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

HELL’S ANGELS RAPE TEEN-AGERS

4,000 CYCLISTS INVADE MONTEREY

Yet only two of the eighteen specific outrages cited in the Lynch report occurred after Labor Day of 1964, and both of these were bar brawls. So the story was just as available to the press on the day after the Monterey rape as it was six months later, when the Attorney General called a press conference and handed it out in a neat white package, one to each news hawk. Until then nobody had shown much interest. . . or they hadn’t had time, for in the fall of 1964 the press was putting every available talent on the national-election story. It was, after all, a real humdinger. All manner of crucial issues were said to be hanging in the balance, and somebody had to keep tabs on the national pulse.

Not even Senator Goldwater seized on the Hell’s Angels issue. Crime in the streets was a winner for him; millions of people felt threatened by gangs of punks, roaming, on foot, through streets in the immediate vicinity of their homes in urban slums. Democrats called this a racist slur. . . but what would they have said if Goldwater had warned the voters about an army of vicious, doped-up Caucasian hoodlums numbering in the thousands. . . based in California but with chapters proliferating all over the nation and even the globe far faster than a man could keep track of them. . . and so highly mobile with their awesome machines that huge numbers of them might appear almost anywhere, at any moment, to sack and destroy a community?

Filthy Huns breeding like rats in California and spreading east. Listen for the roar of the Harleys. You will hear it in the distance like thunder. And then, wafting in on the breeze, will come the scent of dried blood, semen and human grease. . . the noise will grow louder and then they will appear, on the west horizon, eyes bugged and bloodshot, foam on the lips, chewing some rooty essence smuggled in from a foreign jungle. . . they will ravish your women, loot your liquor stores and humiliate your mayor on a bench on the village square. . .

Now there was an issue. The mumbo jumbo about crime in the streets was too vague. What Goldwater needed was an up-to-date concept like crime on the highways, motorized crime, with nobody safe from it. And the first time the Democrats challenged him, he could have produced photos of the dirtiest Hell’s Angels and read from newspaper accounts of the Monterey rape and other stories: . . .they hauled her, screaming, into the darkness ; . . .the bartender, barely conscious, crawled toward the bar while the Angels beat a tattoo on his ribs with their feet. . .

Unfortunately, neither candidate picked up the Monterey story, and with no other takers, it quickly slipped from sight. From Sep­tember 1964 to March of the next year the Hell’s Angels fought a quiet, unpublicized series of skirmishes with police in both Los Angeles and the Bay Area. The massive publicity of the Monterey rape had made them so notorious in California that it was no longer any fun to be part of the act. Every minute on the streets was a calculated risk for any man wearing a Hell’s Angels jacket. The odds were worse than even — except in Oakland* — and the penalty for getting caught was likely to be expensive. At the peak of the heat a former Frisco Angel told me: If I was fired from my job tomorrow and went back to riding with the Angels, I’d lose my driver’s license within a month, be in and out of jail, go way in debt to bondsmen and be hounded by the cops until I left the area. At the time I pegged him as a hopeless paranoid. Then I bought a big motorcycle and began riding around San Francisco and the East Bay. The bike was a sleek factory-style BSA, bearing no aesthetic resemblance to an outlaw Harley, and my primary road garb was a tan sheepherder’s jacket, the last thing a Hell’s Angel might wear. Yet within three weeks after buying the bike, I was arrested three times and accumulated enough points to lose my California driver’s license — which I retained on a more or less day-to-day basis, only because of a fanatic insistence on posting large amounts of bail money and what seemed like a never-ending involvement with judges, bailiffs, cops and lawyers, who kept telling me the cause was lost. Before buying the motorcycle, I had driven cars for twelve years, in all but four states of the nation, and been tagged for only two running viola­tions, both the result of speed traps — one in Pikeville, Kentucky, and the other somewhere near Omaha. So it was a bit of a shock to suddenly face loss of my license for violations incurred in a period of three weeks.