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

* Preetam Bobo tells a story about a man in a big new car who forced him off the road on Highway 40 one Sunday afternoon in the 1950s. The dirty little bastard kept running up on my taillight, said Preetam, until finally I just pulled over and stopped. The other guys had seen it, so we decided to teach the bastard a lesson. Man, we swarmed all over him. . . We whipped on his hood with chains, tore off his aerial and smashed every window we could reach. . . all this at about seventy miles an hour, man. He didn’t even slow down. He was terrified.

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We began to see that the Hell’s Angels were assuming a mythical character. They had become folk heroes — vicarious exemplars of behavior most youth could only fantasize (unless swept away in mob activity), and legendary champions who would come to the rescue of the oppressed and persecuted. An older motorcyclist, witnessing police harassment of his fel­lows at a town outside Prince George’s County, was heard to remark, Just wait till the Angels hear about this when they come in tomorrow — they’ll tear this place apart.

— From an article in Transaction (August 1966), written by two psychologists who worked with Maryland police to avert rioting in a town preparing to host national motorcycle races

I smashed his face. He got wise. He called me a punk. He must have been stupid.

— A Hell’s Angel explaining to a stranger

Of all their habits and predilections that society finds alarming, the outlaws’ disregard for the time-honored concept of an eye for an eye is the one that frightens people most. The Hell’s Angels try not to do anything halfway, and outcasts who deal in extremes are bound to cause trouble, whether they mean to or not. This, along with a belief in total retaliation for any offense or insult, is what makes the Angels such a problem for police and so morbidly fascinating to the general public. Their claim that they don’t start trouble is probably true more often than not, but their idea of provocation is dangerously broad, and one of their main difficulties is that almost nobody else seems to understand it. Yet they have a very simple rule of thumb; in any argument a fellow Angel is always right. To disagree with a Hell’s Angel is to be wrong — and to persist in being wrong is an open challenge.

Despite everything psychiatrists and Freudian castrators have to say about the Angels, they are tough, mean and potentially dangerous as packs of wild boar. The moment a fight begins, any leather fetishes or inadequacy feelings are entirely beside the point, as anyone who has ever tangled with them will sadly tes­tify. When you get in an argument with a group of outlaw motor­cyclists, your chances of emerging unmaimed depend on the number of heavy-handed allies you can muster in the time it takes to smash a beer bottle. In this league, sportsmanship is for old lib­erals and young fools.

Many of their assault victims are people who have seen too many Western movies; they are victims of the John Wayne com­plex, which causes them to start swinging the moment they sense any insult. This is relatively safe in some areas of society, but in saloons frequented by outlaw motorcyclists it is the worst kind of folly. They’re always looking for somebody to challenge them, said a San Francisco policeman. And once you’re involved with them, it’s all or nothing. A stranger who doesn’t want anything to do with them, if one of the bums says something to his woman, he can’t take offense or he’ll have to fight four or five Angels, not just the one. People should understand this.

One of the Frisco Angels explained it without any frills: Our motto, man, is ‘All on One and One on All.’ You mess with an Angel and you’ve got twenty-five of them on your neck. I mean, they’ll break you but good, baby.

The outlaws take the all on one concept so seriously that it is written into the club charter as Bylaw Number 10: When an Angel punches a non-Angel, all other Angels will participate.