Once the outlaws accepted LSD as a righteous thing, they handled it with the same mindless zeal they bring to other pleasures. Earlier that summer the consensus was that any drug powerful enough to render a man incapable of riding a bike should be left alone. . . but when the general resistance collapsed, after several Kesey parties, the Angels began to eat LSD as often as they could get their hands on it — which was often indeed, due to their numerous contacts in the underground drug market. For several months the only limit on their consumption was a chronic shortage of cash. Given an unlimited supply of the acid, probably half the Hell’s Angels then extant would have charred their brains to cinders in less than a month. As it was, their consumption pushed the limits of human toleration. They talked of little else, and many stopped talking altogether. LSD is a guaranteed cure for boredom, a malady no less prevalent among Hell’s Angels than any other segment of the Great Society. . . and on afternoons at the El Adobe, when nothing else was happening and there was not much money for beer, somebody like Jimmy or Terry or Skip would show up with the caps and they would all take a peaceful trip to Somewhere Else.
Contrary to all expectations, most of the Angels became oddly peaceful on acid. With a few exceptions, it made them much easier to get along with. The acid dissolved many of their conditioned reflexes. There was little of the sullen craftiness or the readiness to fight that usually pervades their attitude toward strangers. The aggressiveness went out of them; they lost the bristling, suspicious quality of wild animals sensing a snare. It was a strange thing, and I still don’t quite understand it. At the time I had an uneasy feeling that it was a lull before the storm, that they weren’t really taking enough to get the full effect and that sooner or later the whole scene would be razed by some kind of hellish delayed reaction. Yet there was plenty of evidence that the drug was taking hold. The Angels have no regard for what psychiatrists consider the limits of safe dosage; they doubled and tripled the recommended maximums, often dropping 800 or 1,000 micrograms in a twelve-hour span. Some went into long fits of crying and wailing, babbling incoherent requests to people nobody else could see. Others fell into catatonic slumps and said nothing for hours at a time, then sprang to life again with tales of traveling to distant lands and seeing incredible sights. One night Magoo wandered off in the woods and became panic-stricken, screaming for help until somebody led him back to the light. On another night Terry the Tramp was convinced that he’d died as a person and come back to life as a rooster which was going to be cooked on the bonfire just as soon as the music stopped. Toward the end of every dance he would rush over to the tape recorder, shouting NO! No! Don’t let it stop! An outlaw whose name I forget skied down an almost perpendicular two-hundred-foot cliff in full view of the police; everyone cheered as he leaped off the brink and somehow kept his balance while the heels of his boots kicked up huge sprays of dirt. The only outburst of violence involved an Angel who tried to strangle his old lady on Kesey’s front steps less than a half hour after swallowing his first — and last — capsule.
My own acid-eating experience is limited in terms of total consumption, but widely varied as to company and circumstances. . . and if I had a choice of repeating any one of the half dozen bouts I recall, I would choose one of those Hell’s Angels parties in La Honda, complete with all the mad lighting, cops on the road, a Ron Boise sculpture looming out of the woods, and all the big speakers vibrating with Bob Dylan’s Mr. Tambourine Man. It was a very electric atmosphere. If the Angels lent a feeling of menace, they also made it more interesting. . . and far more alive than anything likely to come out of a controlled experiment or a politely brittle gathering of well-educated truth-seekers looking for wisdom in a capsule. Dropping acid with the Angels was an adventure; they were too ignorant to know what to expect, and too wild to care. They just swallowed the stuff and hung on. . . which is probably just as dangerous as the experts say, but a far, far nuttier trip than sitting in some sterile chamber with a condescending guide and a handful of nervous, would-be hipsters. To my knowledge there are no cases of outlaw motorcycles running amok on LSD; perhaps the hoodlum psyche is too unfertile to sustain the kind of secret madness that comes to life on acid. Lawmakers calling for a ban on LSD invariably cite crimes by intelligent, middle-upper-class strivers with no history of crime or thuggery. A butcher-knife murder in Brooklyn triggered a U.S. Senate investigation. The alleged killer, a brilliant graduate student, said he’d been flying on LSD for three days and couldn’t remember what he’d done. The California State Legislature passed a stiff LSD law* after hearing a Los Angeles police official testify that it caused people to perch naked in trees, run screaming through the streets and get down on all fours to munch on grassy lawns. Other LSD cases feature murder, suicide and crazed behavior of all kinds. A student in Berkeley walked out a third-story window, saying, As long as I’m going to take a trip, I might as well go to Europe. The fall killed him instantly.