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

One night in the winter of 1965 I took my own bike — and a passenger — over the high side on a rain-slick road just north of Oakland. I went into an obviously dangerous curve at about sev­enty, the top of my second gear. The wet road prevented leaning it over enough to compensate for the tremendous inertia, and somewhere in the middle of the curve I realized that the rear wheel was no longer following the front one. The bike was going sideways toward a bank of railroad tracks and there was nothing I could do except hang on. For an instant it was very peaceful. . . and then it was like being shot off the road by a bazooka, but with no noise. Neither a deer on a hillside nor a man on a battlefield ever hears the shot that kills him, and a man going over the high side on a motorcycle hears the same kind of high-speed silence. There are sparks, as the chromed steel grinds down on the road, an awful jerk when your body starts cartwheeling on the first impact. . . and after that, if you’re lucky, there is nothing at all until you wake up in some hospital emergency ward with your scalp hanging down in your eyes and a blood-soaked shirt sticking to your chest while official-looking people stare down at you and assure each other that these crazy bastards won’t learn.

There is nothing romantic about a bad crash, and the only solace is the deadening shock that comes with most injuries. My passenger left the bike in a long arc that ended on the railroad tracks and splintered his thigh bone, driving the sharp edges through muscle and flesh and all the way out to the wet gravel. In the hospital they had to wash the dirt off the bone ends before they put his leg back together. . . but he said it didn’t hurt until the next day, not even when he was lying in the rain and wondering if anybody on the road would call an ambulance to pick us up.

There is not a Hell’s Angel riding who hasn’t made the emergency-ward scene, and one of the natural results is that their fear of accidents is well tempered by a cavalier kind of disdain for physical injury. Outsiders might call it madness or other, more esoteric names. . . but the Angels inhabit a world in which violence is as common as spilled beer, and they live with it as easily as ski bums live with the risk of broken legs. This casual acceptance of bloodletting is a key to the terror they inspire in the squares. Even a small, inept street-fighter has a tremendous advantage over the average middle-class American, who hasn’t had a fight since puberty. It is a simple matter of accumulated experience, of having been hit or stomped often enough to forget the ugly panic that nice people associate with a serious fight. A man who has had his nose smashed three times in brawls will risk it again with hardly a thought. No amount of instruction in any lethal art can teach this — not unless the instructor is a sadist, and even then it would be difficult because the student’s experience would be artifically warped and limited.

San Francisco is a big karate town: in 1965 there were roughly seven thousand full-time fee-paying karate students roaming around the Bay Area. . . but in any active bar you can hear a story about a bartender who busted up a guy who tried to pull some karate stuff. It hardly matters how many of the stories are true. The point is valid: the difference between survival and wipe-out in a physical crisis is nearly always a matter of conditioned reflexes. A bartender with scar tissue all over his knuckles will hit faster and harder than a karate-trained novice who has never been bloodied. For the same reason, a Hell’s Angel who has been over the high side often enough to joke about it will ride a motor­cycle with a style and abandon that comes only with painful experience.*

* Five Hell’s Angels died in fights or crashes in 1964, and three in ’65 — three so far in ’66, along with one shot seriously in the stomach and another permanently paralyzed from the neck down, also from a bullet.