Hell's Angels: A Strange and Terrible Saga

by Hunter S. Thompson

  The first police car arrived just as the beating ended. Two others rolled up from different directions, then came a paddy wagon, and finally an ambulance. The Angels insisted the huge victim had pulled a knife on them and had to be subdued. The cops looked around with their flashlights, but the knife was not to be found. The Negro was in no condition to deny anything, although he regained consciousness almost immediately and was able to walk to the ambulance. This seemed to satisfy the police, at least for the time being. They took a few notes and warned Sonny that the victim might want to press charges when he came out of shock, but I had the impression that they considered the case already closed … natural justice had prevailed.

  The case never came to court, but it whipped the Angels into a very agitated state of mind. There was no doubt in their heads that the niggers would try to get even. And next time it wouldn’t be just four of them. Never in hell. Next time it would be massive retaliation. Probably they would strike on a moonless night … they would wait until almost closing time, hoping to catch the Angels drunk and helpless, and then they would make their move. The dreary neon calm of East Fourteenth Street would be shattered without warning by the screeching of primitive bone whistles. Wave after wave of sweaty black bodies would move out of the command post—the Doggie Diner on East Twenty-third—and move silently through the streets to their positions on the attack perimeter, about four hundred yards from the El Adobe. Then, when the bone whistles sounded, the first wave of niggers would run like the devil across East Fourteenth, ignoring the red light, and fall on the Angels with savage homemade weapons.

  Every time I talked to the Angels in the weeks after the Big Nigger incident they warned me that the cork was ready to blow. “We’re pretty sure it’s gonna be Saturday night,” Sonny would tell me. “We got the word from a fink.” I assured him that I wanted to be there when the attack came, and I did. Several months earlier I would have laughed the whole thing off as some kind of twisted, adolescent delusion … but after spending most of that summer in the drunk-bloody, whore-walloping taverns of East Oakland, I had changed my ideas about reality and the human animal.

  One weekend night in late summer I got out of my car in the El Adobe lot. Somebody called my name in a high-pitched whisper and I nodded to the handful of Angels standing near the doorway. I heard the whisper again, but none of the people I could see had said anything. Then I realized somebody was on the roof. I looked up and saw Sonny’s head peering over the concrete ledge. “Around back,” he hissed. “There’s a ladder.”

  Behind the building, in a jumble of garbage cans, I found a twenty-foot ladder leading up to the roof. I climbed up to find Sonny and Zorro lying in a corner almost invisible in a maze of peeling tar paper. Sonny had an AR-16, the newest U. S. Army rifle, and Zorro had an M-1 carbine. Piled between them on the roof was a stack of ammunition in boxes and clips, a flashlight and a thermos bottle of coffee. They were waiting for the niggers, they said. This was the night.

  It wasn’t—but the Angels kept armed guards on the roof of the El Adobe for nearly a month, until they were sure the niggers were completely intimidated. One afternoon at the height of the tension Barger and five others rode their bikes out to a target range in Alameda. They carried their rifles strapped over their backs and took a route through the middle of Oakland. The police telephone hummed with reports of a heavily armed Hell’s Angel patrol moving south through the center of town. But there was nothing the cops could do. The outlaws had their unloaded guns in plain sight and were observing the speed limit. They felt they needed some target practice … and if their appearance had a bad effect on the public, well, that was the public’s problem, not theirs.

  Most of the Angels knew better than to carry weapons openly, but some of their homes resemble private arsenals—knives, revolvers, automatic rifles and even a homemade armored car with a machine-gun turret on top. They don’t like to talk about their weaponry … it’s their only insurance policy against that day when the Main Cop decides on a showdown, and the Angels are absolutely certain that day is coming.

  No, I wouldn’t call them “racists.” Not really. Maybe deep down they are. There ain’t no Negro Angels, you notice. But the Angels ain’t for anybody, and that makes them anti-Negro and just about anything else.

  —San Bernardino County police inspector

  In the language of politics and public relations the Angels “peaked” in the fall of 1965. The Labor Day Run to Kesey’s was a letdown of sorts, because towns all over the country were braced for the invasion, waiting to be raped and pillaged. The National Guard was called out at such far-flung points as Parker, Arizona, and Claremont, Indiana. Canadian police set up a special border watch near Vancouver, British Columbia; and in Ketchum, Idaho, the locals mounted a machine gun on the roof of a Main Street drugstore. “We’re ready for those punks,” said the sheriff. “We’ll put half of em in jail and the other half in the graveyard.”

  The Angels’ jaunt to La Honda was a sad anticlimax for the press. The outlaws did a lot of strange, high-speed traveling, but it was not in the realm of the five W’s. One of my memories of that weekend is Terry the Tramp’s keynote speech delivered to the police on the highway. He got hold of a microphone tied up to some powerful speakers and used the opportunity to unburden his mind … addressing the police in a very direct way, speaking of morals and music and madness, and finishing on a high, white note which the San Mateo sheriff’s department will not soon forget:

  “Remember this,” he screamed into the mike. “Just remember that while you’re standin out there on that cold road, doin your righteous duty and watchin all us sex fiends and dope addicts in here having a good time … just think about that little old wife of yours back home with some dirty old Hell’s Angel crawlin up between her thighs!” Then a burst of wild laughter, clearly audible on the road. “What do you think about that, you worthless fuzz? You gettin hungry? We’ll bring you some chili if we have any left over … but don’t hurry home, let your wife enjoy herself.”

  It was hard to know, in the triumphant chaos of that Labor Day, that the Angels were on the verge of blowing one of the best connections they’d ever had. Busting up country towns was old stuff, and the cops were getting tense about it. The hippie drug scene was a brand-new dimension—a different gig, as it were—but as the Vietnam war became more and more a public issue the Angels were put in a bind.

  For several months they’d been drifting toward political involvement, but the picture was hazy and one of the most confusing elements was their geographical proximity to Berkeley, the citadel of West Coast radicalism. Berkeley is right next door to Oakland, with nothing between them but a line on the map and a few street signs, but in many ways they are as different as Manhattan and the Bronx. Berkeley is a college town and, like Manhattan, a magnet for intellectual transients. Oakland is a magnet for people who want hour-wage jobs and cheap housing, who can’t afford to live in Berkeley, San Francisco or any of the middle-class Bay Area suburbs.‡ It is a noisy, ugly, mean-spirited place, with the sort of charm that Chicago had for Sandburg. It is also, a natural environment for hoodlums, brawlers, teen-age gangs and racial tension.

  The Hell’s Angels’ massive publicity—coming hard on the heels of the widely publicized student rebellion in Berkeley—was interpreted in liberal-radical-intellectual circles as the signal of a natural alliance. Beyond that, the Angels’ aggressive, antisocial stance—their alienation, as it were—had a tremendous appeal for the more aesthetic Berkeley temperament. Students who could barely get up the nerve to sign a petition or to shoplift a candy bar were fascinated by tales of the Hell’s Angels ripping up towns and taking whatever they wanted. Most important, the Angels had a reputation for defying police, for successfully bucking authority, and to the frustrated student radical this was a powerful image indeed. The Angels didn’t masturbate, they raped. They didn’t come on with theories and songs and quotations, but with noise and muscle and sheer balls.

  The hone
ymoon lasted about three months and came to a jangled end on October 16, when the Hell’s Angels attacked a Get Out of Vietnam demonstration at the Oakland-Berkeley border. The existential heroes who had passed the joint with Berkeley liberals at Kesey’s parties suddenly turned into venomous beasts, rushing on the same liberals with flailing fists and shouts of “Traitors,” “Communists,” “Beatniks!” When push came to shove, the Hell’s Angels lined up solidly with the cops, the Pentagon and the John Birch Society. And there was no joy that day in Berkeley, for Casey had apparently gone mad.

  The attack was an awful shock to those who had seen the Hell’s Angels as pioneers of the human spirit, but to anyone who knew them it was entirely logical. 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. If they wanted to be artful about bugging the squares they would drop the swastika and decorate their bikes with the hammer and sickle. That would really raise hell on the freeways … hundreds of Communist thugs roaming the countryside on big motorcycles, looking for trouble.

  The first clash came on a Saturday afternoon, at the midway point of a protest march from the Berkeley campus to the Oakland Army Terminal, a shipping point for men and matériel bound for the Far East. Some fifteen thousand demonstrators moved down Telegraph Avenue, one of the main streets of Berkeley, and came face to face—at the city limits—with a four-hundred-man wall of Oakland police wearing helmets and holding riot sticks at port arms. They were deployed in a flying wedge formation, with Police Chief Toothman in the central, ball-carrier’s position, giving orders over many walkie-talkies. It was obvious that the march was not going to cross the Oakland line without a fight. I approached the confrontation from the Oakland side—but even with a tape recorder, camera and press credentials, it took almost thirty minutes to get through the no man’s land of the police wall. Most people—even some legitimate journalists—were turned back.

  So it is still beyond my understanding how a dozen Hell’s Angels, obviously intent on causing trouble, managed to filter through and attack the leaders of the protest march as they came forward to confer with Chief Toothman. Tiny led the charge, swinging at anyone unlucky enough to be in his way. The Angels were quickly subdued by Berkeley police, but not before they managed to punch a few people, tear up some signs and rip microphone wires off the march leaders’ sound truck. This was the infamous struggle that resulted in the cop’s broken leg.

  It was all a misunderstanding, the hipster commandos said, explaining the attack: the Angels were duped by the cops, their heads had been turned by secret Right Wing money, they would certainly adjust their allegiance just as soon as they knew the score.

  But the score was a lot more complicated than the hipsters realized. Another Vietnam protest was scheduled for mid-November, and in the meantime there were numerous meetings between the antiwar brain trust and the Hell’s Angels. 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.

  During the weeks preceding the second march on the Oakland Army Terminal, Allen Ginsberg spent much of his time trying to persuade Barger and his people not to attack the marchers. On the Wednesday before the march Ginsberg, Kesey, Neal Cassidy, some of Kesey’s Pranksters and a group of Angels met at Barger’s house in Oakland. A lot of LSD was taken, foolish political discussion was resolved by phonograph voices of Joan Baez and Bob Dylan, all concluding with the whole group chanting the text of the Prajnaparamita Sutra, the Buddhist Highest, Perfect Wisdom Sermon.

  The outlaws had never met anyone quite like Ginsberg: they considered him otherworldly. “That goddamn Ginsberg is gonna fuck us all up,” said Terry. “For a guy that ain’t straight at all, he’s about the straightest sonofabitch I’ve ever seen. Man, you shoulda been there when he told Sonny he loved him … Sonny didn’t know what the hell to say.”

  The Angels never really understood what Ginsberg meant, but his unnerving frankness and the fact that Kesey liked him gave them second thoughts about attacking a march that he obviously considered a Right thing. Shortly before the November march, Ginsberg published this speech in the Berkeley Barb:

  TO THE ANGELS

  by Allen Ginsberg

  These are the thoughts—anxieties—of anxious marchers

  That the Angels will attack them

  for kicks, or to get publicity, to take the heat off themselves

  or to get the goodwill of police & press &/ or right wing Money

  That a conscious deal has been made with Oakland police

  or an unconscious rapport, tacit understanding mutual sympathy

  that Oakland will lay off persecuting the Angels if the Angels attack & break up the March & make it a riot

  Is any of this true, or is it the paranoia of the less stable-minded marchers?

  As long as Angels are ambiguous and don’t give open reassurance that they can be trusted to be tranquil,

  The anxious souls, the naturally violent, the insecure, the hysterics among the marchers have an excuse for policy of

  self-defense thru violence,

  a rationalization for their own inner violence.

  That leaves the Marchers with choice of defending themselves thru force on account of fear & threat unleashing the more irrational minority of rebels

  or at best, defending themselves coolly, under control BUT CRITICIZED FOR BEING LAWLESS

  or not defending selves, and possibly abandoned by police

  (for we have no clear assurance from Oakland police that they will sincerely try to maintain order and guard

  our lawful right to march)

  if you attack, & having innocent pacifists, youths & old ladies busted up

  AND CRITICIZED AS IRRESPONSIBLE COWARDS

  By you, by Press, by Public & by Violence loving leftists & rightists.

  As it stands the VDC adopted policy of pacifism for marchers, WHO SIMPLY WILL NOT RIGHT. And will try to make the march a HAPPY SPECTACLE.

  Do Angels have any questions for Vietnam Day Committee?

  any suspicions that might be cleared up now? What’s the main complaint?

  What do the Angels plan to do Nov. 20? Do they really have a plan?

  Let’s now make a plan that will leave everybody secure.

  Because the Fearheads around the VDC public meetings believe the Image of Angels as “They like to bust people up for kicks” and naturally you get a bad rep. that way

  especially if you’ve finally found a group you can beat up with some social approval, temporarily, & compliance of the cops.

  You don’t want to “change” you want to be yrselves, & if that includes sadism, or forced hostility, here’s a situation where you can get away with it.

  BUT NOBODY WANTS TO REJECT THE SOULS OF THE HELL’S ANGELS

  or make them change—

  WE JUST DON’T WANT TO GET BEAT UP

  The protest march is trying to point out

  that the terror in Vietnam is making

  same terror h
ere inside our country

  loosing publicly the same cruel psychology that’ll

  give approval to busting yellow head gooks in Vietnam

  This is infecting peaceful human relations here allowing for public mass persecution of people who disagree with

  the

  growth of mass hostility mass hypocrisy mass conflict The mass of marchers are not POLITICAL, they’re

  PSYCHOLOGICAL HEADS

  who don’t want the country to drift into the habit of blind violence & unconscious cruelty & egoism NOT COMMUNICATION—with outside world or lonely

  minorities in America

  such as yourselves

  and ourselves

  AND the negroes

  AND the teaheads

  AND the Communists

  AND the Beatniks

  AND the Birchers

  AND even the so called Squares

  I am afraid that once

  the people who hate us peace

  Marchers & let you beat us up,—afraid of us Pacifists—will then, still having this

  fear and hate at heart, turn it on you afraid of you, too,

  or ask you to turn it on other minorities the negroes?

  Ultimately on you and each other.

  (This was the pattern of Brown Shirts in Germany

  who were used by hate politicians,

  & then creamed in Concentration Camps.

  I think.)

  I said we were not politicians mostly. And you say

  you’re indifferent to politics. But you’re getting hung on

  politics and taking Geopolitical positions promoting bomb

  Vietnam.

  What ELSE, besides this politics, will take the heat off the Hell’s Angels?