They are longshoremen, warehousemen, truck drivers, mechanics, clerks and casual laborers at any work that pays quick wages and requires no allegiance. Perhaps one in ten has a steady job or a decent income. Skip from Oakland is a final inspector on a General Motors assembly line, making around $200 a week; he owns his own home and even dabbles in the stock market. Tiny, the Oakland chapter’s sergeant at arms and chief head-knocker, is a credit supervisor for a local TV appliance chain. He owns a Cadillac and makes $150 a week for hustling people who get behind on their payments.* We get a lot of deadbeats in this business, he says. Usually I call em up first. I come on real businesslike until I’m sure I have the right guy. Then I tell him, ‘Listen, motherfucker, I’m givin you twenty-four hours to get down here with that money.’ This usually scares the shit out of em and they pay up quick. If they don’t, then I drive out to the house and kick on the door until somebody answers. Once in a while I get a wise-ass trying to give me the run-around. . . then I pick up a couple of guys, lay a few bucks on em for the help, and we go out to see the punk. That always does it. I never had to stomp anybody yet.
* Numerous court appearances crippled Tiny’s income toward the end of 1965, and in June of 1966 he was forced to take an indefinite leave of absence to attend his own trial on a charge of forcible rape.
There are others with steady incomes, but most of the Angels work sporadically at the kind of jobs that will soon be taken over by machines. It is hard enough to get unskilled work while wearing shoulder-length hair and a gold earring. . . it takes an employer who is either desperate or unusually tolerant. . . but to apply for work as a member of a nationally known criminal motorcycle conspiracy is a handicap that can only be overcome by very special talents, which few Angels possess. Most are unskilled and uneducated, with no social or economic credentials beyond a colorful police record and a fine knowledge of motorcycles.*
* By the middle of 1966 the war in Vietnam had put several of the Angels back in the money. The volume of military shipping through the Oakland Army Terminal caused such a demand for handlers and loaders that Hell’s Angels were hired almost in spite of themselves.
So there is more to their stance than a wistful yearning for acceptance in a world they never made. Their real motivation is an instinctive certainty as to what the score really is. They are out of the ballgame and they know it. Unlike the campus rebels, who with a minimum amount of effort will emerge from their struggle with a validated ticket to status, the outlaw motorcyclist views the future with the baleful eye of a man with no upward mobility at all. In a world increasingly geared to specialists, technicians and fantastically complicated machinery, the Hell’s Angels are obvious losers and it bugs them. But instead of submitting quietly to their collective fate, they have made it the basis of a full-time social vendetta. They don’t expect to win anything, but on the other hand, they have nothing to lose.
If one drawback to being a public figure was the inability to get a job, another was the disappointment in discovering that fame can come without money. Shortly after the news magazines made them celebrities they began to talk about getting rich from it all, and their fear of being wiped out soon gave way to a brooding resentment over being used to sell newspapers and magazines. They weren’t sure how the riches would come, or why, or even if they deserved them. . . but they seemed pretty certain that the balance of payments was about to tip their way. This feeling reached its zenith when an Angel made the Post cover, and for a few weeks after that it was hard to talk to them about anything but money. They had all kinds of deals working, numerous offers that had to be juggled and judged. . . whether to go fast and hard for bundles of short-term cash or try to stay cool and set up a schedule of royalties to be doled out in perpetuity.