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

Charley is another good spade. He’s a wiry little Negro who’s been riding with the Angels for so long that some of them are embarrassed to explain why he’s not a member. Hell, I admire the little bastard, said one, but he’ll never get in. He thinks he will, but he won’t. . . shit, all it takes it two blackballs, and I could tell you who they’d be by just lookin around the room.

I never asked Charley why he didn’t ride with the East Bay Dragons, an all-Negro outlaw club like the Rattlers in San Fran­cisco. The Dragons have the same kind of half-mad élan as the Angels, and a group of them wailing down the highway is every bit as spectacular. They wear multicolored helmets, and their bikes are a flashy mixture of choppers and garbage wagons — all Harley 74s. The Dragons, like the Angels, are mainly in their twenties and more or less unemployed. Also like the Angels, they have a keen taste for the action, violent or otherwise.*

* The Rattlers are generally older. The club dates back to the days of the Booze Fighters. The Rattlers had a lot of class in the old days, one of the Oakland Angels lamented. But all they do now is sit around their bar and play dominoes.

Shortly after I met the Oakland Angels, and long before I knew the Dragons even existed, I was standing in the doorway of the El Adobe on a dull Friday night, when the parking lot suddenly filled up with about twenty big chrome-flashing bikes ridden by the wildest-looking bunch of Negroes I’d ever seen. They rolled in, gunning their engines, and dismounted with such an easy, swaggering confidence that my first impulse was to drop my beer and run. I had been around the Angels long enough to get the drift of their thinking on niggers . . . and now here they were, a gang of black commandos booming right up to the Hell’s Angels com­mand post. I stepped out of the doorway to a spot where I would have a clear sprint to the street when the chain-whipping started.

There were about thirty Angels at the bar that night and most of them hurried outside, still carrying their beers, to see who the visitors were. But nobody looked ready to fight. By the time the Dragons had cut their engines, the Angels were greeting them with friendly jibes about calling the cops and having you bastards locked up for scaring hell out of the citizens. Barger shook hands with Lewis, the Dragons’ president, and asked what was happening. Where’ve you guys been hiding? Sonny said. If you came around here more often you might make the papers. Lewis laughed and introduced Sonny, Terry and Gut to some of the new Dragon members. Most of the black outlaws seemed to know the Angels by their first names. Some went into the bar while others drifted around the parking lot, shaking hands here and there and admiring the bikes. The talk was mainly of motor­cycles, and although it was pointedly friendly, it was also a bit reserved. By this time Sonny had introduced me to Lewis and some of the others. He’s a writer, Barger said with a smile. God only knows what he’s writin, but he’s good people. Lewis nodded and shook hands with me. How you makin it? he said. If Sonny says your okay with him, you’re okay with us. He said it with such a wide smile that I thought he was going to laugh. Then he clapped me on the shoulder in a quick, friendly sort of way, as if to make sure I understood that he’d pegged me for an arch con man, but that he wasn’t going to ruin the joke by letting Sonny in on it.

The Dragons stayed about an hour, then boomed off to wher­ever they were going. The Angels didn’t invite them to any par­ties later on, and I had a feeling that both groups were relieved that the visit had come off so smoothly. The Angels seemed to forget all about the Dragons just as soon as they rolled out of sight. The El Adobe shuffle resumed once again. . . the familiar beery tedium, the honky-tonk blare of the juke box, bikes coming and going, balls clacking on the pool table, and the raucous, repe­titious chatter of people who spend so much time together that they can only kill the boredom by getting out of their heads. Sonny left early, as he usually does, and as he mounted his black Sportster in the parking lot I remembered the Dragons and asked why they seemed on such friendly terms with the Angels. We’re not real close, he replied, and we never will be as long as I’m president. But they’re different from most niggers. They’re our kind of people.