Just a Shot Away

by Saul Austerlitz

  With the end of the war, the country stood on the cusp of a huge surge in the popularity of motorcycle riding. In 1945, there had been only 198,000 motorcycles registered in the United States. By the early 1950s, there were already 500,000, and within two decades, there would be more than 3 million motorcycles on the roads and highways.

  The bikers formed makeshift, ragtag associations. Men interested in motorcycles banded together and gave themselves masculine, grandiose names like the Outlaws. They would gather together to putter with their bikes, ride them on local roads and freeways, and drink beer together. It was mostly a working-class activity, one redolent of axle grease and wrenches, like a fleet of alcohol-fueled mechanics trained to work only on their own roaring two-wheeled beasts.

  And California was the place to be a biker. The warm weather allowed for year-round riding, and the new freeways were as hospitable to motorcycles as they were to cars. California had more registered bikes than any other state in the union, so naturally, the first bikers’ rallies took place in the Golden State in the late 1940s and early 1950s. Motorcyclists would gather in no-name towns like Hollister and Riverside, their drunken antics drawing the attention of the local authorities. The bikers were a direct affront to the enforced quiet of the immediate postwar years of Truman and Eisenhower, a time of panic about saboteurs in the midst and threats to the American way of life. The more that way of life was defined and enforced by the establishment, the more disaffected young men like the bikers would push back against any such designations. “What are you rebelling against?” Marlon Brando’s outlaw biker is asked in the genre-defining 1953 biker film The Wild One. “Whaddaya got?” he sneers.

  The Wild One reflected a slow-burning panic about bikers, and their perceived antipathy toward vanilla American life. What did these bikers want? It was in the nature of motorcyclists to be noticeable. They rode noisy bikes in large groups, often appearing en masse in small towns wholly unprepared for an onslaught of imposing, bearded men in leather jackets drinking beer in their bars and town squares. They did not appear gainfully employed (although in actuality, a good number of them were machinists and other skilled blue-collar workers), nor did they appear to be family men. The authorities were rattled by their presence, often overreacting and sending in their lumbering police forces to counteract the perceived threat. The bikers’ actual crimes, at this point, mostly stopped at public urination and drunk and disorderly behavior.

  The bikers’ groups were what they professed to be: gatherings of enthusiasts with an affinity for motorcycles. And most of them were determinedly law-abiding. As one possibly apocryphal story has it, the American Motorcyclist Association assured a nervous American public that 99 percent of bikers were upstanding citizens, with only the remainder composed of lawbreakers. Hell-raising bikers’ groups soon adopted the critique as a badge of pride, and the one-percenters were born: so-called “outlaw” biker groups intent on standing athwart the historical consensus, shouting incoherently. To be a biker was still a hobby and not a profession, nor was it yet an outright expression of criminality. But it increasingly reflected a certain worldview: defiant, pugilistic, crude, beer-soaked, drugged-out, and vaguely patriotic.

  * * *

  A biker named Vic Bettencourt had gotten stranded in southern California in the late 1940s, and started a bikers’ group while stuck there. It had begun as an offshoot of another biker group, the Pissed Off Bastards. They called themselves the Nomad Hells Angels, soon shortened to the Hells Angels. The names all evoked a certain frame of mind: ornery, vulgar, redolent of low living and bad manners. They were designed to be at odds with polite society, to keep their distance from all that smacked of bourgeois values.

  The future leader of the Oakland chapter of the Hells Angels, and de facto chief Angel, Sonny Barger, had grown up reading Western novels by Zane Grey and Louis L’Amour: hardscrabble, unadorned tales of the frontier, of cowboys and Indians, of two-fisted combat and the romance of the road. In high school, he saw The Wild One and was instantly enamored, not of Brando’s Johnny Strabler, but of Lee Marvin’s psychotic Chino. The frontier was closed, the Indians all slaughtered or penned in on reservations, but the open road remained, and the two-wheeled steeds that could ferry him into the future.

  When Sonny was sixteen, his beloved older sister Shirley got married and left home, and his father sold the family’s house and moved into a hotel in downtown Oakland. Sonny forged a birth certificate and joined the army. Sonny enjoyed the camaraderie and regimentation of military life, and was disappointed when his commanding officers discovered he was underage and booted him from the service, honorable discharge in hand. He was seventeen years old, a veteran, and uninterested in the workaday world or the cozy domestic life promised by the paragons of American propaganda. He wanted a clan. “I needed a second family,” he would later write. “I wanted a group less interested in a wife and two point five kids in a crackerbox home in Daly City or San Jose and more interested in riding, drag racing, and raising hell.”

  Barger met Vic Bettencourt. His organization’s rules reminded Barger favorably of army life, and he joined the Hells Angels. Barger was six feet tall, and a slim 170 pounds, no match for the imposing brutes he associated with. But when Barger spoke, people listened. And the other Angels knew that, in a scrape, he would be the first to enter the fray, whether against a lone, petrified barfly or a passel of armed police officers.

  By the late 1950s, the Hells Angels were well known around northern California for rowdy, occasionally deviant behavior. More than anything, the club was defined by its choice of motorcycles. The Hells Angels rode, romanced, and worshipped Harley-Davidsons, and only Harley-Davidsons. They would often buy their Harleys from police auctions, aware though the authorities were not that even bikes deemed to be little more than scrap metal could always be rebuilt. They lovingly restored the bikes and kept them polished to a high sheen. The Angels fetishized their Harleys, “chopping” them to their specifications by cutting off back fenders, switching out the handlebars, and removing the front fenders, then painting them gaudy colors.

  Everywhere the Angels went, they attracted the attention of prospective converts to the motorcyclists’ cause. Here was rebellion, here was chaos and noise and life on two rubber wheels. Some wanted to join the club. Some wanted to fight them, to test their own mettle. And others just wanted to be in their presence, so they could later tell their friends that they’d been drinking, or riding, with none other than the Hells Angels.

  The club was a study in colliding contrasts. They were majestic in motion and tedious in conversation, glorious outlaws and plodding bores all at once. Some, by the reckoning of old friends of the Angels like onetime Digger Peter Coyote, were thoughtful and personable, others outright sociopaths. By 1958, Barger was president of the Oakland chapter of the Hells Angels, and the club rented an old Victorian home they dubbed the Snake Pit. The place played host to an array of parties, meetings, and dances. The club’s rules were limited but vigorously enforced: no fighting or swearing at club meetings, no Angels chapters within fifty miles of another chapter (the Bay Area, with two chapters, was a notable exception), and mandatory wearing of the Angels’ patch.

  The Angels had their own code, and their own patois. Club patches spoke a language of their own, communicating a rude intimacy with the demimonde. Their leather jackets were all emblazoned with the Angels’ logo and their bottom rocker, a sewn-on patch identifying their local chapter. A “13” patch, worn by practically every member, indicated a taste for smoking marijuana. Red wings professed the Angel had performed oral sex on a menstruating woman; black wings suggested that he had had cunnilingus with an African-American woman.

  Their standard kit could be personalized with earrings and belts made from motorcycle drive chains, and a motley assortment of Nazi paraphernalia purchased from flea markets and gun shops, mostly Luftwaffe gear and death’s-head insignias. The Hells Angels were not neo-Nazis, although Barger himself betrayed a certa
in nostalgia for what he viewed as the discipline and rigor of Hitler’s Germany. American Nazi leader George Lincoln Rockwell once approached Barger, suggesting he start a Nazi motorcycle corps for his party, but Barger demurred. Instead, they deliberately scorned the enforced propriety of the era, daring passersby and bourgeois liberals to be offended by their mockery.

  The Angels would regularly adopt already existing motorcycle clubs into their fold, sometimes issuing polite invitations and at other times telling them to “wear our colors or no colors.” Often, a select group of bikers from a particular club would drift away from the more milquetoast riders in their area and join forces with the Hells Angels. George Christie and Paul Hibbits had attended high school together in Ventura County, and hung out with a group of outlaw bikers known as the Question Marks. Then Hibbits got in trouble with the authorities and wound up fleeing to San Diego, where he fell in with the Hells Angels. Hibbits would ultimately venture north to Oakland, to the heart of the Angels’ California enterprise. There, he would become better known by another name: Animal. He would wind up playing a crucial role in the unraveling at Altamont.

  The Hells Angel known as Animal. Note the fox-fur hat perched atop his head. (Courtesy of Robert Altman)

  * * *

  In 1964 the group first made national headlines, when two members were arrested on rape charges in the beachside town of Monterey. The charges were eventually dismissed, but local newspapers were filled with shocked descriptions of criminal, deviant bikers, their unchecked licentiousness a threat to chaste American womanhood. The outlaw biker became a familiar figure in the American unconscious, feared and envied all at once.

  The Hells Angels were hardasses with an occasional soft spot for stranded motorists or lone women. Many in the Bay Area had spotted them at the side of the road, pulling out jumper cables to help a stalled car, or escorting a woman home through the empty late-night streets, and been pleasantly surprised by their gallantry. Without their knowledge or assent, they became the adopted mascots of a counterculture about which they understood little. They were fêted as folk heroes, and included in the celebrations of a movement with its sights set on remaking the country in its enlightened, progressive image. Hunter S. Thompson introduced the Angels to Ken Kesey and his Merry Pranksters, who gave them their first taste of LSD. Thompson believed that the Hells Angels never understood their new friends, or their affection for bikers. They were just happy to be invited to the party.

  Given their dress, their proclivities, and their general anti-authoritarian bent, there was an assumption in the air that the Angels and other outlaw groups were essentially hippies on bikes, but this was imprecise at best. The Hells Angels and other biker groups gladly formed alliances with the cultural wing of the counterculture while furiously rejecting its political beliefs. In that, they were representative of a fractured nation.

  The country was deeply polarized, torn apart by raging arguments over the war in Vietnam, and over the place of African-Americans in American society. 1969 served as the culmination to a decade of ever-increasing schism. Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society had collapsed under the weight of the morass of Vietnam. The preceding year, Richard Nixon had been elected president on the promise of a vague plan to end the war in Vietnam and a pledge of allegiance to the “silent majority” turned off by campus unrest and hungering for the return of law and order—understood to mean a clamp down on students and blacks.

  The Republican Party, written off for dead after Barry Goldwater’s blowout loss in 1964, had been revitalized, with Nixon peeling off Democrats’ support among anti-civil-rights whites. “The Southern strategy,” it was called, and it was the harbinger of the nation’s fury: over the injustice of racism, or the gall of those who sought to demand their rights while hard-working Americans struggled to make ends meet. “The only consensus,” observed Rick Perlstein in his history of the era, Nixonland, “was that the consensus was long gone.”

  Two groups of Americans faced off uncomprehendingly, each flummoxed and infuriated by the other’s American dream. “What one side saw as liberation the other saw as apocalypse,” argued Perlstein, “and what the other saw as apocalypse, the first saw as liberation.” The New Left had seized the nation’s attention, which was simultaneously attracted and repelled by the freedoms claimed by the young. Politicians surged in popularity by rhetorically thrashing the counterculture. A hippie, argued Governor Ronald Reagan of California, elected in part on his promises to crack down on Berkeley radicals, was someone “who dresses like Tarzan, has hair like Jane, and smells like Cheetah.” The counterculture was ascendant, but the right, led by the likes of Nixon and George Wallace, launched a furious counterattack against what it saw as the potentially fatal threat to the country.

  The two sides occupied different countries, with different populaces, different leaders, even different cultures. When one section of the country watched John Wayne symbolically win the Vietnam War in The Green Berets, the other, hipper half was, as Perlstein notes, on the next block watching Wild in the Streets, in which a rock star becomes president, gives fourteen-year-olds the vote, and places everyone over thirty in an internment camp. The American Dream had splintered into an array of competing fantasias.

  “More and more Americans were forthrightly asserting visions of what a truly moral society would look like,” argued Perlstein. “Unfortunately, their visions were irreconcilable.” And frustration over the shared inability to impose that vision led to an increasing comfort with violence. By 1969, the unfulfilled expectations of the New Left had soured many activists on the possibilities of politics. Nonviolence was a sham, many believed, and the political process was an extended dodge intended to keep radicals from achieving change. Activist organizations like the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and Students for a Democratic Society were succeeded by the Black Panthers and the Weathermen, each intent on proving their bona fides through the symbolic embrace of violence.

  The violence, though, was not just metaphorical; it was increasingly present in the communities in which Americans found themselves. In May, Berkeley police had dropped tear gas from helicopters onto protesters demanding access to a spit of land belonging to the University of California they had dubbed the People’s Park. Officers there had also shot a student named James Rector to death. Two days before Altamont, Chicago police had killed Black Panthers Fred Hampton and Mark Clark as they lay asleep in their beds. That week, indictments were handed down against Charles Manson and his followers in the deaths of Sharon Tate and four others in the Hollywood Hills. The state’s repressive powers were matched by those of the increasingly combative left and the restive right.

  Much of the media’s attention focused on the splintering of the New Left, but right-wing violence, while often less explicitly ideological, was similarly devoted to delivering a message: that dissent was treason, that contrarian voices would be stifled.

  For many Bay Area activists, their first interaction with this new vigilantism had come in October 1965. The Oakland chapter of the Angels, harbingers of a new wave of prowar, anti-counterculture violence, had broken through police lines and disrupted an anti–Vietnam War rally in Berkeley. They beat protesters mercilessly, calling them traitors and beatniks and tearing down their banners. “Go back to Russia, you fucking Communists!” the bikers shouted at the antiwar protesters. The territorial Angels saw themselves as protecting their city from the influx of Berkeley radicals, and were emboldened by the Oakland police’s deliberate refusal to protect the protesters. The Hells Angels were the white lower-middle class and working class’s spiritual avatars, lashing out physically where the others could only bluster helplessly.

  The good tunes and free love and weed proffered by the hippies were all very welcome, but the antiwar rallies attended by many of those same hippies were anathema to many of the bikers. The protesters were cowards, they believed, love-bead-wearing pansies with weak constitutions, physically unfit for the rigors of war. And so the biker
s increasingly became identified not as working-class men or veterans, but as a motorized corps intent on dispensing free-floating violence, or at least the impression of same, to their ideological enemies.

  Barger once sent a letter to President Lyndon Johnson, offering his comrades’ assistance in defeating the North Vietnamese, but the Angels generally betrayed little interest in international geopolitics. They were haphazardly engaged, primarily enthused about opportunities to wreak havoc. When they gave it any thought, Thompson argued, the club and its members loosely aligned with the unapologetically bigoted ultraconservatism of groups like the John Birch Society and the Ku Klux Klan. And yet, he went on to note, “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.”

  The Angels were hardly the only ones to take up arms against the New Left—there were, at roughly the same time, bombings of counterculture groups and newspapers in New York and Berkeley, murders of pacifists in Richmond, Virginia, and more—but they were a reminder that this sotto voce civil war was, as much as anything else, a class conflict, pitting working-class and lower-middle-class conservatives and ultraconservatives against middle-class radicals. Revenge would be taken for the presumptions of the students.

  The Hells Angels were vulgar fascists, bored by ideology or doctrine but loosely espousing a belief in order and the rule of force and the inherent transformative force of technology. “The Angels are prototypes,” Thompson argued. “Their lack of education has not only rendered them completely useless in a highly technical economy, but it has also given them the leisure to cultivate a powerful resentment … and to translate it into a destructive cult which the mass media insists on portraying as a sort of isolated oddity.”