Hell's Angels

In the early morning haze of California, the sound begins. It is a low, guttural rumble that builds into a mechanical roar, shaking the dew from parked cars in Frisco, Hollywood, Berdoo, and Oakland. This is the sound of the wild ones waking, of grease-caked jeans being pulled on and chrome being given a final, cursory wipe. They are the Hell's Angels, the hard core, the pure elite, and they are preparing to descend on the Monterey peninsula like a plague of mechanized locusts, convinced they are the most formidable motorized horde in the history of Christendom. Names echo in the exhaust fumes: Little Jesus, Buzzard, Terry the Tramp, Frenchy, Marvin the Torpedo. They are a legion of outcasts, their faces framed by wild manes and beards, their sleeveless denim jackets bearing the winged death's head that is their soul's own emblem.

We are the one percent, the irreducible and unconditionable few in a nation of the ninety-nine percent conditioned, and we spit in their soup. We are kings of the road. This is the creed, spoken or unspoken, that fuels their Harley 74s. They are a brotherhood of barbarian knights for a new age, men who might be model employees or fathers during the week but who, once astride their machines, have neither faith nor law. They are defined by their “colors,” the uniform that is their reason for being. It is a collage of Nazi insignia, polished motorcycle chains worn as belts, and the grime of a thousand highways, a deliberate and fearsome rejection of the clean world that rejects them. Their rituals are primal, their gatherings explosive festivals of drink and defiance, celebrations of nothing and everything at once.

For a long time, their notoriety was a local affair, a series of lurid police blotter entries. Then came the Labor Day run to Monterey in 1964. The police, expecting trouble, had brokered a kind of armed truce, a fragile peace born of mutual respect for overwhelming force. For a day, it held. But when the Pacific sun rose on that magnificent Saturday, it had only twenty-four hours to live before the abominable rape of Monterey would make headlines across the country. The story that flashed across the wires was a publicist's nightmare and an editor's dream: two young girls, fourteen and fifteen, torn from the arms of their dates and dragged into the dunes to be violated in succession by a pack of filthy, long-haired thugs. One girl emerged naked, the other in a shredded t-shirt, both sobbing and on the verge of collapse. It was a story to make the blood of the average reader boil.

That single, lurid tale, later proved to be a fabrication by the Monterey district attorney after the charges were dropped for lack of evidence, was all it took. The national press - Time, Newsweek, The New York Times - seized upon an official report from the California Attorney General, a document filled with old police files and lurid anecdotes, and built a myth. Suddenly, the Angels were no longer a regional nuisance; they were a national menace. They were rapists, pillagers, and crazed vandals who terrorized entire towns. They were accused of orgies, drug trafficking, and perverse initiation rites where new members were required to bring a woman willing to have relations with every member of the group. The media created an image of blood, liquor, and semen that became intimately familiar to every reader in America, transforming a dwindling band of outcasts into the most infamous outlaws since Dillinger.

I spent a year in their slipstream, riding with them, drinking in their bars, and sleeping on their floors. At first, I was nervous, warned by everyone I knew. My first meeting was in a grimy portside dive bar, a place thick with a palpable hostility that wasn't directed at me specifically, but just hung in the air like smoke, the natural atmosphere of their hyper-hostile world. Slowly, I was accepted. My apartment became an unofficial way station, the roar of their choppers rattling my neighbors' windows at all hours. Their bikes were not mere transportation; they were monuments to themselves, stripped-down, chromed-out works of art, the one thing in their lives they could control with absolute mastery. A man is nothing without his machine, just another loser shuffling down the street. But on his bike, he becomes a part of it, a creature of speed and noise and pure, terrifying presence.

The following Fourth of July, the tension came to a head at Bass Lake. With the press predicting a bloodbath, local authorities and a self-appointed citizens' militia were armed and waiting. The standoff was a piece of pure Western theater: Sheriff Baxter, a classic lawman, facing down Sonny Barger, the Angels' undisputed leader. An agreement was struck, a fragile peace accord that sequestered the bikers in a lakeside cove. For a weekend, the outlaws became a tourist attraction. Families drove by slowly, children pointing at the real-life boogeymen drinking beer by the water. The balance of terror held, a bizarre truce maintained by a sheriff smart enough to negotiate and a biker chief pragmatic enough to see the value in a temporary peace.

But the strange alliance with the straight world was an illusion. A different kind of connection was forged at the wooded compound of the writer Ken Kesey, where the Angels were introduced to a new reality: LSD. For a time, it seemed a bridge could be built. At Kesey's parties, bikers mingled with poets like Allen Ginsberg and the acid-fueled Merry Pranksters. The drug had a pacifying effect, dissolving the Angels' hair-trigger paranoia into a state of bewildered wonder. But this was a temporary truce. Their fundamental nature, forged in the hard streets of Oakland, was one of reaction. When the anti-war movement marched from Berkeley toward the Oakland Army Terminal, the Angels saw not fellow outcasts, but traitors. They attacked the front lines of the peace march, swinging fists and tearing banners, roaring insults at the “stinking communists” and solidifying their true allegiance - not to any counter-culture, but to a fierce, violent, and deeply conservative patriotism.

My own journey with them ended as it had to, in blood and betrayal. The fame they had once scorned now became a commodity they felt entitled to. The accusation was that I was getting rich off their story. The end came on a Labor Day weekend, a year after Monterey. A few words, a misunderstanding fueled by drink, and then the explosion. One of them sucker-punched me, then another, and suddenly I was on the ground, the world a red blur of fists and steel-toed boots. They left me on the side of the road, my face a bloody ruin, my body a map of bruises and broken bones.

There is no moral here. To look for one is to miss the point. They are not heroes, nor are they simple villains. They are a product of the times, a grotesque and unavoidable reflection of a world that created them and then recoiled in horror. They are the lost tribe, the warriors with no war, the final, sputtering flame of a uniquely American dream of absolute, anarchic freedom. They are losers, yes, but in a world of losers, they have found a way to ride high, leaving behind nothing but the roar of their engines and a terrible, lingering question. The horror! The horror! Exterminate all the brutes.