Hell's Angels: A Strange and Terrible Saga

  Yet later in the year, and especially after they made their political debut—in a clash with the Berkeley peace marchers—the Angels stopped laughing at their press clippings. The tone of the coverage was changing, notably in Hearst’s San Francisco Examiner and William Knowland’s Oakland Tribune. Even in the San Francisco Chronicle, a paper that had never done anything but laugh at the Angels, the late Lucius Beebe devoted one of his Sunday columns to sneering at the Berkeley marchers and ended it by saying, “The Hell’s Angels would appear to be possessed of a sense of fitness and realism that is lacking elsewhere on the East Bay scene.”

  At this point it was a tossup as to whether the Angels were bamboozling the press or vice-versa. Impartial observers and newspaper buffs found the truce very strange. Here was the Examiner, which had always viewed the Angels with fear and loathing, suddenly presenting them as misunderstood patriots. The Examiner has fallen on hard times recently, but it remains influential among those who fear King George III might still be alive in Argentina. The Tribune is the same kind of newspaper, but free of the confusing deviations that have come to characterize the Examiner. In 1964, for instance, the Hearst empire forsook Goldwater, while the Tribune held the line. As it happened, Mr. Knowland had managed the senator’s successful California primary campaign, so there was not much doubt where the Tribune stood—without much company—in November. In some circles the Tribune is seen as a classic example of what anthropologists call an “atavistic endeavor.”‡

  Lucius Beebe was in a class by himself, and his opinions have not been a factor in any meaningful issue since the introduction of barbed wire to the prairies … but every now and then he would come up with a really classic screed, and for some reason the Chronicle continued to print them even after his death, in early 1966. In three years of reading the paper I had never encountered anyone who took Beebe seriously until several of the Hell’s Angels quoted his column to me—with straight faces and a certain amount of pride. When I laughed they got huffy. He’d compared them favorably to the Texas Rangers—and with the kind of press they were used to, that amounted to a gold-star breakthrough. I tried to explain that Lucius was a quack, but they would have none of it. “Shit, this is the first time I ever ready anything good about us,” said one, “and you try to tell me the guy’s an asshole … hell, it’s better than anything you ever wrote about us.”

  Which was true, and I felt rotten about it. It had never occurred to me to compare Tiny to Bat Masterson. Or Terry to Billy the Kid. Or Sonny to Buffalo Bill. Even after Big Daddy put it all in a nut I still missed the connection … and then came Beebe, with his Texas Ranger linkage, which the Angels recognized immediately.

  Whatever else might be said about the Angels, nobody has ever accused them of modesty, and this new kind of press was pure balm to their long-abused egos. The Angels were beginning to view their sudden fame as a confirmation of what they had always suspected: they were rare, fascinating creatures (“Wake up and dig it, man, we’re the Texas Rangers”). It was a shock of recognition, long overdue, and although they never understood the timing, they were generally pleased with the result. At the same time they revised their traditional view of the press: not all reporters were congenital liars—there were exceptions, here and there, with the guts and keen understanding to write the real stuff.

  ‡ August 1965

  ‡ Numerous court appearances crippled Tiny’s income toward the end of 1965, and in June of 1966 he was forced to take an indefinite leave of absence to attend his own trial on a charge of forcible rape.

  ‡ By the middle of 1966 the war in Vietnam had put several of the Angels back in the money. The volume of military shipping through the Oakland Army Terminal caused such a demand for handlers and loaders that Hell’s Angels were hired almost in spite of themselves.

  ‡ Circulation figure at the end of 1965, according to the Post circulation department

  ‡ It also turns a profit, unlike the Examiner—which in 1965 finally threw in the towel and merged with the Chronicle now the only morning daily in San Francisco. Rather than fold altogether, the Examiner switched to afternoon publication.

  5

  He wore black denim trousers

  and motorcycle boots

  And a black leather jacket

  with an eagle on the back

  He had a hopped-up cycle

  that took off like a gun,

  That fool was the terror of

  Highway 101

  —Juke box hit of the late 1950s

  The California climate is perfect for bikes, as well as surfboards, convertibles, swimming pools and abulia. Most cyclists are harmless weekend types, no more dangerous than skiers or skin-divers. But ever since the end of World War II the West Coast has been plagued by gangs of young wild men on motorcycles, roaming the highways in groups of ten to thirty and stopping whenever they get thirsty or road-cramped to suck up some beer and make noise. The hellbroth of publicity in 1965 made the phenomenon seem brand-new, but even in the ranks of the Hell’s Angels there are those who insist that the outlaw scene went over the hump in the mid-fifties, when the original faces began drifting off to marriage and mortgages and time payments.

  The whole thing was born, they say, in the late 1940s, when most ex-GIs wanted to get back to an orderly pattern: college, marriage, a job, children—all the peaceful extras that come with a sense of security. But not everybody felt that way. Like the drifters who rode west after Appomattox, there were thousands of veterans in 1945 who flatly rejected the idea of going back to their prewar pattern. They didn’t want order, but privacy—and time to figure things out. It was a nervous, downhill feeling, a mean kind of Angst that always comes out of wars … a compressed sense of time on the outer limits of fatalism. They wanted more action, and one of the ways to look for it was on a big motorcycle. By 1947 the state was alive with bikes, nearly all of them powerful American-made irons from Harley-Davidson and Indian.‡

  Two dozen gleaming, stripped-down Harleys filled the parking lot of a bar called the El Adobe. The Angels were shouting, laughing and drinking beer—paying no attention to two teen-aged boys who stood on the fringe of the crowd, looking scared. Finally one of the boys spoke to a lean, bearded outlaw named Gut: “We like your bikes, man. They’re really sharp.” Gut glanced at him, then at the bikes. “I’m glad you like them,” he said. “They’re all we have.”

  —September 1965

  The Hell’s Angels of the sixties are not keenly interested in their origins or spiritual ancestors. “Those guys aren’t around any more,” Barger told me. But some were—although in 1965 it wasn’t easy to locate them. Some were dead, others were in prison and those who’d gone straight were inclined to avoid publicity. One of the few I managed to locate was Preetam Bobo. I found him on a Saturday afternoon in the Sausalito Yacht Harbor, across the Bay from San Francisco, getting his forty-foot sloop in shape for a one-way cruise to the Caribbean. His crew for the trip, he said, would consist of his sixteen-year-old son, two seaworthy Hell’s Angels and his striking blond British girl friend, who was stretched out on the deck in a blue bikini. Preetam is one of only two lifetime members of the Frisco Angels chapter. The other, Frank, retired from the outlaw world after seven years as Frisco president and is now surfing in the South Pacific. Frank is the George Washington of Angeldom; his name is mentioned with reverence, among the other chapters as well as Frisco. “He was the best president we ever had,” they say. “He held us together and he was good for us.” Frank had class, and he set many styles—from the gold earring to the purple-dyed beard to the clip-on nose ring that he wore whenever he had the right audience. All during his reign, from 1955 to ’62, he held a steady job as a respected cameraman, but he needed more action than any job could provide. For this he had the Angels, a vehicle for his humor and fantasies, a sop for any aggressions and an occasional chance to bust out of the workday murk like some kind of saber-rattling golem and lay at least a small jolt on people he had no other way of reac
hing. Frank was so completely hip that he went down to Hollywood and bought the blue and yellow striped sweatshirt that Lee Marvin wore in The Wild One. Frank wore it ragged, and not only for runs and parties. When he felt the Angels were being persecuted beyond the norm he would make an appearance in the police chief’s office, wearing his Hollywood sweatshirt and demanding justice. If that didn’t get results, he would go to the American Civil Liberties Union—a step that Oakland’s Barger has flatly ruled out because of its “Communist” implications. Unlike Barger, Frank had a wry sense of humor and a very sophisticated instinct for self-preservation. In seven years at the head of what was the biggest and wildest of all the Hell’s Angels chapters, then and now, he was never arrested and never had an intramural fight. Even the Angels find his record amazing. Preetam had to win his vice-presidency by fighting seven Angels in the space of one week—three in one night—and whipping them all to sore pulps. But that was Bobo’s gig; before the Hell’s Angels came into his life he was one of San Francisco’s more promising middleweight boxers, and it was no feat for him to put down a half dozen unsuspecting tavern brawlers. Later, when he became a karate expert, he happily destroyed a new generation of challengers.

  The Angels considered him a valuable hatchet man. “A punchout artist is good to have around,” said one, “but he has to cool it around his buddies. Some guys get boozed up and just start teeing off on people.”

  Until his departure Bobo was the horned toad of waterfront literary bars. His colleagues were not eager to drink with him, and for good reason. He was not a comfortable man to get drunk with. Once, in a fit of pique, he lashed out with a karate chop and cracked a four-inch-thick marble bench in the Hall of Justice. Even the police were leery of him. He ran a karate school and enjoyed “death battles,” a karate version of the no-limit, bare-knuckle boxing matches of the John L. Sullivan era. It is not necessary for one of the combatants to die, but the fight will continue until one of them can’t stand up, for whatever reason … and if the reason happens to be death, then the prearranged understanding, among both fighters and carefully screened spectators, is that the death is accidental.‡ Unfortunately, Bobo accepted a spur-of-the-moment death challenge from a visiting Jap on a night when a San Francisco society columnist and several of her friends had come to see him about the possibility of an offbeat feature. The result was a nightmare of blood, fierce screaming and panic in the gallery. Nobody was killed, but it was a very crude show, and soon afterward Preetam Bobo’s name was removed from the rolls of licensed karate instructors.

  It was only then, after exhausting all other means of demoralizing the public, that he turned seriously to writing. Several years earlier he had given up bikes “because of the stigma.” After a long stint as a motorcycle messenger he stumbled on the Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám and thought it necessary to publish his own views. He could, however, only on the condition that he move through the streets of the world in conventional fashion. “I felt like a whore,” he says, “but I told the editor I’d play it straight. Hell, I didn’t want to spend the rest of my life as a delivery boy.”

  Preetam Bobo is a study in something, but I was never sure what to call it. He is a walking monument to everything the Hell’s Angels would like to stand for, but which few of them do. Preetam is the Compleat Outlaw, and he somehow makes it work. Like Frank, he went through his whole activist period without ever being arrested. “All it takes is the sense to be quiet around cops,” he says. “Whenever we had trouble with the law I just drifted off to the side and kept my mouth shut. If a cop ever asked me a question I’d answer politely and say ‘sir.’ In those situations, man, a cop appreciates somebody calling him ‘sir.’ It’s the smart thing to do, that’s all. And besides, it’s a hell of a lot cheaper than going to jail.”

  Bobo was a motorcyclist long before he was a Hell’s Angel. He remembers one night when he passed the corner of Leavenworth and Market in downtown San Francisco and saw a bunch of bikers outside a pool hall called Antones. He stopped to say hello, and soon afterward he was part of a loosely knit group of riders who called themselves, half jokingly, the Market Street Commandos. Motorcycles were comparatively rare in the early 1950s, and people who rode them were happy to find company. “You could go by there any hour of the day or night,” Preetam recalls, “and there’d always be at least ten bikes out in front. Sometimes on weekends there’d be fifty or sixty. It was a police problem even then. Businessmen were complaining that the bikes kept customers from parking in front of their stores.”

  The Market Street Commandos drifted on, without much action, for about a year. Then, in early 1954, The Wild One came to town, and things changed. “We went up to the Fox Theater on Market Street,” said Preetam. “There were about fifty of us, with jugs of wine and our black leather jackets … We sat up there in the balcony and smoked cigars and drank wine and cheered like bastards. We could all see ourselves right there on the screen. We were all Marlon Brando. I guess I must have seen it four or five times.”

  The Commandos were still in the grip of The Wild One when the second new wave hit—in the person of the wild prophet Rocky, the messiah, bringing the word from the Southland. Ten years later Birney Jarvis, a San Francisco Chronicle police reporter and former Hell’s Angel, described the moment of truth in an article:‡

  One hot summer day in 1954, a swarthily handsome devil, sporting a pointed beard and a derby, broadslid his Harley-Davidson to a screeching halt at a motorcycle hangout in San Francisco.

  His faded blue Levi jacket, the sleeves roughly hacked off with a knife, was emblazoned with the leering winged death’s-head that has become so well known to Californian lawmen.

  You could see the sweat-stained armpits of his checkered shirt as he wrestled the four-foot-high handlebars into position. With a flick of his wrist he blasted the afternoon quiet of a Sunday on Market Street.

  He laid his bike over on the kickstand, polished the glistening chrome of his “XA” spring forks—four inches longer than stock—with a ragged handkerchief. He looked around him, nonchalantly wiping his greasy hands on his oil-crusted jeans.

  This was Rocky. Nobody cared what his last name was because he was “classical” and he was a Hell’s Angel from down Berdoo way.

  Thirty cyclists with polished boots and neatly barbered hair had watched his arrival, not without suspicion because he was, at that time, a stranger and all of them had been riding pals for a long time … The welcoming committee was prime for membership in the Hell’s Angels. Although completely square compared to the latter-day Angels, the street corner gang had had constant brushes with the law … Rocky was elected president of the new branch of the Hell’s Angels because he could really ride and because he had style.

  “He could spin donuts on that hog with his feet on the pegs, and man, he was a wiggy cat,” a member of the Angels recalled. The cyclists found a seamstress who could duplicate Rocky’s sinister emblem and it wasn’t long before nearly 40 Angels were roaring out of San Francisco. The neat “Hell’s Angels—Frisco” surrounding the grinning skull with wings cost $7.50 and was ordinarily sewn on a Levi jacket. The white background of the red lettering soon became spotted with grime—and blood—from the many barroom battles that ensued.

  “Listen, man, those beefs ain’t our fault,” said a battle-scarred veteran of beer-hall punchouts. “We’d go into a bar and someone’d mouth off or try to move in on our chicks and then we’d fight. What else could you do?”

  Police reports kept pouring in as the Angels were forced to move from one hangout to another. A hangout—usually an all-night restaurant or a pool hall—would last about a week, until complaints of noisy or rowdy behavior brought the law.

  “We chased those bike bums off Market Street because they were having drag races right through the traffic. A lot of them were stealing motorcycles and we’d check them all out,” said Terrible Ted, a motorcycle policeman who once called several of the Hell’s Angels his friends.

  “We called t
hat bike heat Terrible Ted because he really was bad, man. Why, he’d ride like a nut to catch us and then he’d throw the book at us.”‡

  “It got so I had to go to work just so’s I could pay off my tickets and stay out of the slammer,” said an Angel who lost his license to drive four times because of his driving record.

  One humorous incident connected with the Hell’s Angels insignia several years ago is still a source of amusement to the hard-riding cycle gang.

  An Angel known as “the Mute” was stopped for speeding by a policeman near the beach in Santa Cruz one Sunday afternoon. The Mute was proudly displaying his colors on a ragged Levi jacket. “Take that off,” the patrolman jotted down on a notepad politely offered by the Mute, who was deaf and dumb.

  The Mute stripped off his Levi jacket, exposing another Angel decal on his leather jacket. “Take that off, too,” the irate patrolman ordered, again using the Mute’s notepad and pencil. And under the leather jacket was a wool shirt—also emblazoned with the club colors. “Off with it,” the officer scribbled angrily. Under the shirt was an undershirt. It too had been stenciled with the club insignia. “Okay, wise guy, take that off too,” the nonplussed patrolman wrote.

  With a smirk, the Mute removed his undershirt, and puffing out his chest, brought into full view the Hell’s Angels’ grinning death’s-head, which had been tattooed on his body. The policeman threw up his hands in disgust, handed the Mute a ticket and sped off in his patrol car. But the Mute had the last laugh. He was prepared to go all the way. His trousers and shorts were also stenciled.

  “He was a way-out mother,” the Mute’s friends agree.

  People are already down on us because we’re Hell’s Angels. That’s why we like to blow their minds. It just more or less burns em, that’s all.

  —Zorro