Hell's Angels: A Strange and Terrible Saga

  Tiny would make a good reporter or an actor’s agent. He has a fine sense of “contacts,” of being in touch with what’s happening, inside dope, the latest. He is an inveterate phone-user. Long distance means nothing to him. In Oakland he has several pay phones on which he takes collect calls from Boston, Providence, New York, Philadelphia and God knows where else. He operates like a master criminal, always checking the action, the chances, the possibilities. When he sits down in a bar he faces the door. While other Angels drink and talk aimlessly Tiny broods about unreachable contacts, unreported action and all the loose ends that might come unraveled at any moment.

  He is six foot five, and his weight varies between 250 and 270, depending on his frame of mind—which gyrates so wildly that he is probably the most dangerous of the Angels and also one of the best-humored. Others are quicker to fight, but they don’t cause half as much damage. Tiny hurts people. When he loses his temper he goes completely out of control and his huge body becomes a lethal weapon. It is difficult to see what role he might play in the Great Society.

  While the beer collection was being taken up, the headlights of a car came poking through the trees. A few bikes had come in since ten, but this was the first car, and the sight of it caused a stir. It turned out to be Filthy Phil, an ex-president of the Frisco chapter, who explained that he’d hidden a fifteen-year-old girl on the highway and needed some help to get her past the roadblock.

  This jelled things. It was decided to do everything at once. Phil and I would go for the beer, try to get the boy past the roadblock on the way out, and take Pete and Puff to a point in the woods where they could locate the girl. Phil was looking anything but filthy. He was wearing dress slacks, a white shirt and a blue cashmere sweater. He’d had a hard time getting into camp, he said, because the cops wouldn’t believe he was an Angel. He looked more like an off-duty cop, or maybe a brawny bouncer from some club on the Sunset Strip. His car, a new white Chevrolet Impala, was as out of place as his clothes.

  About fifty yards short of the highway he pointed out where the girl was hiding, and the two Angels went off through the woods to get her. We continued along the trail to the roadblock. There were three cars and at least ten cops, with a white-haired Highway Patrol captain in charge. Our stowaway was sitting in the back seat, and just as the captain began asking us what we were up to, another car came by and the boy shouted, “That’s them! That’s them!” I reached over and blew the horn, the other car stopped, the boy leaped out, and seconds later he was gone. The police thought something had been put over on them. “You mean, that kid was in there all this time?” one asked. “Was he hurt? What’s going on in there?”

  “Nothing,” I said. “It’s dull. Go in and see for yourself. You’ll be surprised.”

  The captain, who’d been mulling over the bogus press credentials I’d given him, then told us we couldn’t leave. A long argument ensured, having to do with freedom of the press, a citizen’s right to buy beer at any legal hour, and the possibility that the Angels might go looking for beer on their own hook if we were turned back.

  “Where would you buy it?” the captain asked. “All the places are closed.”

  “We’ll go as far as we have to,” I said. “There’s plenty of time.”

  They had a quick huddle and then said we could go—thinking, no doubt, that we’d have to drive sixty miles, to Madera, to find an open bar. As we left, one of the cops smiled and said, “Have a good trip.”

  Ten minutes later we parked beside what appeared to be Tiny’s friend’s market, but it was hard to be sure. It was farther away than he’d said, and much bigger than his description. Because of this I was a little hesitant to go around back and start rapping on dark windows. If we had the wrong market it could be a serious mistake. But it seemed worth a try, so I rapped, keeping ready to sprint around the corner at the first sound of a gun being cocked. Nobody answered, so I rapped again. At any instant I expected to hear a woman shrieking, “Henry! They’re here! Oh God, they’ve come for us! Shoot, Henry! Shoot!” And even if Henry didn’t blow my head off, he’d be sure to call the police and we’d be busted for attempted burglary, trying to crash a beer market in the dead of night.

  Finally I heard movement inside, and somebody yelled, “Who is it?”

  “A friend of Tiny’s,” I said quickly. “We need beer.”

  A light came on and a friendly face appeared. The man came out in his bathrobe and opened the store. He didn’t seem at all upset. “Yeah, good old Tiny,” he said. “He’s a real gas, ain’t he?” I agreed, and gave him the $35 the Angels had collected around the fire. Phil added $5 more, and we left with eight cases. The man held Tiny in such high esteem that he charged only $1.25 a six-pack, instead of the $1.50 we’d paid at the other place. When we got back to the roadblock, the captain flashed his light in the car and seemed shocked to see the beer. We’d been gone less than a half hour. “Where’d you get it?” he asked. “Down the road,” I said.

  He shook his head glumly and waved us into camp. Obviously, some dirty work was afoot. I felt a little sorry for him. Here he was, standing out on the highway all night, sworn to protect the citizens of Bass Lake, and the very people most likely to suffer looting if the Hell’s Angels ran wild were helping to get the hoodlums drunk.

  We were received in camp with cheers and shouting. Our eight cases made the nut. The hoarders wisely fell back on their own stash, and sometime around four a big contingent from the south rolled in with several more cases. The rest of the night was more a question of endurance than enjoyment. Magoo, a twenty-six-year-old teamster from Oakland, stayed by the fire and kept stoking. When somebody warned him not to burn everything up on the first night, he replied, “What the hell? There’s a whole forest. We got plenty of firewood.” Magoo is one of the most interesting of the Angels because his mind seems wholly immune to the notions and tenets of twentieth century American life. Like most of the others, he is a high school dropout, but his gig with the teamsters gives him a decent income and he doesn’t have much to worry about. He drives a truck whenever he gets the call—sometimes six days a week and sometimes only one—and he says he enjoys the work, especially after a long layoff. One night in Oakland he showed up wearing a white shirt under his colors and seeming very pleased with himself: “I did some righteous work today for the first time in a long time,” he said. “I unloaded thirty-five thousand pounds of frozen chickens, even stole one. It made me feel good to do some work for a change.”

  Magoo is a pill freak, and when he gets wired up he does a lot of talking. Despite his Cro-Magnon appearance, he has a peculiar dignity that can only be dealt with on its own terms. He is easily insulted, but unlike some of the others, he distinguishes between accidental insults and those which are obviously intentional. Instead of bashing people he doesn’t like—in the style of Fat Freddy, a heavy-set Mexican, the Oakland chapter’s punchout artist—Magoo will simply turn his back on them. His opinions are flavored with a morality that seems more instinctive than learned. He is very earnest, and although much of his talk is weird and rambling, it is shot through with riffs of something like primitive Christianity and a strong dose of Darwin. Magoo started the Porterville riot in 1963. He was the one who, according to the news magazines, “mercilessly beat” the old man in the tavern. Here is Magoo’s version:

  “I was sitting there at the end of a horseshoe bar, just drinking beer and minding my own business when this old bastard came up, picking up my beer and threw it in my face. ‘What the hell!’ I yelled, and I stood up quick. ‘Uh-oh,’ says the guy, ‘I made a mistake.’ So I clipped him with a right and he stumbled. Then another and he was going down, then I finished him off with another punch and left him there on the floor. That’s all. Hell, what would you do if some sonofabitch threw a beer in your face?”

  One night in Oakland, Magoo and I got into a long conversation about guns. I expected the usual crap about “dum-dums” and “shoot-outs” and “cooling guys with a rod,” but M
agoo talked more like a candidate for the Olympic pistol team. When I casually mentioned man-size targets, he snapped, “Don’t tell me about shooting at people. I’m talking about match sticks.” And he was. He shoots a Ruger .22 revolver, an expensive, long-barreled, precision-made gun that no hood would even consider. And on days when he isn’t working, he goes out to the dump and tries to shoot the heads off match sticks. “It’s hard as hell,” he said. “But now and then I’ll do it just right, and light one.”

  Magoo is more self-contained than most of the Angels. He is one of the few who doesn’t mind telling you his real name. He is married to a quiet, ripe-looking girl named Lynn, but he seldom takes her to any Angel party that might get wild. Usually he comes alone and doesn’t say much unless he decides to drop some pills, which cause him to rave like Lord Buckley.

  At Bass Lake he tended the fire with the single-minded zeal of a man who’s been eating bennies like popcorn. The flames lit up his glasses and his Nazi helmet. Earlier in the day he had chopped his Levi’s at knee level with a hunting knife, exposing his thick white legs for about ten inches before they disappeared again into black motorcycle boots. The effect was an obscene mockery of bermuda shorts.

  Sometime before dawn I was standing by the fire and listening to Magoo make one of his classy propositions. He was talking to two other Angels and a girl, trying to convince them: “Let’s the four of us go off in the bushes,” he said. “We’ll smoke up some weed, get all fucked up, feel no fucking pain—and if she wants to lay some body on us, why not?” He waited a moment, but there was no reply, so he continued: “You’re an Angel, aren’t you? I never manhandled you, did I? Never given you a hard time. So what’s wrong? Let’s go over to the bushes and smoke up some weed. She’s an Angel woman. Hell, she should swing.”

  At that moment, without waiting for a reply, Magoo turned slightly at the hip, not moving his feet, and urinated into the fire. There was a loud hiss as some of the embers went black. The stench caused people to move away. Perhaps he meant it as a mating signal, a carnal gesture designed to strip away all pretense, but all it did was queer his act. The Angel whose woman was being hustled had not been happy with the situation, and Magoo’s mindless indulgence of his bladder gave the others a good excuse to drift off, seeking an upwind position.

  Sometime later, on the other side of the fire, I heard two Angels several feet behind me. They were sitting on the ground, leaning against one of the bikes and talking very seriously while they passed a joint back and forth. I listened for a moment, keeping my back to them, but all I heard was one empathic sentence; “Man, I’d give all the weed in the world to clear up the mess in my head.” I quickly moved away, hoping I hadn’t been recognized.

  At my car I found several people rummaging through the back seat, looking for beer. They had been out in the woods for a while and didn’t realize that another delivery had come in. One of these was the inscrutable Ray, president of the Fresno chapter. Not even the Angels understand Ray. He is too friendly with outsiders, he introduces himself formally and always shakes hands. There is nothing threatening about him except perhaps his size—about six foot three, and two hundred pounds. His blond hair is short by Angel standards, and his face is as wholesome as the cover on a Boy Scout handbook. Some of the outlaws call him a socialite, implying that his connection with the Angels is more dilettantish than desperate. Which is probably true. Ray gives the impression of having options, so the others assume he’ll eventually cop out for something with more of a future. Something like stoop labor, or a steady job in a grease pit. Ray is twenty-five and enjoys being an Angel, but he is not entirely committed—and because of this, he is a bone in the throat of those outlaws who don’t have even the illusion of an option. If Ray moved to Oakland he would have to show some really fiendish class before he could get into Barger’s chapter. He would have to beat up a cop in public, or rape a waitress on the counter of her own hash house. Only then, after burning his bridges back to the square world, would he be welcome in the legion of the damned.

  But Ray is content to stay in Fresno, where he stages wild parties and does a booming trade in motorcycles. He is such a bike zealot that Angels in both L. A. and the Bay Area use him as a sort of clearing house. He travels constantly, and always on his hog. One weekend he will be at the Blue Blazes Bar in Fontana, checking on the Berdoo action, and on the next he’ll turn up at the Luau or the Sinners Club in Oakland … cheerfully giving advice, shaking hands and trying to organize a party. At the height of the civil rights upheaval in Alabama, Ray rode his bike all the way to Selma—not to march, but just to see what was happening. “I thought maybe them niggers was getting out of hand,” he explained with a smile. “So I just went down to check on em.”

  When Ray met Bill Murray in Fontana and learned he was doing an article for the Saturday Evening Post, he invited him up to Fresno and gave him specific instructions on how to make the connection. “When you get to town,” he said, “go out Blackstone Avenue until you find Ratcliff Stadium. Ask for me in the filling station across the street. I’m sometimes hard to find, but they’ll know where I am.”

  But something went wrong, and Murray spent half a day futilely checking leads—which were all false, because Ray’s human antennae took Murray for a cop. He did, however, locate a house where the Fresno Angels had recently staged a party. It made such an impression on him that he quickly left town. Here is the way he described it:

  The house was set back 100 or 200 yards from Blackstone Avenue, which is the main road north to Yosemite, and it was just one of many similar ones in the neighborhood—a one-story, white-frame, three-room bungalow with a tiny front yard and a general air of dilapidation. Nonetheless, it was hard to miss. Part of the fence had been flattened, all of the windows had been smashed, one of the fenceposts had been rammed through a door, and the branches of two small trees in the front yard had been torn away from the trunks and dragged grotesquely on the ground; between them, an armchair sprawled face down, gutted, its arms smashed. On the back of the chair, written in red ink, were the words:

  Hells Angels

  1369er

  Dee—Berdoo

  I went into the house and stood in the center of what must have once been the living room. It was hard to tell, because I had never seen such utter chaos: Every piece of furniture had been smashed; debris littered the floors—broken glass, torn clothing, empty cans, wine and beer bottles, crockery, boxes. Every door had been ripped off its hinges, and a large hole gaped where an air conditioner had been torn away and carted off. The word “cops” had been scrawled in large red letters over a caved-in bed and used as a target for bottles and anything else that had come to hand. Under it was written, “Yea, Fresno,” over another swastika. All the walls had been defaced …

  The immediate neighbors were respectable people whose houses were not more than a few yards away; they said that the house had been rented to a single girl who had seemed all right. The next morning the motorcyclists had started to arrive; there must have been twenty or twenty-five of them, including their girls, and their party had lasted nearly two weeks, until the police had finally come without being summoned. No one had protested or called for help. The man who lived directly in back of the house, and who hadn’t had a night’s sleep in all that time, explained why. “You’re not going to buck an army,” he said. “They wouldn’t have stood for it. They’re like a bunch of animals.”

  ‡ In twelve months of relatively careless dealing with the Angels, I had only two things stolen: the Lynch report was the first; the second was a heavy classic-looking Italian switch-blade knife, which I kept on my mantelpiece and used as a letter opener.

  17

  rapere: to seize, enjoy hastily …

  —Latin dictionary

  The Fresno Angels don’t make news very often, but when they do, it is usually for something outlandish, some genuinely wretched affront to everything the squares hold dear. One of these was a brutal “rape” in a little town
called Clovis, near Fresno, in the Central Valley. When the story hit the papers, the citizens were outraged for miles around.

  A thirty-six-year-old widow and mother of five claimed she’d been yanked out of a bar where she was having a quiet beer with another woman, then carried to an abandoned shack behind the bar and raped repeatedly for two and a half hours by fifteen or twenty Hell’s Angels and finally robbed of $150. That’s how the story appeared in the San Francisco newspapers the next day, and it was kept alive for a few more days by the woman’s claims that she was getting phone calls threatening her life if she testified against her assailants.

  Then, four days after the crime, the victim was arrested on charges of “sexual perversion.” The true story emerged, said the Clovis chief of police, when the woman was “confronted by witnesses. Our investigation shows she was not raped,” said the chief. “She participated in lewd acts in the tavern with at least three Hell’s Angels before the owners ordered them out. She encouraged their advances in the tavern, then led them to an abandoned house in the rear.… She was not robbed, but according to a woman who’d accompanied her, had left her house early in the evening with five dollars to go bar-hopping.”

  This incident did not appear in the Attorney General’s report, but it is as valid as any that did and it is one of the classic Hell’s Angels stories. The O. Henry gimp in the plotline gives it real style. Somebody should have done a public opinion survey in Fresno, getting one set of reactions after the first version of the “rape” appeared, and another when the worm did a full turn. Like the Monterey rape, the Clovis outrage was one of those cases where the prosecuting attorneys would have fared better if their witnesses had been intimidated into silence.

  The Clovis story is amusing not because of what happened, but because of the thundering disparity between accusation and reality. Here was the rape mania, the old bugaboo, one of the big keys to the whole Hell’s Angels phenomenon.