The case never came to court, but it whipped the Angels into a very agitated state of mind. There was no doubt in their heads that the niggers would try to get even. And next time it wouldn’t be just four of them. Never in hell. Next time it would be massive retaliation. Probably they would strike on a moonless night. . . they would wait until almost closing time, hoping to catch the Angels drunk and helpless, and then they would make their move. The dreary neon calm of East Fourteenth Street would be shattered without warning by the screeching of primitive bone whistles. Wave after wave of sweaty black bodies would move out of the command post — the Doggie Diner on East Twenty-third — and move silently through the streets to their positions on the attack perimeter, about four hundred yards from the El Adobe. Then, when the bone whistles sounded, the first wave of niggers would run like the devil across East Fourteenth, ignoring the red light, and fall on the Angels with savage homemade weapons.
Every time I talked to the Angels in the weeks after the Big Nigger incident they warned me that the cork was ready to blow. We’re pretty sure it’s gonna be Saturday night, Sonny would tell me. We got the word from a fink. I assured him that I wanted to be there when the attack came, and I did. Several months earlier I would have laughed the whole thing off as some kind of twisted, adolescent delusion. . . but after spending most of that summer in the drunk-bloody, whore-walloping taverns of East Oakland, I had changed my ideas about reality and the human animal.
One weekend night in late summer I got out of my car in the El Adobe lot. Somebody called my name in a high-pitched whisper and I nodded to the handful of Angels standing near the doorway. I heard the whisper again, but none of the people I could see had said anything. Then I realized somebody was on the roof. I looked up and saw Sonny’s head peering over the concrete ledge. Around back, he hissed. There’s a ladder.
Behind the building, in a jumble of garbage cans, I found a twenty-foot ladder leading up to the roof. I climbed up to find Sonny and Zorro lying in a corner almost invisible in a maze of peeling tar paper. Sonny had an AR-16, the newest U.S. Army rifle, and Zorro had an M-1 carbine. Piled between them on the roof was a stack of ammunition in boxes and clips, a flashlight and a thermos bottle of coffee. They were waiting for the niggers, they said. This was the night.
It wasn’t — but the Angels kept armed guards on the roof of the El Adobe for nearly a month, until they were sure the niggers were completely intimidated. One afternoon at the height of the tension Barger and five others rode their bikes out to a target range in Alameda. They carried their rifles strapped over their backs and took a route through the middle of Oakland. The police telephone hummed with reports of a heavily armed Hell’s Angel patrol moving south through the center of town. But there was nothing the cops could do. The outlaws had their unloaded guns in plain sight and were observing the speed limit. They felt they needed some target practice. . . and if their appearance had a bad effect on the public, well, that was the public’s problem, not theirs.
Most of the Angels knew better than to carry weapons openly, but some of their homes resemble private arsenals — knives, revolvers, automatic rifles and even a homemade armored car with a machine-gun turret on top. They don’t like to talk about their weaponry. . . it’s their only insurance policy against that day when the Main Cop decides on a showdown, and the Angels are absolutely certain that day is coming.
No, I wouldn’t call them racists. Not really. Maybe deep down they are. There ain’t no Negro Angels, you notice. But the Angels ain’t for anybody, and that makes them anti-Negro and just about anything else.