No Angel

by Jay Dobyns

  It was a whirlwind. At one point Pops stepped away to get some beer. As he crossed the room an older Angel—tan, trim, wearing eyeglasses—stepped into his path and grabbed his arm.

  I immediately recognized him as Ralph “Sonny” Barger.

  This was the first time I’d laid eyes on the man. He was around sixty-five, but looked to have the health of a vibrant man in his mid-fifties, a remarkable achievement considering the paces he’d put his body through over the decades. He had close-cropped white hair, was clean-shaven, and looked more like a Marine drill sergeant than a lifelong outlaw. He moved with all the confidence and sureness of a sultan in his harem.

  For those who don’t know, this was the man—the legend, really—who molded the Hells Angels into what they are. It’s not a stretch to say that Sonny Barger is a visionary who essentially created the image of the outlaw biker as we know it. He had help, to be sure, and the names of his cohorts dating back to the late fifties through the present are legendary in the biker world: Johnny Angel, Terry the Tramp, Magoo, Junkie George, Mouldy Marvin, Cisco Valderama. Together and with a host of others, these men created the image—the leather, the hair, the grime, the hardness, the silence, the impenetrability, the bikes—everything that constitutes an outlaw biker.

  Especially the bikes.

  Without the Hells Angels we wouldn’t have floor-model Harleys that look like stripped-down scream machines. No ape hangers, no flared fenders, no bitch bars, no spool wheels, no front-end extenders. There’d be less chrome, less-creative paint jobs, less style. The HA were obsessed with going fast, and without this obsession bikes would be slower. They were relentless in stripping their bikes of all but the barest essentials. The formula was simple: Less weight plus bigger engines equaled more speed. Every pound they shed gained them two miles per hour. Thus, “choppers”—chopped-down motorcycles. What they did was mimicked by everyone who wanted to be a Hells Angel but couldn’t be. Their influence is seen today in bikes designed by Jessie James of West Coast Choppers and the Teutuls at Orange County Choppers.

  Bikes aside, a world without Sonny Barger would look pretty much the same, but the world of the outlaw biker, if it even existed, would look a hell of a lot different. He is the iconic outlaw biker, and all members of every club look up to him as the godfather of their culture. He’s respected for who he is, but he’s also respected for his vision. He saw that the Angels could go international, that though American in origin, they needn’t be limited to America’s borders. As I’ve said before, I believe that the Hells Angels, and to a lesser extent all American-style biker gangs, are this country’s only organized-crime export. This is the doing of Ralph “Sonny” Barger. He embodies everything about the Hells Angels, from their unwavering image right on down to their contradictions.

  Those contradictions fascinate me. The Hells Angels are separate from society, but they’re rooted in it; they’re nonconformists, but they all look the same; they’re a secret society, but also flamboyant exhibitionists; they flout the laws of the land, but they’re governed by a strict code; their name and their Death Head logo represent freedom, individualism, toughness, and lawlessness, but both name and logo are protected by legal trademarks.

  The way these contradictions manifest in the real world is what really pisses me off. These guys shouldn’t be able to have it both ways. I mean, if you don’t respect the law, then why use certain laws to protect yourself? Why conduct toy runs and other charity drives to bolster your public image if you don’t care what the public thinks? Which is it? Are you misunderstood bike enthusiasts, or violent hoodlums? Why do you care if anyone likes you? When the Angels are at their criminal best, they embody everything an outlaw ought to: fight first and ask questions later. Better yet, don’t ask questions. Take what you want: turf, pussy, beer, bikes, drugs. Be violent and don’t apologize. I never apologized for being an undercover cop, even when it put me in life-threatening or ethically compromising positions. I never apologized for arresting people who deserved it, whether I liked them or not. I never apologized for being on the other side of the Hells Angels’ coin.

  Like me, most of these guys had a chip on their shoulder—but unlike me, they all thought that society unjustly discriminated against them. Like me, they had no interest in a regular job or lifestyle. Maybe I cherished my family and friends more than they did—but didn’t they cherish their brothers and their club in the same way? They knew they were outcasts, so why not be outcasts together? Maybe the essence of their alienation was a question of nature versus nurture. Maybe, just maybe, they did get a raw deal. Did the Hells Angels shun the world, or did the world shun them?

  These armchair reflections never crossed my mind during the investigation. All I thought as I watched Sonny approach Pops was, Wow, there’s the Chief. The fucking Chief is here! With us! I’d told myself I wouldn’t be impressed by his presence, but I was wrong. I was starstruck.

  Pops was too. All of Sonny’s movements and gestures were charming. I couldn’t hear him, but I could tell by the way Pops turned his ear to him that Sonny’s tracheostomy hole made no difference. There was nothing funny about Sonny’s cancer kazoo. In fact, it made him more formidable. They’d carved his throat out thirty years back and the guy hadn’t missed a beat. Sonny was the king of the outcasts and he knew it. We all did.

  Sonny checked out Pops’s Solo cut and gave him a hearty hug and they parted.

  Pops told me later that Sonny had said, “Thanks for coming out. Thanks for showing respect. You should come visit us at Cave Creek. We have a charter up there, too.”

  The Solo Angeles Nomads had the blessing of the godfather, and it felt good.

  We hung out. Bad Bob looked more like Barry Gibb than ever. His hair was immobile—perfectly frozen in place with a net of hair spray. Doug Dam wanted to know if I wanted “any of those things,” referring to more guns. I winked and told him we’d talk later. I hung out in the front yard and watched the members-only door swing wide. Inside, on a low table, I saw a rock of crystal the size of a baseball. Next to it was a mound of ground meth several inches high. Members came and went, their women came and went (women, exempt from ever being members, were allowed to enter the front house with permission from a patch). All leaned over the table to snort. All came up zooming.

  At some point during the evening I remembered that I’d brought a donation. I found Bad Bob and handed it to him. He peeked inside at five crisp hundred-dollar bills and removed a Solo Angeles business card (we’d had a thousand printed—black and orange, fssf). On the back I’d written “Love and respect, Solos.” He put it in his vest. We shook hands and ended up hugging.

  Everyone was happy. They were happy because they’d made it five years in the desert. We were happy because we thought they’d never make it to ten. Success and smoke and that dank smell of beer infused everything.

  The haze never lifted. The party wasn’t going to end. I have no idea when we left.

  19

  ARRESTING RUDY KRAMER

  NOVEMBER 2002

  ANOTHER DEVELOPMENT ADDED to our high-flying attitude. As promised, JJ was in Phoenix the night of the anniversary party, listening in with the cover team. On her way back to San Diego the following day she got a call from her ASAC. He said, “Maguire, you got what you wanted. You get to run with those crazy bastards in AZ. Have fun.”

  Her part-time reassignment started on November 5. From then on, JJ would be available to Black Biscuit three glorious days a week.

  I went home on Sunday, October 27, for a couple of days of R&R. I only went because Slats ordered me to. Had he said nothing, I would’ve stayed in Phoenix.

  Pops’s wife and daughters lived in Tucson too. We decided to ride our bikes home, flying full Solo colors down I-10, running side by side through the Valley. I had my cut on over nothing—just my bare torso, the leather vest open and flapping in the wind, my Glocks sticking out of my waistband. Cold as hell but I didn’t care. I was showing off for anyone to see. Pops had
on a long-sleeved orange T-shirt under his cut. We both had orange bandannas tied around our heads. I rode on the left, he rode on the right. I was getting better on a bike: We rode around 85 or 90 mph. Cars got out of our way. The country around us was wide open, the highway seemed to exist just for us. I felt free.

  We peeled apart at the edge of metro Tucson. All we did was wave. We’d see each other soon enough.

  I stopped at a flower farm owned by an old friend. He sold his goods on the honor system, leaving cut flowers in vases in the front of his house. You paid by dropping money in a little wooden box. I took three bouquets’ worth of flowers and stuffed a hundred bucks into the box. I strapped them to the backseat with black and orange bungee cords. Neighbors gave me sideways looks, trying not to be noticed by the badass biker with the flowers.

  I pulled onto my street. It curved this way and that through the desert. A roadrunner sprang across the pavement, his tail pointed straight up. A long black snake slithered into a patch of cholla like an animated S. My bike was loud, people knew I was coming. Gwen stood by the front door when I pulled in.

  I fired down. “What’s up, honey?”

  She eyed me hard. Real hard, harder than any of the guys I’d been hanging out with could ever have hoped to. I didn’t like it. I unstrapped the flowers.

  “I got you and the grandmas some flowers.”

  She didn’t look at them. “I’m going out. Jack’s in his room playing video games. Dale’s at Mel’s.”

  “Who’s Mel?”

  “A new friend. The number’s on the fridge.” She walked toward her car and repeated, “I’m going out.”

  “This Mel, he a boy?”

  “No, Jay.”

  I’d been holding the flowers out to show her. As she moved to her car, I let my hand fall limply to my side. “Where’re you going?”

  “Just out. I’ll be back. Don’t worry.”

  She got in her car and left.

  I went inside and took my cut off. I hung it on the coatrack. It looked out of place next to my family’s outerwear. I caught my image in the hall mirror: topless, tattooed, muscles bulging, arms and face dirty with the road. I was wrong. I looked out of place.

  I moved around the house. It was a mess. Piles of dirty clothes on the bedroom floors, piles of unfolded clean ones on the beds. Unrinsed dishes in the kitchen. Little pools of water on the tops of the bathroom sinks. Gwen knew I had a compulsion for organization and cleanliness. The mess was probably unintentional—I knew she was overwhelmed with being everything to everyone while I was away—but I couldn’t help wondering if the state of the house meant that she didn’t care to make me comfortable whenever I happened to come home.

  I took a shower. When I was done I put on a pair of swim trunks and went to see Jack in his room. Clothes lay on his bed, too, but they were folded. By the way they were folded I could tell he had done it himself. His TV was on. A frozen image from a Madden’s NFL 2001 game was on the screen. Jack was hunched over his desk, writing.

  I said, “Hey, kiddo.”

  He turned. He looked surprised and frustrated. He hadn’t heard me come in. When he realized it was me, his features softened. He was a good kid. Too good for me.

  I asked him what he was doing.

  “Well, homework right now. I was playing Madden’s, trying to learn all the offensive sets so I don’t have to think about it so much, you know?” I told him I did. I knew he had limits on how long he could play video games, but I was happy to hear he was trying to learn all the sets. I’d played the game with him in the past, and even I was shocked by the number of plays the computer had, and how hard they could be to execute or defend. Sad to say, but I looked at his playing of Madden’s as a kind of education, which I fully supported.

  I asked, “Hey, you hungry?”

  “Yep.”

  “Why don’t you bring your homework to the dining room. I’ll make some lunch.”

  He said OK and gathered his stuff up.

  In the kitchen I got out a can of tuna, opened it, drained it, and put it in a bowl. I added mayo and pepper. I cut up a small onion and a sour pickle and put them in the bowl. I added dill. I got out four slices of bread and put them in the toaster. I mashed the fish mixture with a fork. I looked over at Jack. His shoulders were gathered around his ears, his tongue was out. He was trying really hard, striving to do his best. I was proud.

  I put the bread on a big plate and divided the tuna salad onto two pieces of golden bread. I got out some lettuce and put it on the salad. I squirted yellow mustard on the other two slices of bread and folded them onto the lettuce. I pushed them into place and cut the sandwiches diagonally.

  I watched Jack some more. He was erasing some of his letters. No—he was erasing a lot of them. I could see the side of his face. His concentration had crossed back into frustration. I grabbed the plate and walked over to the table.

  He’d been erasing to the point where he was eating holes in his paper. I asked him if he was having trouble with an answer.

  He said, “No. The answer’s right.”

  “Then what’s the problem, kiddo?” I sat next to him, put down the plate, and grabbed a wedge of sandwich. I bit into it.

  “It’s my handwriting. It’s all wrong. I can’t get it right. I hate it.”

  He dropped his pencil and hung his head. The tuna tasted good but I felt sick. I knew immediately that I’d screwed up something in my son’s head.

  I said, “It looks good to me. I can read it.”

  “That’s not the point, Dad, it’s not right, you know? I can do better.”

  “You’re nine years old, kiddo. You’ll get the hang of it.”

  “But it’s not right.” I knew what he meant. I recognized them as a paraphrase of my own words, repeated to him and Dale who knew how many times, in all kinds of contexts: sports, schoolwork, chores. I’d drilled it into them: “Everything you do—everything—do it to the max. This is the key to success in life and personal satisfaction. Nothing short of everything you have is acceptable. That will make you a winner.” I felt like a worm. I should’ve been there to tell Jack that it was his effort that was important, not the result. But I wasn’t there. I mean, I was there in the sense that Jack was trying to make me happy, by getting his letters right—but I wasn’t there physically to tell him that no matter what, Jack always made me happy. He’d confused effort with result, just as I always had.

  A worm. A worm split in two. I writhed, but I wouldn’t let him see it.

  I said, “Hey, kiddo, I know I’ve said otherwise, but what really matters is that you try your best. You give a good effort—your best effort—and there’s no reason why you shouldn’t be satisfied with what you get. Got it? That’s what’s important. Try hard. Effort is its own reward.”

  He said OK, but I didn’t believe him. Why should I? I barely believed myself. Results were all that mattered to me, all that had mattered to me for years. I handed him a sandwich wedge. We ate and talked about Little League and the Arizona Cardinals. I promised I’d take him to a game. He said, “Really?”

  I said, “Really.”

  GWEN CAME BACK later. She’d gone shopping at Old Navy and had an early dinner with some friends she hadn’t seen in a while. Jack was already off to bed, and Dale, who’d had dinner at Mel’s, was in her room reading.

  Gwen wasn’t happy. We went to our room and argued. She told me she didn’t want me showing up at home looking the way I did. She said it was hard enough for the kids my not being there, that I didn’t have to confuse them by looking like a damn biker in my own home. I said Jack didn’t see me decked out. She said he just as easily could have. She was right; I said I wouldn’t wear my UC clothes home ever again. She said that wasn’t the point. She said she was getting worn down. I asked her if she thought I wasn’t. I asked her if she knew the kind of shit I dealt with every day. She asked me the same question. Neither of us knew what the other was dealing with, and we both felt underappreciated, but neither of us was
going to concede that the other was more correct. I asked her why she’d had to go out so quickly, why we couldn’t have had some time at home together, with the kids and all. She yelled my full name—Jay Anthony Dobyns! I said, “Hey, I’m not a detective.”

  She said, “No, you’re an undercover.” She changed gears, said, “I know you have a woman on the case, I just know it.”

  This shocked me. I hadn’t told her anything about JJ, who had yet to work even a full day. Woman’s intuition, I guess. She asked if I thought it was fair that she had to stay home all the time with the family while I did whatever the hell it was I did with whomever the hell I did it with. I didn’t like the implication. I hadn’t slept with another woman and I wasn’t planning to. I told her that was my job, and that, by the way, when I’m working I’m running with thugs in Bullhead, not sipping mai tais on Kauai. She said that when I came home, whenever that happened to be, I could expect her to take off for a while. She said she needed a break too. I agreed. She said it may be my job to do whatever, whenever, with whomever, but it was her job to look after our family. She put a particular emphasis on that word, our, as if I’d forgotten a fact. Maybe I had. No—I’d definitely begun to forget by then. Once again, I felt like a worm. But, more than that, I felt angry for being made to feel like a worm. I was just doing my job, and I was good at my job, and I wasn’t going to stop doing my job.

  I had to cool down. I went out to the pool and listened to the desert. There were crickets and coyotes. There was no moon. The stars were bright. Jack’s light was out. Dale’s and Gwen’s were on. I lit a cigarette and smoked it. I lit another and smoked it. I lit another, and smoked it.