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

These are his originals, to be worn every day until they rot. The Levi’s are dipped in oil, then hung out to dry in the sun — or left under the motorcycle at night to absorb the crankcase drip­pings. When they become too ragged to be functional, they are worn over other, newer Levi’s. Many of the jackets are so dirty that the colors are barely visible, but they aren’t discarded until they literally fall apart. The condition of the originals is a sign of status. It takes a year or two before they get ripe enough to make a man feel he has really made the grade.

Frenchy and the other Angels at the DePau wanted to know if I’d located them by following the smell. Later that night, at the weekly meeting, I noticed that several were wearing expensive wool shirts and ski jackets under their colors. When the bars closed at two, five of the outlaws came over to my apartment for an all-night drinking bout. The next day I learned that one was an infamous carrier of vermin, a walking crab farm. I went over my living room carefully for signs of body lice and other small ani­mals, but found nothing. I waited nervously for about ten days, thinking he might have dropped eggs that were still incubating, but no vermin appeared. We played a lot of Bob Dylan music that night, and for a long time afterward I thought about crabs every time I heard his voice.

That was in early spring of 1965. By the middle of summer I had become so involved in the outlaw scene that I was no longer sure whether I was doing research on the Hell’s Angels or being slowly absorbed by them. I found myself spending two or three days each week in Angel bars, in their homes, and on runs and parties. In the beginning I kept them out of my own world, but after several months my friends grew accustomed to finding Hell’s Angels in my apartment at any hour of the day or night. Their arrivals and departures caused periodic alarums in the neighborhood and sometimes drew crowds on the sidewalk. When word of this reached my Chinese landlord he sent emis­saries to find out the nature of my work. One morning I had Terry the Tramp answer the doorbell to fend off a rent collection, but his act was cut short by the arrival of a prowl car sum­moned by the woman next door. She was very polite while the Angels moved their bikes out of her driveway, but the next day she asked me whether those boys were my friends. I said yes, and four days later I received an eviction notice. The appearance of the rape omen was a clear and present danger to property values; the block had to be purified. It was not until much later, after I’d moved, that I realized the woman had been thoroughly frightened. She’d seen groups of Angels going in and out of my apartment now and then, but once she got a look at them and heard the terrible sound of their machines, she felt a burning in her nerves every time she heard a motorcycle. They menaced her day and night — whirring and booming below her window — and it never crossed her mind that the occasional blast of an outlaw chopper was any different from the high-pitched wailing of the little bikes at the dental fraternity a half block away. In the after­noon she would stand on her front steps, watering the sidewalk with a garden hose and glaring at every Honda that came over the hill from the nearby medical center. At times the whole street seemed alive with Hell’s Angels. It was more than any taxpaying property owner should have to bear. Actually, their visits were marked by nothing more sinister than loud music, a few bikes on the sidewalk, and an occasional shot out the back window. Most of the bad action came on nights when there was no Angels around: one of my most respectable visitors, an advertising ex­ecutive from New York, became hungry after a long night of drink and stole a ham from the refrigerator in a nearby apart­ment; another guest set my mattress afire with a flare and we had to throw it out the back window; another ran wild on the street with a high-powered Falcon air horn normally carried on boats for use as a distress signal; people cursed him from at least twenty windows and he narrowly escaped injury when a man in pajamas rushed out of a doorway and swung at him with a long white club.