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

At that time, Gut was not technically a Hell’s Angel. Several years earlier he had been one of the charter members of the Sacramento chapter — which, like the Frisco chapter, began with a distinctly bohemian flavor. Terry the Tramp was another charter member of the North Sac Angels. They had always got along well with Sacramento’s beatnik element, and when the chapter moved to Oakland they brought some of this influence with them. It didn’t go over too well at the El Adobe. The original Oakland Angels were hard-ass brawlers — a purer strain, as it were — and they had never made contact with the jazz, poetry and protest element of Berkeley and San Francisco. Because of this conflict in backgrounds, the sudden consolidation in Oakland of Angel refugees from Sacramento and Berdoo had an unsettling effect on the whole scene.

A wanderer like most of the others, Gut had also been a member of the Berdoo chapter, but now — at twenty-seven — he was having second thoughts about making another plunge. Mem­bership doesn’t transfer automatically. The fellowship does, and the assumption is always that a transient Angel will eventually be absorbed into whatever chapter he chooses to ride with, but there is always a waiting period. . . just to make sure. In Gut’s case the trial period was a very mutual thing. He wanted to go back to col­lege in the fall, he said. He already had a year at a junior college down south; he wanted to be a commercial artist, and his sketchbook of motorcycle drawings showed a natural talent. I’m not so sure I want to join the Angels again, he said one night. But I hate to lose friends. Sometimes I think I’d like to drop the club and settle down to something different, but it’s hard to tell the Angels that. A friend of Gut’s, a non-Angel, predicted, He’ll join again. Hell, he doesn’t know how not to. *

* Gut eventually drifted away from the Angels and into the Berkeley-LSD scene.

The three of us were still sitting there, talking aimlessly, when the patrol car suddenly jumped backward, made a tight circle in the parking lot and zoomed off down the highway. I quickly fin­ished my beer and was packing up the tape recorder when there was a tremendous sound all around us. Seconds later, a phalanx of motorcycles came roaring over the hill from the west. Both Gut and Buzzard rushed toward the highway, waving and shouting happily. The road was dense with bikes. The hot dog stand was on the crest of a hill above Bass Lake; it was the last geographic barrier between the Angels and their destination. The police, in their wisdom, had managed to pile up at least a hundred bikes at the roadblock — where the restraining orders were cere­moniously handed out — and then release them all at once. So instead of arriving in quiet knots, the outlaws crested the hill in a great body. . . howling, hooting, waving bandanas and presenting the citizens with a really terrifying spectacle. The discipline of the highway had broken down entirely; now it was madness. The sight of Gut and Buzzard cheering beside the road caused Little Jesus to fling his hands in the air and utter triumphant screams. His bike veered off to the right and nearly collided with Charger Charley the Child Molester. An Angel I had never seen came by on an orange three-wheeler, kicking his feet straight out like a rodeo rider. Andy from Oakland who has no driver’s license, came by with his wife sitting in front of him on the gas tank, ready to grab the handlebars at the first sight of the fuzz. The noise was like a landslide, or a wing of bombers passing over. Even knowing the Angels, I couldn’t quite handle what I was seeing. It was like Genghis Khan, Morgan’s Raiders, The Wild One and the Rape of Nanking all at once. Both Gut and Buzzard leaped on their bikes and roared off to join the pack.

As I was getting into my car another bike pulled into the lot. It was an outlaw BSA, a rare animal in this league, and on it was a stocky, tough-looking man in his late thirties with a $400 Nikon camera hanging on his neck. . . Don Mohr, then a photographer for the Oakland Tribune. Except for the Nikon and the lack of colors, Mohr looked as grimy and menacing as any Hell’s Angel, and with good reason. He was a veteran motorcyclist, who’d been riding longer than most of the Angels. Unlike many of his con­temporaries, he had developed at least one of his talents and gained some leverage in the world of squares and money, but he had never given up bikes. In Oakland he wore a blue suit to work and drove a white Thunderbird, but when the Angels went out on a run he joined them on his old Beezer. He wore boots, greasy Levi’s and a sleeveless denim vest, showing tattoos on both arms. He looked like a middleweight Rocky Marciano and talked the same way.*