with the same mindless zeal they bring to other pleasures. Earlier that summer the consensus was that any drug powerful enough to render a man incapable of riding a bike should be left alone ... but when the general resistance collapsed, after several Kesey parties, the Angels began to eat LSD as often as they could get their hands on it -- which was often indeed, due to their numerous contacts in the underground drug market. For several months the only limit on their consumption was a chronic shortage of cash. Given an unlimited supply of the acid, probably half the Hell's Angels then extant would have charred their brains to cinders in less than a month. As it was, their consumption pushed the limits of human toleration. They talked of little else, and many stopped talking altogether. LSD is a guaranteed cure for boredom, a malady no less prevalent among Hell's Angels than any other segment of the Great Society ... and on afternoons at the El Adobe, when nothing else was happening and there was not much money for beer, somebody like Jimmy or Terry or Skip would show up with the caps and they would all take a peaceful trip to Somewhere Else. Contrary to all expectations, most of the Angels became oddly peaceful on acid. With a few exceptions, it made them much easier to get along with. The acid dissolved many of their conditioned reflexes. There was little of the sullen craftiness or the readiness to fight that usually pervades their attitude toward strangers: The aggressiveness went out of them; they lost the bristling, suspicious quality of wild animals sensing a snare. It was a strange thing, and I still don't quite understand it. At the time I had an uneasy feeling that it was a lull before the storm, that they weren't really taking enough to get the full effect and that sooner or later the whole scene would be razed by some kind of hellish delayed reaction. Yet there was plenty of evidence that the drug was taking hold. The Angels have no regard for what psychiatrists consider the limits of safe dosage; they doubled and then tripled the recommended maximums, often dropping 800 or 1,000 micrograms in a twelve- hour span. Some went into long fits of crying and wailing, babbling incoherent requests to people nobody else could see. Others fell into catatonic slumps and said nothing for hours at a time, then sprang to life again with tales of traveling to distant lands and seeing incredible sights. One night Magoo wandered off in the woods and became panic-stricken, screaming for help until somebody led him back to the light. On another night Terry the Tramp was convinced that he'd died as a person and come back to life as a rooster which was going to be cooked on the bonfire just as soon as the music stopped. Toward the end of every dance he would rush over to the tape recorder, shouting "No! No! Don't let it stop!" An outlaw whose name I forget "skied" down an almost perpendicular two-hundred-foot cliff in full view of the police; everyone cheered as he leaped off the brink and somehow kept his balance while the heels of his boots kicked up huge sprays of dirt. The only outburst of violence involved an Angel who tried to strangle his old lady on Kesey's front steps less than a half hour after swallowing his first -- and last -- capsule. My own acid-eating experience is limited in terms of total consumption, but widely varied as to company and circumstances ... and if I had a choice of repeating any one of the half dozen bouts I recall, I would choose one of those Hell's Angels parties in La Honda, complete with all the mad lighting, cops on the road, a Ron Boise sculpture looming out of the woods, and all the big speakers vibrating with Bob Dylan's "Mr. Tambourine Man." It was a very electric atmosphere. If the Angels lent a feeling of menace, they also made it more interesting ... and far more alive than anything likely to come out of a controlled experiment or a politely brittle gathering of well-educated truth-seekers looking for wisdom in a capsule. Dropping acid with the Angels was an adventure; they were too ignorant to know what to expect, and too wild to care. They just swallowed the stuff and hung on ... which is probably just as dangerous as the experts say, but a far, far nuttier trip than sitting in some sterile chamber with a condescending guide and a handful of nervous, would-be hipsters. To my knowledge there are no cases of outlaw motorcyclists running amok on LSD; perhaps the hoodlum psyche is too unfertile to sustain the kind of secret madness that comes to life on acid. Lawmakers calling for a ban on LSD invariably cite crimes by intelligent, middle-upper-class strivers with no history of crime or thuggery. A butcher-knife murder in Brooklyn triggered a U.S. Senate investigation. The alleged killer, a brilliant graduate student, said he'd been "flying on LSD for three days" and couldn't remember what he'd done. The California State Legislature passed a stiff LSD law [7] after hearing a Los Angeles police official testify that it caused people to perch naked in trees, run screaming through the streets and get down on all fours to munch on grassy lawns. Other LSD cases feature murder, suicide and crazed behavior of all kinds. A student in Berkeley walked out a third-story window, saying, "As long as I'm going to take a trip, I might as well go to Europe." The fall killed him instantly. None of these incidents involve that element of American society usually associated with criminal behavior. Like price fixing, tax evasion and embezzlement, psychedelic crimes seem to be a vice of the fatter classes. This has nothing to do with the price of LSD, which ranges from $.75 a cap, or cube, up to $5.00 -- the maximum price for a twelve-hour trip of indeterminate intensity. Heroin, by contrast, is definitely a lower-class vice, yet it costs most addicts at least $20 a day, and usually much more. Conclusions are a bit hazy at this point, and the rash of LSD laws passed in 1965 and '66 will probably abort any meaningful research on the subject for many years. In the meantime the Kesey Experiment should be noted, pondered and perhaps expanded upon by researchers of a similar persuasion. Even in its abbreviated form, it deflated the conventional wisdom concerning (1) the nature of LSD, (2) the structure and flexibility of the hoodlum personality, or (3) both of these. [8] One of the best of the La Honda soirees was held on Labor Day weekend of 1965, the first anniversary of the Monterey rape. By this time the Angels' publicity blitz was in high gear and they were dealing constantly with the news media. Reporters and photographers were hanging around the El Adobe nearly every weekend -- asking questions, taking photos and hoping for action to beef up the next day's headlines. The Oakland police assigned a special four-man detail to keep tabs on the Angels. They would stop by the bar now and then, smiling good-naturedly through a torrent of insults, and hang around just long enough to make sure the outlaws knew they were being watched. The Angels enjoyed these visits; they were much happier talking with cops than they were with reporters or even sympathetic strangers, who were frequenting the El Adobe in ever increasing numbers. Despite the outlaws' growing notoriety, the Oakland police never put the kind of death-rattle heat on them that the other chapters were getting. Even at the peak of the heat, Barger's chapter had a special relationship with the local law. Barger explained it as a potential common front against the long-rumored Negro uprising in East Oakland, which both Negroes and Hell's Angels think of as their own turf. The cops, he said, were counting on the Angels to "keep the niggers in line." "They're more scared of the niggers than they are of us," Sonny said, "because there's a lot more of em." The Angels' relationship with Oakland Negroes is just as ambivalent as it is with the cops. Their color line is strangely gerrymandered, so that individual "good spades" are on one side and the mass of "crazy niggers" are on the other. One of the Nomads (formerly the Sacramento chapter) shares an apartment with a Negro artist who makes all the Angel parties without any hint of self-consciousness. The outlaws call him a "real good cat." "He's an artist," Jimmy told me one night at a party in Oakland. "I don't know much about art, but they say he's good." Charley is another good spade. He's a wiry little Negro who's been riding with the Angels for so long that some of them are embarrassed to explain why he's not a member. "Hell, I admire the little bastard," said one, "but he'll never get in. He thinks he will, but he won't ... shit, all it takes is two blackballs, and I could tell you who they'd be by just lookin around the room." I never asked Charley why he didn't ride with the East Bay Dragons, an all-Negro outlaw club like the Rattlers in San Francisco. The Dragons have the same kind of half-mad elan as the Angels, and a group of them wailing down the highway is every bit as spectacular. They wear multicotored helmets, and their bikes are a flashy mixture of choppers and garbage wagons -- all Harley 74s. The Dragons, like the Angels, are mainly in their twenties and more or less unemployed. Also like the Angels, they have a keen taste for the action, violent or otherwise. [9] Shortly after I met the Oakland Angels, and long before I knew the Dragons even existed, I was standing in the doorway of the El Adobe on a dull Friday night, when the parking lot suddenly filled up with about twenty big chrome-flashing bikes ridden by the wildest-looking bunch of Negroes I'd ever seen. They rolled in, gunning their engines, and dismounted with such an easy, swaggering confidence that my first 'impulse was to drop my beer and run. I had been around the Angels long enough to get the drift of their thinking on "niggers" ... and now here they were, a gang of black commandos booming right up to the Hell's Angels command post. I stepped out of the doorway to a spot where I would have a clear sprint to the street when the chain-whipping started. There were about thirty Angels at the bar that night and most of them hurried outside, still carrying their beers, to see who the visitors were. But nobody looked ready to fight. By the time the Dragons had cut their engines, the Angels were greeting them with friendly jibes about "calling the cops" and "having you bastards locked up for scaring hell out of the citizens." Barger shook hands with Lewis, the Dragons' president, and asked what was happening. "Where've you guys been hiding?" Sonny said. "If you came around here more often you might make the papers." Lewis laughed and introduced Sonny, Terry and Gut to some of the new Dragon members. Most of the black outlaws seemed to know the Angels by their first names. Some went into the bar while others drifted around the parking lot, shaking hands here and there and admiring the bikes. The talk was mainly of motorcycles, and although it was pointedly friendly, it was also a bit reserved. By this time Sonny had introduced me to Lewis and some of the others. "He's a writer," Barger said with a smile. "God only knows what he's writin, but he's good people." Lewis nodded and shook hands with me. "How you makin it?" he said. "If Sonny says you're okay with him, you're okay with us." He said it with such a wide smile that I thought he was going to laugh. Then he clapped me on the shoulder in a quick, friendly sort of way, as if to make sure I understood that he'd pegged me for an arch con man, but that he wasn't going to ruin the joke by letting Sonny in on it. The Dragons stayed about an hour, then boomed off to wherever they were going. The Angels didn't invite them to any parties later on, and I had a feeling that both groups were relieved that the visit had come off so smoothly. The Angels seemed to forget all about the Dragons just as soon as they rolled out of sight. The El Adobe shuffle resumed once again ... the familiar beery tedium, the honky-tonk blare of the juke box, bikes coming and going, balls clacking on the pool table, and the raucous, repetitious chatter of people who spend so much time together that they can only kill the boredom by getting out of their heads. Sonny left early, as he usually does, and as he mounted his black Sportster in the parking lot I remembered the Dragons and asked why they seemed on such friendly terms with the Angels. "We're not real close," he replied, "and we never will be as long as I'm president. But they're different from most niggers. They're our kind of people." I never saw the Dragons at the El Adobe again, but other Negroes who came there got a different reception. One weekend night in late August a group of four came in. They were all in their twenties, wearing sport coats without ties, and one was so big that he had to duck through the doorway. He was almost seven feet tall and weighed between 250 and 300. The place was crowded, but the four Negroes found some room at the bar and the big one struck up an apparently friendly conversation with Don Mohr, the photographer, who had just been made an honorary Angel. The rest of the outlaws ignored the newcomers, but about thirty minutes after their arrival, Mohr and the black Goliath began snarling at each other. The nature of the dispute was never made clear, but Mohr said later that he'd bought the "big nigger" two beers in the course of their conversation. "Then he ordered another one," Mohr explained, "and I told him I'd be fucked if I'd pay for it. That's all it took, man. He was lookin for trouble just by comin in here. When I told him to buy his own goddamn beer after I paid for the first two rounds he got sarcastic -- so I said let's go outside." The two were already squared off in the parking lot before the other Angels even realized a fight was in the making, but by the time the first blow landed, the combat area was enclosed in a ring of spectators. Mohr went after this huge opponent without any preliminaries; he leaped forward and swung at the Negro's head -- and that was the end of the fight. The Negro swung blindly as the others swarmed over him. He was whacked simultaneously in the stomach, the kidneys and on all sides of his head. One of his friends tried to help him but ran into Tiny's forearm and was knocked unconscious. The other two had enough sense to run. The monster reeled back for a moment, then rushed forward, still swinging, until he was hit from the side and sent sprawling. Three of the outlaws tried to hold him, but he jumped up and bulled into the bar. He didn't look hurt, but he was bleeding from several small cuts, and after being hit so often, from so many different directions, he couldn't get his bearings. He went down again but got up quickly and backed against the juke box. Until then he'd been a moving, lunging target and only two or three of the Angels had managed a solid shot at him. But now he was brought to bay. For about five seconds nothing happened. The Negro looked desperately for an opening to run through, and he was still looking when Terry's off-the-floor blockbuster caught him in the left eye. He fell back on the juke box, smashing the glass cover, and sank to the floor. For a moment he seemed done, but after a flurry of boots in the ribs he pulled one of his attackers off balance and got back on his feet. He was still straightening up when Andy, one of the frailest and least talkative of the Angels, caught him in the right eye with a frenzied running punch that would have fractured a normal man's skull. When he went down this time Sonny grabbed his collar and jerked him onto his back. A boot heel crashed into his mouth. He was helpless now, his face covered with blood, but the stomping continued. Finally they dragged him outside and dropped him face down in the parking lot. The first police car arrived just as the beating ended. Two others rolled up from different directions, then came a paddy wagon, and finally an ambulance. The Angels insisted the huge victim had pulled a knife on them and had to be subdued. The cops looked around with their flashlights, but the knife was not to be found. The Negro was in no condition to deny anything, although he regained consciousness almost immediately and was able to walk to the ambulance. This seemed to satisfy the police, at least for the time being. They took a few notes and warned Sonny that the victim might want to press charges when he came out of shock, but I had the impression that they considered the case already closed ... natural justice had prevailed. The case never came to court, but it whipped the Angels into a very agitated state of mind. There was no doubt in their heads that the niggers would try to get even. And next time it wouldn't be just four of them. Never in hell. Next time it would be massive retaliation. Probably they would strike on a moonless night ... they would wait until almost closing time, hoping to catch the Angels drunk and helpless, and then they would make their move. The dreary neon calm of East Fourteenth Street would be shattered without warning by the screeching of primitive bone whistles. Wave after wave of sweaty black bodies would move out of the command post -- the Doggie Diner on East Twenty-third -- and move silently through the streets to their positions on the attack perimeter, about four hundred yards from the El Adobe. Then, when the bone whistles sounded, the first wave of niggers would run like the devil across East Fourteenth, ignoring the red light, and fall on the Angels with savage homemade weapons. Every time I talked to the Angels in the weeks after the Big Nigger incident they warned me that the cork was ready to blow. "We're pretty sure it's gonna be Saturday night," Sonny would tell me. "We got the word from a fink." I assured him that I wanted to be there when the attack came, and I did. Several months earlier I would have laughed the whole thing off as some kind of twisted, adolescent delusion ... but after spending most of that summer in the drunk-bloody, whore-walloping taverns of East Oakland, I had changed my ideas about reality and the human animal. One weekend night in late summer I got out of my car in the El Adobe lot. Somebody called my name in a high-pitched whisper and I nodded to the handful of Angels standing near the doorway. I heard the whisper again, but none of the people I could see had said anything. Then I realized somebody was on the roof. I looked up and saw Sonny's head peering over the concrete ledge. "Around back," he hissed. "There's a ladder." Behind the building, in a jumble of garbage cans, I found a twenty-foot ladder leading up to the roof. I climbed up to find Sonny and Zorro lying in a corner, almost invisible in a maze of peeling tar paper. Sonny had an AR-16, the newest U.S. Army rifle, and Zorro had an M-1 carbine. Piled between them on the roof was a stack of ammunition in boxes and clips, a flashlight and a thermos bottle of coffee. They were waiting for the niggers, they said. This was the night. It wasn't -- but the Angels kept armed guards on the roof of the El Adobe for nearly a month, until they were sure the niggers were completely intimidated. One afternoon at the height of the tension Barger and five others rode their bikes out to a target range in Alameda. They carried their rifles strapped over their backs and took a route through the middle of Oakland. The police telephone hummed with reports of a heavily armed Hell's Angel patrol moving south through the center of town. But there was nothing the cops could do. The outlaws had their unloaded guns in plain sight and were observing the speed limit. They felt they needed some target practice ... and if their appearance had a bad effect on the public, well, that was the public's problem, not theirs. Most of the Angels know better than to carry weapons openly, but some of their homes resemble private arsenals -- knives, revolvers, automatic rifles and even a homemade armored car with a machine-gun turret on top. They don't like to talk about their weaponry ... it's their only insurance policy against that day when the Main Cop decides on a showdown, and the Angels are absolutely certain that day is coming.
No, I wouldn't call them "racists." Not really. Maybe deep
down they are. There ain't no
Negro Angels, you notice. But the
Angels ain't for anybody, and
that makes them anti-Negro and
just about anything else. In the language of politics and public relations the Angels "peaked" in the fall of 1965. The Labor Day Run to Kesey's was a letdown of sorts, because towns all over the country were braced for the invasion, waiting to be raped and pillaged. The National Guard was called out at such far-flung points as Parker, Arizona, and Claremont, Indiana. Canadian police set up a special border watch near Vancouver, British Columbia; and in Ketchum, Idaho, the locals mounted a machine gun on the roof of a Main Street drugstore. "We're ready for those punks," said the sheriff. "We'll put half of em in jail and the other half in the graveyard." The Angels' jaunt to La Honda was a sad anticlimax for the press. The outlaws did a lot of strange, high-speed traveling, but it was not in the realm of the five W's. One of my memories of that weekend is Terry the Tramp's keynote speech delivered to the police on the highway. He got hold of a microphone tied up to some powerful speakers and used the opportunity to unburden his mind ... addressing the police in a very direct way, speaking of morals and music and madness, and finishing on a high, white note which the San Mateo sheriff's department will not soon forget: "Remember this," he screamed into the mike. "Just remember that while you're standin out there on that cold road, doin your righteous duty and watchin all us sex fiends and dope addicts in here having a good time ... just think about that little old wife of yours back home with some dirty old Hell's Angel crawlin up between her thighs!" Then a burst of wild laughter, clearly audible on the road. "What do you think about that, you worthless fuzz? You gettin hungry? We'll bring you some chili if we have any left over ... but don't hurry home, let your wife enjoy herself." It was hard to know, in the triumphant chaos of that Labor Day, that the Angels were on the verge of blowing one of the best connections they'd ever had. Busting up country towns was old stuff, and the cops were getting tense about it. The hippie drug scene was a brand-new dimension -- a different gig, as it were -- but as the Vietnam war became more and more a public issue the Angels were put in a bind. For several months they'd been drifting toward political involvement, but the picture was hazy and one of the most confusing elements was their geographical proximity to Berkeley, the citadel of West Coast radicalism. Berkeley is right next door to Oakland, with nothing between them but a line on the map and a few street signs, but in many ways they are as different as Manhattan and the Bronx. Berkeley is a college town and, like Manhattan, a magnet for intellectual transients. Oakland is a magnet for people who want hour-wage jobs and cheap housing, who can't afford to live in Berkeley, San Francisco or any of the middle-class Bay Area suburbs. [10] It is a noisy, ugly, mean-spirited place, with the sort of charm that Chicago had for Sandburg. It is also a natural environment for hoodlums, brawlers, teenage gangs and racial tensions. The Hell's Angels' massive publicity -- coming hard on the heels of the widely publicized student rebellion in Berkeley -- was interpreted in liberal-radical-intellectual circles as the signal for a natural alliance. Beyond that, the Angels' aggressive, antisocial stance -- their alienation, as it were -- had a tremendous appeal for the more aesthetic Berkeley temperament. Students who could barely get up the nerve to sign a petition or to shoplift a candy bar were fascinated by tales of the Hell's Angels ripping up towns and taking whatever they wanted. Most important, the Angels had a reputation for defying police, for successfully bucking authority, and to the frustrated student radical this was a powerful image indeed. The Angels didn't masturbate, they raped. They didn't come on with theories and songs and quotations, but with noise and muscle and sheer balls. The honeymoon lasted about three months and came to a jangled end on October 16, when the Hell's Angels attacked a Get Out Of Vietnam demonstration at the Oakland-Berkeley border. The existential heroes who had passed the joint with Berkeley liberals at Kesey's parties suddenly turned into venomous beasts, rushing on the same liberals with flailing fists and shouts of "Traitors," "Communists," "Beatniks!" When push came to shove, the Hell's Angels lined up solidly with the cops, the Pentagon and the John Birch Society. And there was no joy that day in Berkeley, for Casey had apparently gone mad. The attack was an awful shock to those who had seen the Hell's Angels as pioneers of the human spirit, but to anyone who knew them it was entirely logical. The Angels' collective viewpoint has always been fascistic. They insist and seem to believe that their swastika fetish is no more than an antisocial joke, a guaranteed gimmick to bug the squares, the taxpayers -- all those they spitefully refer to as citizens. What they really mean is the Middle Class, the Bourgeoisie, the Burghers -- but the Angels don't know these terms and they're suspicious of anyone who tries to explain them. If they wanted to be artful about bugging the squares they would drop the swastika and decorate their bikes with the hammer and sickle. That would really raise hell on the freeways ... hundreds of Communist thugs roaming the countryside on big motorcycles, looking for trouble.
The first clash came on a Saturday afternoon, at the midway point of a protest march from the Berkeley campus to the Oakland Army Terminal, a shipping point for men and materiel bound for the Far East. Some fifteen thousand demonstrators moved down Telegraph Avenue, one of the main streets of Berkeley, and came face to face -- at the city limits -- with a four-hundred-man wall of Oakland police wearing helmets and holding riot sticks at port arms. They were deployed in a flying wedge formation, with Police Chief Toothman in the central, ball-carrier's position, giving orders over many walkie-talkies. It was obvious that the march was not going to cross the Oakland line without a fight. I approached the confrontation from the Oakland side -- but even with a tape recorder, camera and press credentials, it took almost thirty minutes to get through the no man's land of the police wall. Most people -- even some legitimate journalists -- were turned back. So it is still beyond my understanding how a dozen Hell's Angels, obviously intent on causing trouble, managed to filter through and attack the leaders of the protest march as they came forward to confer with Chief Toothman. Tiny led the charge, swinging at anyone unlucky enough to be in his way. The Angels were quickly subdued by Berkeley police, but not before they managed to punch a few people, tear up some signs and rip microphone wires off the march leaders' sound truck. This was the infamous struggle that resulted in the cop's broken leg. It was all a misunderstanding, the hipster commandos said, explaining the attack: the Angels were duped by the cops, their heads had been turned by secret Right Wing money, and they would certainly adjust their allegiance just as soon as they knew the score. But the score was a lot more complicated than the hipsters realized. Another Vietnam protest was scheduled for mid-November, and in the meantime there were numerous meetings between the antiwar brain trust and the Hell's Angels. Barger would sit in his living room and listen patiently to everything the Vietnam Day Committee had to say, then brush it all aside. The Berkeley people argued long and well, but they never understood that they were talking on a different frequency. It didn't matter how many beards, busts or acid caps they could muster; Sonny considered them all chickenshit -- and that was that. The Angels, like all other motorcycle outlaws, are rigidly anti-Communist. Their political views are limited to the same kind of retrograde patriotism that motivates the John Birch Society, the Ku Klux Klan and the American Nazi Party. They are blind to the irony of their role ... knight errants of a faith from which they have already been excommunicated. The Angels will be among the first to be locked up or croaked if the politicians they think they agree with ever come to power. During the weeks preceding the second march on the Oakland Army Terminal, Allen Ginsberg spent much of his time trying to persuade Barger and his people not to attack the marchers. On the Wednesday before the march Ginsberg, Kesey, Neal Cassidy, some of Kesey's Pranksters and a group of Angels met at Barger's house in Oakland. A lot of LSD was taken, foolish political discussion was resolved by phonograph voices of Joan Baez and Bob Dylan, all concluding with the whole group chanting the text of the Prajnaparamita Sutra, the Buddhist Highest, Perfect Wisdom Sermon. The outlaws had never met anyone quite like Ginsberg: they considered him otherworldly. "That goddamn Ginsberg is gonna fuck us all up," said Terry. "For a guy that ain't straight at all, he's about the straightest sonofabitch I've ever seen. Man, you shoulda been there when he told Sonny he loved him ... Sonny didn't know what the hell to say." The Angels never really understood what Ginsberg meant, but his unnerving frankness and the fact that Kesey liked him gave them second thoughts about attacking a march that he obviously considered a Right thing. Shortly before the November march, Ginsberg published this speech in the Berkeley Barb:
TO THE ANGELS
These are the thoughts -- anxieties -- of anxious marchers
That leaves the Marchers with choice of defending them-
or not defending selves, and possibly abandoned by police
As it stands the VDC adopted policy of pacifism for marchers, ***
Do Angels have any questions for Vietnam Day Committee?
What do the Angels plan to do Nov. 20? Do they really have
Because the Fearheads around the VDC public meetings
You don't want to "change" you want to be yrselves, ***
The protest march is trying to point out
Ultimately on you and each other. **
I said we were not politicians mostly. And you say ***
What ELSE, besides this politics, will take the heat
That heat's on everybody, not just you
To take the heat off, you've got
Take the heat -- Anxiety Paranoia --
Forcing self, others and police into a corner
Yes time to take the heat symbolism off the Swastika ***
I called Beatnick or Vietnick not want a way that is not ***
What is the way out of the heat
The heat is human, emotional, not a law
How many Angels really dig your political position
If you dig POT why don't you dig that the whole
There are some rigid souls -- who believe the universe is
All separate identities are bankrupt
Hell's Angels & Tiny Intervention has probably had good OR
How much the march will be a free expression -- Delivered as a speech at San Jose State College, Monday November 15, 1965, before students and representatives of Bay Area Hell's Angels Despite Ginsberg's pleas, Sonny told me a week before the march that he was going to meet it with "the biggest bunch of outlaw bikes anybody ever saw in California." Allen and his friends meant well, he said, but they just didn't know what was happening. So it came as a real surprise when, on November 19 -- the day before the march -- the Angels called a press conference to announce that they would not man the barricades. The explanation, in the form of a mimeographed press release, said: "Although we have stated our intention to counterdemonstrate at this despicable, un-American activity, we believe that in the interest of public safety and the protection of the good name of Oakland, we should not justify the V.D.C. by our presence ... because our patriotic concern for what these people are doing to our great nation may provoke us to violent acts ... [and that] any physical encounter would only produce sympathy for this mob of traitors." The highlight of the press conference was the reading, by Barger, of a telegram he had already sent to His Excellency, the President of the United States:
PRESIDENT LYNDON B. JOHNSON Dear Mr. President: On behalf of myself and my associates I volunteer a group of loyal Americans for behind the lines duty in Viet Nam. We feel that a crack group of trained gorrillas [sic] would demoralize the Viet Cong and advance the cause of freedom. We are available for training and duty immediately.
Sincerly For reasons never divulged, Mr. Johnson was slow to capitalize on Barger's offer and the Angels never went to Vietnam. But they didn't bust up the November 20 protest march either, and some people said this meant the outlaws were coming around.
We don't have a police problem
in this community -- we have a
people problem. It was about this time that my long-standing rapport with the Angels began to deteriorate. All the humor went out of the act when they began to believe their own press clippings, and it was no longer much fun to drink with them. Even the names lost their magic. Instead of Bagmaster, Scuzzy and Hype, it was Luther Young, E.O. Stuurm and Norman Scarlet III. There was no more mystery; overexposure had reduced the menace to an all-too-common denominator, and as the group portrait became more understandable it also became less appealing. For nearly a year I had lived in a world that seemed, at first, like something original. It was obvious from the beginning that the menace bore little resemblance to its publicized image, but there was a certain pleasure in sharing the Angels' amusement at the stir they'd created. Later, as they attracted more and more attention, the mystique was stretched so thin that it finally became transparent. One afternoon as I sat in the El Adobe and watched an Angel sell a handful of barbiturate pills to a brace of pimply punks no more than sixteen, I realized that the roots of this act were not in any time-honored American myth but right beneath my feet in a new kind of society that is only beginning to take shape. To see the Hell's Angels as caretakers of the old "individualist" tradition "that made this country great" is only a painless way to get around seeing them for what they really are -- not some romantic leftover, but the first wave of a future that nothing in our history has prepared us to cope with. The Angels are prototypes. Their lack of education has not only rendered them completely useless in a highly technical economy, but it has also given them the leisure to cultivate a powerful resentment ... and to translate it into a destructive cult which the mass media insists on portraying as a sort of isolated oddity, a temporary phenomenon that will shortly become extinct now that it's been called to the attention of the police. This is a reassuring viewpoint and it would be even more so if the police shared it. Unfortunately, they don't. Cops who know the Angels only from press accounts are sometimes afraid of them, but familiarity seems to breed contempt, and cops who know the Angels from experience usually dismiss them as an overrated threat. On the other hand, at least 90 percent of the dozens of cops I talked to all over California were seriously worried about what they referred to as "the rising tide of lawlessness," or "the dangerous trend toward lack of respect for law and order." To them the Hell's Angels are only a symptom of a much more threatening thing ... the Rising Tide. "Mainly it's the teenagers," said a young patrolman in Santa Cruz. "Five years ago it was only a matter of talking to them, telling them in a friendly kind of way just what they could or couldn't get away with. They were just as wild, I guess, but you knew they would listen to reason." He shrugged, fingering the .38 Special cartridges that circled his waist. "But now, goddamnit, it's different. You never know when some kid's going to swing on you, or pull a gun, or maybe just take off running. The badge doesn't mean a damn thing to them. They've lost all respect for it, all fear. Hell, I'd rather bust a dozen Hell's Angels every day of the week than have to break up one fight at a big high school beer party. With the motorcycle crowd you at least know what you're up against, but these kids are capable of anything. I mean it, they give me the creeps. I used to understand them, but not any more." The trends and problems of law enforcement have never interested the Angels, however, and even after their temporary detente with the Oakland police, they still viewed cops very simply as the enemy. Nor do they take much interest in their emotional or ideological connection to other rebellious elements. To them all comparisons are either presumptuous or insulting. "There's only two kinds of people in the world," Magoo explained one night. "Angels, and people who wish they were Angels." Yet not even Magoo really believes that. When the party swings right, with plenty of beer and broads, being an Angel is a pretty good way to go. But on some of those lonely afternoons when you're fighting a toothache and trying to scrape up a few dollars to pay a traffic fine and the landlord has changed the lock on your door until you pay the back rent ... then it's no fun being an Angel. It's hard to laugh when your teeth are so rotten that they hurt all the time and no dentist will touch you unless the bill is paid in advance. So it helps to believe, when the body rot starts to hurt, that the pain is a small price to pay for the higher rewards of being a righteous Angel. This wavering paradox is a pillar of the outlaw stance. A man who has blown all his options can't afford the luxury of changing his ways. He has to capitalize on whatever he has left, and he can't afford to admit -- no matter how often he's reminded of it -- that every day of his life takes him farther down a blind alley. Most Angels understand where they are, but not why, and they are well enough grounded in the eternal verities to know that very few of the toads in this world are Charming Princes in disguise. Most are simply toads, and no matter how many magic maidens they kiss or rape, they are going to stay that way ... Toads don't make laws or change any basic structures, but one or two rooty insights can work powerful changes in the way they get through life. A toad who believes he got a raw deal before he even knew who was dealing will usually be sympathetic to the mean, vindictive ignorance that colors the Hell's Angels' view of humanity. There is not much mental distance between a feeling of having been screwed and the ethic of total retaliation, or at least the kind of random revenge that comes with outraging the public decency. The outlaw stance is patently antisocial, although most Angels, as individuals, are naturally social creatures. The contradiction is deep-rooted and has parallels on every level of American society. Sociologists call it "alienation," or "anomie." It is a sense of being cut off, or left out of whatever society one was presumably meant to be a part of. In a strongly motivated society the victims of anomie are usually extreme cases, isolated from each other by differing viewpoints or personal quirks too private for any broad explanation. But in a society with no central motivation, so far adrift and puzzled with itself that its President [11] feels called upon to appoint a Committee on National Goals, a sense of alienation is likely to be very popular -- especially among people young enough to shrug off the guilt they're supposed to feel for deviating from a goal or purpose they never understood in the first place. Let the old people wallow in the shame of having failed. The laws they made to preserve a myth are no longer pertinent; the so-called American Way begins to seem like a dike made of cheap cement, with many more leaks than the law has fingers to plug. America has been breeding mass anomie since the end of World War II. It is not a political thing, but the sense of new realities, of urgency, anger and sometimes desperation in a society where even the highest authorities seem to be grasping at straws. In the terms of our Great Society the Hell's Angels and their ilk are losers -- dropouts, failures and malcontents. They are rejects looking for a way to get even with a world in which they are only a problem. The Hell's Angels are not visionaries, but diehards, and if they are the forerunners or the vanguard of anything it is not the "moral revolution" in vogue on college campuses, but a fast-growing legion of young unemployables whose untapped energy will inevitably find the same kind of destructive outlet that "outlaws" like the Hell's Angels have been finding for years. The difference between the student radicals and the Hell's Angels is that the students are rebelling against the past, while the Angels are fighting the future. Their only common ground is their disdain for the present, or the status quo. It goes without saying that some of the student radicals in Berkeley and on dozens of other campuses, are as wild and aggressive as any Hell's Angels -- and that not all the Angels are cruel thugs and potential Nazis. This was especially true before the Angels got all their publicity. As recently as early 1965 there were less than a half dozen Angels who gave a hoot in hell what was happening on the Berkeley campus. If they'd been seriously interested in Red-baiting, they would have made an appearance at some of the free-speech rallies. But they didn't show up. Not even to swagger through the crowds and get their pictures in the papers. Nor -- at about the same time -- did they harass CORE's picket lines in Jack London Square, in the middle of downtown Oakland. Even in the spring and early summer of 1965, when they were beginning to realize the extent of their infamy, they ignored several golden opportunities to tangle with both civil rights and Get Out of Vietnam demonstrators. They simply didn't care. Or at least not enough of them cared ... and not all of them care even now. But the burden of fame made the Hell's Angels very conscious of their image; they began reading the newspapers like politicians, looking for mention of things they had said or done. And as they dealt more and more with the press, they were inevitably asked to comment on the issues of the day. ("Tell me, Sonny, do the Hell's Angels have any position on the war in Vietnam?" ... "How do you feel about the civil rights movement, Tiny?") The answers made good copy and it wasn't long before the Angels discovered they could call a press conference, [12] complete with TV cameras, for the purpose of delivering various screeds and pronouncements. The news media loved it, and although many of the items on the Angels were rendered with considerable humor, the outlaws never noticed. They got a great hoot out of seeing themselves on TV, and by the time things had come to this pass, there was no question of any ideological deviation within the club. Barger and the other officers spoke for the whole organization, and anybody who didn't agree could hang up his colors. None did, of course, even though Barger and perhaps two or three others were the only Angels with any kind of political awareness. But if Sonny had a beef with some pinko demonstrators, then by God, they all had a beef. And that was the way it went. Yet there were shreds of evidence, toward the end of 1965, that the La Honda atmosphere was having a gradual effect. One afternoon several weeks before the political crisis Terry was sitting m the El Adobe, sipping a beer and talking thoughtfully about the difference between the Angels and the hipster-radical types he'd been partying with: "You know, sometimes I think we ain't makin it," he said. "These other people at least got somethin goin for em. They're fuck-ups, too, but they're constructive. We're too goddamn negative. Our whole bit is destructive. I can't see any way out for us if we can't find some other kind of scene besides tearin things up." Six months earlier the Angels' only real problem had been keeping out of jail, but now they were engage and had to sit through meetings with other people who were engage. A few of the outlaws thrived on the new gig, but for most it was only a drag. And to those who could look back on a decade or more of hostile isolation, it seemed like the end of an era.
No more self-defeating device
could be discovered than the one
society has developed in dealing
with the criminal. It proclaims
his career in such loud and dramatic forms that both he and the
community accept the judgment as a fixed description. He becomes conscious of himself as a
criminal, and the community expects him to live up to his reputation, and will not credit him if
he does not live up to it. Far from being freaks, the Hell's Angels are a logical product of the culture that now claims to be shocked at their existence. The generation represented by the editors of Time has lived so long in a world full of Celluloid outlaws hustling toothpaste and hair oil that it is no longer capable of confronting the real thing. For twenty years they have sat with their children and watched yesterday's outlaws raise hell with yesterday's world ... and now they are bringing up children who think Jesse James is a television character. This is the generation that went to war for Mom, God and Apple Butter, the American Way of Life. When they came back, they crowned Eisenhower and then retired to the giddy comfort of their TV parlors, to cultivate the subtleties of American history as seen by Hollywood. To them the appearance of the Hell's Angels must have seemed like a wonderful publicity stunt. In a nation of frightened dullards there is a sorry shortage of outlaws, and those few who make the grade are always welcome: Frank Sinatra, Alexander King, Elizabeth Taylor, Raoul Duke ... they have that extra "something."
Charles Starkweather had something extra too, but he couldn't get an agent, and instead of taking his vitality to Hollywood, he freaked out in Wyoming and killed a dozen people for reasons he couldn't explain. So the state put him to death. There were other outlaws who missed the brass ring in the fifties. Lenny Bruce was one; he was never quite right for television. Bruce had tremendous promise until about 1961, when the people who'd been getting such a kick out of him suddenly realized he was serious. Just like Starkweather was serious ... and like the Hell's Angels are serious. Soon after the Post article appeared, the Associated Press put this item on the wire, with a Detroit dateline: "A gang of seven teen-age terrorists -- 13, 14 and 15 years old -- has been broken up, police said yesterday. Police said the boys perpetrated arson, armed robbery, burglary and cruelty to animals. The gang usually wore hoods, made of pillowcases. They called themselves 'The Bylaws' and named Jews, Negroes and Frats (well-dressed students) as hate objects." Several months earlier the United Press International wire carried this item, from Dallas, headed: MOB BLOCKS RESCUE. Firemen attempting to reach a burning home in south Dallas Thursday night were blocked by a group of 60 yelling, heckling youths who refused to move out of the street. The firemen called police. Several carloads of police, using dogs, finally dispersed the young hecklers, whom they described as "wild punks." The youths threatened and fought with police. Firemen who then were able to make their way into the burning house found the limp form of Patrick Chambers, two. But it was too late. The child was pronounced dead on arrival at a hospital. His mother, Mrs. Geneva Chambers, 31, and a neighbor, Mrs. Jessie Jones, 27, were hospitalized in shock. "If your police want trouble, they've come to the right place and we'll take care of you, too," a fire department spokesman quoted one of the youths as saying. Firemen said when they tried to revive the baby on the lawn, several youths ran up and "tried to stomp on the dead baby." A woman and two men, part of the growing crowd of 400 persons, were arrested. Police said the woman scratched and slapped a policeman. The men jumped on policemen trying to prevent the woman from attacking the officer.
As you were, I was Now, looking for labels, it is hard to call the Hell's Angels anything but mutants. They are urban outlaws with a rural ethic and a new, improvised style of self-preservation. Their image of themselves derives mainly from Celluloid, from the Western movies and two-fisted TV shows that have taught them most of what they know about the society they live in. Very few read books, and in most cases their formal education ended at fifteen or sixteen. What little they know of history has come from the mass media, beginning with comics ... so if they see themselves in terms of the past, it's because they can't grasp the terms of the present, much less the future. They are the sons of poor men and drifters, losers and the sons of losers. Their backgrounds are overwhelmingly ordinary. As people, they are like millions of other people. But in their collective identity they have a peculiar fascination so obvious that even the press has recognized it, although not without cynicism. In its ritual flirtation with reality the press has viewed the Angels with a mixture of awe, humor and terror -- justified, as always, by a slavish dedication to the public appetite, which most journalists find so puzzling and contemptible that they have long since abandoned the task of understanding it to a handful of poll-takers and "experts." The widespread appeal of the Angels is worth pondering. Unlike most other rebels, the Angels have given up hope that the world is going to change for them. They assume, on good evidence, that the people who run the social machinery have little use for outlaw motorcyclists, and they are reconciled to being losers. But instead of losing quietly, one by one, they have banded together with a mindless kind of loyalty and moved outside the framework, for good or ill. They may not have an answer, but at least they are still on their feet. One night about halfway through one of their weekly meetings I thought of Joe Hill on his way to face a Utah firing squad and saying his final words: "Don't mourn. Organize." It is safe to say that no Hell's Angel has ever heard of Joe Hill or would know a Wobbly from a bushmaster, but there is something very similar about the attitudes. The Industrial Workers of the World had serious blueprints for society, while the Hell's Angels mean only to defy the social machinery. There is no talk among the Angels of "building a better world," yet their reactions to the world they live in are rooted in the same kind of anarchic, paralegal sense of conviction that brought the armed wrath of the Establishment down on the Wobblies. There is the same kind of suicidal loyalty, the same kind of in-group rituals and nicknames, and above all the same feeling of constant warfare with an unjust world. The Wobblies were losers, and so are the Angels ... and if every loser in this country today rode a motorcycle the whole highway system would have to be modified. There is an important difference between the words "loser" and "outlaw." One is passive and the other is active, and the main reasons the Angels are such good copy is that they are acting out the daydreams of millions of losers who don't wear any defiant insignia and who don't know how to be outlaws. The streets of every city are thronged with men who would pay all the money they could get their hands on to be transformed -- even for a day -- into hairy, hard-fisted brutes who walk over cops, extort free drinks from terrified bartenders and thunder out of town on big motorcycles after raping the banker's daughter. Even people who think the Angels should all be put to sleep find it easy to identify with them. They command a fascination, however reluctant, that borders on psychic masturbation. The Angels don't like being called losers, but they have learned to live with it. "Yeah, I guess I am," said one. "But you're looking at one loser who's going to make a hell of a scene on the way out." _________________ Notes: 1. It reminded me of a cartoon in The Realist showing the World's Fair Poverty Pavilion. 2. One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest and Sometimes a Great Notion. 3. Several months later, when Kesey came to trial on the first marijuana charge, one of the conditions attached to his relatively light six months' jail sentence was that he sell his property and leave San Mateo County -- permanently. Which he did, but he moved a little farther than the authorities had in mind. On January 31, 1966, Kesey jumped bail and disappeared. A suicide note was found in his abandoned bus on the northern California coast, but not even the police believed he was dead. Results of my own investigation are very hazy, although I managed -- after many months of digging -- to locate his forwarding address: c/o Agricultural Attache 4. Name deleted at insistence of publisher's lawyers. 5. There is a minority opinion among acid-eaters that the solemn preparations for a controlled LSD experiment might produce more bad trips than they prevent. Many "subjects" are so rigidly indoctrinated by what they've read and heard that by the time they finally swallow the capsule, their reactions have already been articulated in their own minds. When the experience deviates from their preconceived notions -- or shatters them altogether -- they are 1ikely to panic. And panic is always a bad trip, with or without acid. 6. In retrospect I think the cops' restraint was not entirely rooted in the knowledge that any illegal arrests might cause them embarrassment later, in the courtroom. I'm sure they also felt that if they waited long enough the loonies in Kesey's enclave would destroy each other, thus saving the taxpayers the expense of loading court dockets with complicated trials. 7. In June 1966. 8. After three or four months of chronic overindulgence on acid, most of the Angels began tapering off. A few suffered terrifying hallucinations and swore off the drug entirely. Some said they were afraid it would drive them crazy or cause them to wreck their bikes. By 1966 only a few were still eating acid with any consistency. One of these told me LSD was the best thing that ever happened to him. "I haven't had a worry since I took the first cap," he said. In September of '66 Kesey returned to California unannounced and made a series of brief appearances at "underground " parties and press conferences. He said he'd decided, after six months south of the border, to return to this country as "a permanent fugitive and salt in the wounds of J. Edgar Hoover." Kesey's red panel truck was either too slow, or his driver too inept, to avoid J. Edgar's hounds. As this was written he was free on more than $30,000 bail and awaiting trial on charges that could send him to prison for one to five years. My own feeling is that he should have stayed in Asunci6n and gotten a job. 9. The Rattlers are generally older. The club dates back to the days of the Booze Fighters. "The Rattlers had a lot of class in the old days," one of the Oakland Angels lamented. "But all they do now is sit I around their bar and play dominoes." 10. Oakland's official population is nearly four hundred thousand, but it is the center of a vastly urban sprawl called the East Bay, with a population of about two million -- more than twice the size of San Francisco. 11. Eisenhower. 12. At one press conference in Oakland, held at the downtown office of the Angels' bondswoman, I counted forty-two reporters on hand and thirteen microphones massed in front of Barger while he spoke -- and five TV cameras.
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