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HELL'S ANGELS -- A STRANGE AND TERRIBLE SAGA OF THE OUTLAW MOTORCYCLE GANGS |
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Chapter 4
They're the Wild Bill Hickoks,
the Billy the Kids -- they're the
last American heroes we have,
man. Not all the outlaws were happy to be celebrities. The Frisco Angels had been severely burned after the series in the Chronicle and viewed reporters as pilot fish for disaster. Across the Bay in Oakland the reaction was more varied. After seven years of being virtually ignored by the press, the East Bay outlaws were more curious than wary -- except among the newer arrivals, especially those from Berdoo. They had come up to Oakland for refuge, not publicity, and the last thing they needed was a press photographer. Several were wanted in southern California on charges of theft, assault and nonsupport. Even a chance photo or a name shouted carelessly across a parking lot might set off a chain of events that would land them in jail: a photograph taken in Oakland, or an interview mentioning names, could be picked up by a wire service and published in San Bernardino the next morning. After that it would be only a matter of hours before the hounds found the trail again. The publicity also had a bad effect on their employment picture. At the end of 1964 perhaps two thirds of the outlaws were working, but a year later the figure was down to about one third. Terry was summarily fired from his assembly-line job at General Motors a few days after the True article appeared. [1] "They just told me to move on," he said with a shrug. "They didn't give no reason, but the guys I worked with told me the foreman was all shook up about that article. He asked one guy if he'd ever seen me take dope and if I ever talked about gang rapes -- that kind of bullshit. The union says they're gonna fight it, but what the hell -- I got other ways to get bread." Motorcycle outlaws are not much in demand on the labor market. With a few exceptions, even those with saleable skills prefer to draw unemployment insurance ... which gives them the leisure to sleep late, spend plenty of time on their bikes, and free-lance for extra cash whenever they feel the need. Some practice burglary, and others strip cars, steal motorcycles or work erratically as pimps. Many are supported by working wives and girlfriends, who earn good salaries as secretaries, waitresses and nightclub dancers. A few of the younger outlaws still live with their parents, but they don't like to talk about it and only go home when they have to -- either to sleep off a drunk, clean out the refrigerator, or cadge a few bucks from the family cookie jar. Those Angels who work usually do it part time or drift from one job to another, making good money one week and nothing at all the next. They are longshoremen, warehousemen, truck drivers, mechanics, clerks and casual laborers at any work that pays quick wages and requires no allegiance. Perhaps one in ten has a steady job or a decent income. Skip from Oakland is a final inspector on a General Motors assembly line, making around $200 a week; he owns his own home and even dabbles in the stock market. Tiny, the Oakland chapter's sergeant at arms and chief head- knocker, is a "credit supervisor" for a local TV appliance chain. He owns a Cadillac and makes $150 a week for hustling people who get behind on their payments. [2] "We get a lot of deadbeats in this business," he says. "Usually I call em up first! I come on real businesslike until I'm sure I have the right guy. Then I tell him, 'Listen, motherfucker, I'm givin you twenty-four hours to get down here with that money.' This usually scares the shit out of em and they pay up quick. If they don't, then I drive out to the house and kick on the door until somebody answers. Once in a while I get a wise-ass trying to give me the run-around ... then I pick up a couple of guys, lay a few bucks on em for the help, and we go out to see the punk. That always does it. I never had to stomp anybody yet." There are others with steady incomes, but most of the Angels work sporadically at the kind of jobs that will soon be taken over by machines. It is hard enough to get unskilled work while wearing shoulder-length hair and a gold earring ... it takes an employer who is either desperate or unusually tolerant ... but to apply for work as a member of a nationally known "criminal motorcycle conspiracy" is a handicap that can only be overcome by very special talents, which few Angels possess. Most are unskilled and uneducated, with no social or economic credentials beyond a colorful police record and a fine knowledge of motorcycles. [3] So there is more to their stance than a wistful yearning for acceptance in a world they never made. Their real motivation is an instinctive certainty as to what the score really is. They are out of the ballgame and they know it. Unlike the campus rebels, who with a minimum amount of effort will emerge from their struggle with a validated ticket to status, the outlaw motorcyclist views the future with the baleful eye of a man with no upward mobility at all. In a world increasingly geared to specialists, technicians and fantastically complicated machinery, the Hell's Angels are obvious losers and it bugs them. But instead of submitting quietly to their collective fate, they have made it the basis of a full-time social vendetta. They don't expect to win anything, but on the other hand, they have nothing to lose. If one drawback to being a public figure was the inability to get a job, another was the disappointment in discovering that fame can come without money. Shortly after the news magazines made them celebrities they began to talk about "getting rich from it all," and their fear of being wiped out soon gave way to a brooding resentment over being "used" to sell newspapers and magazines. They weren't sure how the riches would come, or why, or even if they deserved them ... but they seemed pretty certain that the balance of payments was about to tip their way. This feeling reached its zenith when an Angel made the Post cover, and for a few weeks after that it was hard to talk to them about anything but money. They had all kinds of deals working, numerous offers that had to be juggled and judged ... whether to go fast and hard for bundles of short-term cash or try to stay cool and set up a schedule of royalties to be doled out in perpetuity. None of them realized what an empty bag they were holding until their deals began to collapse. The Angels weren't quick to see the trend, because they were still celebrities. But one day the phone stopped ringing and the game was all over. They were still talking money, but the talk would soon go sour. Cash was all around, but they couldn't get their hands on it. What they needed was a good agent or a money-mad nark, but they couldn't get that either. There was nobody to hustle Sal Mineo for the $3,000 they wanted for helping him make his movie. And nobody to coax $2,000 out of the producers of the Merv Griffin show, who had also talked about a film. (God knows I tried, and the Angels still blame me for blowing that two grand they wanted, but the sad truth is that Merv's people just wouldn't pay ... perhaps because they knew Les Crane had already scheduled a Hell's Angels bit.) There were others who tried to put the outlaws onto some loot: a San Francisco journalist who knew the Angels was contacted by a man from one of the TV networks who wanted to be on band with a camera crew the next time the outlaws ripped up a town. But the deal fell through when the Angels offered, for $100 apiece, to terrorize any town the TV people selected. It must have been tempting, a flat guarantee of some hair-raising footage ... and it is a measure of the television industry's concern for the public welfare that the offer was turned down. Would ye deny the public prints? The Angels were extremely proud of their Post exposure, though the cover featured one of the most obscure and least typical members. Given a chance to present their 6,670,000 [4] readers with a really unnerving tableau, the Post chose instead to go with Skip Von Bugening, a former rock-'n'-roll musician and supermarket clerk who looks and talks like everybody's idea of the ideal Job Corps candidate. Skip is a good lad, but to foist him off on the public as a typical Hell's Angel is like reshooting The Wild One with Sal Mineo playing the lead instead of Marlon Brando. Less than six months after he made the Post cover, Skip was stripped of his colors and kicked out of the club. "He never was Angel material," said one. "He was just a goddamn show-off." As the outlaws got more and more publicity their reaction to it became increasingly ambiguous. At first, when nearly everything written about them was taken from the Lynch report, they were outraged that responsible journalists could be so sloppy and biased. They spoke of editors and reporters as so much human garbage, hopelessly corrupt and not worth talking to under any circumstances. Every unfavorable article produced outbursts of bitterness, but they enjoyed being interviewed and photographed, and instead of withdrawing into angry silence, they kept trying to even the score by giving new interviews to set the record straight. Only once did they become seriously hostile to everything connected with the news media. This was immediately after the Time and Newsweek articles. I recall trying to show the Time article to Crazy Rock, then working as a night custodian at the San Francisco Hilton. He glanced at the clipping and tossed it aside. "I'd go nuts if I started reading that stuff," he said. "It don't make any sense. It's all bullshit." The Frisco Angels wanted to give me a chain-whipping on general principles. Later, when I met the Oakland Angels, there was talk of setting me on fire because of what Newsweek had done. It was not until my article on motorcycles appeared in The Nation that they really believed I hadn't been conning them all along. Yet later in the year, and especially after they made their political debut -- in a clash with the Berkeley peace marchers -- the Angels stopped laughing at their press clippings. The tone of the coverage was changing, notably in Hearst's San Francisco Examiner and William Knowland's Oakland Tribune. Even in the San Francisco Chronicle, a paper that had never done anything but laugh at the Angels, the late Lucius Beebe devoted one of his Sunday columns to sneering at the Berkeley marchers and ended it by saying, "The Hell's Angels would appear to be possessed of a sense of fitness and realism that is lacking elsewhere on the East Bay scene." At this point it was a tossup as to whether the Angels were bamboozling the press or vice-versa. Impartial observers and newspaper buffs found the truce very strange. Here was the Examiner, which had always viewed the Angels with fear and loathing, suddenly presenting them as misunderstood patriots. The Examiner has fallen on hard times recently, but it remains influential among those who fear King George III might still be alive in Argentina. The Tribune is the same kind of newspaper, but free of the confusing deviations that have come to characterize the Examiner. In 1964, for instance, the Hearst empire forsook Goldwater, while the Tribune held the line. As it happened, Mr. Knowland had managed the senator's successful California primary campaign, so there was not much doubt where the Tribune stood -- without much company -- in November. In some circles the Tribune is seen as a classic example of what anthropologists call an "atavistic endeavor." [5] Lucius Beebe was in a class by himself, and his opinions have not been a factor in any meaningful issue since the introduction of barbed wire to the prairies ... but every now and then he would come up with a really classic screed, and for some reason the Chronicle continued to print them even after his death, in early 1966. In three years of reading the paper I had never encountered anyone who took Beebe seriously until several of the Hell's Angels quoted his column to me -- with straight faces and a certain amount of pride. When I laughed they got huffy. He'd compared them favorably to the Texas Rangers -- and with the kind of press they were used to, that amounted to a gold-star breakthrough. I tried to explain that Lucius was a quack, but they would have none of it. "Shit, this is the first time I ever read anything good about us," said one, "and you try to tell me the guy's an asshole ... hell, it's better than anything you ever wrote about us." Which was true, and I felt rotten about it. It had never occurred to me to compare Tiny to Bat Masterson. Or Terry to Billy the Kid. Or Sonny to Buffalo Bill. Even after Big Daddy put it all in a nut I still missed the connection ... and then came Beebe, with his Texas Ranger linkage, which the Angels recognized immediately. Whatever else might be said about the Angels, nobody has ever accused them of modesty, and this new kind of press was pure balm to their long-abused egos. The Angels were beginning to view their sudden fame as a confirmation of what they had always suspected: they were rare, fascinating creatures ("Wake up and dig it, man, we're the Texas Rangers"). It was a shock of recognition, long overdue, and although they never understood the timing, they were generally pleased with the result. At the same time they revised their traditional view of the press: not all reporters were congenital liars -- there were exceptions, here and there, with the guts and keen understanding to write the real stuff. _______________ Notes: 1. August 1965. 2. Numerous court appearances crippled Tiny's income toward the end of 1965, and in June of 1966 he was forced to take an indefinite leave of absence to attend his own trial on a charge of forcible rape. 3. By the middle of 1966 the war in Vietnam had put several of the Angels back in the money. The volume of military shipping through the Oakland Army Terminal caused such a demand for handlers and loaders that Hell's Angels were hired almost in spite of themselves. 4. Circulation figure at the end of 1965, according to the Post circulation department. 5. It also turns a profit, unlike the Examiner -- which in 1965 finally threw in the towel and merged with the Chronicle now the only morning daily in San Francisco. Rather than fold altogether, the Examiner switched to afternoon publication.
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