Hell's Angels

by Hunter S. Thompson

  The only significant press breakthrough during this crackdown winter of 1964–65 was a tongue-in-cheek series in the San Francisco Chronicle, based on some Angel parties at the Frisco chapter’s new clubhouse—which was raided and closed down almost immediately after the series appeared. Meanwhile, the Oakland Angels fattened steadily on the tide of refugees. From Berdoo, Hayward, Sacramento, the Angels were moving into the few remaining sanctuaries. By December, Barger’s chapter was so swollen and starved for enemies that they began crossing the bridge and attacking the Frisco Angels. Barger felt that Frisco, by allowing the membership to shrink to eleven, had so dishonored the Hell’s Angels’ tradition that they should forfeit their colors. Accordingly, he declared the Frisco charter void and sent his people over to collect the jackets. The Frisco Angels refused, but they were badly unnerved by the mad-dog raids from Oakland. “Man, we’d be sitting over there in the bar,” said one, “just coolin it around the pool table with a few beers—and all of a goddamn sudden the door would bust open and there they’d be, chains and all.

  “We finally got back at em, though. We went over to their hangout and set fire to one of their bikes. You should of seen it—we burned it right in the middle of the street, man, then we went into their pad and wiped em out. What a blast! Man, I tell you we had some real beefs.”

  That was in December. Two more quiet months followed … and then came the Attorney General’s report, coast-to-coast infamy and a raft of new possibilities. The whole scene changed in a flash. One day they were a gang of bums, scratching for any hard dollar … and twenty-four hours later they were dealing with reporters, photographers, free-lance writers and all kinds of showbiz hustlers talking big money. By the middle of 1965 they were firmly established as all-American bogeymen.

  Besides appearing in hundreds of wire-serviced newspapers and a half dozen magazines, they posed for television cameramen and answered questions on radio call-in shows. They issued statements to the press, appeared at various rallies and bargained with Hollywood narks and magazine editors. They were sought out by mystics and poets, cheered on by student rebels and invited to parties given by liberals and intellectuals. The whole thing was very weird, and it had a profound effect in the handful of Angels still wearing the colors. They developed a prima-donna complex, demanding cash contributions (to confound the Internal Revenue Service) in return for photos and interviews. The New York Times was hard hit by these developments, and a dispatch from Los Angeles on July 2, 1965, said: “A man representing himself as a ‘public relations man’ for … [the Hell’s Angels] has approached news media offering to sell photographic coverage of this weekend’s ‘rumble’ for sums ranging from $500 to $1,000. He also offered to arrange interviews with club members for $100 apiece, or more if pictures were taken. The representative told reporters it would be ‘dangerous’ to go to the San Bernardino bar where the group regularly congregates without paying the money for ‘protection.’ One magazine, he said, paid $1,000 for permission to have a photographer accompany the group this weekend.”

  The report was a combination of truth and absurdity, compounded by the fact that the Times’ Los Angeles correspondent had by this time developed a serious aversion to anything connected with the Hell’s Angels. His reasons were excellent; they had threatened him with a beating if he attempted to get a story on the Angels without first contributing to the club’s coffers. No journalist likes to be held up for cash payoffs in the line of duty, and the normal reaction—or at least the mythical reaction—is a quick decision to clamp down on the story like a bulldog and write it at all costs.

  The Times’ reaction was more subtle. They tried to de-emphasize the Angels, hoping they would go away. Which is exactly the opposite of what happened. The story was already snowballing, and the monsters which the Times had helped to create came back, with a press agent, to haunt them. Here was a handful of hoodlums, without status even in San Bernardino, demanding $1,000 from any journalist who wanted to hang around them for a single weekend. Most of the Angels saw the humor in it, but even at that stage of the game, there were a few who felt they were asking a fair price for their act … and their faith was justified when “one magazine” came through with either $1,000 (according to the Times) or $1,200 (according to the Angels). The question of this contribution is very touchy, for even if the editors would admit such a payoff, the writer and/or photographer who required it would do everything possible to avoid being labeled as one who has to buy his stories. The Angels talked freely about the money at first, but later denied it, after Sonny Barger passed the word that such talk could get them in tax trouble. It is a fact, however, that a Life-assigned photographer spent quite a bit of time with the Angels, working on a photo feature that was never published.

  An interesting sidelight on the demand for protection money is that the Angels got the idea from a man who makes more than $100,000 a year by capitalizing on various fads. This is the public relations man referred to by the Times. His involvement with the Angels began in Berdoo with the dragster set, but he was never their public relations man—only a noisy contact, a phone number and an unhired hustler with a penchant for bugging the press. (By the summer of 1965 he was marketing Hell’s Angels Fan Club T-shirts, which sold fairly well until the Angels announced they would burn every one they saw, even if they had to rip them off people’s backs.)

  In the long run he queered the Berdoo Angels’ whole stance by demanding big money from anybody who wanted to see them. And because nobody (except “one magazine”) was willing to pay, and also because nobody called his bluff, he was able to pass for almost half a year as the well-connected front man for a thing that had long since gone down the tube. The Berdoo Angels made the classic Dick Nixon mistake of “peaking” too early. Publicity from the Monterey rape and two subsequent local brawls had brought such relentless heat that those few who insisted on wearing the colors were forced to act more like refugees than outlaws, and the chapter’s reputation withered accordingly. By the middle of August 1965—while the action in Oakland was booming—the Los Angeles Times assayed the Berdoo situation: HELL’S ANGELS FADE IN VALLEY, POLICE PRESSURE TAMES OUTLAW CLUBS. The lead paragraph said, “Whatever outlaw motorcyclists there are in the [San Fernando] Valley have filtered underground, police say. They are lying low and causing very little trouble and no uproar.”

  “If a couple of them stick their heads up and appear on the streets now,” said a police sergeant, “the first patrol car that sees them stops them for questioning. If we can’t find anything else, we can almost always learn that they have traffic warrants outstanding against them. That’s enough to get them off the street, and it really bugs them.‡

  “We maintain a checkpoint at Gorman on the Ridge Route to stop and discourage them when groups from northern California—where they are more active—try to move into Los Angeles. We have other checkpoints along the Pacific Coast Highway, especially near Malibu.

  “They have become a very fluid bunch. We have a list of twenty-five hundred [sic] names of members in the various clubs, but we don’t even bother to try to keep addresses. They move constantly. They change their addresses, they change their names, they even change the color of their hair.”

  In Fontana, heartland of the Berdoo chapter’s turf, the Angels don’t raise much hell in public and they are not often rousted. “Four or five of them together, that’s all right,” said Police Inspector Larry Wallace. “A whole bunch of em, ten or twelve or more, and we bust it up.”

  In his private office Wallace keeps a souvenir to remind himself of what the Angels mean to him. It’s a two-by-four framed reproduction of a Modigliani woman he confiscated out of an Angel pad. The lady is sleepy-looking, long-necked, with a prim little mouth. An Iron Cross has been scrawled over her head, and the word “help” is entwined in her hair. Around her neck hangs a Star of David with a swastika stamped into it, and there’s a bullet hole in her throat, with a drawing of the bullet emerging from the back of her head. Scatter
ed here and there are Angel maxims of the day:

  Dope Forever

  Forever Loaded

  Honest officer, had I known my

  .… health stood in jeprody I

  .… would never had lit one.

  The Angels survived in Berdoo, but they never regained their status of the late fifties and early sixties. When fame finally beckoned, they had little to offer but a hideous reputation and a shrewd press agent. Otto, president of the chapter, couldn’t get a handle anywhere. Sal Mineo was talking about a $3,000 fee to cover outlaw participation in a movie, but the Angels couldn’t muster a quorum: some were in jail, others had quit and many of the best specimens had gone north to Oakland—or “God’s Country,” as some of them called it—where Sonny Barger called the shots and there was no talk at all of the Hell’s Angels fading away. But Otto wanted some of the action too, and he still had a handful of loyalists to back him up. Between them they managed to pull off one last coup—a full-dress show for a writer from the Saturday Evening Post.

  The Post article appeared in November 1965, and although the view it expressed was critical, the Angels were far more impressed with the quantity of such coverage than the quality. Its total effect on them was considerable. They had, after all, made the cover of the Saturday Evening Post—in color and along with Princess Margaret. They were bona-fide celebrities, with no worlds left to conquer. Their only gripe was that they weren’t getting rich. (“All these mothers are using us and making a scene,” Barger told the Post reporter, “and we ain’t getting a damn cent out of it.”) It was true that the Oakland Angels had been cut out of the Los Angeles bargaining, but they eventually got nearly $500 for the photos they sold to the Post, so it was difficult to view them as a wholly exploited minority.

  We’re a gallant bunch of heroes,

  We’ve been organized ten years,

  We’re known about the city

  As the Bowery Grenadiers …

  We’re good old stock

  With a Cobble rock,

  And a length of gaspipe too.

  We can lick the Brooklyn Guards

  If they only show their cards,

  We can run like the devil

  When the ground is level

  For about four hundred yards.

  And the girls, the little dears,

  They’re in love up to their ears,

  When they see the style

  And smell the hair oil

  Of the Bowery Grenadiers.

  —From “The Bowery Grenadiers,” words and music by John Allison‡

  My dealings with the Angels lasted about a year, and never really ended. I came to know some of them well and most of them well enough to relax with. But at first—due to numerous warnings—I was nervous about even drinking. I met a half dozen Frisco Angels one afternoon in the bar of a sleazy dive called the DePau Hotel, located in the south industrial section of the San Francisco waterfront and on the fringe of the Hunger’s Point ghetto. My contact was Frenchy,‡‡ one of the smallest and shrewdest of the outlaws, who was then part owner of a transmission-repair garage called the Box Shop, across Evans Avenue from the degraded premises of the DePau. Frenchy is twenty-nine, a skilled mechanic and an ex-submariner in the Navy. He is five foot five and weighs 135 pounds, but the Angels say he is absolutely fearless and will fight anybody. His wife is a willowy, quiet young blonde whose taste runs more to folk music than to brawls and wild parties. Frenchy plays the guitar, the banjo and the tiple.

  The Box Shop is always full of cars, but not all of them belong to paying customers. Frenchy and a rotating staff of three or four other Angels run the place, working anywhere from four to twelve hours a day most of the time, but occasionally taking off for a bike trip, an extended party or a run down the coast on a sailboat.

  I talked to Frenchy on the phone and met him the next day at the DePau, where he was playing pool with Okie Ray, Crazy Rock and a young Chinaman called Ping-Pong. Immediately upon entering the bar, I took off my Palm Beach sport coat, in deference to the starkly egalitarian atmosphere which the customers seemed to prefer.

  Frenchy ignored me long enough to make things uncomfortable, then nodded a faint smile and rapped a shot toward one of the corner pockets. I bought a glass of beer and watched. Not much was going on. Ping-Pong was doing most of the talking and I wasn’t sure what to make of him. He wasn’t wearing any colors, but he talked like a veteran. (Later I was told he had an obsession about getting in and spent most of his time hanging around the Box Shop and the DePau. He had no bike, but he tried to compensate by carrying a snub-nosed .357 Magnum revolver in his hip pocket.) The Angels were not impressed. They already had one Chinese member, a mechanic for Harley-Davidson, but he was a quiet, dependable type and nothing like Ping-Pong, who made the outlaws nervous. They knew he was determined to impress them, and was so anxious to show class, they said, that he was likely to get them all busted.

  When the pool game ended, Frenchy sat down at the bar, and asked what I wanted to know. We talked for more than an hour, but his style of conversation made me nervous. He would pause now and then, letting a question hang, and fix me with a sad little smile … an allusion to some private joke that he was sure I understood. The atmosphere was heavy with hostility, like smoke in an airless room, and for a while I assumed it was all focused on me—which most of it was when I made my initial appearance, but the focus dissolved very quickly. The sense of menace remained; it is part of the atmosphere the Hell’s Angels breathe … Their world is so rife with hostility that they don’t even recognize it. They are deliberately hard on most strangers, but they get bad reactions even when they try to be friendly. I have seen them try to amuse an outsider by telling stories which they consider very funny—but which generate fear and queasiness in a listener whose sense of humor has a different kind of filter.

  Some of the outlaws understand this communications gap, but most are puzzled and insulted to hear that “normal people” consider them horrible. They get angry when they read about how filthy they are, but instead of shoplifting some deodorant, they strive to become even filthier. Only a few cultivate a noticeable body odor. Those with wives and steady girl friends bathe as often as most half-employed people, and make up for it by fouling their clothes more often.‡ This kind of exaggeration is the backbone of their style. The powerful stench they are said to exude is not so much body odor as the smell of old grease in their crusty uniforms. Every Angel recruit comes to his initiation wearing a new pair of Levis and a matching jacket with the sleeves cut off and a spotless emblem on the back. The ceremony varies from one chapter to another but the main feature is always the defiling of the initiate’s new uniform. A bucket of dung and urine will be collected during the meeting, then poured on the newcomer’s head in a solemn baptismal. Or he will take off his clothes and stand naked while the bucket of slop is poured over them and the others stomp it in.

  These are his “originals,” to be worn every day until they rot. The Levi’s are dipped in oil, then hung out to dry in the sun—or left under the motorcycle at night to absorb the crankcase drippings. When they become too ragged to be functional, they are worn over other, newer Levi’s. Many of the jackets are so dirty that the colors are barely visible, but they aren’t discarded until they literally fall apart. The condition of the originals is a sign of status. It takes a year or two before they get ripe enough to make a man feel he has really made the grade.

  Frenchy and the other Angels at the DePau wanted to know if I’d located them by following the smell. Later that night, at the weekly meeting, I noticed that several were wearing expensive wool shirts and ski jackets under their colors. When the bars closed at two, five of the outlaws came over to my apartment for an all-night drinking bout. The next day I learned that one was an infamous carrier of vermin, a walking crab farm. I went over my living room carefully for signs of body lice and other small animals, but found nothing. I waited nervously for about ten days, thinking he might have dropped eggs that w
ere still incubating, but no vermin appeared. We played a lot of Bob Dylan music that night, and for a long time afterward I thought about crabs every time I heard his voice.

  That was in early spring of 1965. 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. The appearance of the rape omen was a clear and present danger to property values; the block had to be purified. It was not until much later, after I’d moved, that I realized the woman had been thoroughly frightened. She’d seen groups of Angels going in and out of my apartment now and then, but once she got a look at them and heard the terrible sound of their machines, she felt a burning in her nerves every time she heard a motorcycle. They menaced her day and night—whining and booming below her window—and it never crossed her mind that the occasional blast of an outlaw chopper was any different from the high-pitched wailing of the little bikes at the dental fraternity a half block away. In the afternoon she would stand on her front steps, watering the sidewalk with a garden hose and glaring at every Honda that came over the hill from the nearby medical center. At times the whole street seemed alive with Hell’s Angels. It was more than any taxpaying property owner should have to bear. 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 was 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.