Early weather forecasts said the whole state would be blazing hot that day, but dawn in San Francisco was typically foggy. I overslept, and in the rush to get moving I forgot my camera. There was no time for breakfast but I ate a peanut-butter sandwich while loading the car … sleeping bag and beer cooler in back, tape recorder in front, and under the driver’s seat an unloaded Luger. I kept the clip in my pocket, thinking it might be useful if things got out of hand. Press cards are nice things to have, but in riot situations a pistol is the best kind of safe-conduct pass.
By the time I left my apartment it was almost eight, and somewhere on the fog-shrouded Bay Bridge between San Francisco and Oakland, I heard the first radio bulletin:
The Sierra community of Bass Lake is bracing this morning for a reported invasion of the notorious Hell’s Angels motorcycle gang. Heavily armed police and sheriff’s deputies are stationed on all roads leading to Bass Lake. Madera County sheriff, Marlin Young, reports helicopters and other emergency forces standing by. Neighboring law enforcement agencies, including the Kern County sheriff’s Canine Patrol, have been alerted and are ready to move. Recent reports say the Hell’s Angels are massing in Oakland and San Bernardino. Stay tuned for further details.
Among those who made a point of staying tuned that morning were several thousand unarmed taxpayers en route to spend the holiday in the vicinity of Bass Lake and Yosemite. They had just got under way, most of them still irritable and sleepy from last-minute packing and hurrying the children through breakfast … when their car radios crackled a warning that they were headed right into the vortex of what might soon be a combat zone. They had read about Laconia and other Hell’s Angels outbursts, but in print the menace had always seemed distant—terrifying, to be sure, and real in its way, but with none of that sour-stomach fright that comes with the realization that this time it’s you. Tomorrow’s newspapers won’t be talking about people being beaten and terrorized three thousand miles away, but right exactly where you and your family are planning to spend the weekend.
The Hell’s Angels … blood, gang rape … glance over at your wife, your children in the back seat, could you protect them against a gang of young toughs gone wild on booze and drugs?… remember those pictures? Big ugly street-fighters not even afraid of police, loving a fight, swinging chains and big wrenches, knives—no mercy at all.
The bridge was crowded with vacationers getting an early start. I was running late by twenty or thirty minutes, and when I got to the toll plaza at the Oakland end of the bridge I asked the gatekeeper if any Hell’s Angels had passed through before me. “The dirty sonsabitches are right over there,” he said with a wave of his hand. I didn’t know what he was talking about until some two hundred yards past the gate, when I suddenly passed a large cluster of people and motorcycles grouped around a gray pickup truck with a swastika painted on the side. They seemed to materialize out of the fog, and the sight was having a bad effect on traffic. There are seventeen eastbound toll gates on the bridge, and traffic coming out of them is funneled into only three exits, with everyone scrambling for position in a short, high-speed run between the toll plaza and the traffic dividers about a half mile away. This stretch is hazardous on a clear afternoon, but in the fog of a holiday morning and with a Dread Spectacle suddenly looming beside the road the scramble was worse than usual. Horns sounded all around me as cars swerved and slowed down; heads snapped to the right; it was the same kind of traffic disruption that occurs near a serious accident, and many a driver went off on the wrong ramp that morning after staring too long at the monster rally that—if he’d been listening to his radio—he’d been warned about just moments before. And now here it was, in the stinking, tattooed flesh … the Menace.
I was close enough to recognize the Gypsy Jokers, about twenty of them, milling around the truck while they waited for late-running stragglers. They were paying no attention to the traffic but their appearance alone was enough to give anyone pause. Except for the colors, they looked exactly like any band of Hell’s Angels: long hair, beards, black sleeveless vests … and the inevitable low-slung motorcycles, many with sleeping bags lashed to the handlebars and girls sitting lazily on the little pillion seats.
It was eight-fifteen when I got to the El Adobe. The parking lot was full of bikes. I’d stopped at a diner in downtown Oakland to fill my canteen with coffee and to let the outlaws get mustered. It was the Gypsy Jokers who made up the bulk of the crowd in the El Adobe parking lot when I arrived. A group of fifty or sixty Angels had already left for Bass Lake.
I introduced myself and drew a dead blank. Word had gone out that this was going to be a head-knocking run anyway, and the idea of having a writer in tow didn’t groove anybody … which was understandable, but I hadn’t asked the Jokers if I’d be welcome on the run in the first place and I didn’t expect them to bother me if they thought I was with the Angels. Buck, a huge Indian on a purple Harley, told me later that they’d pegged me for a cop.
The hostility was obvious but muted. I decided to stay with the Jokers until they got under way, then try to catch up with the others. They were running a few minutes ahead and I knew they’d be holding to the speed limit. A handful of Angels trying to catch up with a run will often wail through traffic at eighty-five or ninety, using all three lanes of the freeway or running straight down the centerline if there’s no other way to pass … because they know all the cops are up ahead, watching the big formation. But when the outlaws move in a mass, under the watchful eye of the Highway Patrol, they maintain a legal pace that would do pride to a U. S. Army convoy.
For most of the year the Hell’s Angels are pretty quiet. Around home, on their own turf, they cultivate a kind of forced coexistence with the local police. But on almost any summer weekend one of the half dozen chapters might decide to roam on its own, twenty or thirty strong, booming along the roads to some small town with a token police force, to descend like a gang of pirates on some hapless tavern owner whose only solace is a soaring beer profit that might be wiped out at any moment by the violent destruction of his premises. With luck, he’ll get off with nothing more than a few fights, broken glasses or a loud and public sex rally involving anything from indecent exposure to a gang-bang in one of the booths.
These independent forays often make news, but it is on their two major runs—Labor Day and the Fourth—that the hell and headlines break loose. At least twice a year outlaws from all parts of the state gather somewhere in California for a king-size brain-bender.
A run is a lot of things to the Angels: a party, an exhibition and an exercise in solidarity. “You never know how many Angels there are until you go on a big run,” says Zorro. “Some get snuffed, some drop out, some go to the slammer and there’s always new guys who’ve joined. That’s why the runs are important—you find out who’s on your side.”
It takes a strong leader like Barger to maintain the discipline necessary to get a large group of Hell’s Angels to the run’s destination. Trouble can break out almost anywhere. (The Angels won’t admit it, but one of the main kicks they get on a run comes from spooking and jangling citizens along the way.) They’d have no problem getting from the Bay Area to Bass Lake if they wanted to travel incognito, dressed like other weekenders and riding in Fords or Chevrolets. But this is out of the question. They wear their party clothes, making themselves as conspicuous as possible.
“People are already down on us because we’re Hell’s Angels,” Zorro explained. “This is why we like to blow their minds. It just more or less burns em, that’s all. They hate anything that’s not right for their way of living.”
Anybody who has ever seen the Angels on a run will agree that rural Californians are likely to reject the spectacle as not right for their way of living. It is a human zoo on wheels. An outlaw whose normal, day-to-day appearance is enough to disrupt traffic will appear on a run with his beard dyed green or bright red, his eyes hidden behind orange goggles, and a brass ring in his nose. Others wear capes and Apache head
bands, or oversize sunglasses and peaked Prussian helmets. Earrings, Wehrmacht headgear and German Iron Crosses are virtually part of the uniform—like the grease-caked Levi’s, the sleeveless vests and all those fine tattoos: “Mother,” “Dolly,” “Hitler,” “Jack the Ripper,” swastikas, daggers, skulls, “LSD,” “Love,” “Rape” and the inevitable Hell’s Angels insignia.
Many wear other, more esoteric decorations—symbols, numbers, letters and cryptic mottos—but few of these had any public meaning until the outlaws began talking to reporters. Among the first to be exposed was the numeral “13” (indicating a marijuana smoker). This one is almost as common as the one-percenter badge. Others, like the patch saying “DFFL” (Dope Forever, Forever Loaded) and the Playboy Rabbit (mocking birth control) were exposed by True magazine, which also explained the varicolored pilots’ wings: red wings indicating that the wearer has committed cunnilingus on a menstruating woman, black wings for the same act on a Negress, and brown wings for buggery.
California has laws against “outraging the public decency,” but for some reason they are rarely applied to the Hell’s Angels, whose very existence is a mockery of all public decency.
“When you walk into a place where people can see you, you want to look as repulsive and repugnant as possible,” said one. “We are complete social outcasts—outsiders against society. And that’s the way we want to be. Anything good, we laugh at. We’re bastards to the world and they’re bastards to us.”
“I don’t really care if people think we’re bad,” said another. “I think this is what really keeps us going. We fight society and society fights us. It doesn’t bother me.”
There are very few Angels who won’t go far out of their way to lay a bad jolt on the squares—preferably to the extent of unbalancing their metabolism and causing them to shriek in their sleep for days afterward—but there is also a certain amount of humor involved. Funny Sonny once explained the Angels’ bizarre garb as “a kind of a joke—you know, like a giant masquerade.”
Which is true to some extent, but not everybody digs the Angels’ sense of humor … which can range all the way from belly laughs at Jackie Gleason jokes to quiet giggling at the sight of a man’s face being shredded with a broken beer bottle.
A WEIRD HAUL AT GANG’S HIDEOUT
SAN DIEGO, July 18 (UPI)—Four coffins, two grave markers and Nazi emblems were found Saturday in the headquarters of a motorcycle gang where three members were arrested on narcotics charges.
The residence also contained a throne chair five feet tall, a stuffed owl, an Oriental beheading sword and assorted motorcycle trophies, police said.
I don’t recall any laughter that morning at the El Adobe. Late-arriving Angels kept rolling in, and rather than go off on their own, they elected to stick with whatever crowd was available. Now and then somebody would do a wheelstand across the parking lot. Others squatted on the ground, making last-minute carburetor adjustments, and those with nothing else to do stood quietly beside their bikes, smoking cigarettes or sipping from one of the beer cans that were being passed around. Bill, the Jokers’ president, was deep in serious pondering over a road map with Dirty Ed, president of the Hayward Hell’s Angels. Hutch, the Jokers’ vice-president and chief spokesman, stood next to my car with two Angels and listened to the newscast. “Man, those mothers up there are double-shook,” said one of the Angels. “I just hope they don’t hide the broads.”
The certain knowledge that an emergency force of cops and dogs was waiting for them—a knowledge now reinforced by radio bulletins—had already made a difference in the make-up of the run. Many who would ordinarily take their “old ladies” had left the girls behind in case of a serious clash with the law. Getting locked up in a country town is bad enough if you’re by yourself, but to have your wife or girl friend locked up in the same jail—instead of back home to call lawyers and bondsmen—is a kind of double jeopardy that the Angels have learned to avoid.
When I found such perennial double packers as Sonny, Terry, Tiny, Tommy and Zorro without their women, I realized the outlaws were expecting real trouble. But instead of trying to avoid it, as they often have in the past, this time they were determined to meet it head on. “It ain’t that we’re really so hot for Bass Lake,” said Barger, “but with all this newspaper and radio stuff saying they’re laying for us up there, we can’t back out. This is one run we got to make or they’ll never give us any peace again. We don’t want trouble, but by God if it comes, there won’t nobody be able to say we ducked out.”
This was the kind of talk that was making the rounds in the parking lot when the eight-thirty radio alert led into the rock-’n’-roll song called “A World of Our Own.”
We’ll build a world of our own—
that no one else can share.
All our sorrows we’ll leave far behind us there …
The song made the whole scene jell. As I sat there in the car, sipping coffee from an Army surplus canteen on a mean cold morning when all of us should have been home in bed, I tried to fit the lyrics to the scene I was part of. At first it seemed like just another teen-age pipe dream with a good swinging beat:
And I know you will find
there’ll be peace of mind—
when we live in a world of our own.‡
A World of Our Own … and then, sweet Jesus, it dawned on me that I was right in the middle of it, with a gaggle of righteous dudes that no man could deny … weird flotsam on the rising tide, Giant Boppers, Wild Ones, Motorcycle Outlaws.
I had a feeling that at any moment a director would appear, waving cards saying “Cut” or “Action.” The scene was too strange to be real. On a peaceful Saturday morning in Oakland, in front of a dumpy, Turkish-looking bar, this weird hellbroth of humanity had gathered … wearing labels saying “Hell’s Angels” and “Gypsy Jokers,” and now they were anxious to shove off on their annual Independence Day picnic … a Monster rally too rotten for Hollywood, crude parody of the crazy-cool melodramatic scene that Brando had already made famous.
Yet the action was certified by Time, Newsweek and The New York Times. It was at least that real. Grant Wood might have titled it American Modern. But there were no artists on hand—nor photographers, nor legmen for the New York press establishment. Here was the radio chattering crazily about the impending destruction of a California resort by an army of five hundred motorcycle hoodlums, and not even a wire-service stringer was there to get a first-hand report. As it turned out, the press was getting the story from the police, by telephone—which seemed odd in light of all the advance publicity they had whipped up.
Finally the Joker president gave the word, and we thundered out of the parking lot. The lead bikes peeled off into the street, and the others followed, whooping and gunning their engines. But the noise died down almost instantly. By the time the formation turned onto the freeway, just a few blocks away, the riders were strung out two abreast in each lane, holding a steady sixty-five miles an hour. Everybody looked grim and purposeful; there was no talk at all between riders.
Here’s the man who doesn’t have any identity. But tonight he has the Los Angeles Police Department and the Los Angeles Fire Department upset. He has the National Guard called out. Tonight he is somebody. Tonight he has an identity.
—Reverend G. Mansfield Collins, a Watts minister, speaking in the wake of the 1965 riots
As the most reprehensible celebrities in years, it was inevitable that their trek to Bass Lake would draw large crowds of horrified burghers all along the route. In Tracy, a town of about eleven thousand on U. S. 50, people ran out of stores to get a better look. I was standing in an air-conditioned liquor store buying beer when the outlaws rolled through town. “Good God Almighty!” said the clerk. He rushed to the door, throwing it open to let in a blast of noise and hot air from the street. He stood there for several minutes with his hand on the arm of a customer who moved up beside him. All of downtown Tracy was silent except for the roar of motorcycle engines. The outlaws p
assed slowly down the main street, as if in review, keeping a tight formation with no talk and strictly dead pan. Then, at the eastern city limit, they accelerated up to sixty-five and roared out of sight.
In Modesto, on U. S. 99 in the Central Valley, there were crowds on the sidewalks and photographers at downtown intersections. Some of the photos later appeared on the Associated Press wire … wonderful shots, Independence Day in California, with the natives taking to the hills, done up in the latest West Coast styles.
While the main clusters of outlaws rolled in lawful splendor toward the destination, there were others, late-running stragglers and double-tough independents, who were hustling to catch up. Somewhere near the Manteca turnoff a quartet of Hangmen from El Cerrito came thundering past. They materialized out of traffic in my rear-view mirror. I saw them coming before I heard the noise … and suddenly they were right next to the car, filling the sunshine peace of the morning with a roar that drowned out the radio.
Traffic veered to the right as if to make room for a fire engine. In front of me was a station wagon with several children in the back. They pointed excitedly as the hoodlums came past, almost close enough to reach out and touch. The whole line of traffic slowed down; the bikes went by so fast that some people probably thought they’d been buzzed by a low-flying crop duster. But that wouldn’t have bothered anyone for more than an instant. What made the sudden appearance of the outlaws unnerving was the element of intrusion. The Central Valley is healthy, rich-looking farmland. There are hand-painted signs along the road, advertising fresh corn, apples and tomatoes for sale at wooden stands; in the fields tractors moving slowly along the furrows, their drivers shielded from the sun by yellow umbrellas mounted above the seats. It is an atmosphere as congenial to crop-dusting airplanes as to horses and cattle. But not to outlaw motorcyclists: they seemed as out of place as a crowd of Black Muslims at the Georgia State Fair. The sight of these refugees from big-city saloon society running around loose in Norman Rockwell country was hard to accept. It was brazen, unnatural and uppity.