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

The Angels considered him a valuable hatchet man. A punch-out artist is good to have around, said one, but he has to cool it around his buddies. Some guys get boozed up and just start teeing off on people.

Until his departure Bobo was the horned toad of waterfront lit­erary bars. His colleagues were not eager to drink with him, and for good reason. He was not a comfortable man to get drunk with. Once, in a fit of pique, he lashed out with a karate chop and cracked a four-inch-thick marble bench in the Hall of Justice. Even the police were leery of him. He ran a karate school and enjoyed death battles, a karate version of the no-limit, bare­knuckle boxing matches of the John L. Sullivan era. It is not nec­essary for one of the combatants to die, but the fight will continue until one of them can’t stand up, for whatever reason. . . and if the reason happens to be death, then the prearranged under­standing, among both fighters and carefully screened spectators, is that the death is accidental.* Unfortunately, Bobo accepted a spur-of-the-moment death challenge from a visiting Jap on a night when a San Francisco society columnist and several of her friends had come to see him about the possibility of an offbeat feature. The result was a nightmare of blood, fierce screaming and panic in the gallery. Nobody was killed, but it was a very crude show, and soon afterward Preetam Bobo’s name was removed from the rolls of licensed karate instructors.

* Deaths are extremely rare. The combat usually ends when the backers of either man decide the cause is lost.

It was only then, after exhausting all other means of demoral­izing the public, that he turned seriously to writing. Several years earlier he had given up bikes because of the stigma. After a long stint as a motorcycle messenger he stumbled on the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam and thought it necessary to publish his own views. He could, however, only on the condition that he move through the streets of the world in conventional fashion. I felt like a whore, he says, but I told the editor I’d play it straight. Hell, I didn’t want to spend the rest of my life as a delivery boy.

Preetam Bobo is a study in something, but I was never sure what to call it. He is a walking monument to everything the Hell’s Angels would like to stand for, but which few of them do. Preetam is the Compleat Outlaw, and he somehow makes it work. Like Frank, he went through his whole activist period without ever being arrested. All it takes is the sense to be quiet around cops, he says. Whenever we had trouble with the law I just drifted off to the side and kept my mouth shut. If a cop ever asked me a question I’d answer politely and say ‘sir.’ In those situa­tions, man, a cop appreciates somebody calling him ‘sir.’ It’s the smart thing to do, that’s all. And besides, it’s a hell of a lot cheaper than going to jail.

Bobo was a motorcyclist long before he was a Hell’s Angel. He remembers one night when he passed the corner of Leavenworth and Market in downtown San Francisco and saw a bunch of bikers outside a pool hall called Antones. He stopped to say hello, and soon afterward he was part of a loosely knit group of riders who called themselves, half jokingly, the Market Street Commandos. Motorcycles were comparatively rare in the early 1950s, and people who rode them were happy to find company. You could go by there any hour of the day or night, Preetam recalls, and there’d always be at least ten bikes out in front. Sometimes on weekends there’d be fifty or sixty. It was a police problem even then. Businessmen were complaining that the bikes kept customers from parking in front of their stores.

The Market Street Commandos drifted on, without much action, for about a year. Then, in early 1954, The Wild One came to town, and things changed. We went up to the Fox Theater on Market Street, said Preetam. There were about fifty of us, with jugs of wine and our black leather jackets. . . We sat up there in the balcony and smoked cigars and drank wine and cheered like bastards. We could all see ourselves right there on the screen. We were all Marlon Brando. I guess I must have seen it four or five times.