Another part of the report stated that of 463 identified Hell's Angels, 151 had felony convictions. This is the kind of statistic that gives taxpayers faith in their law enforcement agencies. . . and it would have been doubly edifying if the 463 Hell's Angels had actually existed when the statistic was committed to print.
he was playing pool with Okie Ray, Crazy Rock and a young Chinaman called Ping-Pong.
Motorcycle outlaws are not much in demand on the labor market.
mechanics, clerks and casual laborers at any work that pays quick wages and requires no allegiance.
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.
They are longshoremen, warehousemen, truck drivers, mechanics, clerks and casual laborers at any work that pays quick wages and requires no allegiance.
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.
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.
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.
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 ready 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.
well as surfboards, convertibles, swimming pools and abulia.
abulia.
Preetam Bobo is a study in something, but I was never sure what to call it.
The concept of the motorcycle outlaw was as uniquely American as jazz.
The highways are crowded with people who drive as if their sole purpose in getting behind the wheel is to avenge every wrong ever done them by man, beast or fate. The only thing that keeps them in line is their own fear of death, jail and lawsuits. . . which are much less likely if they can find a motorcycle to challenge, instead of another two-thousand-pound car or a concrete abutment.
When you get in an argument with a group of outlaw motorcyclists, your chances of emerging unmaimed depend on the number of heavy-handed allies you can muster in the time it takes to smash a beer bottle. In this league, sportsmanship is for old liberals and young fools.
The outlaws take the all on one concept so seriously that it is written into the club charter as Bylaw Number 10: When an Angel punches a non-Angel, all other Angels will participate.
The odd truth is that the Angels have only a wavering respect for their own terms -- or, again, what seems to be their own terms -- and they are generally receptive, in any action beyond their own turf, to people who haven't prejudged them to the extent of assuming they have to be dealt with violently. They are so much aware of their mad-dog reputation that they take a perverse kind of pleasure in being friendly.
Many a groveling merchant has made a buck off the Hell's Angels. All they ask is tribute, and naked fear is a very pure form of it. Any man who tacitly admits to being terrified is safe from them unless he overdoes it.
I recall a party one night when they decided to set an offending Berkeley student on fire. Then, when the host protested, they looped a rope around the victim's ankles and said they were going to drag him away behind a motorcycle.
anyone who spends any time with the Angels knows the difference between outlaw motorcyclists and homosexual leather cults.
The difference is as basic as between a professional football player and a rabid fan. One is a performer in a harsh, unique corner of reality; the other is a cultist, a passive worshiper, and occasionally a sloppy emulator of a style that fascinates him because it is so hopelessly remote from the reality he wakes up to every morning.
Any attempt to explain the Hell's Angels as an essentially homosexual phenomenon would be a cop-out, a self-satisfied dismissal of a reality that is as complex and potentially malignant as anything in American society.
he seemed offended at the notion that he might be so far behind the times as to turn out anything so banal as a topical documentary.
These punks with their cycles and their Nazi trappings have it in for the world -- and for everyone in it. They're a menace, a damned serious menace that's growing bigger every year. -- Florida police official quoted in Man's Peril (February 1966)
To see a lone Angel screaming through traffic -- defying all rules, limits and patterns -- is to understand the motorcycle as an instrument of anarchy,
His motorcycle is the one thing in life he has absolutely mastered. It is his only valid status symbol, his equalizer, and he pampers it the same way a busty Hollywood starlet pampers her body. Without it, he is no better than a punk on a street corner. And he knows it.
Sonny Barger, a man not given to sentimental rambling, once defined the word love as the feelin you get when you like somethin as much as your motorcycle.
The little bikes may be fun, like the industry people say, but Volkwagens are fun too, and so are BB guns. Big bikes, Ferraris and .44 Magnum revolvers are something beyond fun; they are man-made machines so powerful and efficient in their own realms that they challenge a man's ability to control them, to push them to the limits of their design and possibilities.
I had owned a big motorcycle before, and two motor scooters, but only because they'd been cheap and available when I had some money to buy something.
After being around the Angels for a while I became so accustomed to seeing casts, bandages, slings and lumpy faces that I took them for granted and stopped asking what happened.
Justice is not cheap in this country, and people who insist on it are usually either desperate or possessed by some private determination bordering on monomania.
They try to avoid places where the odds are stacked against them, legally or otherwise. . . and they are usually pretty shrewd about knowing what the odds really are. Runs are primarily parties, not war games, and small-town jails are dull.
The outlaws don't share the middle-class respect for authority and have no reverence for the badge. They measure a cop's authority by his power to enforce it.
American law enforcement procedures have never been designed to control large groups of citizens in rebellion, but to protect the social structure against specifically criminal acts, or persons. The underlying assumption has always been that the police and the citizenry form a natural alliance against evil and dangerous crooks, who should certainly be arrested on sight and shot if they resist.
It may be that America is developing a whole new category of essentially social criminals. . . persons who threaten the police and the traditional social structure even when they are breaking no law. . . because they view The Law with contempt and the police with distrust, and this abiding resentment can explode without warning at the slightest provocation.
I ate a peanut-butter sandwich while loading the car. . . sleeping bag and beer cooler in back, tape recorder in front, and under the driver's seat an unloaded Luger. I kept the clip in my pocket, thinking it might be useful if things got out of hand. Press cards are nice things to have, but in riot situations a pistol is the best kind of safe-conduct pass.
This stretch is hazardous on a clear afternoon, but in the fog of a holiday morning and with a Dread Spectacle suddenly looming beside the road the scramble was worse than usual.
A handful of Angels trying to catch up with a run will often wail through traffic at eighty-five or ninety, using all three lanes of the freeway or running straight down the centerline if there's no other way to pass. . . because they know all the cops are up ahead, watching the big formation. But when the outlaws move in a mass, under the watchful eye of the Highway Patrol, they maintain a legal pace that would do pride to a U. S. Army convoy.
to descend like a gang of pirates on some hapless tavern owner whose only solace is a soaring beer profit that might be wiped out at any moment by the violent destruction of his premises. With luck, he'll get off with nothing more than a few fights, broken glasses or a loud and public sex rally involving anything from indecent exposure to a gang-bang in one of the booths.
Anybody who has ever seen the Angels on a run will agree that rural Californians are likely to reject the spectacle as not right for their way of living. It is a human zoo on wheels.
At a gas station in Mariposa, I asked directions to Bass Lake. The attendant, a boy of about fifteen, advised me solemnly to go elsewhere. The Hell's Angels are gonna tear the place up, he said. There's a story about them in Life magazine. Jesus, why would anybody want to go to Bass Lake? Those guys are terrible. They'll burn the place down. I told him I was a karate master and wanted to be in on the action.
As it happened, I had barely enough money for gas back to San Francisco. Once my two cases were gone I couldn't buy a single can all weekend without cashing a check, and that was out of the question. Beyond that, I was -- and might still be -- the only journalist the Angels had ever seen who didn't have an expense account, so I was a little worried at their reaction when I'd be forced to plead poverty and start drinking out of the kitty. My own taste for the hops is very powerful, and I had no intention of spending a beerless weekend in the withering sun.
The outlaws gave it no thought. To them it was just as natural for me to have their beer as for them to have mine. By the end of the weekend I'd consumed three or four times as much as I'd brought with me. . . and even now, looking back on nearly a year of drinking with the Angels, I think I came out ahead. But that isn't the way they balance the books. Despite their swastika fetish, the fiscal relationship between Angels is close to pure communism: from each according to his abilities and to each according to his needs.
north, in Placerville, the police chief gives his men a pep talk and deploys them with shotguns on both sides of the highway, south of the city limits. Two hours later they are still waiting and the dispatcher in Sacramento relays an impatient demand for a report on Placerville's handling of the crisis. The chief nervously reports no contact and asks if his restless troops can go home and enjoy the holiday. The dispatcher, sitting in the radio room at Highway
Red-blooded American boys don't normally fight this way. Nor do they swing heavy chains on people whose backs are turned. . . and when they find themselves in a brawl where things like this are happening, they have good reason to feel at a disadvantage. It is one thing to get punched in the nose, and quite another to have your eyeball sprung or your teeth shattered with a wrench.
Barger knew this and he didn't want it to happen. But he also knew that it was not a sense of hospitality or concern for social justice that had got them a campsite. Tiny Baxter had a bomb on his hands, and he had to tread carefully to keep it from going off. This was Barger's leverage -- the certainty that his people would behave like wild beasts if they were pushed too far. But it would last only as long as things stayed quiet.
The casualty list showed two dead, a dozen serious injuries and the final demise of the old notion that rural communities are geographically insulated from city trouble.
that nobody gives interviews without checking with him first.
Angels are leery of being photographed or recorded and even of talking to a man with a notebook. Tapes and film are regarded as especially dangerous because they can't be denied. This is true even in peaceful situations, where a casual photograph can place a man at the scerie of a crime not yet committed.
Together they looked like figures in some ominous painting, a doomsday portrait of the human animal comfronting itself. . . as if a double-yolked egg had hatched both a chicken and a wildebeest.
Magoo is one of the most interesting of the Angels because his mind seems wholly immune to the notions and tenets of twentieth century American life.
At Bass Lake he tended the fire with the single-minded zeal of a man who's been eating bennies like popcorn.
The effect was an obscene mockery of bermuda shorts.
Only then, after burning his bridges back to the square world, would he be welcome in the legion of the damned.
Everything went black, and my first thought was that they'd finally turned on me and it was all over: then I felt the hairy kiss and heard the laughter. Ronnie, the Oakland secretary, seemed offended that I hadn't caught him in mid-air, as he'd expected, and returned the kiss heartily. It was a serious social error and further proof to the outlaws that I was only about half bright. They considered me a slow learner, a borderline case with only splinters of real potential. My first plunge into folly was getting a limey bike, an insult that I only partially redeemed by destroying it in a high-speed crash and laying my head open. The wreck gave me a kind of minimum status that lasted until I blew the kissing act. After that they treated me with a gentle sort of detachment, as if I were somebody's little brother with an incurable disease -- Let the poor fool have his way; God knows, it's the least we can do for him. *
Many of the Angels spent Sunday afternoon at the beer market, performing for an overflow crowd of tourists. They poured beer on each other, exchanged lewd chatter with the citizens and had a fine time keeping everybody on edge. Old men bought beer for them, middle-aged women called out insulting questions and the cash register clanged merrily.
It looked like the annual picnic for the graveyard shift at the Never Sweat copper mine in Butte, Montana.
If they'd grabbed me that night I'd have admitted to being an Enforcer for the Opium Tong before saying I was a free-lance writer. Police are always more careful with people who're employed, even by the Tong. The only thing better is a wallet full of high-toned credentials. . . membership cards, all kinds of them, covered with filigreed, wording and strange codes alluding to firm connections with various Power Combines and seats of influence that no smart cop should cross.
People with beards are shaken down thoroughly. I have crossed the border at Tijuana more than a dozen times, but the only time I was stopped and searched was after a week of skin-diving off the Baja California when three of us tried to get back into the States with a week's growth of hair on our faces. At the border we were asked the standard questions, gave the standard replies and were instantly seized. The customs agents took our truck, full of camping and Scuba gear, into a special shed and picked over it for an hour and a half. They found several bottles of liquor but no dope. They couldn't seem to believe it. They kept feeling the sleeping bags and groping under the chassis. Finally they let us go with a warning to be more careful in the future.
The Angels are too obvious for serious drug traffic. They don't even have enough capital to function as middlemen, so they end up buying most of their stuff in small lots at high prices. Three or four of them will nurse a joint until it is so short they have to hold it with alligator clips -- which many outlaws carry for exactly this purpose. People
The Angels are too obvious for serious drug traffic. They don't even have enough capital to function as middlemen, so they end up buying most of their stuff in small lots at high prices. Three or four of them will nurse a joint until it is so short they have to hold it with alligator clips -- which many outlaws carry for exactly this purpose.
A taste for pot is not part of the formula for success in a profit-oriented society. If Horatio Alger had been born near a field of locoweed his story might have been a lot different. He would have gone on unemployment and spent most of his time just standing around smiling at things, brushing off the protests of his friends and benefactors, saying, Don't bug me, baby -- you'll never know.
The younger Angels -- especially those who joined after the great publicity rash -- are far more involved with the drug underground than the veterans. They are less cautious about the risks in selling and handling. The Angels have always been consumers, but in 1966 they were drifting more toward a more businesslike involvement -- such as selling junk in large quantities.
The Angels insist there are no dope addicts in the club, and by legal or medical definitions this is true. Addicts are focused; the physical need for whatever they're hooked on forces them to be selective. But the Angels have no focus at all. They gobble drugs like victims of famine turned loose on a rare smorgasbord.
When my turn came I held out my hand and received about thirty small white pills. For a moment the talk ceased, while the outlaws gulped down their rations, chasing the pills with beer. I asked what they were and somebody beside me said, Cartwheels, man. Bennies. Eat some, they'll keep you going. I asked him what they were in milligrams, but he didn't know. Just take about ten, he advised. And if that don't work, take more.
they prefer the reds -- which they take along with beer and bennies to keep from getting sleepy. The combination brews up some hellish effects. Barbiturates and alcohol can be a fatal mixture, but the outlaws combine enough stimulants with their depressants to at least stay alive, if not rational.
(None of the four had motorcycles, and except for the lettering on their backs they looked like a bowling team from the
(None of the four had motorcycles, and except for the lettering on their backs they looked like a bowling team from the Bronx.)
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.
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!
they were too ignorant to know what to expect, and too wild to care.
The outlaws did a lot of strange, high-speed traveling, but it was not in the realm of the five W's.
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.
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.
détente with the Oakland police, they still viewed cops very
But in a society with no central motivation, so far adrift and puzzled with itself that its President 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 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.
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 day-dreams 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.
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 day-dreams 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.
another few seconds on the edge. . . The Edge. . . There is no honest way to explain it because the only people who really know where it is are the ones who have gone over. The others -- the living -- are those who pushed their control as far as they felt they could handle it, and then pulled back, or slowed down, or did whatever they had to when it came time to choose between Now and Later.