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

On another night a local attorney drove his car across the sidewalk and over the ledge of my entranceway, where he leaned on his horn and tried to knock down the door with his bumper. A visiting poet hurled a garbage can under the wheels of a passing bus, causing a noise like a bad accident. My upstairs neighbor said it sounded like a Volkswagen being crushed. It jolted me right out of bed, he said. But when I looked out the window all I could see was the bus. I thought the car must have hit it head on and gone underneath. There was an awful dragging sound. I thought people were mashed down there in the wreckage.

One of the worst incidents of that era caused no complaints at all: this was a sort of good-natured firepower demonstration, which occurred one Sunday morning about three-thirty. For rea­sons that were never made clear, I blew out my back windows with five blasts of a 12-gauge shotgun, followed moments later by six rounds from a .44 Magnum. It was a prolonged outburst of heavy firing, drunken laughter and crashing glass. Yet the neighbors reacted with total silence. For a while I assumed that some freakish wind pocket had absorbed all the noise and carried it out to sea, but after my eviction I learned otherwise. Every one of the shots had been duly recorded on the gossip log. Another tenant in the building told me the landlord was convinced, by all the tales he’d heard, that the interior of my apartment was reduced to rubble by orgies, brawls, fire and wanton shooting. He had even heard stories about motorcycles being driven in and out the front door.

No arrests resulted from these incidents, but according to neighborhood rumor they were all linked to the Hell’s Angels, operating out of my apartment. Probably this is why the police were so rarely summoned; nobody wanted to be croaked by an Angel revenge party.

Shortly before I moved out, a clutch of the landlord’s Mandarin-speaking relatives came to inspect the place, apparently for the purpose of compiling a bill of damages. They seemed puzzled, but hugely relieved, to find no grave destruction. There were no signs of a Hell’s Angel’s presence, and the only motorcycle in sight was on the sidewalk. When they left they stopped to look at it, chattering rapidly in their own tongue. I was a little worried that they might be talking about seizing my bike in lieu of back rent, but the one member of the group who spoke English assured me that they were admiring its elegance.

The landlord himself had only a dim understanding of the Hell’s Angels’ threat to his property. All complaints had to be translated into Chinese, and I suspect he found them inscrutable. With a personal frame of reference unfazed by the English-speaking mass media, he could have no way of knowing why my neighbors were so agitated. The people he sent to hustle me when the rent was overdue were similarly blank on the subject of outlaw motorcyclists. They were terrified of my Doberman pup, but they didn’t blink an eye that morning when they rang the doorbell and came face to face with Terry the Tramp.

He had been up all night and was groggy from pills and wine. It was a cold wet day, and on the way to my place he had stopped at a Salvation Army store and bought the shaggy remains of a fur coat for thirty-nine cents. It looked like some­thing Marlene Dietrich might have worn in the twenties. The ragged hem flapped around his knees, and the sleeves were like trunks of matted hair growing out of the armholes of his Hell’s Angels vest. With the coat wrapped around him, he appeared to weigh about three hundred pounds. . . something primitive and demented, wearing boots, a beard, and round black glasses like a blind man.

Letting him answer the doorbell seemed like a final solution to the rent problem. As he stomped down the hallway we opened a new round of beers and waited to hear the terrified cries and the sound of running feet. But all we heard was a quick mumbled conversation, and seconds later Terry was back in the living room. Hell, they never even flinched, he said. To them I’m just another American. The two old ladies just grinned at me, and the little guy that spoke English was so polite I got shook up. I said you were gone and I didn’t know when you’d be back, but they said they’d wait.