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

Not everyone is comfortable with this concept. I had owned a big motorcycle before, and two motor scooters, but only because they’d been cheap and available when I had some money to buy something. There is no place in the mystique for this kind of sloppy pragmatism, and when I told the Angels I was thinking of buying a bike of my own they were eager to help out. The main thing, of course, was to get a Harley-Davidson. They had several to sell, but the newer ones were all hot. . . they were also cheap: a $1,500 bike for $400 is hard to turn down, but to ride a stolen bike, you have to know how to explain to a cop why your frame or engine numbers bear no resemblance to the numbers on your license registration. There are ways to carry this off, but the penalty for failure is jail time, and I didn’t feel up to it. I tried unsuccessfully to have the Angels find me a cheap, second­hand — and legal — Harley 74, customized in the latest outlaw fashion. Then, like some of the outlaw avant-garde, I decided on the lighter, hotter Harley Sportster. After pressure from the respectable camp, I tried the Triumph Bonneville and even the staid BMW. In the end I narrowed it down to the Sportster, the Bonneville and the BSA Lightning Rocket. All three will run circles around a stock Harley 74, and even the Angel version of the hog — which is anything but stock — can’t run with the newest and best production models without extensive alterations and a very savvy rider. That I eventually bought the BSA is immaterial; the point is that it took me four weeks of hard asking and thinking, with $1,500 in the balance, to realize that stripped-down Harleys weren’t basically superior machines. Later, after riding a few months, I understood that the difference between a Hell’s Angel on a hog and a white-collar bike buff on a race-tuned Tri­umph is not all in the engine. The Angels push their luck to the limit. They take drastic risks with no thought at all. As individ­uals they have been busted, excluded and defeated in so many ways that they are not about to be polite or careful in the one area where they have an edge.

The special relationship between an Angel and his bike is obvious even to people who know nothing at all about motor­cycles. While gathering data for his Saturday Evening Post article, Bill Murray watched a half-hour television documentary made by a Los Angeles station with the hazy co-operation of the Berdoo Angels. One of the four specimens was, in Murray’s words: an almost inarticulate brute behind glass-bottom eye­glasses who was known as Blind Bob. (He spoke fiercely of what would happen to anybody who tried to mess with his girl. ‘If she’s with me, she’s with me,’ he said, grinding his jaw.)

Murray’s view of the Angels was wholly contemptuous but he was very much taken with the sight of at least one of the brutes on a hog. The most vivid moment of the television program, he said, came when Blind Bob, an inarticulate earthbound slob during the interview, had been shown riding his cycle down the highway. He handled that big powerful machine with consum­mate ease, steering it casually with one hand, like Valenzuela bringing Kelso to the starting gate, the wind blowing hard into his face, and his mouth set in a tight grin of pure enjoyment. Planted on the back of his hog, this oaf had acquired instant grace. . .

With rare exceptions, the outlaw bike is a Harley 74, a giant of a motorcycle that comes out of the Milwaukee factory weighing seven hundred pounds, but which the Angels strip down to about five hundred. In the argot of the cycle world the Harley is a hog, and the outlaw bike is a chopped hog. Basically it is the same machine all motorcycle cops use, but the police bike is an accessory-loaded elephant compared to the lean, customized dynamos the Hell’s Angels ride. The resemblance is about the same as that of a factory-equipped Cadillac to a dragster’s stripped-down essence of the same car. The Angels refer to stan­dard 74s as garbage wagons, and Bylaw Number 11 of the charter is a put-down in the grand manner: An Angel cannot wear the colors while riding on a garbage wagon with a non-Angel. A chopped hog, or chopper, is little more than a heavy frame, a tiny seat and a massive, 1,200-cubic-centimeter (or 74-cubic-inch) engine. This is nearly twice the size of the engines in the Triumphe Bonneville or the BSA Lightning Rocket, both 650-cubic-centimeter machines capable of 120 to 130 miles an hour. The Honda Super Hawk has a 305-cubic-centimeter engine and a top speed of just under 100. A columnist for the Los Angeles Times once described hogs as the kind of cycle the German couriers used to run down dogs and chickens — and people — in World War II: low brutish machines, with drivers to match.