But the highways! Christ, here you are, moving along in traffic about sixty-five, right there at the speed limit, and it’s all you can do to keep out of people’s way. If the road’s a little wet — even damp from the fog — you’re in trouble no matter what happens. Slow down, and they’ll come right up on your tail or muscle you out of the lane. Speed up to get some room, and some geek hits his brakes right in front of you — God knows why, but they do it all the time.
One little thing like that and you’re into the meat grinder. The minute you hit the brakes you’ll start losing it; bikes don’t drift like cars. And once you go down, you’ll be lucky if you only get run over twice.
During 1965 more than a thousand people died in the United States as a result of motorcycle accidents. Automobiles killed nearly fifty times that many, but the growing number of bike deaths caused the American Medical Association to label motorcycles a serious health hazard in our communities. The Hell’s Angels lose an average of four members a year on the road, but considering the way most of them ride, a 4 percent annual mortality rate is a towering tribute to their skill. A Harley 74 is probably the only motorcycle that can cause real damage to a car, and a hard-running Angel can intimidate traffic as severely as a speeding torpedo. The outlaws are experts with hogs, and in their own narrow world, on their own terms, they can outride just about anybody.
In the late 1950s, before the Angels became so notorious, Pete, from the Frisco chapter, was one of the top drag racers in northern California. He was sponsored by the local Harley-Davidson dealer and collected a roomful of trophies. Not only did he wear his Hell’s Angels colors in the races, but he rode his competition bike out to the track, packing his pretty blond wife on the fender pad behind him. Other dragsters brought their bikes on trailers, handling them like Ming vases.
Pete could really make a bike go, one of the Angels recalls. It was really classy the way he’d go out and win. When he got to the track, man, he’d just change his spark plugs and go out — high handlebars and all — and wipe out them drag irons.
In the early sixties Pete retired from the Angels, feeling he’d had enough. Shortly after his thirtieth birthday he moved his wife and two children to a small town in the Sierras, where he tried to settle down as a peaceful country mechanic. His retirement lasted about two years and might have been longer if the Angels had not become famous. But the lure of publicity and new action was too much. By early 1965 Pete was back in town, toasting his old buddies, shedding his family and hustling around for parts to build a new bike.
Like most of the other Angels, he regards the factory product only in terms of potential – a bundle of good raw material, but hardly a machine that any man with class would want to call his own.*
* The bike he finally built turned 108 in the quarter mile, in twelve seconds flat.
The outlaws tend to see their bikes as personal monuments, created in their own image, however abstract, and they develop an affection for them that is hard for outsiders to understand. It seems like a pose, or even a perversion — and maybe it is, but to bike freaks it is very real. Anybody who has ever owned one of the beasts will always be a little bit queer for them. Not the little bikes, but the big expensive temperamental bastards, the ones that respond to the accelerator like a bucking horse to a whip, that will stand up in the air and run fifteen yards on one wheel, scorching the pavement with a fiery blast from the chrome tailpipes. The little bikes may be fun, like the industry people say, but Volkwagens are fun too, and so are BB guns. Big bikes, Ferraris and .44 Magnum revolvers are something beyond fun; they are man-made machines so powerful and efficient in their own realms that they challenge a man’s ability to control them, to push them to the limits of their design and possibilities. This is one of the pillars of the Big Bike mystique that looms so large in the life of every Hell’s Angel. Or as they say: That’s where it’s at, man. That’s where it lives.