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

Miles had been president of the Sacramento chapter. His influ­ence was so great that in 1965 he moved the whole club down to Oakland, claiming the police had made life intolerable for them by constant harassment. The outlaws simply picked up and moved, not questioning Miles’ wisdom. His real name was James, but the Angels called him Mother.

I guess it was because he was kind of motherly, said Gut. Miles was great, great people. He took care of everybody. He worried. You could always depend on him.

I knew Miles in a distant kind of way. He didn’t trust writers, but there was nothing mean about him, and once he decided I wasn’t going to get him locked up somehow, he was friendly. He had the build of a pot-bellied stevedore, with a round face and a wide, flaring beard. I never thought of him as a hoodlum. He had the usual Hell’s Angel police record: drunk, disorderly, fighting, vagrancy, loitering, petty larceny and a handful of ominous sus­picion of charges that had never gone to trial. But he wasn’t plagued by the same demons that motivate some of the others. He wasn’t happy with the world, but he didn’t brood about it, and his appetite for revenge didn’t extend beyond specific wrongs done to the Angels or to him personally. You could drink with Miles without wondering when he was going to swing on somebody or lift your money off the bar. He wasn’t that way. Booze seemed to make him more genial. Like most of the Angels’ leaders, he had a quick mind and a quality of self-control which the others relied on.

When I heard he’d been killed I called Sonny to ask about the funeral, but by the time I finally got hold of him the details were already on the radio and in the newspapers. Miles’ mother was arranging for the funeral in Sacramento. The outlaw caravan would form at Barger’s house at eleven on Thursday morning. The Angels have gone to plenty of funerals for their own people, but until this one they had never tried to run the procession for ninety miles along a major highway. There was also a chance that the Sacramento police would try to keep them out of town.

The word went out on Monday and Tuesday by telephone. This was not going to be any Jay Gatsby funeral; the Angels wanted a full-dress rally. Miles’ status was not the point; the death of any Angel requires a show of strength by the others. It is a form of affirmation — not for the dead, but the living. There are no set penalties for not showing up, because none are necessary. In the cheap loneliness that is the overriding fact of every outlaw’s life, a funeral is a bleak reminder that the tribe is smaller by one. The circle is one link shorter, the enemy jacks up the odds just a little bit more, and defenders of the faith need something to take off the chill. A funeral is a time for counting the loyal, for seeing how many are left. There is no question about skipping work, going without sleep or riding for hours in a cold wind to be there on time.

Early Thursday morning the bikes began arriving in Oakland. Most of the outlaws were already in the Bay Area, or at least within fifty or sixty miles, but a handful of Satan’s Slaves rode all of Wednesday night, five hundred miles from Los Angeles, to join the main caravan. Others came from Fresno and San Jose and Santa Rosa. There were Hangmen, Misfits, Presidents, Night-riders, Grossmen and some with no colors at all. A hard-faced little man whom nobody spoke to wore an olive-drab bom­bardier’s jacket with just the word Loner on the back, written in small, blue-inked letters that looked like a signature.

I was crossing the Bay Bridge when a dozen Gypsy Jokers came roaring past, ignoring the speed limit as they split up to go around me on both sides of the car. Seconds later they disap­peared up ahead in the fog. The morning was cold and bridge traffic was slow except for motorcycles. Down in the Bay there were freighters lined up, waiting for open piers.