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HELL'S ANGELS -- A STRANGE AND TERRIBLE SAGA OF THE OUTLAW MOTORCYCLE GANGS |
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Chapter 3
Indeed I tremble for my country when I reflect that God
is just. According to Attorney General Lynch's own figures, California's overall crime picture makes the Angels look like a gang of petty jack-rollers. The police counted 463 Hell's Angels: 205 around Los Angeles, 233 in the San Francisco-Oakland area, and the rest scattered widely around the state. These woeful departures from reality made it hard to accept their other statistics. The dubious package cited Hell's Angel convictions on 1,023 misdemeanor counts and 151 felonies -- primarily vehicle theft, burglary and assault. This was for all years and all alleged members, including many long since retired. California's overall figures for 1963 showed 1,116 homicides, 12,448 aggravated assaults, 6,257 sex offenses and 24,532 burglaries. In 1962 the state listed 4,121 traffic deaths, up from 3,839 in 1961. Drug-arrest figures for 1964 showed a 101 percent increase in juvenile marijuana arrests over 1963, and a 1965 back-page story in the San Francisco Examiner said, "The venereal disease rate among [the city's] teen-agers from 15 to 19 has more than doubled in the past four years." Even allowing for the annual population jump, juvenile arrests in all categories are rising by 10 percent or more each year. Late in 1965 Governor Edmund "Pat" Brown, a Democrat, was berated by Republicans in the Legislature for "remaining aloof" to the threat of the rising crime rate, which they said had jumped 70 percent during his seven years in office. Against this background, it is hard to see how it would make any difference to the safety and peace of mind of the average Californian if every motorcycle outlaw in the state (all 901, according to the police) were garroted within twenty-four hours. If the "Hell's Angels Saga" proved any one thing, it was the awesome power of the New York press establishment. The Hell's Angels as they exist today were virtually created by Time, Newsweek and The New York Times. The Times is the heavyweight champion of American journalism. On nine stories out of ten the paper lives up to its reputation. Yet the editors make no claims to infallibility, and now and then they will blow the whole duke. It would be senseless to try to list these failures, and besides that the purpose of this harangue is not to nail any one newspaper or magazine -- but to point out the potentially massive effect of any story whose basic structure is endorsed and disseminated not only by Time and Newsweek, but by the hyper-prestigious New York Times. The Times took the Lynch report at face value and simply reprinted it in very condensed form. The headline said: CALIFORNIA TAKES STEPS TO CURB TERRORISM OF RUFFIAN CYCLISTS. The bulk of the article was straight enough, but the lead was pure fiction: "A hinterland tavern is invaded by a group of motorcycle hoodlums. They seize a female patron and rape her. Departing, they brandish weapons and threaten bystanders with dire reprisals if they tell what they saw. Authorities have trouble finding a communicative witness, let alone arresting and prosecuting the offenders." This incident never occurred. It was created, as a sort of journalistic montage, by the correspondent who distilled the report. But the Times is neither written nor edited by fools, and anyone who has worked on a newspaper for more than two months knows how technical safeguards can be built into even the wildest story, without fear of losing reader impact. What they amount to, basically, is the art of printing a story without taking legal responsibility for it. The word "alleged" is a key to this art. Other keys are "so-and-so said" (or "claimed"), "it was reported" and "according to." In fourteen short newspaper paragraphs, the Times story contained nine of these qualifiers. The two most crucial had to do with the Hollywood lead and the "'alleged gang rape last Labor Day of two girls, 14 and 15 years old, by five to ten members of the Hell's Angels gang on the beach at Monterey" (my italics). Nowhere in the story was it either reported or implied that the Monterey charges had long since been dropped -- according to page one of the report being quoted. The result was a piece of slothful, emotionally biased journalism, a bad hack job that wouldn't have raised an eyebrow or stirred a ripple had it appeared in most American newspapers ... but the Times is a heavyweight even when it's wrong, and the effect of this article was to put the seal of respectability on a story that was, in fact, a hysterical, politically motivated accident. Had Time and Newsweek never touched the story, the New York-based mass media would have jumped on it anyway. A social cancer had been uncovered by the nation's leading newspaper. And then one week later came the Time-Newsweek double-barreled blast that really put the Angels over the top. What followed was an orgy of publicity. The long-dormant Hell's Angels got eighteen years' worth of exposure in six months, and it naturally went to their heads. Until the Monterey rape they were bush-league hoods known only to California cops and a few thousand cycle buffs. For whatever it was worth, they were the state's biggest and most notorious motorcycle gang. Among outlaws their primacy was undisputed -- and nobody else cared. Then, as a result of the Monterey incident, they made the front page of every daily in California, including the Los Angeles, Sacramento and San Francisco papers -- which are scanned and clipped each day by researchers for Time and Newsweek. Some of the stories said the victims had been roasting weenies on the beach with their two dates -- who fought like tigers to save them -- when an advance party of some four thousand Hell's Angels suddenly surrounded the campfire and said things like: "Don't worry, kid, we're just going to break the girls in for you." (And then, according to one account: "The bearded one pressed his hairy lips to hers. She screamed and struggled. He and another Angel picked her up and hauled her, screaming, into the darkness. A piercing scream was followed by a deep-throated curse ...") HELL'S ANGELS RAPE TEEN-AGERS Yet only two of the eighteen specific outrages cited in the Lynch report occurred after Labor Day of 1964, and both of these were bar brawls. So the story was just as available to the press on the day after the Monterey rape as it was six months later, when the Attorney General called a press conference and handed it out in a neat white package, one to each news hawk. Until then nobody had shown much interest ... or they hadn't had time, for in the fall of 1964 the press was putting every available talent on the national-election story. It was, after all, a real humdinger. All manner of crucial issues were said to be hanging in the balance, and somebody had to keep tabs on the national pulse. Not even Senator Goldwater seized on the Hell's Angels issue. "Crime in the streets" was a winner for him; millions of people felt threatened by gangs of punks, roaming, on foot, through streets in the immediate vicinity of their homes in urban slums. Democrats called this a racist slur ... but what would they have said if Goldwater had warned the voters about an army of vicious, doped-up Caucasian hoodlums numbering in the thousands ... based in California but with chapters proliferating all over the nation and even the globe far faster than a man could keep track of them ... and so highly mobile with their awesome machines that huge numbers of them might appear almost anywhere, at any moment, to sack and destroy a community? Filthy Huns Breeding like rats in California and spreading east. Listen for the roar of the Harleys. You will hear it in the distance like thunder. And then, wafting in on the breeze, will come the scent of dried blood, semen and human grease ... the noise will grow louder and then they will appear, on the west horizon, eyes bugged and bloodshot, foam on the lips, chewing some rooty essence smuggled in from a foreign jungle ... they will ravish your women, loot your liquor stores and humiliate your mayor on a bench on the village square ... Now there was an issue. The mumbo jumbo about "crime in the streets" was too vague. What Goldwater needed was an up-to-date concept like "crime on the highways," motorized crime, with nobody safe from it. And the first time the Democrats challenged him, he could have produced photos of the dirtiest Hell's Angels and read from newspaper accounts of the Monterey rape and other stories: "... they hauled her, screaming, into the darkness"; "... the bartender, barely conscious, crawled toward the bar while the Angels beat a tattoo on his ribs with their feet ..." Unfortunately, neither candidate picked up the Monterey story, and with no other takers, it quickly slipped from sight. From September 1964 to March of the next year the Hell's Angels fought a quiet, unpublicized series of skirmishes with police in both Los Angeles and the Bay Area. The massive publicity of the Monterey rape had made them so notorious in California that it was no longer any fun to be part of the act. Every minute on the streets was a calculated risk for any man wearing a Hell's Angels jacket. The odds were worse than even -- except in Oakland [1] -- and the penalty for getting caught was likely to be expensive. At the peak of the heat a former Frisco Angel told me: "If I was fired from my job tomorrow and went back to riding with the Angels, I'd lose my driver's license within a month, be in and out of jail, go way in debt to bondsmen and be hounded by the cops until I left the area." At the time I pegged him as a hopeless paranoid. Then I bought a big motorcycle and began riding around San Francisco and the East Bay. The bike was a sleek factory-style BSA, bearing no aesthetic resemblance to an outlaw Harley, and my primary road garb was a tan sheepherder's jacket, the last thing a Hell's Angel might wear. Yet within three weeks after buying the bike, I was arrested three times and accumulated enough points to lose my California drivers' license -- which I retained on a more or less day-to-day basis, only because of a fanatic insistence on posting large amounts of bail money and what seemed like a never-ending involvement with judges, bailiffs, cops and lawyers, who kept telling me the cause was lost. Before buying the motorcycle, I had driven cars for twelve years, in all but four states of the nation, and been tagged for only two running violations, both the result of speed traps -- one in Pikeville, Kentucky, and the other somewhere near Omaha. So it was a bit of a shock to suddenly face loss of my license for violations incurred in a period of three weeks. The heat was so obvious that even respectable motorcyclists were complaining of undue police harassment. The cops denied it officially, but shortly before Christmas of that year a San Francisco policeman told a reporter, "We're going to get these guys. It's war." "Who do you mean?" asked the reporter. "You know who I mean," the policeman said. "The Hell's Angels, those motorcycle hoods." "You mean everybody on a motorcycle?" said the reporter. "The innocent will have to suffer along with the guilty," the policeman replied. "When I finished the story," the reporter recalls. "I showed it to a cop I ran into on the street outside the Hall of Justice. He laughed and called another cop over. 'Look at this,' he said. 'stepped on his prick again.'" The only significant press breakthrough during this crackdown winter of 1964-65 was a tongue-in-cheek series in the San Francisco Chronicle, based on some Angel parties at the Frisco chapter's new clubhouse -- which was raided and closed down almost immediately after the series appeared. Meanwhile, the Oakland Angels fattened steadily on the tide of refugees. From Berdoo, Hayward, Sacramento, the Angels were moving into the few remaining sanctuaries. By December, Barger's chapter was so swollen and starved for enemies that they began crossing the bridge and attacking the Frisco Angels. Barger felt that Frisco, by allowing the membership to shrink to eleven, had so dishonored the Hell's Angels' tradition that they should forfeit their colors. Accordingly, he declared the Frisco charter void and sent his people over to collect the jackets. The Frisco Angels refused, but they were badly unnerved by the mad-dog raids from Oakland. "Man, we'd be sitting over there in the bar," said one, "just coolin it around the pool table with a few beers -- and all of a goddamn sudden the door would bust open and there they'd be, chains and all." "We finally got back at em, though. We went over to their hangout and set fire to one of their bikes. You should of seen it -- we burned it right in the middle of the street, man, then we went into their pad and wiped em out. What a blast! Man, I tell you we had some real beefs." That was in December. Two more quiet months followed ... and then came the Attorney General's report, coast-to-coast infamy and a raft of new possibilities. The whole scene changed in a flash. One day they were a gang of bums, scratching for any hard dollar ... and twenty-four hours later they were dealing with reporters, photographers, free-lance writers and all kinds of showbiz hustliers talking big money. By the middle of 1965 they were firmly established as all-American bogeymen. Besides appearing in hundreds of wire-serviced newspapers and a half dozen magazines, they posed for television cameramen and answered questions on radio call-in shows. They issued statements to the press, appeared at various rallies and bargained with Hollywood narks and magazine editors. They were sought out by mystics and poets, cheered on by student rebels and invited to parties given by liberals and intellectuals. The whole thing was very weird, and it had a profound effect in the handful of Angels still wearing the colors. They developed a prima-donna complex, demanding cash contributions (to confound the Internal Revenue Service) in return for photos and interviews. The New York Times was hard hit by these developments, and a dispatch from Los Angeles on July 2, 1965, said: "A man representing himself as a 'public relations man' for ... [the Hell's Angels] has approached news media offering to sell photographic coverage of this weekend's 'rumble' for sums ranging from $500 to $1,000. He also offered to arrange interviews with club members for $100 apiece, or more if pictures were taken. The representative told reporters it would be 'dangerous' to go to the San Bernardino bar where the group regularly congregates without paying the money for 'protection.' One magazine, he said, paid $1,000 for permission to have a photographer accompany the group this weekend." The report was a combination of truth and absurdity, compounded by the fact that the Times' Los Angeles correspondent had by this time developed a serious aversion to anything connected with the Hell's Angels. His reasons were excellent; they had threatened him with a beating if he attempted to get a story on the Angels without first contributing to the club's coffers. No journalist likes to be held up for cash payoffs in the line of duty, and the normal reaction -- or at least the mythical reaction -- is a quick decision to clamp down on the story like a bulldog and write it at all costs. The Times' reaction was more subtle. They tried to de-emphasize the Angels, hoping they would go away. Which is exactly the opposite of what happened. The story was already snowballing, and the monsters which the Times had helped to create came back, with a press agent, to haunt them. Here was a handful of hoodlums, without status even in San Bernardino, demanding $1,000 from any journalist who wanted to hang around them for a single weekend. Most of the Angels saw the humor in it, but even at that stage of the game, there were a few who felt they were asking a fair price for their act ... and their faith was justified when "one magazine" came through with either $1,000 (according to the Times) or $1,200 (according to the Angels). The question of this contribution is very touchy, for even if the editors would admit such a payoff, the writer and/ or photographer who required it would do everything possible to avoid being labeled as one who has to buy his stories. The Angels talked freely about the money at first, but later denied it, after Sonny Barger passed the word that such talk could get them in tax trouble. It is a fact, however, that a Life-assigned photographer spent quite a bit of time with the Angels, working on a photo feature that was never published. An interesting sidelight on the demand for protection money is that the Angels got the idea from a man who makes more than $100,000 a year by capitalizing on various fads. This is the public relations man referred to by the Times. His involvement with the Angels began in Berdoo with the dragster set, but he was never their public relations man -- only a noisy contact, a phone number and an unhired hustler with a penchant for bugging the press. (By the summer of 1965 he was marketing Hell's Angels Fan Club T-shirts, which sold fairly well until the Angels announced they would burn every one they saw, even if they had to rip them off people's backs.) In the long run he queered the Berdoo Angels' whole stance by demanding big money from anybody who wanted to see them. And because nobody (except "one magazine") was willing to pay, and also because nobody called his bluff, he was able to pass for almost half a year as the well-connected front man for a thing that had long since gone down the tube. The Berdoo Angels made the classic Dick Nixon mistake of "peaking" too early. Publicity from the Monterey rape and two subsequent local brawls had brought such relentless heat that those few who insisted on wearing the colors were forced to act more like refugees than outlaws, and the chapter's reputation withered accordingly. By the middle of August 1965 -- while the action in Oakland was booming -- the Los Angeles Times assayed the Berdoo situation: HELL'S ANGELS FADE IN VALLEY, POLICE PRESSURE TAMES OUTLAW CLUBS. The lead paragraph said, "Whatever outlaw motorcyclists there are in the [San Fernando] Valley have filtered underground, police say. They are lying low and causing very little trouble and no uproar." "If a couple of them stick their beads up and appear on the streets now," said a police sergeant, "the first patrol car that sees them stops them for questioning. If we can't find anything else, we can almost always learn that they have traffic warrants outstanding against them. That's enough to get them off the street, and it really bugs them. [2] "We maintain a checkpoint at Gorman on the Ridge Route to stop and discourage them when groups from northern California -- where they are more active -- try to move into Los Angeles. We have other checkpoints along the Pacific Coast Highway, especially near Malibu. "They have become a very fluid bunch. We have a list of twenty-five hundred [sic] names of members in the various clubs, but we don't even bother to try to keep addresses. They move constantly. They change their addresses, they change their names, they even change the color of their hair." In Fontana, heartland of the Berdoo chapter's turf, the Angels don't raise much hell in public and they are not often rousted. "Four or five of them together, that's all right," said Police Inspector Larry Wallace. "A whole bunch of em, ten or twelve or more, and we bust it up." In his private office Wallace keeps a souvenir to remind himself of what the Angels mean to him. It's a two-by- four framed reproduction of a Modigliani woman he confiscated out of an Angel pad. The lady is sleepy- looking, long-necked, with a prim little mouth. An Iron Cross has been scrawled over her head, and the word "help" is entwined in her hair. Around her neck hangs a Star of David with a swastika stamped onto it, and there's a bullet hole in her throat, with a drawing of the bullet emerging from the back of her head. Scattered here and there are Angel maxims of the day:
Dope Forever
Honest officer, had I known my The Angels survived in Berdoo, but they never regained their status of the late fifties and early sixties. When fame finally beckoned, they had little to offer but a hideous reputation and a shrewd press agent. Otto, president of the chapter, couldn't get a handle anywhere. Sal Mineo was talking about a $3,000 fee to cover outlaw participation in a movie, but the Angels couldn't muster a quorum: some were in jail, others had quit and many of the best specimens had gone north to Oakland -- or "God's Country," as some of them called it --where Sonny Barger called the shots and there was no talk at all of the Hell's Angels fading away. But Otto wanted some of the action too, and he still had a handful of loyalists to back him up. Between them they managed to pull off one last coup -- a full-dress show for a writer from the Saturday Evening Post. The Post article appeared in November 1965, and although the view it expressed was critical, the Angels were far more impressed with the quantity of such coverage than the quality. Its total effect on them was considerable. They had, after all, made the cover of the Saturday Evening Post -- in color and along with Princess Margaret. They were bona-fide celebrities, with no worlds left to conquer. Their only gripe was that they weren't getting rich. ("All these mothers are using us and making a scene," Barger told the Post reporter, "and we ain't getting a damn cent out of it.") It was true that the Oakland Angels had been cut out of the Los Angeles bargaining, but they eventually got nearly $500 for the photos they sold to the Post, so it was difficult to view them as a wholly exploited minority.
We're a gallant bunch of heroes, My dealings with the Angels lasted about a year, and never really ended. I came to know some of them well and most of them well enough to relax with. But at first -- due to numerous warnings -- I was nervous about even drinking. I met a half dozen Frisco Angels one afternoon in the bar of a sleazy dive called the DePau Hotel, located in the south industrial section of the San Francisco waterfront and on the fringe of the Hunger's Point ghetto. My contact was Frenchy, [4] one of the smallest and shrewdest of the outlaws, who was then part owner of a transmission-repair garage called the Box Shop, across Evans Avenue from the degraded premises of the DePau. Frenchy is twenty-nine, a skilled mechanic and an ex-submariner in the Navy. He is five foot five and weighs 135 pounds, but the Angels say he is absolutely fearless and will fight anybody. His wife is a willowy, quiet young blonde whose taste runs more to folk music than to brawls and wild parties. Frenchy plays the guitar, the banjo and the tiple. The Box Shop is always full of cars, but not all of them belong to paying customers. Frenchy and a rotating staff of three or four other Angels run the place, working anywhere from four to twelve hours a day most of the time, but occasionally taking off for a bike trip, an extended party or a run down the coast on a sailboat. I talked to Frenchy on the phone and met him the next day at the DePau, where he was playing pool with Okie Ray, Crazy Rock and a young Chinaman called Ping-Pong. Immediately upon entering the bar, I took off my Palm Beach sport coat, in deference to the starkly egalitarian atmosphere which the customers seemed to prefer. Frenchy ignored me long enough to make things uncomfortable, then nodded a faint smile and rapped a shot toward one of the comer pockets. I bought a glass of beer and watched. Not much was going on. Ping-Pong was doing most of the talking and I wasn't sure what to make of him. He wasn't wearing any colors, but he talked like a veteran. (Later I was told he had an obsession about getting in and spent most of his time hanging around the Box Shop and the DePau. He had no bike, but he tried to compensate by carrying a snub-nosed .357 Magnum revolver in his hip pocket.) The Angels were not impressed. They already had one Chinese member, a mechanic for Harley Davidson, but he was a quiet, dependable type and nothing like Ping Pong, who made the outlaws nervous. They knew he was determined to impress them, and was so anxious to show class, they said, that he was likely to get them all busted. When the pool game ended, Frenchy sat down at the bar, and asked what I wanted to know. We talked for more than an hour, but his style of conversation made me nervous. He would pause now and then, letting a question hang, and fix me with a sad little smile ... an allusion to some private joke that he was sure I understood. The atmosphere was heavy with hostility, like smoke in an airless room, and for a while I assumed it was all focused on me -- which most of it was when I made my initial appearance, but the focus dissolved very quickly. The sense of menace remained; it is part of the atmosphere the Hell's Angels breathe ... Their world is so rife with hostility that they don't even recognize it. They are deliberately hard on most strangers, but they get bad reactions even when they try to be friendly. I have seen them try to amuse an outsider by telling stories which they consider very funny -- but which generate fear and queasiness in a listener whose sense of humor has a different kind of filter. Some of the outlaws understand this communications gap, but most are puzzled and insulted to hear that "normal people" consider them horrible. They get angry when they read about how filthy they are, but instead of shoplifting some deodorant, they strive to become even filthier. Only a few cultivate a noticeable body odor. Those with wives and steady girl friends bathe as often as most half-employed people, and make up for it by fouling their clothes more often. [5] This kind of exaggeration is the backbone of their style. The powerful stench they are said to exude is not so much body odor as the smell of old grease in their crusty uniforms. Every Angel recruit comes to his initiation wearing a new pair of Levis and a matching jacket with the sleeves cut off and a spotless emblem on the back. The ceremony varies from one chapter to another but the main feature is always the defiling of the initiate's new uniform. A bucket of dung and urine will be collected during the meeting, then poured on the newcomer's head in a solemn baptismal. Or he will take off his clothes and stand naked while the bucket of slop is poured over them and the others stomp it in. These are his "originals," to be worn every day until they rot. The Levis are dipped in oil, then hung out to dry in the sun -- or left under the motorcycle at night to absorb the crankcase drippings. When they become too ragged to be functional, they are worn over other, newer Levis. Many of the jackets are so dirty that the colors are barely visible, but they aren't discarded until they literally fall apart. The condition of the originals is a sign of status. It takes a year or two before they get ripe enough to make a man feel he has really made the grade. Frenchy and the other Angels at the DePau wanted to know if I'd located them by following the smell. Later that night, at the weekly meeting, I noticed that several were wearing expensive wool shirts and ski jackets under their colors. When the bars closed at two, five of the outlaws came over to my apartment for an all-night drinking bout. The next day I learned that one was an infamous carrier of vermin, a walking crab farm. I went over my living room carefully for signs of body lice and other small animals, but found nothing. I waited nervously for about ten days, thinking he might have dropped eggs that were still incubating, but no vermin appeared. We played a lot of Bob Dylan music that night, and for a long time afterward I thought about crabs every time I heard his voice. That was in early spring of 1965. By the middle of summer I had become so involved in the outlaw scene that I was no longer sure whether I was doing research on the Hell's Angels or being slowly absorbed by them. I found myself spending two or three days each week in Angel bars, in their homes, and on runs and parties. In the beginning I kept them out of my own world, but after several months my friends grew accustomed to finding Hell's Angels in my apartment at any hour of the day or night. Their arrivals and departures caused periodic alarms in the neighborhood and sometimes drew crowds on the sidewalk. When word of this reached my Chinese landlord he sent emissaries to find out the nature of my work. One morning I had Terry the Tramp answer the doorbell to fend off a rent collection, but his act was cut short by the arrival of a prowl car summoned by the woman next door. She was very polite while the Angels moved their bikes out of her driveway, but the next day she asked me whether "those boys" were my friends. I said yes, and four days later I received an eviction notice. The appearance of the rape omen was a clear and present danger to property values; the block had to be purified. It was not until much later, after I'd moved, that I realized the woman had been thoroughly frightened. She'd seen groups of Angels going in and out of my apartment now and then, but once she got a look at them and heard the terrible sound of their machines, she felt a burning in her nerves every time she heard a motorcycle. They menaced her day and night -- whirring and booming below her window, and it never crossed her mind that the occasional blast of an outlaw chopper was any different from the high-pitched wailing of the little bikes at the dental fraternity a half block away. In the afternoon she would stand on her front steps, watering the sidewalk with a garden hose and glaring at every Honda that came over the hill from the nearby medical center. At times the whole street seemed alive with Hell's Angels. It was more than any taxpaying property owner should have to bear. Actually, their visits were marked by nothing more sinister than loud music, a few bikes on the sidewalk, and an occasional shot out the back window. Most of the bad action came on nights when there were no Angels around: one of my most respectable visitors, an advertising executive from New York, became hungry after a long night of drink and stole a ham from the refrigerator in a nearby apartment; another guest set my mattress afire with a flare and we had to throw it out the back window; another ran wild on the street with a high-powered Falcon air horn normally carried on boats for use as a distress signal; people cursed him from at least twenty windows and he narrowly escaped injury when a man in pajamas rushed out of a doorway and swung at him with a long white club. On another night a local attorney drove his car across the sidewalk and over the ledge of my entranceway, where he leaned on his horn and tried to knock down the door with his bumper. A visiting poet hurled a garbage can under the wheels of a passing bus, causing a noise like a bad accident. My upstairs neighbor said it sounded like a Volkswagen being crushed. "It jolted me right out of bed," he said. "But when I looked out the window all I could see was the bus. I thought the car must have hit it head on and gone underneath. There was an awful dragging sound. I thought people were mashed down there in the wreckage." One of the worst incidents of that era caused no complaints at all: this was a sort of good-natured firepower demonstration, which occurred one Sunday morning about three-thirty. For reasons that were never made clear, I blew out my back windows with five blasts of a 12-gauge shotgun, followed moments later by six rounds from a .44 Magnum. It was a prolonged outburst of heavy firing, drunken laughter and crashing glass. Yet the neighbors reacted with total silence. For a while I assumed that some freakish wind pocket had absorbed all the noise and carried it out to sea, but after my eviction I learned otherwise. Every one of the shots had been duly recorded on the gossip log. Another tenant in the building told me the landlord was convinced, by all the tales he'd heard, that the interior of my apartment was reduced to rubble by orgies, brawls, fire and wanton shooting. He had even heard stories about motorcycles being driven in and out the front door. No arrests resulted from these incidents, but according to neighborhood rumor they were all linked to the Hell's Angels, operating out of my apartment. Probably this is why the police were so rarely summoned; nobody wanted to be croaked by an Angel revenge party. Shortly before I moved out, a clutch of the landlord's Mandarin-speaking relatives came to inspect the place, apparently for the purpose of compiling a bill of damages. They seemed puzzled, but hugely relieved, to find no grave destruction. There were no signs of a Hell's Angel's presence, and the only motorcycle in sight was on the sidewalk. When they left they stopped to look at it, chattering rapidly in their own tongue. I was a little worried that they might be talking about seizing my bike in lieu of back rent, but the one member of the group who spoke English assured me that they were admiring its "elegance." The landlord himself had only a dim understanding of the Hell's Angels' threat to his property. All complaints had to be translated into Chinese, and I suspect he found them inscrutable. With a personal frame of reference unfazed by the English-speaking mass media, he could have no way of knowing why my neighbors were so agitated. The people he sent to hustle me when the rent was overdue were similarly blank on the subject of outlaw motorcyclists. They were terrified of my Doberman pup, but they didn't blink an eye that morning when they rang the doorbell and came face to face with Terry the Tramp. He had been up all night and was groggy from pills and wine. It was a cold wet day, and on the way to my place he had stopped at a Salvation Army store and bought the shaggy remains of a fur coat for thirty-nine cents. It looked like something Marlene Dietrich might have worn in the twenties. The ragged hem flapped around his knees, and the sleeves were like trunks of matted hair growing out of the armholes of his Hell's Angels vest. With the coat wrapped around him, he appeared to weigh about three hundred pounds ... something primitive and demented, wearing boots, a beard, and round black glasses like a blind man. Letting him answer the doorbell seemed like a final solution to the rent problem. As he stomped down the hallway we opened a new round of beers and waited to hear the terrified cries and the sound of running feet. But all we heard was a quick mumbled conversation, and seconds later Terry was back in the living room. "Hell, they never even flinched," he said. "To them I'm just another American. The two old ladies just grinned at me, and the little guy that spoke English was so polite I got shook up. I said you were gone and I didn't know when you'd be back, but they said they'd wait." He'd been back in the room about thirty seconds when we heard a commotion in the street. The police had come for the bikes, and Terry hurried outside. The ensuing debate drew a crowd of about two dozen, but the Chinese paid no attention. They had come to talk about money, and they were not about to be lured off the scent by a senseless squabble between cops and something that looked like it had burrowed straight through the earth from Mongolia. Most people who stopped to watch the argument had recognized the emblem on Terry's back, so they were able to view the scene from many different levels of involvement -- although the only real question was whether Terry and Mouldy Marvin (who stayed inside) would be fined $15 each for blocking a driveway, or the law might opt for mercy and allow the bikes to be moved ten feet up the hill to a legal parking space. The cops were obviously enjoying the whole thing. A routine parking complaint had led to a dramatic confrontation (before a good crowd) with one of the most notorious of the Hell's Angels. The worst they could do was write two citations totaling $30, but it required twenty minutes to make the fateful decision. Finally, the cop who'd grabbed the initiative in the first moments of the drama brought it all to an end by abruptly pocketing his citation book and turning his back on Terry with a sigh of weary contempt. "All right, all right," he snapped. "Just get the goddamn things out of the way, will ya? Christ, I should have em both towed in, but ..." The cop was young, but he had a fine stage presence. It was like watching Bing Crosby shame the Amboy Dukes by refusing to press charges against one of their warlords accused of spitting on the bells of St. Mary's. _______________ Notes: 1. There was a basic difference between the kind of pressure the Angels got in Oakland and the kind they felt elsewhere. In Oakland it was not political, not the result of any high-level pressure or policy decision -- but more of a personal thing, like arm-wrestling. Barger and his People get along pretty well with the cops. In most cases, and with a few subtle differences, they operate on the same emotional frequency. Both the cops and the Angels deny this. The very suggestion of a psychic compatibility will be denounced -- by both groups -- as a form of Communist slander. But the fact of the thing is obvious to anyone who has ever seen a routine confrontation or sat in on a friendly police check at one of the Angel bars. Apart, they curse each other savagely, and the brittle truce is often jangled by high-speed chases and brief, violent clashes that rarely make the papers. Yet behind the sound and fury, they are both playing the same game, and usually by the same rules. 2. This tactic quickly became popular with police in other parts of the state and in situations having nothing to do with the Hell's Angels. It is an especially effective means of crowd control and by the middle of 1966 was standard procedure for dealing with peace marchers in Berkeley. Police began seizing people at random and running radio checks on their driving records. Moments later the word would come back from headquarters, and if the person being detained had even one unpaid traffic or parking citation he would be "taken off the street" -- a police euphemism meaning "put in jail." 3. © Copyright 1957, Hollis Music, Inc., New York. Used by permission. 4. Frenchy from Frisco, not Frenchy from Berdoo. 5. The Angels' old ladies are generally opposed to B.O. "My old man went for two months once without taking a shower," a girl from Richmond recalls. "He wanted to see what it would be like to live up to the reputation people gave us ... I've got sinus and I can't smell that good anyhow, but it finally got so bad I sez, 'Go pull out the other mattress -- I ain't gonna asleep with you till you shower.'"
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