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

The other market was in the center of the main tourist area, and when we got there the crowd was so dense that the only place to park was between the gas pump and the side door. If trouble broke out we’d be hopelessly penned in. At a glance the scene looked even worse than the one we’d just been rescued from.

But this was a different crowd. They’d apparently been waiting for hours to see the Angels in action, and now, as the two stepped out of the car, a murmur of gratification went up. These were not locals, but tourists — city people, from the valley and the coast. The store was full of newspapers featuring the Hell’s Angels rape in Los Angeles, but nobody looked frightened. A curious crowd gathered as the outlaws bargained with the owner, a short moon­faced man who kept saying, Sure thing, boys — I’ll take care of you. He was aggressively friendly, even to the point of putting his arm around Pete’s grimy shoulders as they made their way to the beer vault.

I bought a paper and went to the bar and lunch counter at the far end of the store. While I was reading the rape story I heard a little girl behind me ask, Where are they, Mommy? You said we were going to see them. I turned to look at the child, a bandy­legged pixie just getting her permanent teeth, and felt thankful once again that my only issue is male. I glanced at the mother and wondered what strange grooves her mind had been fitted to in these wonderfully prosperous times. She was a downbeat thirty-five, with short blond hair and a sleeveless blouse only half tucked into her tight bermuda shorts. It was a vivid Pepsi Genera­tion tableau. . . on a hot California afternoon a sag-bellied woman wearing St. Tropez sunglasses is hanging around a resort-area market, trailing her grade-school daughter and waiting in the midst of an eager crowd for the arrival of The Hoodlum Circus, as advertised in Life.

I remembered the previous spring, when I was driving one night from San Francisco to Big Sur and heard a radio bulletin about a tidal wave due to strike the California coast around mid­night. Shortly before eleven I got to Hot Springs Lodge — which sits on a cliff just above the ocean — and rushed inside to sound the alarm. It was a slow night, and the only people still awake were a half dozen locals sitting around a redwood table with some bottles of wine. They had already heard the warnings and were waiting for the thing to hit. A tidal wave was a sight worth waiting up for. That same night, according to anguished police reports, more than ten thousand people flocked to Ocean Beach in San Francisco, creating a night-long traffic jam on the Coast Highway. They too were curious, and if the wave had come up on schedule most of them would have been killed. Luckily it petered out somewhere between Honolulu and the West Coast. . .

A crowd of about fifty people gathered to watch us load the beer. Several teen-agers got up the nerve to help. A man wearing madras shorts and black business socks kept asking Pete and Sonny to pose while he backed off for panoramic sequences with his home-movie camera. Another man, also wearing bermudas, sidled up to me and asked quietly, Say, are you guys really Nazis?

Not me, I said. I’m Kiwanis.

He nodded wisely, as if he had known all along. Then what’s all this stuff you read? he asked. You know, this stuff about swastikas.

I called to Sonny, who was showing our helpers how to stack the cases in the back seat. Hey, this man wants to know if you’re a Nazi. I expected him to laugh, but he didn’t. He made the usual disclaimers regarding the swastikas and Iron Crosses ( That don’t mean nothin, we buy that stuff in dime stores ), but just about the time the man seemed satisfied that it was all a rude put-on, Barger unloaded one of those jarring ad libs that have made him a favorite among Bay area newsmen. But there’s a lot about that country we admire, he said, referring to prewar Germany. They had discipline. There was nothing chickenshit about em. They might not of had all the right ideas, but at least they respected their leaders and they could depend on each other.