People are already down on us because we’re Hell’s Angels, Zorro explained. This is why we like to blow their minds. It just more or less burns em, that’s all. They hate anything that’s not right for their way of living.
Anybody who has ever seen the Angels on a run will agree that rural Californians are likely to reject the spectacle as not right for their way of living. It is a human zoo on wheels. An outlaw whose normal, day-to-day appearance is enough to disrupt traffic will appear on a run with his beard dyed green or bright red, his eyes hidden behind orange goggles, and a brass ring in his nose. Others wear capes and Apache headbands, or oversize sunglasses and peaked Prussian helmets. Earrings, Wehrmacht headgear and German Iron Crosses are virtually part of the uniform — like the grease-caked Levi’s, the sleeveless vests and all those fine tattoos: Mother, Dolly, Hitler, Jack the Ripper, swastikas, daggers, skulls, LSD, Love, Rape and the inevitable Hell’s Angels insignia.
Many wear other, more esoteric decorations — symbols, numbers, letters and cryptic mottos — but few of these had any public meaning until the outlaws began talking to reporters. Among the first to be exposed was the numeral 13 (indicating a marijuana smoker). This one is almost as common as the one-percenter badge. Others, like the patch saying DFFL (Dope Forever, Forever Loaded) and the Playboy Rabbit (mocking birth control) were exposed by True magazine, which also explained the varicolored pilots’ wings: red wings indicating that the wearer has committed cunnilingus on a menstruating woman, black wings for the same act on a Negress, and brown wings for buggery.
California has laws against outraging the public decency, but for some reason they are rarely applied to the Hell’s Angels, whose very existence is a mockery of all public decency.
When you walk into a place where people can see you, you want to look as repulsive and repugnant as possible, said one. We are complete social outcasts — outsiders against society. And that’s the way we want to be. Anything good, we laugh at. We’re bastards to the world and they’re bastards to us.
I don’t really care if people think we’re bad, said another. I think this is what really keeps us going. We fight society and society fights us. It doesn’t bother me.
There are very few Angels who won’t go far out of their way to lay a bad jolt on the squares — preferably to the extent of unbalancing their metabolism and causing them to shriek in their sleep for days afterward — but there is also a certain amount of humor involved. Funny Sonny once explained the Angels’ bizarre garb as a kind of a joke — you know, like a giant masquerade.
Which is true to some extent, but not everybody digs the Angels’ sense of humor. . . which can range all the way from belly laughs at Jackie Gleason jokes to quiet giggling at the sight of a man’s face being shredded with a broken beer bottle.
A WEIRD HAUL AT GANG’S HIDEOUT
San Diego, July 18 (UPI) — Four coffins, two grave markers and Nazi emblems were found Saturday in the headquarters of a motorcycle gang where three members were arrested on narcotics charges. The residence also contained a throne chair five feet tall, a stuffed owl, an Oriental beheading sword and assorted motorcycle trophies, police said.
I don’t recall any laughter that morning at the El Adobe. Late-arriving Angels kept rolling in, and rather than go off on their own, they elected to stick with whatever crowd was available. Now and then somebody would do a wheelstand across the parking lot. Others squatted on the ground, making last-minute carburetor adjustments, and those with nothing else to do stood quietly beside their bikes, smoking cigarettes or sipping from one of the beer cans that were being passed around. Bill, the Jokers’ president, was deep in serious pondering over a road map with Dirty Ed, president of the Hayward Hell’s Angels. Hutch, the Jokers’ vice-president and chief spokesman, stood next to my car with two Angels and listened to the newscast. Man, those mothers up there are double-shook, said one of the Angels. I just hope they don’t hide the broads.