Hell's Angels: A Strange and Terrible Saga

by Hunter S. Thompson

  If the Angels had good sense they would only patronize gas stations operated on a lease basis by absentee owners. The difference is easily discernible, in less than a minute’s time, to anyone who has ever pumped gas for a living, and many of the outlaws have. But as a group they scorn foresight and rely on a colorful, willful ignorance that brings them now and then to pick on a gas station whose owner works twelve hours a day on the premises, has his life savings tied up in the franchise, and whose body bloats with adrenaline at the prospect of being victimized by a gang of punks. People like this keep revolvers in the cash register, in the tool rack and even—in rough or robbery-type neighborhoods—in shoulder holsters under their friendly service jackets. Most of the Angels’ gas-station incidents involve proprietors who panic and go into a rage at the very sight of them.

  Some people can make the tough act work, but others will blow it badly. The Angels fear these “nuts,” as they call them, because they are just as likely to shoot for no reason at all as for the very best of reasons. But God’s mercy on a man who pulls a gun on a group of Hell’s Angels and then has it taken away. There are some awful stories about this, and in every case the victims could have saved themselves by shooting first and later pleading self-defense. On the Angel scale of values the only thing worse than a fink with a loose or frightened mouth is a loud antagonist who can’t follow through. People like this get the full measure of retribution—the natural attack on any human obstacle, plus the hyped-up hell-grinding contempt for a man who tries and fails to deal with them on their own terms … or at least what seems to be their own terms, if only by default.

  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.

  A filling-station owner near the Sierra town of Angels Camp (site of Mark Twain’s story “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County”) recalls his first confrontation with the Hell’s Angels in tones of fear and wonderment:

  “About thirty of them roared into my station one night. They said they needed a place to work on their bikes. I took one look at them and told them the place was theirs, and got the hell out of there in a hurry.”

  It was a normal enough reaction for a man running a no-help station at night in the mountains—for even a decision to fight to the death wouldn’t have accomplished much against thirty hoodlums. “After an hour or so I finally summoned the courage to go back and see if my place was still standing,” he said. “The Angels were just finishing up. I was never so surprised in my whole life. The place was spotless. They had washed every tool they used with gasoline and hung it back exactly where they found it. They even swept the floor. The place was actually cleaner than when they first came in.”

  Stories like this are common, even among cops. There is the testimony of a bar owner in Porterville: “Sure, they rode their motorcycles into my place, even tore up the tile doing it. But before they left they paid for every bit of damage, every broken glass. And I never sold so much beer in my life. They’re welcome here any time.”

  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 … and this happens, often with covert homosexuals long gone on booze or drugs and unable to control themselves in the presence of so much “rough trade.” The outlaws will nearly always give a flip-out a bad time. 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. This also caused protests, so they settled for hanging him by one arm from a living-room rafter. After a half hour or so they relented and cut him down, shaking their heads in puzzlement at his stony silence. The wretch hadn’t uttered a word throughout the ordeal. He seemed in a daze, and I had a fleeting impression that he’d planned the whole thing. Afterward he went outside and sat on a stump for several hours, saying nothing at all, but trembling now and then like a man coming down from some indescribable peak.

  The Angels are great favorites on the sado-masochism circuit, and although motorcycle hoods as a group are consistently accused of deviate leanings, I suspect the issue was stripped to the bony truth one afternoon by a Frisco Angel who said: “Hell yes, I’ll take a blow-job any day for ten bucks. Just the other night in some bar downtown I had a queer come up to me with a big tenner … he laid it on me and said what did I want to drink? I said, ‘A double Jack Daniels, baby,’ so he told the bartender, ‘Two of those for me and my friend,’ and then he sat down there on the bar rail and gave me a hell of a blow-job, man, and all I had to do was smile at the bartender and keep cool.” He laughed. “Hell, and me with four kids and a broad up front dancing the wig or the wag or something like that with some spade. Shit, man, the day they can call me queer is when I let one of these faggots suck on me for less than a tenner … Man, I’d go underwater and fuck fish for that kind of money, you just tell me who’s payin.”

  To whatever extent the Hell’s Angels may or may not be latent sado-masochists or repressed homosexuals is to me—after nearly a year in the constant company of outlaw motorcyclists—almost entirely irrelevant.

  There are literary critics who insist that Ernest Hemingway was a tortured queer and that Mark Twain was haunted to the end of his days by a penchant for interracial buggery. It is a good way to stir up a tempest in the academic quarterlies, but it won’t change a word of what either man wrote, nor alter the impact of their work on the world they were writing about. Perhaps Manolete was a hoof fetishist, or suffered from terrible hemorrhoids as a result of long nights in Spanish horn parlors … but he was a great matador, and it is hard to see how any amount of Freudian theorizing can have the slightest effect on the reality of the thing he did best.

  For the same reason, the behavior of the Hell’s Angels would not be changed or subdued for a moment if every newspaper in the land denounced them as brutal homosexuals—even if they were. Significantly, I have never heard anyone who had any personal dealings with them endorse the Freudian viewpoint—probably because anyone who spends any time with the Angels knows the difference between outlaw motorcyclists and homosexual leather cults. At any bar full of Hell’s Angels there will be a row of sleek bikes lined up on the curb outside. At a leather bar there are surrealistic renderings of motorcycles on the wall and perhaps, but not always, one or two huge, accessory-laden Harleys parked outside—complete with windshields, radios and red plastic saddlebags. 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.

  According to the Lynch report, “While homosexuals seem to be attracted to Hell’s Angels, no information received indicates that the Hell’s Angels as a group are homosexuals. They seem primarily concerned with heterosexual contacts. Some heterosexual perversions figure in the police reports, but taken in context, they appear to be means of attracting attention, ‘being different,’ and performed primarily for the shock impact on others. These and other attention-attracting actions are characterized by the Angels as ‘showing class.’ ”

  Certainly the Lynch report is not the last word on the Angels, but the nature and bias of the document is such that any available evidence of their homosexual action would have been prominently mentioned. The report makes so many references to cunnilingus that the word fellatio is conspicuous by its absence. No doubt there are Freudian ramifications even in
this omission—but again, I think they are mainly beside the point. 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.

  The motorcycle is obviously a sexual symbol. It’s what’s called a phallic locomotor symbol. It’s an extension of one’s body, a power between one’s legs.

  —Dr. Bernard Diamond, University of California criminologist, 1965

  The best-known public link between outlaw cyclists and homosexuality is a film titled Scorpio Rising. It is an underground classic of sorts, created in the early 1960s by a young San Francisco film-maker named Kenneth Anger. He never claimed that Scorpio had anything to do with the Hell’s Angels, and most of it was filmed in Brooklyn, with the co-operation of a group of motorcycle buffs so loosely organized that they hadn’t even bothered to name themselves. Unlike The Wild One, Anger’s creation had no journalistic or documentary intent. It was an art film with a rock-’n’-roll score, a bizarre little comment on twentieth century America, using motorcycles, swastikas and aggressive homosexuality as a new culture trilogy. By the time the Hell’s Angels joined the cultural mainstream Anger had made several other films with a strongly homosexual bias, and 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.

  Nevertheless, Scorpio Rising played in San Francisco in 1964 at a North Beach theater called The Movie, where Anger was living at the time, upstairs, which advertised the film with a sidewalk montage of Hell’s Angels newspaper clippings. The implication was so obvious that even the San Francisco Angels made a pilgrimage to check it out. It didn’t groove them at all. They weren’t angry, but genuinely offended. Their name, they felt, had been put to fraudulent commercial use. “Hell, I liked the film,” said Frenchy. “But it didn’t have anything to do with us. We all enjoyed it. But then we came outside and saw all those clippings about us, pasted up like advertisements. Man, it was a bummer, it wasn’t right. A lot of people got conned, and now we have to listen to all this crap about us being queers. Shit, did you see the way those punks were dressed? And those silly goddamn junkwagon bikes? Man, don’t tell me that has any connection with us. You know it doesn’t.”

  Anger seemed to agree, but quietly. There was no need to spoil a new boom for the film … and besides, one of the keenest talents in the homosexual repertoire is the ability to recognize homosexuality in others, very nearly without exception. So the phenomenon emerged: the Angels provided the realism that Scorpio lacked. The secret-queer factor gave the press an element of strange whimsy to mix in with the rape reports, and the outlaws themselves were relegated to new nadirs of sordid fascination. More than ever before, they were wreathed in an aura of violent and erotic mystery … brawling satyrs, ready to attempt congress with any living thing, and in any orifice.

  ‡ In 1966 a California license tag for a year-old Harley 74 cost $48.

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  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)

  They worship their motorcycles. They take them inside their homes at night. They sleep on grease-caked beds, but their bikes are spotless.

  —Los Angeles cop, 1965

  The farther the Angels roam from their own turf, the more likely they are to cause panic. A group of them seen on a highway for the first time is offensive to every normal notion of what is supposed to be happening in this country; it is bizarre to the point of seeming like a bad hallucination … and this is the context in which the term “outlaw” makes real sense. To see a lone Angel screaming through traffic—defying all rules, limits and patterns—is to understand the motorcycle as an instrument of anarchy, a tool of defiance and even a weapon. A Hell’s Angel on foot can look pretty foolish. Their sloppy histrionics and inane conversations can be interesting for a few hours, but beyond the initial strangeness, their everyday scene is as tedious and depressing as a costume ball for demented children. There is something pathetic about a bunch of men gathering every night in the same bar, taking themselves very seriously in their ratty uniforms, with nothing to look forward to but the chance of a fight or a round of head jobs from some drunken charwoman.

  But there is nothing pathetic about the sight of an Angel on his bike. The whole—man and machine together—is far more than the sum of its parts. 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. The Angels are not articulate about many things, but they bring a lover’s inspiration to the subject of bikes. 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. Yeah, I guess you could say that was love.”

  The fact that many Angels have virtually created their bikes out of stolen, bartered or custom-made parts only half explains the intense attachment they have for them. You’ve got to see an outlaw straddle his hog and start jumping on the starter pedal to fully appreciate what it means. It is like seeing a thirsty man find water. His face changes; his whole bearing radiates confidence and authority. He sits there for a moment with the big machine rumbling between his legs, and then he blasts off … sometimes in a cool, muted kind of way, and sometimes with a roaring wheelstand that rattles nearby windows—but always with style, with élan. And by cutting out in the grand manner at the end of each barroom night, he leaves the others with the best possible image of himself. Each Angel is a mirror in the mutual admiration society. They reflect and reassure each other, in strength and weakness, folly and triumph … and each night at closing time they cut out with a flourish: the juke box wails a Norman Luboff tune, the bar lights dim, and Shane thunders off drunkenly into the moonlight.

  Whether the Hell’s Angels are real motorcycle artists or not is hard to say. With the exception of a few drag meets, the outlaws are barred from all sanctioned competition, so there are no performance charts to go on.‡ Their bikes are entirely different from racing and scrambles machines, and even from other road bikes. The Angels tell tales of wiping out professionals in impromptu showdowns … but there are also stories about outlaws on souped-up hogs being humiliated by lightweight Ducatis.

  Perhaps the stories are true, perhaps not—but either way the argument is still moot. Motorcycles are designed for specific purposes: crosscountry, racing, cruising or just hopping around the neighborhood. They will all run … and so will dogs and horses, but nobody breeds horses to hunt possums, or enters dogs in the Kentucky Derby. Bike manufacturers have been trying for decades to make a genuine all-purpose model, but so far nobody has.

  There is no valid comparison between riding in dirt or competition, and riding a bike in traffic, day in and day out, on city streets and highways. Different skills are involved, and different kinds of reflexes. Some of the fastest racing bikes have no brakes, which would mean instant death in traffic—yet many professional riders say highways are far more dangerous than any race track.

  Dirt riders feel the same way: few even bother to license their bikes for the street. Don McGuire, a veteran scrambles rider and full-time motorcycle mechanic in Richmond, insists that only a madman or a masochist would ride a bike in traffic. “Look at it this way,” he says. “In any kind of race we’re all going the same way and we all know what we’re doing. Nobody has to worry about nuts or drunks or old ladies coming out of blind alleys. It makes a hell of a difference; you can concentrate on your own motor and keep it under control. We get injuries now and then, but broken bones are about the worst of it, and damn few people get killed.

  “But the highways!
Christ, here you are, moving along in traffic about sixty-five, right there at the speed limit, and it’s all you can do to keep out of people’s way. If the road’s a little wet—even damp from the fog—you’re in trouble no matter what happens. Slow down, and they’ll come right up on your tail or muscle you out of the lane. Speed up to get some room, and some geek hits his brakes right in front of you—God knows why, but they do it all the time.

  “One little thing like that and you’re into the meat grinder. The minute you hit the brakes you’ll start losing it; bikes don’t drift like cars. And once you go down, you’ll be lucky if you only get run over twice.”