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The highways are crowded with people who drive as if their sole purpose in getting behind the wheel is to avenge every wrong ever done them by man, beast or fate. The only thing that keeps them in line is their own fear of death, jail and lawsuits … which are much less likely if they can find a motorcycle to challenge, instead of another two-thousand-pound car or a concrete abutment. A motorcyclist has to drive as if everybody else on the road is out to kill him. A few of them are, and many of those who aren’t are just as dangerous—because the only thing that can alter their careless,
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The difference is as basic as between a professional football player and a rabid fan. One is a performer in a harsh, unique corner of reality; the other is a cultist, a passive worshiper, and occasionally a sloppy emulator of a style that fascinates him because it is so hopelessly remote from the reality he wakes up to every morning.
A Hell’s Angel on foot can look pretty foolish. Their sloppy histrionics and inane conversations can be interesting for a few hours, but beyond the initial strangeness, their everyday scene is as tedious and depressing as a costume ball for demented children.
Sonny Barger, a man not given to sentimental rambling, once defined the word “love” as “the feelin you get when you like somethin as much as your motorcycle. Yeah, I guess you could say that was love.”
In the argot of the cycle world the Harley is a “hog,” and the outlaw bike is a “chopped hog.”
“Well, it’s a good thing you didn’t try it,” he replied. “The last motorcycle punk who tried to run from me got killed. I kept on his tail until he made a mistake, then I ran right over him.”
“We’ve all been over the high side, baby. You know what that is? It’s when your bike starts sliding when you steam into a curve at seventy or eighty … She slides toward the high side of the curve, baby, until she hits a curb or a rail or a soft shoulder or whatever’s there, and then she flips … That’s what you call making a classic get-off, baby.”
It is a simple matter of accumulated experience, of having been hit or stomped often enough to forget the ugly panic that nice people associate with a serious fight. A man who has had his nose smashed three times in brawls will risk it again with hardly a thought. No amount of instruction in any lethal art can teach this—not unless the instructor is a sadist, and even then it would be difficult because the student’s experience would be artificially warped and limited.
American law enforcement procedures have never been designed to control large groups of citizens in rebellion, but to protect the social structure against specifically criminal acts, or persons.
Whaddeyou mean by that word “right”? The only thing we’re concerned about is what’s right for us. We got our own definition of “right.” —A Hell’s Angel sunk in philosophy
I told him I was a karate master and wanted to be in on the action.
There is a beautiful consistency about Buzzard; he is a porcupine among men, with his quills always flared. If he won a new car with a raffle ticket bought in his name by some momentary girl friend, he would recognize it at once as a trick to con him out of a license fee. He would denounce the girl as a hired slut, beat up the raffle sponsor, and trade off the car for five hundred Seconals and a gold-handled cattle prod.
“Just because I have a beard,” he muttered, “they want to put me in jail. What’s this country coming to?”
Gut eventually drifted away from the Angels and into the Berkeley-LSD scene.
In the Carolinas they say “hill people” are different from “flatlands people,” and as a native Kentuckian with more mountain than flatlands blood, I’m inclined to agree. This was one of the theories I’d been nursing all the way from San Francisco. Unlike Porterville or Hollister, Bass Lake was a mountain community … and if the old Appalachian pattern held, the people would be much slower to anger or panic, but absolutely without reason or mercy once the fat was in the fire. Like the Angels, they would tend to fall back in an emergency on their own native sense of justice—which bears only a
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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.
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.
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.”
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
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Another man, also wearing bermudas, sidled up to me and asked quietly, “Say, are you guys really Nazis?” “Not me,” I said. “I’m Kiwanis.”
Californians are known to be enthusiastic outdoorsmen; in 1964, near Los Angeles, thousands of weekend
A reporter on the scene said the campers were “pitching their tents among smoking stumps.” One man who had brought his family explained that there was “no place else to go, and we only have two days.”
Among the hardest hit was Terry the Tramp, who immediately loaded up on LSD and spent the next twelve hours locked in the back of a panel truck, shrieking and crying under the gaze of some god he had almost forgotten, but who came down that night to the level of the treetops “and just stared—man, he just looked at me, and I tell you I was scared like a little kid.”
“Everybody believes in something,” she said. “Some people believe in God. I believe in the Angels.”
When he recovered, he said the incident had taught him a valuable lesson: he no longer had to worry about what kind of pills he ate, because his body could handle anything he put into it.
he is a bone in the throat of those outlaws who don’t have even the illusion of an option.
One of the Jokers I’d been talking to earlier had become fascinated with the word “shunt.” It caught his ear when I referred to them having been “shunted off to a bad campsite. He repeated the word with a grin, then went off to play with it for a while. Several hours later I heard him urge another Joker: “Say, man, let’s go into town and shunt somebody.” By four in the morning the word had grown like a tumor in his consciousness and he wandered around the fire, buttonholing people and asking, “What would you do if I said I was gonna shunt you?” Or “Say, man, can you lend me some shunt until
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to make matters worse, he admitted being a free lancer—a term most police interpret to mean a bum who can’t even get a job. If they’d grabbed me that night I’d have admitted to being an Enforcer for the Opium Tong before saying I was a free-lance writer. Police are always more careful with people who’re employed, even by the Tong. The only thing better is a wallet full of high-toned credentials … membership cards, all kinds of them, covered with filigreed wording and strange codes alluding to firm connections with various Power Combines and seats of influence that no smart cop should cross.
We talked on the phone for about an hour one Thursday morning. I was so fascinated that I couldn’t hang up. The mayor spoke in a very exotic way. It was obvious that he was a man who marched through life to the rhythms of some drum I would never hear.
While he elaborated on this I checked my calender to make sure I hadn’t lost track of the days. If it was Sunday, perhaps he had just come back from church in a high, biblical state of mind. At any moment I expected to hear that the Angels had driven their motorcycles straight into the sea, which had rolled back to let them pass.
“Christ was a Hype”
The only problem with the Angels’ new image was that the outlaws themselves didn’t understand it. It puzzled them to be treated as symbolic heroes by people with whom they had almost nothing in common.
They talked of little else, and many stopped talking altogether. LSD is a guaranteed cure for boredom, a malady no less prevalent among Hell’s Angels than any other segment of the Great Society
Contrary to all expectations, most of the Angels became oddly peaceful on acid. With a few exceptions, it made them much easier to get along with.
If the Angels lent a feeling of menace, they also made it more interesting … and far more alive than anything likely to come out of a controlled experiment or a politely brittle gathering of well-educated truth-seekers looking for wisdom in a capsule.
None of these incidents involve that element of American society usually associated with criminal behavior. Like price fixing, tax evasion and embezzlement, psychedelic crimes seem to be a vice of the fatter classes.
When I told him to buy his own goddamn beer after I paid for the first two rounds he got sarcastic—so I said let’s go outside.”
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.
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.
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.
Yes time to take the heat symbolism off the Swastika and give the swastika back to the Indians & Peaceful Mystics & Calcutta Ganja Smokers Can you imagine doing the same for the Hammer and Sickle?
It was about this time that my long-standing rapport with the Angels began to deteriorate.
For nearly a year I had lived in a world that seemed, at first, like something original. It was obvious from the beginning that the menace bore little resemblance to its publicized image, but there was a certain pleasure in sharing the Angels’ amusement at the stir they’d created. Later, as they attracted more and more attention, the mystique was stretched so thin that it finally became transparent.
To see the Hell’s Angels as caretakers of the old “individualist” tradition “that made this country great” is only a painless way to get around seeing them for what they really are—not some romantic leftover, but the first wave of a future that nothing in our history has prepared us to cope with.
“There’s only two kinds of people in the world,” Magoo explained one night. “Angels, and people who wish they were Angels.” Yet not even Magoo really believes that.
Most Angels understand where they are, but not why, and they are well enough grounded in the eternal verities to know that very few of the toads in this world are Charming Princes in disguise. Most are simply toads, and no matter how many magic maidens they kiss or rape, they are going to stay that way …
There is not much mental distance between a feeling of having been screwed and the ethic of total retaliation, or at least the kind of random revenge that comes with outraging the public decency.
The laws they made to preserve a myth are no longer pertinent; 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. America has been breeding mass anomie since the end of World War II. It is not a political thing, but the sense of new realities, of urgency, anger and sometimes desperation in a society where even the highest authorities seem to be grasping at straws.
The news media loved it, and although many of the items on the Angels were rendered with considerable humor, the outlaws never noticed. They got a great boot out of seeing themselves on TV, and by the time things had come to this pass, there was no question of any ideological deviation within the club.
