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

Some people can make the tough act work, but others will blow it badly. The Angels fear these nuts, as they call them, because they are just as likely to shoot for no reason at all as for the very best of reasons. But God’s mercy on a man who pulls a gun on a group of Hell’s Angels and then has it taken away. There are some awful stories about this, and in every case the vic­tims could have saved themselves by shooting first and later pleading self-defense. On the Angel scale of values the only thing worse than a fink with a loose or frightened mouth is a loud antagonist who can’t follow through. People like this get the full measure of retribution — the natural attack on any human obstacle, plus the hyped-up hell-grinding contempt for a man who tries and fails to deal with them on their own terms. . . or at least what seems to be their own terms, if only by default.

The odd truth is that the Angels have only a wavering respect for their own terms — or, again, what seems to be their own terms — and they are generally receptive, in any action beyond their own turf, to people who haven’t prejudged them to the extent of assuming they have to be dealt with violently. They are so much aware of their mad-dog reputation that they take a per­verse kind of pleasure in being friendly.

A filling-station owner near the Sierra town of Angels Camp (site of Mark Twain’s story The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County ) recalls his first confrontation with the Hell’s Angels in tones of fear and wonderment:

About thirty of them roared into my station one night. They said they needed a place to work on their bikes. I took one look at them and told them the place was theirs, and got the hell out of there in a hurry.

It was a normal enough reaction for a man running a no-help sta­tion at night in the mountains — for even a decision to fight to the death wouldn’t have accomplished much against thirty hoodlums. After an hour or so I finally summoned the courage to go back and see if my place was still standing, he said. The Angels were just finishing up. I was never so surprised in my whole life. The place was spotless. They had washed every tool they used with gasoline and hung it back exactly where they found it. They even swept the floor. The place was actually cleaner than when they first came in.

Stories like this are common, even among cops. There is the testi­mony of a bar owner in Porterville: Sure, they rode their motorcy­cles into my place, even tore up the tile doing it. But before they left they paid for every bit of damage, every broken glass. And I never sold so much beer in my life. They’re welcome here any time.

Many a groveling merchant has made a buck off the Hell’s Angels. All they ask is tribute, and naked fear is a very pure form of it. Any man who tacitly admits to being terrified is safe from them unless he overdoes it. . . and this happens, often with covert homo­sexuals long gone on booze or drugs and unable to control them­selves in the presence of so much rough trade. The outlaws will nearly always give a flip-out a bad time. I recall a party one night when they decided to set an offending Berkeley student on fire. Then, when the host protested, they looped a rope around the victim’s ankles and said they were going to drag him away behind a motorcycle. This also caused protests, so they settled for hanging him by one arm from a living-room rafter. After a half hour or so they relented and cut him down, shaking their heads in puzzlement at his stony silence. The wretch hadn’t uttered a word throughout the ordeal. He seemed in a daze, and I had a fleeting impression that he’d planned the whole thing. Afterward he went outside and sat on a stump for several hours, saying nothing at all, but trembling now and then like a man coming down from some indescribable peak.