It was Bass Lake all over again, but with a different breed of voyeur: this time it was the Bay Area’s hip establishment, who adopted the Angels just as eagerly as any crowd of tourists at a scraggy Sierra beer market.* The outlaws were very much the rage. They were big, dirty and titillating. . . unlike the Beatles, who were small, clean and much too popular to be fashionable. As the Beatles drifted Out, they created a vacuum that sucked the Hell’s Angels In. And right behind the outlaws came Roth saying, They’re the last American heroes we have, man. Roth was so interested in the Angels that he began producing icons to commemorate their existence — plastic replicas of Nazi helmets with swinging slogans, Christ was a Hype and Iron Crosses, which he sold on the teen-age market from coast to coast.
* It reminded me of a cartoon in The Realist showing the World’s Fair Poverty Pavilion.
The only problem with the Angels’ new image was that the outlaws themselves didn’t understand it. It puzzled them to be treated as symbolic heroes by people with whom they had almost nothing in common. Yet they were gaining access to a whole reservoir of women, booze, drugs and new action — which they were eager to get their hands on, and symbolism be damned. But they could never get the hang of the role they were expected to play, and insisted on ad-libbing the lines. This fouled their channels of communication, which made them nervous. . . and after a brief whirl on the hipster party circuit, all but a few decided it was both cheaper and easier, in the long run, to buy their own booze and hustle a less complicated breed of pussy.
The only really successful connection I made for the Angels was with Ken Kesey, a young novelist* living in the woods near La Honda, south of San Francisco. During 1965 and ’66 Kesey was arrested twice for possession of marijuana and finally had to flee the country to avoid a long prison term. His association with the Hell’s Angels was not calculated to calm his relationship with the forces of law and decency, but he pursued it nonetheless, and with overweening zeal.
* One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and Sometimes a Great Notion
I met Kesey one afternoon in August at the studios of KQED, the educational TV station in San Francisco. We had a few beers at a nearby tavern, but I was forced to leave early because I had a Brazilian drum record to take out to Frenchy at the Box Shop. Kesey said he’d come along, and when we got there he made a great hit with the four or five Angels still on the job. After several hours of eating, and drinking and the symbolic sharing of herbs, Kesey invited the Frisco chapter down to La Honda for a party on the coming weekend. He and his band of Pranksters had about six acres, with a deep creek between the house and the highway, and a general, overcrowded madness in the private sector.
As it happened, nine marijuana charges against the Kesey menagerie were dropped on Friday; this was duly noted in the Saturday papers, which appeared in La Honda just about the time Kesey was posting a sign on his gate saying: THE MERRY PRANKSTERS WELCOME THE HELL’S ANGELS. The sign, in red, white and blue, was fifteen feet long and three feet high. It had a bad effect on the neighbors. When I got there, in the middle of the afternoon, five San Mateo County sheriffs’ cars were parked on the highway in front of Kesey’s property. About ten Angels had already arrived and were safely inside the gate; twenty others were said to be en route. The pot was boiling nicely.
I had brought my wife and small son along, and we wanted to go down to the beach for a short meal before joining the festivities. Several miles down the road I stopped at the general store in San Gregorio, a crossroads community with no real population but which serves as a center for the surrounding farms. The store was quiet back around the tool, produce and harness sections, but up front at the bar, things were loud and edgy. The folks were not happy about the goings-on up the road. That goddamn dope addict, said a middle-aged farmer. First it’s marywanna, now it’s Hell’s Angels. Christ alive, he’s just pushin our faces in the dirt!