A righteous Angel loading up on a run will consume almost anything, and in any quantity combination or sequence. I recall a two-day party, many months after Bass Lake, at which Terry began the first day with beer, had a stick of the grass at noon, then more beer, and another joint before dinner, then to red wine and a handful of bennies to keep awake. . . more grass in the middle of the evening, along with a red for some odd feeling, then all through the night more beer, wine, bennies and another red to get some rest. . . before taking off again for another twenty hours, on the same diet, but this time with a pint of bourbon and five hundred micrograms of LSD to ward off any possibility of boredom setting in. This is a pretty extreme diet, and not all of the Angels can handle the whole spectrum of stimulation, depression, hallucinations, drunkenness and wiped-out fatigue for forty-eight hours at a time. Most try to stick with limited combinations — such as beer, pot and Seconal; or gin, beer and bennies; or wine and LSD. But a few will go the whole route and on top of everything else shoot some methydrine or DMT and turn into total zombies for hours at a time.
20
The only way we can stop this is to arrest, arrest, arrest.
— Los Angeles police chief, William Parker (since deceased), on the subject of Negro riots
The possibility of a Hell’s Angels’ dope network brings up once again the old bugaboo of expansion. Are the Angels spreading East? According to the New York Daily News, the dirty buggers have already made the leap. One night when the mist was on the river they boomed through the toll gates on the George Washington Bridge, chain-whipping a gatekeeper who noticed that their saddlebags were full of dope and sex instruments. The News broke the story with a screaming headline: TERROR ON WHEELS.
THEY’RE A MOTORCYCLE MOB CALLED HELL’S ANGELS, AND THEY GET THEIR KICKS FROM SEX AND VIOLENCE.
Above the headline was a picture of Tiny, laughing in the grip of three Berkeley policemen. The caption beneath it said that bearded Tiny, blood streaming from his wrist, was clubbed down during a brawl that erupted last week when free-swinging Angels took on Vietnam protest marchers. Towering Tiny and two others were jailed, and a cop suffered a broken leg in melee. The caption must have got scrambled with one from a Beauty Slashes Self, Dies story on another page. There is no other explanation for the strange line about blood streaming from wrist. . . Whose wrist? The picture shows three wrists, but none bleeding. And why is Tiny laughing? Is he hysterical after slashing his wrists at a Vietnam protest? If so, why was it necessary to club him? Which cop has the broken leg? And why are the others smiling?*
* Tiny was arrested for assaulting the officer whose leg got broken. A cop at the scene said he saw Tiny do it with a Coke bottle. Nine months later, after lengthy proceedings, the charge was reduced to disorderly conduct and Tiny paid a $150 fine. The felony charge was dropped because films showed Tiny falling on the officer’s leg after being clubbed on the head by another cop.
The photo was very unsettling, but the one below it was even more so — especially to the Angels. It showed four neatly dressed suspects being booked in Greenwich Village for stabbing an AWOL Marine. They look no different from anyone else who might be arrested in the Village for stabbing a Marine, except that all four are wearing jackets with Hell’s Angels lettered on the back. There is no emblem, no death’s-head, no class at all. . . and yet they claimed to be Hell’s Angels. The account of their arrest was a model of police-blotter journalism. Several hours after the crime the four had been arrested — quite by coincidence, said the News — at the same hospital where the victim Marine was being treated. They just wandered in, jacketed, booted and wearing telltale gold earrings. . . to see about having a cyst removed from the neck of one of them.