The transaction had been carried out in Hollywood Indian style. There was a childlike simplicity in the dialogue between Barger and the lawmen:
“If you play straight with us, Sonny, we’ll play straight with you. We don’t want any trouble and we know you guys have as much right to camp on this lake as anybody else. But the minute you cause trouble for us or anyone else, we’re gonna come down on you hard, it’s gonna be powder valley for your whole gang.”
Barger nods, seeming to understand. “We didn’t come here for trouble, Sheriff. The way we heard it, you had trouble waitin for us.”
“Well, what did you expect? We heard you were coming in for a rumble, to tear things up.” Baxter forces a smile. “But there’s no reason why you can’t enjoy yourselves here like everybody else. You guys know what you’re doing. There’s nothing wrong with you. We know that.”
Then Barger smiles, very faintly, but he smiles so seldom that even a grimace means he thinks something is very funny. “Come off it, Sheriff. You know we’re all fuck-ups or we wouldn’t be here.”
The sheriff shrugged and walked back to his car, but one of the deputies picked up the conversation and soon found himself telling five or six grinning Angels what basically decent fellows they were. Barger went off to get a beer kitty going. He stood in the middle of the big clearing and called for donations. We had been there about half an hour and by this time I’d suffered a fatal run on my own stock. Puff had spotted the cooler in my car. I hadn’t planned to roll into camp and instantly dispose of my beer supply for the weekend, but under the circumstances I had little choice. There was no hint of intimidation, but neither was there any question in anyone’s mind that I’d brought the beer for any other purpose than to share it at this crucial, bone-dry time. 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.
In retrospect this seems like a small point, but it didn’t at the time. It was an ill-chosen moment to cast my bread on the waters … the suck-tide was running. Somewhere in the cacophony of foaming and hissing that followed the discovery of my cache, I recall saying, to nobody in particular: “All right, goddamnit, this thing had better work both ways.” But there was no reason to believe it would. At that stage of their infamy the Angels equated all reporters with Time and Newsweek. Only a few of them knew me, and the others were not going to be happy when I began lurking around the beer supply, draining one can after another in a feverish effort to even the score.
Many hours later, after the beer crisis had passed, I felt a little foolish for having worried. 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.” The timing and the spirit of the exchange are just as important as the volume. Much as they claim to admire the free enterprise system, they can’t afford it among themselves. Their working ethic is more on the order of “He who has, shares.” There is nothing verbal or dogmatic about it; they just couldn’t make it any other way.
But none of this was apparent that afternoon in Bass Lake as I watched my stock disappear while Barger called for funds. Although Sheriff Baxter had left, six deputies had attached themselves to the camp on what appeared to be a permanent basis. I was talking to one of them when Barger joined us with a handful of money. “The sheriff said that place by the post office will sell us all the beer we want,” he said. “How about using your car? There’s likely to be trouble if we take one of the trucks.”
I didn’t mind and the deputy said it was a socko idea, so we counted out the money on the hood of the car. It came to $120 in bills and roughly $15 in change. Then, to my astonishment, Sonny handed me the whole bundle and wished me well. “Try to hustle,” he said. “Everybody’s pretty thirsty.”
I insisted that somebody come with me to help load the beer in the car … but my real reason for not wanting to go alone had nothing to do with loading problems. I knew all the outlaws lived in cities, where the price of a six-pack ranges from $.79 to $1.25. But we were nowhere near a city, and I also knew, from long experience, that small stores in remote areas sometimes get their pricing policy from The Gouger’s Handbook.
Once, near the Utah-Nevada border, I had to pay $3.00 for a six-pack, and if that was going to be the case at Bass Lake, I wanted a reliable witness—like Barger himself. At normal city prices, $135 would fetch about thirty cases of beer, but up in the Sierras it would only cover twenty, or maybe fifteen if the merchants were putting up a solid front. The Angels were in no position to do any comparison shopping, and if they were about to be taught a harsh lesson in socioeconomics, I figured they’d be more receptive to the bad news if it came from one of their own people. There was also the fact that sending a penniless writer to get $135 worth of beer was—as Khrushchev said of Nixon—“like sending a goat to tend the cabbage.”
I mentioned this on the way to town, after Sonny and Pete had agreed to come with me. “You’d of come back with it,” Sonny said. “A person would have to be awful stupid to run off with our beer money.” Pete laughed. “Hell, we even know where you live. And Frenchy says you got a boss-lookin old lady, too.” He said it jokingly, but I noted that raping my wife was the first form of retaliation that came to his mind.
Barger, like the politician he is, hastened to change the subject. “I read that article you wrote about us,” he said. “It was okay.”
The article had appeared a month or so earlier, and I remembered a night in my apartment when one of the Frisco Angels had said, with a beery smile, that if they didn’t like what I wrote they’d come over some night to kick down my door, throw gasoline into the hall and then put a match to it. We were all in good spirits at the time, and I recall pointing to the loaded double-barreled shotgun on my wall and replying, with a smile, that I would croak at least two of them before they got away. But none of this violence had come to pass, so I assumed they either hadn’t read the article or had managed to live with what it said. Nonetheless, I was leery of having it mentioned, and especially by Barger, whose opinions automatically become the Hell’s Angels’ official line. I had written the piece with the idea that I would never again have any contact with motorcycle outlaws, whom I’d referred to as “losers,” “ignorant thugs” and “mean hoodlums.” None of these were terms I looked forward to explaining while surrounded at a remote Sierra campsite by two hundred boozing outlaws.
“What are you doin now?” Barger asked. “Are you writin somethin else?”
“Yeah,” I said. “A book.”
He shrugged. “Well, we don’t ask for nothin but the truth.‡ Like I say, there’s not much good you can write about us, but I don’t see where that gives people the right to just make up stuff … all this bullshit, hell, ain’t the truth bad enough for em?”
We were almost to Williams’ store, and I suddenly remembered my burr-haired inquisitor with his high-powered language barrier. We made the turn at the bottom of the hill and I parked the car as inconspicuously as possible about thirty yards from the store. According to the deputy at the campsite, the sale was already arranged. All we had to do was pay, load the beer and leave. Sonny had the cash, and as far as I was concerned, I was just the chauffeur.
It to
ok about fifteen seconds to understand that something had boggled the plan. As we stepped out of the car the vigilantes began moving toward us. It was very hot and quiet, and I could taste the dust that hung over the parking area. A Madera County paddy wagon was parked at the other end of the shopping center, with two cops in the front seat. The mob stopped short of the car and formed a bristling human wall on the boardwalk outside the store. Apparently they hadn’t been informed of the pending transaction. I opened the trunk of my car, thinking that Sonny and Pete would go in for the beer. If things got serious I could jump into the trunk and lock it behind me, then kick out the back seat and drive away when it was all over.
Neither Angel made a move toward the store. Traffic had stopped and the tourists were standing off at a safe distance, watching. The scene reeked of Hollywood: the showdown, High Noon, Rio Bravo. But without cameras or background music it didn’t seem quite the same. After a long moment of silence the burr-haired fellow took a few steps forward and shouted, “You better get your asses out of here. You don’t have a chance.”
I walked over to talk with him, thinking to explain the beer agreement. I wasn’t particularly opposed to the idea of a riot, but I didn’t want it to happen right then, with my car in the middle and me a participant. It would have been ugly: two Hell’s Angels and a writer against a hundred country toughs on a dusty street in the Sierras. Burr-head listened to my reasoning, then shook his head. “Mr. Williams changed his mind,” he said. And then I heard Sonny’s voice right behind me: “Well, fuck that! We can change our minds too.” He and Pete had walked out to join the argument, and now the vigilantes moved forward to support Burr-head, who didn’t look at all worried.
Well, I thought, here we go. The two cops in the paddy wagon hadn’t moved; they were in no hurry to break the thing up. Getting beaten by a mob is a very frightening experience … like being caught in a bad surf: there is not much you can do except try to survive. It has happened to me twice, in New York and San Juan, and it came within seconds of happening again at Bass Lake. All that prevented it was the suspiciously timely arrival of Tiny Baxter. The crowd parted to make room for his big car with the flashing red light on top. “I thought I told you to stay out of town,” he snapped.
“We came for the beer,” Sonny replied.
Baxter shook his head. “No, Williams says he’s running low. You gotta go over to the market on the other side of the lake. They have plenty.”
We left instantly. Like the first campsite, the first beer contact had all the signs of a calculated botch. Baxter may or may not have known what he was doing, but if he did he deserves credit for coming up with a subtle and ingenious strategy. He made a limited number of appearances during that weekend, but each one came at a critical moment and he always arrived with a solution. After the fixing of the beer crisis the Angels began to view him as a secret sympathizer, and by midnight of the first day Barger had been made to feel almost personally responsible for the welfare of everybody in Bass Lake. Each time Baxter fixed something he put the Angels more in his debt. The strange burden eventually ruined Barger’s holiday. The vagaries of the restraining order and the numerous agreements he’d made with the sheriff caused him to worry constantly. One of his few pleasures was the knowledge that Baxter wasn’t getting any sleep either.
On the way around the lake we speculated about what sort of mob might be waiting at the next store. “Those bastards were gonna stomp us,” said Pete.
“Yeah, and that would have been it,” Sonny muttered. “That sheriff don’t know how close he was to havin a war on his hands.”
I didn’t take his remark very seriously, but by the time the weekend was over I knew he hadn’t been kidding. If Barger had been stomped by a mob of locals, nothing short of a company of armed militia could have kept the main body of outlaws from swarming into town for vengeance. An attack on the Prez would have been bad enough, but under those circumstances—a police-planned beer run—it would have been evidence of the foulest treachery, a double cross, and the Angels would have done exactly what they all came to Bass Lake expecting to do. Most would have finished the weekend in jail or the hospital, but they were expecting that too. It would have been a good riot, but looking back, I no longer think the initial clash would have been evenly matched. Many of the vigilantes would have lost their taste for the fight the moment they realized that their opponents meant to inflict serious injury on anybody they could reach. Big Frank from Frisco,‡ for instance, is a black belt in karate who goes into any fight with the idea of jerking people’s eyeballs out of their sockets. It is a traditional karate move and not difficult for anyone who knows what he’s doing … although it is not taught in “self-defense” classes for housewives, businessmen and hot-tempered clerks who can’t tolerate bullies kicking sand in their faces. The intent is to demoralize your opponent, not blind him. “You don’t really jerk out the eyeball,” Big Frank explained. “You just sorta spring it, so it pops outta the socket. It hurts so much that most guys just faint.”
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.
So if there had been a full-strength fight that afternoon, the locals would probably have been routed after the first clash. But it would have taken a while for the police to muster enough strength to prevail, and in the meantime the outlaws would have wreaked all manner of destruction on the merchant Williams’ property—breaking windows, looting beer coolers and probably rifling some cash registers. A few would have been shot by Burr-head and his crew, but most would have tried to flee at the first sign of serious police action. This would have led to wild chases and skirmishing, but Bass Lake is a long way from Angel turf and not many of them could have made it all the way home without being captured at roadblocks.
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. John Foster Dulles might have called it a “balance of terror,” a volatile stand-off which neither side wanted to upset. Whether this was a just or desirable situation for a woodsy American community to find itself in is, again, pretty much beside the point. As weird and unreal as the Bass Lake confrontation might have sounded to radio listeners in New York or Chicago, nobody on the scene had any doubt about what they were seeing. Right or wrong, it was happening, and by the time the Angels were settled at Willow Cove, even the locally made restraining order was irrelevant. The outlaws simply had to be dealt with in terms of moment-to-moment reality.
I hadn’t planned to get physically involved, but after the narrow escape at Williams’ store I was so firmly identified with the Angels that I saw no point in trying to edge back to neutrality. Barger and Pete seemed to take me for granted. As we drove around the lake they tried earnestly to explain the importance of the colors. Pete seemed puzzled that the question had ever come up. “Hell,” he said, “that’s what it’s all about.”
The other market was in the center of the main tourist area, and when we got there the crowd was so dense that the only place to park was between the gas pump and the side door. If trouble broke out we’d be hopelessly penned in. At a glance the scene looked even worse than the one we’d just been rescued from.
But this was a different crowd. They’d apparently been waiting for hours to see the Angels in action, and now, as the two stepped out of the car, a murmur of gratification went up. These were not locals, but tourists—city people, from the valley and the coa
st. The store was full of newspapers featuring the Hell’s Angels rape in Los Angeles, but nobody looked frightened. A curious crowd gathered as the outlaws bargained with the owner, a short moon-faced man who kept saying, “Sure thing, boys—I’ll take care of you.” He was aggressively friendly, even to the point of putting his arm around Pete’s grimy shoulders as they made their way to the beer vault.
I bought a paper and went to the bar and lunch counter at the far end of the store. While I was reading the rape story I heard a little girl behind me ask, “Where are they, Mommy? You said we were going to see them.” I turned to look at the child, a bandy-legged pixie just getting her permanent teeth, and felt thankful once again that my only issue is male. I glanced at the mother and wondered what strange grooves her mind had been fitted to in these wonderfully prosperous times. She was a downbeat thirty-five, with short blond hair and a sleeveless blouse only half tucked into her tight bermuda shorts. It was a vivid Pepsi Generation tableau … on a hot California afternoon a sag-bellied woman wearing St. Tropez sunglasses is hanging around a resort-area market, trailing her grade-school daughter and waiting in the midst of an eager crowd for the arrival of The Hoodlum Circus, as advertised in Life.
Hell's Angels: A Strange and Terrible Saga Page 16