No Angel

by Jay Dobyns

  PART IV

  THE END, AGAIN

  34

  HYDROXYCUT HIGHWAY

  MAY 2003

  ON THE SIXTEENTH, Pops and I sat in the trailer watching the Discovery Channel—a show about the African savannah. The English-accented narrator spoke about wild dogs, the lowest predators on the food chain, calling them the “low-ranking snouts.” Pops observed that lately, with all our glorious hangaround duties, that was us. “We’re the low-ranking snouts.”

  I called him a lame gazelle and Bobby a lion, and Pops didn’t laugh. He was getting tired of the whole show. It wasn’t worth $500 a week any longer. I put my hand on his shoulder—Pops was still a good friend—and told him to hang in there. He just pointed his bottle at the TV and repeated, “Low-ranking snouts.”

  My phone rang. It was Chris Bayless, my old partner and friend, checking in on me. He asked jokingly, “You fall in love with your sponsor yet?”

  “Fuck, no. One, he’s a murderer. Two, he loves mafiosi. Three, he lectures me on how to be a badass. Four, he—”

  “All right, got it. How’s your head?”

  “Screwed on sideways and halfway up my asshole.”

  “Sounds about right.”

  “Yeah, it’s great.”

  “What’re you looking forward to?”

  “Me? I think I got a plan. I’ll run it by you soon. Have to sleep on it. Other than that, putting these psycho loner clowns in jail.”

  “That sounds about right too. Give Slats my love.”

  “Will do.”

  Since April, when the Solos got dissolved, I’d been getting more head checks from Chris, from my psych officer, Paul Hagerty, and, since our weekend in Vegas, from Gayland. They were making sure I wasn’t cracking, that I hadn’t decided I liked the bad guys more than the good guys, especially since they all knew how much of a pain in the ass the good guys could be.

  I wasn’t sure why they were so worried. Maybe it was my appearance, or how much time I was spending with the Angels, but I didn’t like the bad guys more, not at all. I was more concentrated on Black Biscuit than on any case I’d ever been involved in. It was, in every sense, my life.

  I told them I was fine.

  We came up for more guard duty on the twenty-first in Berdoo. Rode out with Joey and stood around the clubhouse in the blazing sun. At one point I was relieved and told to go inside. Timmy and Pops had been sent on separate errands. We were split in three directions, making it nearly impossible for our cover team to protect us. I was sure Slats was sick of it and thinking of calling the whole thing off. Joey saw me and told me I could have a beer. I said thanks and asked him if I could smoke. It was a facetious question, but it went over his head. In front of the other Angels he had to act tough. He told me no, only when I was off duty. I said OK, thinking, fuck that motherfucker. Walking to the bar I accidentally bumped a full patch, a sandy-haired California dude I’d never seen. He growled at me and said, “Outside. Now.”

  I said, “Hey, dude, I didn’t mean anything. It was an accident.”

  “Fuck that.”

  “I didn’t see you, that’s all.”

  “You didn’t fucking see me? Motherfucker, you always see me. That’s your fucking job. Outside. NOW!”

  Bobby had lectured me on this too. The rules of fighting for a Hells Angel were simple. A non-Angel picks a fight with an Angel, all Angels come to his aid. This situation will not be fair, but as far as the Angels are concerned it will be just. On the contrary, when an Angel picks a fight with an Angel—or an official hangaround or a prospect—it will go down one-on-one. Angels have the privilege of settling scores among themselves. He told me that if I was ever challenged, the only admirable thing to do was fight.

  I didn’t disagree.

  I said, “All right, let’s go.” I followed the guy. He wore tight Levi’s and shit-brown riding boots. He was bigger than me—not taller, just broader across the shoulders and thicker around the arms. His legs were skinny.

  As I walked through the clubhouse I started to take the rings from my fingers, stuffing them in my pockets. I was prepared to take a beating, but I wouldn’t go down easy. We got outside and he turned. Ten or twelve guys stood around, waiting. We were underneath a twenty-foot-high pole in the middle of the compound. On top of the pole was a disk—it looked like a gas station sign—with a huge Death Head on it.

  The guy sized me up in the shadow of the disk. Joey Richardson stood behind him, looking like he’d decided to back his patched brother and not me. I thought maybe Joey had put him up to it to mud-check me. The Angel watched me struggle with a ring I hadn’t removed in over five years.

  He asked me if I was Bird. I said I was. He asked what I was doing. I said, “I’m taking my rings off so when I start to beat on your face it doesn’t get too fucked up.” He smiled slowly.

  Joey laughed out loud. “Shit, here comes Skull Valley.”

  The smile on the Angel’s face faded. He shrugged and said, “Aw, fuck it. What were you drinking?” I looked him in the eye and told him.

  Mud-check passed. I put my rings back on.

  Four days later we pulled more guard duty at Cave Creek. There was no shade to be had there, either. It was a big party, guys were coming and going from all over. A guy from England, the London P named Marcus, was there. Bad Bob, Smitty, Joby, Dennis, Mac, Pete Eunice, Sonny Barger, a whole mess of West Coast Angels—everyone. We’d met so many guys by then that Timmy, Pops, and I were introducing Hells Angels to one another. I’d been asked, at various times through the day, for beer, a bottle opener, cigarettes, a condom, a pen, five dollars, my phone number, ketchup, help pushing a dead bike, and a sewing kit. I had everything but the sewing kit. Timmy offered that guy safety pins. He took them.

  Around six, the party humming, the same classic rockabilly tunes swirling around the clubhouse, mixed in now and then with Metallica, Korn, and Iron Maiden, a car started to drive back and forth in front of the house. A California prospect—he said to call him Pit—didn’t like it. The guys in the car looked lost, and they looked Mexican. They must’ve been ignorant of bikers because they showed no trepidation in repeatedly, and slowly, cruising past the clubhouse. As they approached the fourth time I said, “Hey, Pit, let’s scare these guys outta here.”

  “Sounds like a fucking plan.”

  We stepped into the street, and Timmy took a position by the gate. We stood in the middle of the road and waved at the car—an early-nineties Toyota hatchback with a lot of miles on it. It stopped. Pit asked who they were.

  The guy held up a crumpled piece of paper and pointed at it. He didn’t speak English. He looked like an itinerant looking for a relative’s house. Pit didn’t look at the paper. He asked, “It look like I speak Spic?” The guy didn’t understand Pit or his insults, but he and his buddy understood the guns. He started to repeat OK, OK, OK, holding his open hands in the air. I could see his buddy tapping him on the shoulder like they had to leave.

  Pit was not happy with them. “Listen close, hombre. You’re in Hells Angels territory. Cruising by too many times and too slow will get your ass shot.” He held up his pistol, a small-caliber, blue-steel semiauto, and shook it for emphasis. “Get it? Bang, bang?”

  “OK, OK, OK.” The driver put it in reverse and slowly backed away. We didn’t see them again.

  Pit and I went back to the front yard. “Those wetback motherfuckers were Mongols! I fucking know it, Bird. They come back here and I will slit their throats and give them Colombian fucking neckties. I will cut off their dicks and stuff them in their mouths. Can you believe the balls on those motherfuckers? Mongols coming around here, Cave Creek, Hoover’s backyard?”

  I told him to calm down, they were probably just poor sap nobodies who’d gotten lost. Pit wasn’t having it. Timmy whispered in my ear, “We bring any tranquilizer darts?” I chuckled.

  As if on cue, the guy started to beat the air. At first I thought he was acting out what he’d do to them. He was high-kicking and
punching and doing little spins. Some guys wandered out to watch him. His words were unintelligible. His head started to go this way, then that; he looked at the air around him with wild eyes, like he was all of a sudden losing his imaginary fight, fists coming from everywhere. Someone stood next to me. It was Mac.

  “What’s with that guy?”

  “Don’t know, dude. Looks like he’s about to have a seizure.”

  That’s when we started to understand what he was saying. “A fucking bee! I’m fucking allergic! Get this fucking bee away from me!”

  I started howling. Mac had to hold me up.

  “I’ll fucking die, man, I ain’t got my EpiPen!”

  Marcus marched out from a side entrance, collared Pit, and yanked him inside. He was an embarrassment.

  I laughed harder than I’d laughed in weeks, maybe months. Tears fell from my eyes. When I could talk again, I told Mac about the Mexicans. “I mean, this guy goes from Billy Badass to mortal combat with a honeybee inside of five minutes. That guy’s a punk.”

  Bobby heard that. He came up and told me I was right, but I shouldn’t say it. He said the guy was just a prospect, but that I was just a hangaround. I said I was sorry. Mac said I was right anyway, the guy was a punk, at least he thought so. Bobby told me to stop goofing off and get to work, and to bring him a beer. I asked Mac if he wanted one, and he shook his head. I got Bobby a beer from a cooler by the front door, walked back, and fought the urge to open it for him and spit in it, knowing I’d be seen. When I got back they were talking about guns.

  Bobby said, “Yeah, I got my old lady a little twenty-two. A nice hit piece. One behind the ear, gets in there and scrambles everything up. Like on The Sopranos, you know?” He turned to me and reached for the beer. “You know, right, Bird?”

  “You know I do, Bobby. Anything else? I gotta secure the perimeter.” I lit a cigarette.

  “Naw. That’s good.” Then he said wait, held up his beer bottle, and told me to open it for him. The guy had an opener right on one of his belt loops, but didn’t even move for it. I took his bottle, opened it, handed it back, and walked off.

  I HAD A hard time falling asleep that night. I’d taken four or five Hydroxys late in the day and they were still working their magic. When I was idle, not working or riding or talking or writing, the pills caused my mind to switch and flicker. That night, trying to sleep, I saw Bobby ordering me around, I saw the outlines of my developing plan, I saw Dale asking for her new guitar, I saw the spiderweb tattoo on my elbow, I saw Slats trying to rein me in, Teddy with the pliers, Joby when he drew down on the tweaker so many months back. I saw Bad Bob that first night at Mesa when he reminded me of Barry Gibb. I saw my mom’s tears, heard Gwen’s accusations, held Jack’s rocks. He’d never neglected to put one in my hand as I left the house, or if he wasn’t there, leave one for me on the kitchen counter. I had more Jackrocks than I could count. I passed them out, and guys at the Patch had started to keep them for themselves. I could only vaguely remember the way Jack looked as he rounded the bases in Little League. I thought, Jackrocks are a shit substitute for Jack.

  That night, exhausted and overrun, I cried myself into an uneasy sleep.

  I was met, at some point in the middle of the night, by Bobby standing over my bed with a two-by-four. He wore his shades. He was harshly backlit, as if he’d driven his motorcycle into my bedroom and left its headlight on. He pursed his lips and raised the piece of wood, bringing the butt-end of it down on my face. I saw the splinters as it came down. It didn’t hurt. The next thing I knew, I was in the Skull Valley Clubhouse. Teddy was there, holding his pliers and a bloody Chucky doll that he kept in a corner of the living room, the centerpiece of a caricatured shrine to death. He shook the doll at me, and drops of blood spattered off it. Teddy said something I didn’t understand in a bad, high-pitched impersonation of the murderous toy. I looked around. We were all of a sudden behind the clubhouse by the wire fence. Teddy pulled his oxygen tubes from his nose, inhaled loudly, gathering phlegm, and spat on me. He was powerful, no longer sick, possessed of all the menacing vigor of his youth. He click-clicked the jaws of the pliers. They were rusty. Chucky was gone, and in his place were a pair of silver Vise-Grips. Bobby still clutched the two-by-four. They said I was a rat. I couldn’t speak. Maybe my face was too bashed in. They must have understood, though, since they insisted I was a rat. I spat some blood and managed some words, saying, “No, I’m something worse.” I thought, Rats don’t have partners. Rats don’t have backup.

  But backup never came.

  Bobby wedged my mouth open with a pair of wooden blocks. Using a nylon compression strap, he secured my head to a fencepost. I couldn’t turn away. Teddy came toward me. He stuck the pliers in my mouth. They tasted like a penny. I could tell because they latched onto my tongue. He pulled. Through it all I remembered the taste. He pulled and pulled and pulled and when my tongue was far enough out of my mouth, Bobby raised a serrated Buck knife and—

  I woke in a cold sweat, my heart racing. I stood up and fell down with dizziness almost immediately. I crawled to the doorway and pulled myself up. My left arm began to hurt. I slapped myself a few times and tried walking again, touching my face, making sure it was still there. It was. I made it to the kitchen. I grabbed my car keys. I went outside, fell into the Cougar. No one else was home. Timmy and Pops were with their families, JJ was off for the weekend. I sat there and clutched my chest, short of breath. There was a hospital close by. I turned over the engine and put it in gear and drove.

  I drove to the emergency room, but when I pulled up I stayed in the car. My chest still hurt, but I wasn’t so woozy. I looked at the light of the hospital and knew if I admitted myself and Slats or anyone else found out, the case would be over. I took ten deep breaths. I told myself I was fine, that I’d had worse from hits on the football field back in my playing days. I remembered one time when I’d gotten laid out so badly I didn’t know left from right. Never one to let a defensive player gloat over my sprawled-out body, I popped up and returned to the huddle. Someone tapped me on the shoulder, pointed across the field, and said, “Dobyns, you’re in the wrong huddle, man.” It was the guy who’d hit me, the middle linebacker. I was standing with the defense, not the offense. He laughed his ass off. I gave him a starry-eyed look and ran to the sidelines for some smelling salts.

  Thinking back to those days calmed me down. I laughed at myself. I knew what had messed me up. The pills. My heart stopped racing. I took another ten breaths. I rolled down the window and took ten more. I put the car in gear and drove back to the undercover house, concluding I’d suffered a panic attack. When I got there I went into the bathroom, filled the sink with cold water, and dunked my head in it. Then I emptied the Hydroxycuts into the toilet and flushed them away. I’d never take them again.

  35

  BOTTOM ROCKERS ARE US

  MAY–JUNE 2003

  FROM THEN ON, Starbucks, Red Bulls, and smokes would have to do.

  Without the pills my everyday particulars became less exacting. I couldn’t recognize it when I was popping them, but they’d given me a kind of tunnel vision. In most instances this is a good, if not necessary, thing for an undercover agent, but in my case it was no longer a necessity. I didn’t have to fool anyone anymore. It wasn’t just that I felt invincible, I was invincible. Truth was, the deeper I got with the club, the safer I got. The guys at the Patch couldn’t understand it, but the more I was trusted by the Angels, the more I was protected. I didn’t need the cover team because the Hells Angels were looking out for me. This became crystal clear when I flushed the Hydroxycuts. The vibrating edge brought on by the pills evaporated quickly, and in its place was something I hadn’t felt in months: focus.

  Everyday things still happened, but after the panic attack my ultimate goal crystallized: I’d do everything I could to become a Hells Angel.

  Quickly.

  The idea that had taken root in my pilled-up mind took on definition. It was simple, and it hinged on
one simple fact: that for the Hells Angels, violence is power. I decided that to prove my ultimate worth, I’d play by their rules.

  I’d become violent.

  I DIDN’T TELL anyone about my panic attack. No one could think I might be breaking down.

  But we were all breaking down.

  JJ, an athletic seven-year ex-smoker when she came onto the case, was back to a pack or more a day, and she’d gained thirty pounds. Timmy spent every free minute at home, recharging his batteries with family. Pops was gaunt, bent over, and showing his fifty hard-lived years. The task force agents were tired of covering us. I didn’t care. In those days I’d just call Slats and tell him where I was and not to worry. He didn’t like it—he knew he was losing control. He needed several drinks every night just to grab a little shut-eye.

  Because Slats could see things I couldn’t, and probably knew more about my physical and emotional degradation than he let on, he ordered me home for Father’s Day. He said that we were all too vested, and that a little rest and relaxation wouldn’t hurt anyone.

  Rest, anyway.

  I went home and gave the outward impression of relaxing—lying around on my couch, twisting my straggly goatee, catching up on SportsCenter—but true relaxation was impossible. I stared out the sliding doors of my living room at a stand of blooming saguaros and, beyond them, an electric-green golf course. I thought of something task force agent Sean “Spider-Man” Hoover had told me: “Man, this is such a joke. These guys look at you as some hard-luck hit man, and you live in a fucking mansion on a golf course.” My place wasn’t a mansion, but it was nice, and I do play golf. He was right. I tried to picture any of the Hells Angels I knew swinging a seven iron, digging through weeds for a lost ball, or trying to read a green. These were ludicrous images, ones that perfectly reflected how disconnected my life had become.

  Gwen floated around me that weekend, keeping her distance, sometimes bringing me snacks I barely touched. We’d drifted far from each other. Maybe “drifted” isn’t right: She’d stayed put while I’d run away at a dead sprint. She seemed resigned to facts. She’d told me she wouldn’t give up on us—Gwen can be just as stubborn as I can—but it was evident she wasn’t happy about our situation. Only because of Gwen’s will have we stayed together. She didn’t say much to me that weekend, but I remember her asking why I had to do everything to the limit. I didn’t say anything. There was no answer; it was the way God made me.