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

* Frenchy from Frisco, not Frenchy from Berdoo

The Box Shop is always full of cars, but not all of them belong to paying customers. Frenchy and a rotating staff of three or four other Angels run the place, working anywhere from four to twelve hours a day most of the time, but occasionally taking off for a bike trip, an extended party or a run down the coast on a sailboat.

I talked to Frenchy on the phone and met him the next day at the DePau, where he was playing pool with Okie Ray, Crazy Rock and a young Chinaman called Ping-Pong. Immediately upon entering the bar, I took off my Palm Beach sport coat, in deference to the starkly egalitarian atmosphere which the cus­tomers seemed to prefer.

Frenchy ignored me long enough to make things uncomfortable, then nodded a faint smile and rapped a shot toward one of the corner pockets. I bought a glass of beer and watched. Not much was going on. Ping-Pong was doing most of the talking and I wasn’t sure what to make of him. He wasn’t wearing any colors, but he talked like a veteran. (Later I was told he had an obsession about getting in and spent most of his time hanging around the Box Shop and the DePau. He had no bike, but he tried to compen­sate by carrying a snub-nosed .357 Magnum revolver in his hip pocket.) The Angels were not impressed. They already had one Chinese member, a mechanic for Harley-Davidson, but he was a quiet, dependable type and nothing like Ping-Pong, who made the outlaws nervous. They knew he was determined to impress them, and was so anxious to show class, they said, that he was likely to get them all busted.

When the pool game ended, Frenchy sat down at the bar, and asked what I wanted to know. We talked for more than an hour, but his style of conversation made me nervous. He would pause now and then, letting a question hang, and fix me with a sad little smile. . . an allusion to some private joke that he was sure I under­stood. The atmosphere was heavy with hostility, like smoke in an airless room, and for a while I assumed it was all focused on me — which most of it was when I made my initial appearance, but the focus dissolved very quickly. The sense of menace remained; it is part of the atmosphere the Hell’s Angels breathe. . . Their world is so rife with hostility that they don’t even recognize it. They are deliberately hard on most strangers, but they get bad reactions even when they try to be friendly. I have seen them try to amuse an outsider by telling stories which they consider very funny — but which generate fear and queasiness in a listener whose sense of humor has a different kind of filter.

Some of the outlaws understand this communications gap, but most are puzzled and insulted to hear that normal people con­sider them horrible. They get angry when they read about how filthy they are, but instead of shoplifting some deodorant, they strive to become even filthier. Only a few cultivate a noticeable body odor. Those with wives and steady girl friends bathe as often as most half-employed people, and make up for it by fouling their clothes more often.* This kind of exaggeration is the backbone of their style. The powerful stench they are said to exude is not so much body odor as the smell of old grease in their crusty uniforms. Every Angel recruit comes to his initiation wearing a new pair of Levis and a matching jacket with the sleeves cut off and a spotless emblem on the back. The ceremony varies from one chapter to another but the main feature is always the defiling of the initiate’s new uniform. A bucket of dung and urine will be collected during the meeting, then poured on the newcomer’s head in a solemn baptismal. Or he will take off his clothes and stand naked while the bucket of slop is poured over them and the others stomp it in.

* The Angels’ old ladies are generally opposed to B.O. My old man went for two months once without taking a shower, a girl from Richmond recalls. He wanted to see what it would be like to live up to the reputation people gave us. . . I’ve got sinus and I can’t smell that good anyhow, but it finally got so bad I sez, ‘Go pull out the other mattress — I ain’t gonna sleep with you till you shower.’