Hell’s Angels. A Strange and Terrible. Saga by Hunter S. Thompson

Beatniks! said somebody else. Not worth a pound of piss.

There was talk of divvying up the ax handles in the store and goin up there to clean the place out. But somebody said the cops were already on the job: Gonna put em in jail for good this time, every damn one of em. . . So the ax handles stayed in the rack.

By nightfall Kesey’s enclave was full of people, music and multi-colored lights. The police added a nice touch by parking along the highway with their own lights flashing. . . red and orange blips lighting up the trees and the sheer dirt cliff across the road. Earlier that spring the Kesey estate had been raided by seventeen cops and a half dozen dogs, led by a notorious federal narcotics agents named Willie Wong. Kesey and twelve of his friends were arrested on marijuana charges, but most of these had to be dropped due to peculiarities in the search warrant. Shortly after the raid Agent Wong was transferred out of the district; and the local police made no further attempts to breach the gates. They contented themselves with lurking on the highway across the creek and checking out all those coming and going. Local sheriffs deputies stopped and questioned a steady stream of col­lege professors, vagrants, lawyers, students, psychologists and high-style hippies. There was not much the police could do except run radio checks for unpaid traffic citations, but they did this with unflagging determination. Now and then they would roust an obvious drunk or somebody completely stoned, but during several months of intense vigil their only actual arrests netted less than a half dozen traffic fugitives.

Meanwhile, the parties grew wilder and louder. There was very little marijuana, but plenty of LSD, which was then legal. The cops stood out on the highway and looked across the creek at a scene that must have tortured the very roots of their under­standing. Here were all these people running wild, bellowing and dancing half naked to rock-‘n’-roll sounds piped out through the trees from massive amplifiers, reeling and stumbling in a maze of psychedelic lights. . . WILD, by God, and with no law to stop them.

Then, with the arrival of the Hell’s Angels, the cops finally got a handle — a raison d’être, as it were — and they quickly tripled the guard. Kesey had finally gone over the line. A bunch of beatniks and college types eating some kind of invisible drug was a hard thing to deal with, but a gang of rotten thugs on motorcycles was as tangible a menace as the law could hope for.*

* Several months later, when Kesey came to trial on the first marijuana charge, one of the conditions attached to his relatively light six months’ jail sentence was that he sell his property and leave San Mateo County — permanently. Which he did, but he moved a little farther than the authorities had in mind. On January 31, 1966, Kesey jumped bail and dis­appeared. A suicide note was found in his abandoned bus on the northern California coast, but not even the police believed he was dead. Results of my own investigation are very hazy, although I managed — after many months of digging — to locate his forwarding address:

c/o Agricultural Attaché

U. S. Embassy

Asunción, Paraguay

The first party, featuring only the Frisco chapter, was a roaring success. Sometime around midnight, Pete, the drag racer, grinned as he rummaged through a beer tub and said, Man, this is nothin but a goddamn wonderful scene. We didn’t know what to expect when we came, but it turned out just fine. This time it’s all ha-ha, not thump-thump.

Most of the Angels were posed and defensive until they got thoroughly drunk, and a few never got over the idea that they were going to be challenged and whipped on at any moment. . . but as a group, they seemed to realize that if they wanted any ten­sion they were going to have to work pretty hard to create it on their own. Kesey’s people were too busy getting out of their heads to worry about anything so raw and realistic as the Hell’s Angels. Other luminaries wandered through the party (notably, poet Allen Ginsberg and Richard Alpert, the LSD guru), and although the Angels didn’t know them, they were put a bit off balance by having to share the spotlight.