Hell's Angels: A Strange and Terrible Saga

by Hunter S. Thompson

  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.

  ‡ 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 motional 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.

  ‡ 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.”

  ‡ © Copyright 1957, Hollis Music, Inc., New York. Used by permission

  ‡‡ Frenchy from Frisco, not Frenchy from Berdoo

  ‡ 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 sleep with you till you shower.’ ”

  4

  They’re the Wild Bill Hickoks, the Billy the Kids—they’re the last American heroes we have, man.

  —Ed “Big Daddy” Roth

  Go get those punks.

  —Newsweek (March 1965)

  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 t
he 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.‡ “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 girl friends, 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.‡ “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.‡

  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 hand 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?

  —Anglo-Saxon motto

  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‡ 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.