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

The dispatcher, sitting in the radio room at Highway Patrol headquarters in Sacramento, says to sit tight while he checks around. . . and moments later his voice squawks out of the speaker: Schwein! You lie! Vere are dey?

Don’t call me no swine, says the Placerville chief. They never got here,

The dispatcher checks all over northern California, with no result. Police cars scream up and down the highways, checking every bar. Nothing. Eighty of the state’s most vicious hoodlums are roaming around drunk somewhere between Sacramento and Reno, hungry for rape and pillage. It will be another embarrass­ment for California law enforcement. . . to simply lose the bug­gers, a whole convoy, right out on a main highway. . . heads will surely roll.

By now, the outlaws are far up a private road, having left the highway at a sign saying: OWL FARM, NO VISITORS. They are beyond the reach of the law unless the owner complains. Mean­while, another group of fifty disappears in the same vicinity. Police search parties stalk the highway, checking for traces of spittle, grime and blood. The dispatcher still rages over his mike; the duty officer’s voice cracks as he answers urgent queries from radio newsmen in San Francisco and Los Angeles: I’m sorry, that’s all I can say. They seem to have. . . ah. . . our information is that they. . . they disappeared, yes, they’re gone.

The only reason it hasn’t happened is that the Hell’s Angels have no access to private property in the boondocks. One or two claim to have relatives with farms, but there are no stories of the others being invited out for a picnic. The Angels don’t have much contact with people who own land. They are city boys, economi­cally and emotionally as well as physically. For at least one gen­eration and sometimes two they come from people who never owned anything at all, not even a car.

The Hell’s Angels are very definitely a lower-class phenom­enon, but their backgrounds are not necessarily poverty-stricken. Despite some grim moments, their parents seem to have had credit. Most of the outlaws are the sons of people who came to California either just before or during World War II. Many have lost contact with their families, and I have never met an Angel who claimed to have a home town in any sense that people who use that term might understand it. Terry the Tramp, for instance, is from Detroit, Norfolk, Long Island, Los Angeles, Fresno and Sacramento. As a child, he lived all over the country, not in poverty but in total mobility. Like most of the others, he has no roots. He relates entirely to the present, the moment, the action.

His longest bout with stability was a three-year hitch in the Coast Guard after finishing high school. Since then he has worked half-heartedly as a tree-trimmer, mechanic, bit actor, laborer and hustler of various commodities. He tried college for a few months but quit to get married. After two years, two children and numerous quarrels, the marriage ended in divorce. He had another child, by his second wife, but that union didn’t last either. Now, after two hugely publicized rape arrests, he refers to him­self as an eligible bachelor.

Despite his spectacular rap sheet, he estimates his total jail time at about six months — ninety days for trespassing and the rest for traffic offenses. Terry is one of the most arrest-prone of all the Angels; cops are offended by the very sight of him. In one stretch, covering 1964 and ’65, he paid roughly $2,500 to bail bondsmen, lawyers and traffic courts. Like most of the other Angels he blames the cops for making him a full-time outlaw.

At least half the Hell’s Angels are war babies, but that is a very broad term. There are also war babies in the Peace Corps, in cor­porate training programs, and fighting in Vietnam. World War II had a lot to do with the Hell’s Angels’ origins, but you have to stretch the war theory pretty thin to cover both Dirty Ed, in his early forties, and Clean Cut from Oakland, who is twenty years younger. Dirty Ed is old enough to be Clean Cut’s father — which is not likely, though he’s planted more seeds than he cares to remember.