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In this league, sportsmanship is for old liberals and young fools.
How would the Yo-Yo king feel if he were stripped, in less than a decade, of all his customers except Hell’s Angels and cops?
red wings indicating that the wearer has committed cunnilingus on a menstruating woman, black wings for the same act on a Negress, and brown wings for buggery.
They considered me a slow learner, a borderline case with only splinters of real potential. My first plunge into folly was getting a limey bike,
Police are always more careful with people who’re employed, even by the Tong.
Barger’s chapter had a special relationship with the local law. Barger explained it as a potential common front against the long-rumored Negro uprising in East Oakland,
This wavering paradox is a pillar of the outlaw stance. A man who has blown all his options can’t afford the luxury of changing his ways. He has to capitalize on whatever he has left, and he can’t afford to admit—no matter how often he’s reminded of it—that every day of his life takes him farther down a blind alley.
Sociologists call it “alienation,” or “anomie.” It is a sense of being cut off, or left out of whatever society one was presumably meant to be a part of. In a strongly motivated society the victims of anomie are usually extreme cases, isolated from each other by differing viewpoints or personal quirks too private for any broad explanation.
the so-called American Way begins to seem like a dike made of cheap cement, with many more leaks than the law has fingers to plug.
The difference between the student radicals and the Hell’s Angels is that the students are rebelling against the past, while the Angels are fighting the future.
Their image of themselves derives mainly from Celluloid, from the Western movies and two-fisted TV shows that have taught them most of what they know about the society they live in.
so if they see themselves in terms of the past, it’s because they can’t grasp the terms of the present, much less the future.
In the cheap loneliness that is the overriding fact of every outlaw’s life, a funeral is a bleak reminder that the tribe is smaller by one. The circle is one link shorter, the enemy jacks up the odds just a little bit more,
and another few seconds on the edge … The Edge … There is no honest way to explain it because the only people who really know where it is are the ones who have gone over. The others—the living—are those who pushed their control as far as they felt they could handle it, and then pulled back, or slowed down, or did whatever they had to when it came time to choose between Now and Later.