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

* In June 1966.

None of these incidents involve that element of American society usually associated with criminal behavior. Like price fixing, tax evasion and embezzlement, psychedelic crimes seem to be a vice of the fatter classes. This has nothing to do with the price of LSD, which ranges from $.75 a cap, or cube, up to $5.00 — the maximum price for a twelve-hour trip of indeterminate intensity. Heroin, by contrast, is definitely a lower-class vice, yet it costs most addicts at least $20 a day, and usually much more.

Conclusions are a bit hazy at this point, and the rash of LSD laws passed in 1965 and ’66 will probably abort any meaningful research on the subject for many years. In the meantime the Kesey Experiment should be noted, pondered and perhaps expanded upon by researchers of a similar persuasion. Even in its abbreviated form, it deflated the conventional wisdom concerning (1) the nature of LSD, (2) the structure and flexibility of the hoodlum personality, or (3) both of these.*

* After three or four months of chronic overindulgence on acid, most of the Angels began tapering off. A few suffered terrifying hallucinations and swore off the drug entirely. Some said they were afraid it would drive them crazy or cause them to wreck their bikes. By 1966 only a few were still eating acid with any consistency. One of these told me LSD was the best thing that ever happened to him, I haven’t had a worry since I took the first cap, he said.

In September of ’66 Kesey returned to California unannounced and made a series of brief appearances at underground parties and press conferences. He said he’d decided, after six months south of the border, to return to this country as a permanent fugitive and salt in the wounds of J. Edgar Hoover. Kesey’s red panel truck was either too slow, or his driver too inept, to avoid J. Edgar’s hounds. As this was written he was free on more than $30,000 bail and awaiting trial on charges that could send him to prison for one to five years. My own feeling is that he should have stayed in Asunción and gotten a job.

One of the best of the La Honda soirees was held on Labor Day weekend of 1965, the first anniversary of the Monterey rape. By this time the Angels’ publicity blitz was in high gear and they were dealing constantly with the news media. Reporters and pho­tographers were hanging around the El Adobe nearly every weekend — asking questions, taking photos and hoping for action to beef up the next day’s headlines. The Oakland police assigned a special four-man detail to keep tabs on the Angels. They would stop by the bar now and then, smiling good-naturedly through a torrent of insults, and hang around just long enough to make sure the outlaws knew they were being watched. The Angels enjoyed these visits; they were much happier talking with cops than they were with reporters or even sympathetic strangers, who were fre­quenting the El Adobe in ever increasing numbers. Despite the outlaws’ growing notoriety, the Oakland police never put the kind of death-rattle heat on them that the other chapters were get­ting. Even at the peak of the heat, Barger’s chapter had a special relationship with the local law. Barger explained it as a potential common front against the long-rumored Negro uprising in East Oakland, which both Negroes and Hell’s Angels think of as their own turf. The cops, he said, were counting on the Angels to keep the niggers in line.

They’re more scared of the niggers than they are of us, Sonny said, because there’s a lot more of em.

The Angels’ relationship with Oakland Negroes is just as ambivalent as it is with the cops. Their color line is strangely ger­rymandered, so that individual good spades are on one side and the mass of crazy niggers are on the other. One of the Nomads (formerly the Sacramento chapter) shares an apartment with a Negro artist who makes all the Angel parties without any hint of self-consciousness. The outlaws call him a real good cat.

He’s an artist, Jimmy told me one night at a party in Oak­land. I don’t know much about art, but they say he’s good.