January 29, 1967

On the Wild Side

By LEO E. LITWAK

HELL'S ANGELS

A Strange and Terrible Saga.

By Hunter S. Thompson.



n 1965 the Attorney General of the State of California distributed a report on the Hell's Angels Motorcycle Club to law enforcement agencies throughout the state, urging that all measures be taken to contain the menace of this elite outlaw organization.

According to the Lynch report, the 450 members of the club had a record of 874 felony arrests, 300 felony convictions, more than 1,000 misdemeanor convictions. The report held that there would have been an even more extensive record, but for the Angels' practice of intimidating witnesses.

The criminal actions listed by the Lynch report ranged from the terrorization of rural communities to the theft of motorcycle parts. Included were detailed charges of attempted murder, assault and battery, malicious destruction of property, narcotics violations and sexual aberrations. Investigating officers further reported that "both club members and female associates seem badly in need of a bath."

It was a picture of alarming menace. Depraved hoodlums--unmanageable, incorrigible, vindictive and organized--roamed the California highways in stripped down Harley-Davidson motorcycles. They were dressed like pirates, with full beards, a ring in one ear, shoulder-length hair, an embroidered winged skull on the backs of their sleeveless denim jackets, Iron Crosses on their chests, swastikas on their helmets. These weren't the teen-agers of the usual urban gang, but adults, ranging in age from the early 20's to the mid-40's. They could strike anywhere in the state, and they didn't fear the police. The underground in which they were lords seemed dark, rancid, impenetrable.

Hunter Thompson entered this terra incognita to become its cartographer. For almost a year, he accompanied the Hell's Angels on their rallies. He drank at their bars, exchanged home visits, recorded their brutalities, viewed their sexual caprices, became converted to their motorcycle mystique, and was so intrigued, as he puts it, that "I was no longer sure whether I was doing research on the Hell's Angels or being slowly absorbed by them." At the conclusion of his year's tenure the ambiguity of his position was ended when a group of Angels knocked him to the ground and stomped him.

Without denying that the Angels are violent, unpredictable and dangerous, Thompson regards the Lynch report as vastly exaggerating their menace and misrepresenting their life in crime. "There was a certain pleasure," he writes, "in sharing the Angels' amusement at the stir they created."

According to Thompson, the membership is in the neighborhood of 100, not 450 as the report claimed. The failure to get convictions had less to do with the intimidation of witnesses than with the baselessness of the complaints. Police harassment was responsible for the large number of misdemeanor convictions. Thompson, noting the relatively insignificant part the Angels play in California crime statistics, is amused at the disproportionate publicity they have secured. He argues that publicity saved the club from extinction. Prior to the Lynch report, club fortunes were on the wane. The Lynch report called the Angels to the attention of national media and with the "publicity breakthrough" they again flourished. Thompson, in a tone of exuberant irony reminiscent of Mencken, comments, "In a nation of frightened dullards there is a shortage of outlaws."

The underworld Thompson reveals to us is a more familiar terrain than the shadowy nightmare world of the Lynch report. He doesn't find an effective criminal conspiracy, nor does he see an organization ground in Nazi ideology. He draws a picture of desperate men, without status and-- despite their motorcycles--without mobility. He traces their origins to the Okies and Arkies and hillbillies who migrated to California during the Depression. He finds the literary prototype of their ancestor in the protagonist of Nelson Algren's "A Walk on the Wild Side," Dove Linkhorn. Most Angels are uneducated. Only one Angel in 10 has steady work; "Motorcycle outlaws are not much in demand on the labor market." The world demands skills they have no chance of acquiring; "They are out of the ball game and they know it." They have no future; "In a world increasingly geared to specialists, technicians, and fantastically complicated machinery, the Hell's Angels are obvious losers, and it bugs them."

They survive in various ways. According to Thompson, a few have steady work, some pander, some steal, some live off their ladies. Some are married and faithful to their wives. Others have a predilection for gang love. What they share is a guiding concern to be "righteous Angels" and a love for motorcycles. An Angel is quoted as saying, "We don't lie to each other. Of course that don't go for outsiders because we have to fight fire with fire."

Thompson describes the attitude of a Hell's Angel to outsiders as follows: "To him they are all the same--the running dogs of whatever fiendish conspiracy has plagued him all these years. He knows that somewhere behind the moat, the Main Cop has scrawled his name on a blackboard in the Big Briefing Room with a notation beside it: 'Get this boy, give him no peace, he's incorrigible, like an egg-sucking dog.'"

Mounted on his bike, he assumes a dignity he often lacks on foot. The high-speed trip described by Thompson is akin to the psychedelic trip made on LSD. The Angel has small chance of assuming the role of hero save in a fantasy trip. "Most Angels. . . are well enough grounded in the eternal verities to know that very few of the toads in this world are Charming Princes in disguise. The others are simply toads, and no matter how many magic maidens they kiss or rape, they are going to stay that way."

Vindictive at being toads, they invert the ethic of Prince Charming. The initiation ceremony of an Angel centers on the defiling of his new uniform and emblem. "A bucket of dung and urine will be collected during the meeting, then poured on the newcomer's head in a solemn baptismal." They never wash their soiled colors. They mock the courtly love of Prince Charming with gang love. Instead of the gentlemanly duel they subscribe to the principle of All on One. They don't seek justice in dispensing punishment. Rather, the response is always one of total retaliation. "If a man gets wise, mash his face. If a woman snubs you, rape her. This is the thinking, if not the reality, behind the whole Angel's act."

The Angel rejects precautions, whether riding a motorcycle or entering a brawl. "They inhabit a world in which violence is as common as spilled beer." The Angel has been injured so often that he is indifferent to pain. "This casual acceptance of bloodletting is a key to the terror they inspire in the squares. . . . It is a simple matter of having been hit or stomped often enough to forget the ugly panic that nice people associate with a serious fight." The "reality behind the Angel's whole act" is that most of the damage is inflicted on themselves. An average of four die violently each year.

The easy acceptance of violence lends to Thompson's account a cartoon quality. We observe Angels brutalizing themselves and others and somehow we expect them to recover as quickly as the cartoon cat and mouse. It's not that Thompson doesn't give us a vivid picture of brawls and orgies. His language is brilliant, his eye is remarkable, and his point of view is reminiscent of Huck Finn's. He'll look at anything; he won't compromise his integrity. Somehow his exuberance and innocence are unaffected by what he sees.

Dirty Ed is laid flat by a two-foot lead pipe, but he gets up and drives away on his motorcycle. Terry the Tramp is stomped by the Diablos, a rival gang, but he still manages to make the Labor Day run. We see a mass assault on a compliant lady during a party; the dancing continues. A 7- foot Negro invades the Angel clubroom. He is overwhelmed, cast down, kicked in the face and belly, dumped in the parking lot. He gets up and walks to the ambulance. During Thompson's last interview with a group of Angels, he is suddenly struck from behind, then from all sides. He is knocked down and stomped. He is almost done in by a "vicious swine trying to get at me with the stone held in a two-handed Godzilla grip." He gets to a hospital unaided.

Because the Hell's Angels have lacked a focus for their hostility, their violence has been undirected. However, those who observe the trappings--the swastikas and Iron Crosses--have wondered if there might not be in them the raw material out of which Brown Shirts are made. This suspicion seemed confirmed when, in the fall of 1965, a group of Hell's Angels attacked an anti-war rally at the Oakland-Berkeley boundary, an assault which put them into direct conflict with the radical left in neighboring Berkeley.

"The attack was an awful shock to those who had seen the Hell's Angels as pioneers of the human spirit, but to anyone who knew them it was entirely logical. The Angels' collective viewpoint has always been fascistic. They insist and seem to believe that their swastika fetish is no more than an anti-social joke, a guaranteed gimmick to bug the squares, the taxpayers--all those they spitefully refer to as 'citizens.' . . . If they wanted to be artful about bugging the squares they would drop the swastika and decorate their bikes with the hammer and sickle. That would really raise hell on the freeways. . . hundreds of Communist thugs roaming the countryside on big motorcycles, looking for trouble."

However, the threat to disrupt all future anti-war demonstrations didn't materialize. A visit from poet Allen Ginsberg and novelist Ken Kesey served to pacify the Angels and there has been no recent sign of political direction.

Hunter Thompson has presented us with a close view of a world most of us would never dare encounter, yet one with which we should be familiar. He has brought on stage men who have lost all options and are not reconciled to the loss. They have great resources for violence which doesn't as yet have any effective focus. Thompson suggests that these few Angels are but the vanguard of a growing army of disappropriated, disaffiliated and desperate men. There's always the risk that somehow they may force the wrong options into being.

Mr. Litwak teaches at San Francisco State College, and is the author of a novel, "To the Hanging Gardens."