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

I enjoy Buzzard, but I have never met anyone outside the Angels who thought he deserved anything better than twelve hours of the bastinado. One morning when Murray was doing his research for the Post article I assured him it would be safe to go over to Barger’s house in Oakland for an interview. Then I went back to sleep. Several hours later the phone rang, and it was Murray, yelling with rage. He’d been talking quietly with Barger, he said, when suddenly he was confronted by a wild-eyed psy­chotic who shook a knotty cane under his nose and shouted, Who the fuck are you? The assailant’s description didn’t fit any Angel I’d ever met, so I called Sonny and asked what had hap­pened. Aw hell, it was just Buzzard, he said with a laugh. You know how he is.

Indeed. Anyone who has ever met Buzzard knows how he is. It took Murray several hours to calm down after his introduction, but weeks later — after lengthy reflection and a distance of three thousand miles — he was still sufficiently affected by the incident to describe it like this:

We talked affably enough for half an hour or so and at one point Barger grinned and said, Well, nobody never wrote nothin good about us, but then we ain’t never done nothin good to write about. But the convivial atmosphere began to change noticeably when four or five other Angels, including Tiny, the chapter’s huge sergeant at arms, stopped by and joined in. One, a surly black-bearded youth named Buzzard, was sporting a pork-pie hat and a cane he had picked up somewhere; he waved the cane about as he talked and jabbed it at me from time to time. I suddenly got the clear impression that he would have enjoyed using it on somebody. I was the only candidate in the room. I was certain Barger and the other Angels weren’t about to pick on me, but I knew that if Buz­zard began going to work with the cane I couldn’t count on anyone stopping it before I got hurt. To resist would have been folly, because the Angel code would then have called for all of them to pitch in for old Buzzard and I would have been demolished. I sensed menace in the room, and as soon as I could manage it without giving the impression that I was bolting (which might have been a fatal mistake), I said goodbye to Sonny and strolled out of the house.

I quote Murray because he gives me a sense of balance. His perspective on the Angels was very different from mine. Buzzard was the only one who really gave him a jolt. The others only made his flesh crawl. The fact of their existence was an insult to everything he considered decent. He may have been right, and in a way I hope he was, for it would add to the satisfaction — the sense of culture and old-world solidity — that I got from agreeing with him now and then.

Actually, Buzzard is not that dangerous. He has a keen dra­matic sense and a taste for weird props. The pork-pie hat Murray referred to is an expensive straw Panama with a madras band. They sell for about $18 at the best shops in San Juan and are worn by American businessmen all over the Caribbean. Buzzard’s cane — which Murray saw as a cudgel of some kind — is an inte­gral part of his uniform, his image. Next to Zorro, Buzzard is the Angels’ fashion plate. Except for his colors and his neatly trimmed black beard, he looks almost collegiate. In his late twen­ties, he is tall, wiry and articulate. During the daylight hours he is easy enough to joke with, but at dusk he begins to eat Seconal, which affects him in the same general way that a full moon affects a werewolf. His eyes glaze over, he snarls at the juke box, pops his knuckles and wanders around the premises in a mean funk. By midnight he is a real hazard, a human lightning bolt looking for something to zap.

My first encounter with Buzzard was at the hot dog stand just out of Bass Lake. He and Gut were sitting at a patio table, pon­dering the five-page legal document they’d been handed moments earlier. They have a roadblock down by Coarsegold, said Gut. Everybody who comes through gets one of these — and they take your picture when they give it to you.