Hell's Angels

by Hunter S. Thompson

  ‡ Copyright © 1965 by Springfield Music, Ltd., Chappell & Co., Inc., owner of publication and allied rights for the Western Hemisphere

  11

  Were it not for the presence of the unwashed and the half-educated, the formless, queer and incomplete, the unreasonable and absurd, the infinite shapes of the delightful human tadpole, the horizon would not wear so wide a grin.

  —Frank Moore Colby,

  Imaginary Obligations

  The Hell’s Angels as a group are often willfully stupid, but they are not without savoir-faire, and their predilection for travelling in packs is a long way from being all showbiz. Nor is it entirely due to warps and defects in their collective personality. No doubt these are factors, but the main reason is purely pragmatic. “If you want the cops to leave you alone you have to shake em up,” explains Barger. “If we make the scene with less than fifteen bikes they’ll always bust us. But if we show up with a hundred or two hundred they’ll give us a goddamn escort, they’ll show a little respect. Cops are like anybody else: they don’t want any more trouble than they think they can handle.”

  This was obviously true at Bass Lake, which had already hosted one Hell’s Angel rally, in 1963, an occasion which resulted in the defiling of a local church. Because of this previous hurt to the community—coupled with a fear of disrupted tourist trade—the law enforcement agencies of Madera County decided to fight the Hell’s Angels with a new kind of stratagem. The district attorney, Everett L. Coffee, drew up a document—a “legal restraining order” designed to keep the outlaws out of Madera County forever. Or at least that was the general idea.

  Sometime around noon it became apparent from the multitude of radio alarms that several large bands of Hell’s Angels were indeed headed for Bass Lake. Yet there were other reports of communities in both northern and southern California still “braced for invasion.” This was because various elements of the press had managed to convince each other that there were actually five hundred to a thousand Hell’s Angels—so when only two hundred showed up at Bass Lake both the news media and the police felt certain the others would strike somewhere else. When a half dozen of the Frisco Angels appeared in Marin County they were immediately surrounded and followed by sheriff’s deputies who knew they were only the vanguard of a whole army just over the rise. The sad truth was that Frenchy and a few of his Box Shop cohorts had canceled out on the main run, wanting to avoid trouble, and had decided to go off on their own for a peaceful weekend. As it turned out, they were harassed more severely than they would have been at Bass Lake.

  If the Angels needed evidence to support their strength-in-numbers policy, they got it on July Fourth. The only outlaws who didn’t get jerked around by the law were those who made the rally. The few splinter groups who went off by themselves were searched and ticketed from one end of the state to the other. Afterward, a careful count of Hell’s Angels sightings added up to less than three hundred, including all the rest of the clubs. Where the other seven hundred outlaws spent the holiday is any man’s guess; if Mr. Lynch knew, he wasn’t talking.‡

  Somewhere near Modesto, about halfway between Oakland and Bass Lake, I heard on the radio that roadblocks were being set up to prevent the outlaws from entering the resort area. At the time I was running slightly ahead of the Joker-Angel convoy but behind the main Angel contingent that had left the El Adobe before I arrived. I wanted to be on hand when they got to Bass Lake, for the newscasts left no doubt that a major riot was inevitable.

  There are two ways to get to Bass Lake from the freeway U.S. 99. I knew the Angels would go south to Madera and then take California 41, a wide, well-paved highway, all the way into Yosemite. The other access route is about fifty miles shorter, but it is a maze of switch-offs and half-paved backroads through the mountains. It took off at Merced and climbed up to Tuttle, Planada, Mariposa and Bootjack. According to the map, the last twenty miles appeared to be a gravel goat track. My car had been wheezing and shimmying all the way from San Francisco, but I swung left at Merced and floored it for a long roller-coaster-run through the foothills. Only two of the outlaws, both strays, made the mistake of taking the same route. I passed one; he was kneeling over a road map in an ancient gas station near Mormon Bar. The other, with a girl on the back, came wailing past me on the climb to Mariposa. The temperature at noon was 105 degrees, and the brown California hills looked ready to burst into flame at any moment. The only green in the landscape was the fringe of scrub oaks looking down on the valley. People who claim to know say these knotty little trees exist in only two places—California and Jerusalem. In any case, they burn well, and if a fire gets started in the grass below, the main job of the stand-by fire crews is to keep it from reaching the oaks which squat there in the dry wind like an army of nervous virgins, a firestorm waiting for a spark.

  I was laboring along behind a fire truck when the untracked outlaw came zooming past. He had apparently tired of the slow pace and whacked his hog down into second … winding it out until he got abreast of me and then crashing into third. The men in the fire crew stared as if a polar bear had just rushed across the road. The bike was gone in an instant, but the clang and blast of its gear changes hung on the wind like the sound of a jet passing over. And in that instant the firemen caught a glimpse of the hairy rider, the swastika on the gas tank, and the girl on the back—a sight so unutterably strange to their mountain eyes that they could only gape at it.

  A few miles west of Mariposa, well into the mountains, I heard another radio bulletin:

  The Hell’s Angels motorcycle club has arrived at Bass Lake, and members are reported trying to filter into the resort area. Authorities, armed with a court restraining order, are manning roadblocks in an effort to keep the motorcyclists out of the area during the long holiday weekend.

  If the roadblocks were strategically placed they could prevent a rendezvous by cutting off access to public campsites in the national forest and forcing the outlaws to congregate in places where they would be certain, by the very nature of their gathering, to violate some county or municipal ordinance. A blockade at Oakhurst, just short of the national-forest boundary, could have created a situation where the Angels could be arrested for either blocking the highway or moving off of it and trespassing on private property. With a little imagination, the roadblocks might have been gerrymandered to force one group of outlaws off to the south and another to the north. There was no lack of methods the authorities might have used to prevent a Hell’s Angels rally at Bass Lake. But it was the same old story: the police were expecting at least five hundred savages coming in for a rumble; roadblocks would detain them, but for how long? And what then? The idea that the Angels would ride two hundred miles for a party and then be turned back by a roadblock ten miles from their destination was obviously wishful thinking. There would surely be violence, a bloody clash on a major highway, with holiday traffic backed up for miles. The alternative was to let them pass, but that too was fraught with tragic possibilities. It was a certified conundrum, a rooty challenge to the legal and social machinery of Madera County.

  At a gas station in Mariposa, I asked directions to Bass Lake. The attendant, a boy of about fifteen, advised me solemnly to go elsewhere. “The Hell’s Angels are gonna tear the place up,” he said. “There’s a story about them in Life magazine. Jesus, why would anybody want to go to Bass Lake? Those guys are terrible. They’ll burn the place down.”

  I told him I was a karate master and wanted to be in on the action. As I left he warned me to watch myself and not take chances. “The Hell’s Angels are worse than you think,” he said. “They’ll run right down a shotgun barrel.”

  The next stretch of road was like something from a Lewis and Clark diary. The car suffered so badly that I figured I would have to abandon it before the weekend was out and catch a ride back to San Francisco in one of the swastika trucks. I amused myself between creek crossings by telling the tape recorder how weird it was to be seeking out a gang of big-city psychopath
s in this kind of country. The road was not even numbered on the map. Now and then I would pass an abandoned log house or the remains of a gold-panning rig. Except for the radio I felt as remote from civilization as any lone poacher in the jagged Mission Range peaks of northern Montana.‡

  Somewhere around two in the afternoon I reached the smooth pavement of Highway 41, just south of Bass Lake. I was flipping the radio dial for bulletins when I passed a hot dog stand and saw two outlaw bikes parked conspicuously beside the road. I made a U-turn, parked beside the bikes and found Gut and Buzzard brooding over the restraining order. Buzzard, formerly of Berdoo, is a Hell’s Angel straight out of Central Casting. He is a weird combination of menace, obscenity, elegance and genuine distrust of everything that moves. He turns his back on photographers and thinks all journalists are agents of the Main Cop, who lives in a penthouse on the other side of some bottomless moat that no Hell’s Angel will ever cross except as a prisoner—and then only to have his hands chopped off as a lesson to the others. 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.

  I enjoy Buzzard, but I have never met anyone outside the Angels who thought he deserved anything better than twelve hours of the bastinado. One morning when Murray was doing his research for the Post article I assured him it would be safe to go over to Barger’s house in Oakland for an interview. Then I went back to sleep. Several hours later the phone rang, and it was Murray, yelling with rage. He’d been talking quietly with Barger, he said, when suddenly he was confronted by a wild-eyed psychotic who shook a knotty cane under his nose and shouted, “Who the fuck are you?” The assailant’s description didn’t fit any Angel I’d ever met, so I called Sonny and asked what had happened. “Aw hell, it was just Buzzard,” he said with a laugh. “You know how he is.”

  Indeed. Anyone who has ever met Buzzard knows how he is. It took Murray several hours to calm down after his introduction, but weeks later—after lengthy reflection and a distance of three thousand miles—he was still sufficiently affected by the incident to describe it like this:

  We talked affably enough for half an hour or so and at one point Barger grinned and said, “Well, nobody never wrote nothin good about us, but then we ain’t never done nothin good to write about.” But the convivial atmosphere began to change noticeably when four or five other Angels, including Tiny, the chapter’s huge sergeant at arms, stopped by and joined in. One, a surly black-bearded youth named Buzzard, was sporting a pork-pie hat and a cane he had picked up somewhere; he waved the cane about as he talked and jabbed it at me from time to time. I suddenly got the clear impression that he would have enjoyed using it on somebody. I was the only candidate in the room. I was certain Barger and the other Angels weren’t about to pick on me, but I knew that if Buzzard began going to work with the cane I couldn’t count on anyone stopping it before I got hurt. To resist would have been folly, because the Angel code would then have called for all of them to pitch in for old Buzzard and I would have been demolished. I sensed menace in the room, and as soon as I could manage it without giving the impression that I was bolting (which might have been a fatal mistake), I said goodbye to Sonny and strolled out of the house.

  I quote Murray because he gives me a sense of balance. His perspective on the Angels was very different from mine. Buzzard was the only one who really gave him a jolt. The others only made his flesh crawl. The fact of their existence was an insult to everything he considered decent. He may have been right, and in a way I hope he was, for it would add to the satisfaction—the sense of culture and old-world solidity—that I got from agreeing with him now and then.

  Actually, Buzzard is not that dangerous. He has a keen dramatic sense and a taste for weird props. The pork-pie hat Murray referred to is an expensive straw Panama with a madras band. They sell for about $18 at the best shops in San Juan and are worn by American businessmen all over the Caribbean. Buzzard’s cane—which Murray saw as a cudgel of some kind—is an integral part of his uniform, his image. Next to Zorro, Buzzard is the Angels’ fashion plate. Except for his colors and his neatly trimmed black beard, he looks almost collegiate. In his late twenties, he is tall, wiry and articulate. During the daylight hours he is easy enough to joke with, but at dusk he begins to eat Seconal, which affects him in the same general way that a full moon affects a werewolf. His eyes glaze over, he snarls at the juke box, pops his knuckles and wanders around the premises in a mean funk. By midnight he is a real hazard, a human lightning bolt looking for something to zap.

  My first encounter with Buzzard was at the hot dog stand just out of Bass Lake. He and Gut were sitting at a patio table, pondering the five-page legal document they’d been handed moments earlier. “They have a roadblock down by Coarsegold,” said Gut. “Everybody who comes through gets one of these—and they take your picture when they give it to you.”

  “That dirty sonofabitch,” said Buzzard.

  “Who?” I asked.

  “Lynch, that bastard. This is his work. I’d like to get my hands on that cheap-ass punk.” He suddenly shoved the document across the table. “Here, you read this. Can you tell me what it means? Hell no, you can’t! Nobody could make sense of this shit!”

  The thing was titled: ORDER TO SHOW CAUSE WHY PRELIMINARY INJUNCTION SHOULD NOT ISSUE AND TEMPORARY RESTRAINING ORDER MADE. It named as plaintiff “The People of the State of California,” and as defendants “John Does 1 through 500, Jane Does 1 through 500, individually and as associated under the name and style of HELL’S ANGELS or ONE PERCENTERS, or COFFIN CHEATERS, or SATAN’S SLAVES, or IRON HORSEMEN, or BLACK AND BLUE, or PURPLE AND PINK, or RED AND YELLOW, unincorporated associations.”

  The intent of the order was clear, but the specific language was as vague and archaic as the list of defendants, which must have been taken from some yellowed newspaper clipping dating from the late fifties. What it amounted to was a temporary injunction, applicable to anyone photographed in the act of receiving it from the police, against (1) violating any public law, statute or ordinance or committing any public nuisance … (2) any conduct which is indecent or offensive to the senses … or (3) carrying or possessing, for the purpose of using same as weapons, any blackjack, sling shot, billy, sandclub, sawed-off shotgun, metal knuckles, switch-blade knives, tire chains, and firearms of any type …”

  It cited, as reason for the order, the incident two years earlier at the Little Church in the Pines: “Defendants were drunk … and entered said Church without authority and without permission took possession of numerous choir robes, donned the same, and paraded on foot and by motorcycles in a lewd manner using vile and obscene language. At said time and place it was necessary for a Deputy Sheriff to threat [sic] said defendants in order to recover said robes.”

  Page two of the document struck a plaintive note, saying it is “well known in the State of California” that the members of these associations, “by intimidation, assault, and other generally violent means, attempt to take over the area in which they congregate; that an outbreak of violence habitually attends such actions, with resulting injury and possible loss of life to members of the public; that the only reasonably certain way for any individual to avoid this violence is to remain at home or to depart from the area in which members of defendant associations are present.”

  To Buzzard’s vast amusement, I couldn’t explain what the document meant. (Nor, several weeks later, could a San Francisco lawyer who tried to interpret it for me.) As it turned out, the Madera County police couldn’t explain it either, but their roadside translation was relatively clear: at the first sign of trouble, everybody on a motorcycle would be clapped in jail and denied bond.

  Gut seemed more depressed than
angry at this turn of events. “Just because I have a beard,” he muttered, “they want to put me in jail. What’s this country coming to?” I was trying to think of an answer when a Highway Patrol car drove up to within ten feet of where we were sitting. I hastily wrapped the court order around the can of beer I was drinking. The two cops just sat there and stared at us, a shotgun mounted in front of them on the dashboard. A high-pitched dispatcher’s voice crackled urgently from their radio, telling of various Hell’s Angels movements: “No arrests reported in Fresno … large groups of Highway Ninety-nine … group of twenty stopped at roadblock west of Bass Lake …”

  I made a point of talking to my tape recorder, hoping the sight of it would keep them from shooting all three of us if the radio suddenly ordered them to “take appropriate action.” Gut slumped in his wooden chair, sipping an Orange Crush and staring off at the sky. Buzzard seemed to quiver with rage, but he kept himself under control. The surface resemblance between the two was striking: both tall, lean, dressed for the road, but neither looking particularly scraggy—beards trimmed, medium-long hair, and neither with any sign of weaponry or weird extras. Without the Hell’s Angels’ insignia they wouldn’t have attracted any more attention than a couple of touring hipsters from L.A.

  At that time, Gut was not technically a Hell’s Angel. Several years earlier he had been one of the charter members of the Sacramento chapter—which, like the Frisco chapter, began with a distinctly bohemian flavor. Terry the Tramp was another charter member of the North Sac Angels. They had always got along well with Sacramento’s beatnik element, and when the chapter moved to Oakland they brought some of this influence with them. It didn’t go over too well at the El Adobe. The original Oakland Angels were hard-ass brawlers—a purer strain, as it were—and they had never made contact with the jazz, poetry and protest element of Berkeley and San Francisco. Because of this conflict in backgrounds, the sudden consolidation in Oakland of Angel refugees from Sacramento and Berdoo had an unsettling effect on the whole scene.