When we got back, I noticed some of the Angels going outside of Kesey’s house, where we were all hanging out, from time to time passing through a side door. When we got back in the car to leave, Hunter was very, very agitated. He said, “Do you know what just happened? There was a gang bang in the cabin next door to the main house.” Hunter just happened to open the door. She wasn’t screaming or yelling or resisting, he said. She might have been passed out part of the time. It was not violent, but it was continual; lots of different Angels got involved.
This was the scene he wrote about toward the end of Hell’s Angels. It was very disturbing to him. He felt partially at fault for bringing them all together, and he felt sick.
DR. BOB GEIGER
People think that Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas is dedicated to me because they think I was supplying Hunter with drugs, but the main reason is that I would drive down to San Francisco almost every night, and Hunter and I would read through the Hell’s Angels manuscript page by page, word by word. I had a different idea of the way he should be writing it than he did, and I was absolutely wrong.
I would say, “Hunter, why are you writing about these losers? These guys are crazies, and you’re glorifying them. They’re nothing. You wouldn’t stop to piss on them if they were on fire, so why the hell are you writing a book about them? In essence, you’re kind of glorifying them in this book. Even though you’re not saying positive things, you’re giving them all kinds of publicity.” And he would listen to me. Remember, some of those articles in the National Observer were stories I wrote. But he said, “No, these guys are really showing us where society is going.” And I totally missed it, because he was absolutely right.
SONNY BARGER
He would fire a gun out the window of his apartment in San Francisco trying to impress people—to me, that is the stupidest thing anybody can do—and he would talk himself up that he was a tough guy, when he wasn’t. When anything happened, he would run and hide, like what he did at Bass Lake.
Bass Lake was the big run of the year, the Labor Day run. We had a place up there, and one year Hunter drove up in his car and met us. We’d be there, two, three, four days. Tiny Baxter might have been the sheriff; Sergeant Ring was the guy that ran the show up there. Sergeant Ring and I had a very good understanding. But Hunter jumped in his car for a beer run and a couple of us went with him. The first store we went to was a bust, so we went to another store. “These fucking punks ain’t going to run us off. We came here to get beer, and they aren’t going to tell us, ‘You can’t buy beer.’” But we get to the other store, and there was a group of mostly sheriffs waiting for us—there might have been three or four locals with them—and we got in a little verbal argument with the sheriffs there and we were going to fight, and Hunter jumped in the trunk of his car. When he’s got citizens around him, he’ll shoot his gun off and talk loud, but when the shit comes down, he’s out of there. When it was settled, he came out. He didn’t write about that part in the book.
JOHN CLANCY
I went over to Hunter’s place one Sunday to have a few beers and head to the football game—the Niners were playing the Packers that day, and we were all pretty excited—and nobody was home. I was furious. The big game was about to start and he was really late, and suddenly he comes screeching up and says, “I’m sorry I’m late, but the Hells Angels beat me up last night when they found out they weren’t going to get any royalties out of me. I probably wouldn’t have even made it, but I knew you guys were waiting for me.” He was bruised, and he had these welts on his face, and his nose was definitely broken and pushed in. This had happened the night before or maybe around midnight. He was pretty battered but certainly coherent. We walked to the game. He didn’t seem to be really badly injured.
SONNY BARGER
We hadn’t seen Hunter in months, maybe a year, and he said that his editor told him, “Finish the book or you’re not getting paid.” He said himself that he got a bottle of whiskey and an ounce of coke and wrote the second half of the book overnight. When the book was done, he came back around to us and said, “I’d like to go on this run with you.” We went up to Squaw Rock. It’s a big rock, 5,200 feet high. Supposedly in ancient folklore, the squaw’s boyfriend was fucking another squaw down at the bottom. She climbed up on the rock, jumped off, and landed on them both and killed them. But anyway, it’s up in northern California.
So we were up there. Hunter says it was an argument over whether his Triumph or BSA or whatever he had was faster than Junkie George’s Harley, which is total bullshit. Junkie George was the name of the guy that beat him up, but it had nothing to do with that. We were there and George got in an argument with his old lady—George’s old lady, not Hunter’s. They got in an argument, and George slapped her. You know, guys do that. Well, when he did that, his dog bit him. But when his dog bit him, George kicked the dog. And Hunter jumps right in. Now, Hunter’s run with us for a year. He knows policy and procedure, and he says, “Only punks slap their old ladies and kick their dogs.” And George says, “Well, I guess you want some too” and started beating him up. We let George beat him up for a couple of seconds, and then we stopped him. To hear Hunter talk, he was beaten half to death.
We stopped it. We put him in a car and told him, “You better get the fuck out of here. You’re outgunned.” He went to the sheriff’s department, and they told him, “Get the fuck out of here. You’re bleeding in our jail.” Well, he left. And then his book was a myth I had to live with.
JACK THIBEAU
I saw him two days after they beat him up. He looked like death warmed over. He was staying at some crash pad getting ready to leave for Aspen, and both of his eyes were filled with blood. His ribs were taped, and he was sleeping in a sleeping bag on the floor of this empty house. He and Sandy had moved out of their place and put all their stuff in a trailer, which was parked outside this house.
Juan and Sandy were already in the car. And as Hunter got out of the sleeping bag, he could hardly stand up. I tried to help him, but he said, “Oh no, no, don’t help me.” So he crawled up the wall from the sleeping bag and managed to get into his clothes and hobble out to the car. He got out up to the car, and then he sent me back into the house to the refrigerator for a six-pack of beer.
He made a mistake. He trusted them a little too much, and they got him. Sonny Barger’s great statement was: “You treat me good, I treat you better. You treat me bad, I treat you worse.” That’s the way they do it. If one Angel fights you, they all fight you. He just made that one last run he shouldn’t have.
SONNY BARGER
Of course he doesn’t want to admit he set it up. The best part of it was we wanted a keg of beer when the book was sold. That’s what our payment was, and he didn’t give it to us. That’s why I’ve never spoken to him. When I got out of prison the last time, in ’92, Hunter called my wife and wanted to talk to me. I didn’t want to talk to that motherfucker. And then he wanted to know what the problem was, and she told him, “You never gave him a keg of beer.” “Oh, if that’s all it is, I’ll buy him one now.” Well, mate, fuck you, you’re twenty-five years too late. We didn’t want money. We wanted a keg of beer.
It’s a funny thing. Hunter’s probably one of the best writers that we’ll ever get, but I didn’t care about that. The Rolling Stones are probably the best rock & roll singers left, but they’re total fucking jerks in my world. I met them at Altamont. I didn’t like them before they came out, I didn’t like what they did when they came out, and I didn’t like what they said about us afterwards. I don’t think that people realize that just because you’re really good at something, it doesn’t make you a good person.
JAMES SILBERMAN was the editor in chief of Random House in 1965.
I got onto Hunter because he had written this very good piece in The Nation about the Angels, and the subject seemed great. He didn’t need any help writing the book, but he needed help organizing the narrative. He hadn’t yet discovered his full voice, but he wa
s already beyond standard journalism. He was his own subject. He was putting himself into situations and not only letting them develop, but making them develop. He was interested in results. I said to him, “Hunter, I know how you do your research. You tie yourself to a set of railroad tracks and wait for the train.” That’s what happened at the end of Hell’s Angels. He was on the tracks the whole time he was working on that book.
From Hell’s Angels: The Strange and Terrible Saga of the Outlaw Motorcycle Gangs (1967)
By the middle of summer I had become so involved in the outlaw scene that I was no longer sure whether I was doing research on the Hell’s Angels or being slowly absorbed by them. I found myself spending two or three days each week in Angel bars, in their homes, and on runs and parties. In the beginning I kept them out of my own world, but after several months my friends grew accustomed to finding Hell’s Angels in my apartment at any hour of the day or night. Their arrivals and departures caused periodic alarums in the neighborhood and sometimes drew crowds on the sidewalk. When word of this reached my Chinese landlord he sent emissaries to find out the nature of my work. One morning I had Terry the Tramp answer the doorbell to fend off a rent collection, but his act was cut short by the arrival of a prowl car summoned by the woman next door. She was very polite while the Angels moved their bikes out of her driveway, but the next day she asked me whether “those boys” were my friends. I said yes, and four days later I received an eviction notice.
. . . Actually, their visits were marked by nothing more sinister than loud music, a few bikes on the sidewalk, and an occasional shot out the back window. Most of the bad action came on nights when there were no Angels around: one of my most respectable visitors, an advertising executive from New York, became hungry after a long night of drink and stole a ham from the refrigerator in a nearby apartment; another guest set my mattress afire with a flare and we had to throw it out the back window; another ran wild on the street with a high-powered Falcon air horn normally carried on boats for use as a distress signal; people cursed him from at least twenty windows and he narrowly escaped injury when a man in pajamas rushed out of a doorway and swung at him with a long white club.
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.
. . . [Terry the Tramp] 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.
TOM WOLFE is the author of numerous bestselling books.
Hell’s Angels is a beautiful mixture of very brassy reporting—I mean, to be with those guys as much as he was is like inviting that last scene—and very real thinking. He hadn’t been trying to interpret the Angels all through the book, and then at the end he comes up with the meaning of the Angels—“Exterminate all the brutes!”—which is from Conrad in Heart of Darkness. It was an awfully good combination of real reporting, real thinking, and the comic style.
SONNY BARGER
He didn’t belittle us. If there’s any falseness to the book, it’s more on the glamorous side than on the detractive side. He made us even more of a myth than we were at the time.
JAMES SILBERMAN
He’d come up to the offices on Madison Avenue when we were still in this mansion, and he’d sneak down the halls with this yachting foghorn attached to an air canister, which he’d blast, and we’d send out for the whiskey, and he’d hang around and talk. He soon became one of those authors who are a celebrity in the building. When Hunter was around, people showed up to take a look at him. It was life as performance art.
During one of these visits, Hunter had brought a snake, four or five feet long. He couldn’t carry it around with him everywhere, so he wanted to leave it in the Random House building. So he put the snake in a cardboard carton, which for a snake is nothing to get out of, and taped it up. Sometime during the weekend the snake got out, and the weekend guard looked up from his post and saw this gigantic snake slithering across the marble entryway. The guard got some sort of blunt instrument and quite brashly killed the snake.
When Hunter came in on Monday morning and found that his pet snake had been beaten to death, he was in a total rage. That snake story came up once a year for all the rest of the time that I knew Hunter. It had nothing to do with him being at all at fault for leaving a giant snake in a cardboard box in a midtown office building. It was this insane, crazed night watchman who had lost his head.
While I was having lunch with Hunter, I saw an agent I knew, Lynn Nesbit, and brought her together with Hunter. I thought it would be a very good match, and Lynn made a deal with Hunter.
LYNN NESBIT was Hunter’s literary agent for thirty years.
He had already written Hell’s Angels, so he was already very much on the map of celebrity. He was an incredibly good-looking and very strong man, and he was obsessed with getting enough money for his work. He had to depend on his writing, and he also spent money like it was going out of style. The arguments we had about money went on and on.
He’d come blundering into our offices, and there were always some secretaries there who were rather smitten with him. Some people were terrified of him. He’d be talking at the top of his voice with some strange baseball cap on and a bag full of his funny things. Even when it was quite cold out, he’d be in shorts.
WILLIAM KENNEDY
I noted the transformation of Hunter into a public personality for the first time when he was doing publicity for Hell’s Angels in 1968. He was in New York and he turned up with a cowboy hat and very bizarre sunglasses, bright red or green, glow in the dark. It was a costume for Halloween, and that persona was what he was after, that look. I asked him, “What are you made up for? What are you trying to prove?” He had always shown up at my house wearing sweaters, slacks—clothes, not costumes. But now the image was foremost. I believe Hunter was captured by that persona, and that his writing was transformed. More and more it was about that persona, not about what it used to be about. And it seemed he was reveling in it.
JACK THIBEAU
David Pierce, the mayor of Richmond, was having a birthday party across the bay, and I told him I’d come over and celebrate. Hunter was there, and he was whacked on something. I asked him what it was. He kind of hiked up his pants and said, “These drugs could knock down an elephant.” I said, “What do you mean?” He said, “I’m either high or I’m low, I can’t tell which where . . . which when . . . how I feel, you know?”
It got late, and Hunter said he had to go home and write, and I didn’t have a ride home. Hunter said that he’d drive me but that he had to stop off at the Angels bar in East Oakland. We got on his BSA and rode down the hill. Hunter stopped the bike and pulled off his helmet and gave it to me. I said, “No, it’s your helmet. Wear it.” He just said, “Do as I told you. Put that helmet on.” So I did and we went around the corner, and there was a long run to a stoplight, about two hundred yards, and the light was green. By the time we went through the stoplight we were going about sixty
miles an hour. He hit third gear, and the streets were very, very, very slick. We must have gotten up to about eighty, and then Hunter hit a turn, and all of a sudden I was being catapulted end over end. I felt like I could have rolled through it, but my knee hit a railroad track at eighty-five miles an hour.
I don’t know how long I was unconscious, but I woke up and saw that my pants were ripped, and there was some blood. I picked my leg up and it began to flop around like a fish. I saw a bone protruding. I hollered over to Hunter, who was maybe twenty yards away. He was unconscious, and the BSA looked like a mutilated machine. Then I saw some lights coming from the highway, and I realized they were police lights. All of a sudden Hunter was on his feet holding a bowie knife, standing and facing the police. And he said, “All right, you’ve been tracking me for months now, you cocksuckers.” Like they were a rival gang. “It’s about time we got it on. I’m sick and tired of it.”
The police pulled their guns and said, “Put down that weapon, or we’re going to use force.” And Hunter said, “I’ve had it with you motherfuckers.” The police got the knife away from him, and I saw that Hunter had a huge gash on his forehead, which turned out to be a concussion. As it turns out, he had a broken hand too.
They splinted my leg and put me and Hunter in an ambulance and took us to a hospital. While they were checking my insurance, Hunter came up with an expired Blue Cross card and said he was paying for everything. Then he disappeared. The hospital got a call about ten minutes later from a bowling alley—there’s a guy there bleeding all over the place, pounding his fist on the counter demanding beer. I woke up in intensive care with my knee raised above my head with two pins through it, and I had to stay that way for three months.
Hunter came to see me maybe once a week. He brought me a hot television set, some books. He’d come at two, three o’clock in the morning up the back stairs, drinking beer, smoking grass. The night nurse would give me a shot of morphine, and Hunter would say, “You know, you’re going to turn into a junkie taking that shit, man.” I said, “Well, it’s getting me through the day and night.” He said, “Yeah, you’re going to end up in fucking prison taking that shit. But don’t worry, they’ll cut you off. They’ll cut you off eventually, man, and then you’ll be fucked.”
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