It is said, however, that the Hell’s Angels have some offbeat ideas about fun and relaxation. If they are, after all, the lowest form of animals, not even Senator Murphy could expect them to gather together in a drunken mass for any such elevated pastimes as ping pong, shuffleboard and whist. Their picnics have long been noted for certain beastly forms of entertainment, and any young girl who shows up at a Hell’s Angels bonfire camp at two o’clock in the morning is presumed, by the outlaws, to be in a condition of heat. So it was only natural that the two girls attracted more attention when they arrived at the beach than they had earlier in the convivial bedlam at Nick’s.
One aspect of the case overlooked in most newspaper accounts had to do with elementary logistics. How did these two young girls happen to be on a deserted midnight beach with several hundred drunken motorcycle thugs? Were they kidnapped from Nick’s? And if so, what were they doing there in the first place, aged fourteen and fifteen, circulating all evening in a bar jammed wall to wall with the state’s most notorious gang of outlaws? Or were they seized off the street somewhere — perhaps at a stoplight — to be slung over the gas tank of a bored-out Harley and carried off into the night, screaming hysterically, while bystanders gaped in horror?
Police strategists, thinking to isolate the Angels, had reserved them a campsite far out of town, on an empty stretch of dunes between Monterey Bay and Fort Ord, an Army basic-training center. The reasoning was sound; the beasts were put off in a place where they could whip themselves into any kind of orgiastic frenzy without becoming dangerous to the citizenry — and if things got out of hand, the recruits across the road could be bugled out of bed and issued bayonets. The police posted a guard on the highway, in case the Angels got restless and tried to get back to town, but there was no way to seal the camp off entirely, nor any provision for handling local innocents who might be drawn to the scene out of curiosity or other, darker reasons not mentioned in police training manuals.
The victims told police they had gone to the beach because they wanted to look at the cyclists. They were curious — even after several hours at Nick’s, which was so crowded that evening that most of the outlaws took to pissing in the parking lot rather than struggle inside to the bathroom.
Hell, those broads didn’t come out there for any singsong, said Terry. They were loaded and they wanted to get off some leg, but it just got to be too many guys. To start with, it was groovy for em. Then more and more guys came piling over the dunes. . . ‘yea, pussy,’ you know, that kinda thing. . . and the broads didn’t want it. The suede dudes just split; we never saw em again. I don’t know for sure how it ended. All I knew then was that they had some mamas out there in the dunes, but me and my old lady went and crashed pretty early. I was so wasted I couldn’t even make it with her.
No family newspaper saw fit to quote the Angel version, but six months later, playing pool in a San Francisco bar, Frenchy remembered it this way: One girl was white and pregnant, the other was colored, and they were with five colored studs. They hung around Nick’s about three hours on Saturday night, drinking and talking with our riders, then they came out to the beach with us — them and their five boyfriends. Everybody was standing around the fire, drinking wine, and some of the guys were talking to them — hustling em, naturally — and pretty soon somebody asked the two chicks if they wanted to be turned on — you know, did they want to smoke some pot? They said yeah, and then they walked off with some of the guys to the dunes. The spade went with a few guys, and then she wanted to quit, but the pregnant one was really hot to trot; the first four or five guys she was really draggin into her arms, but after that she cooled off too. By this time, though, one of their boyfriends had got scared and gone for the cops — and that’s all it was.