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

The next morning, said Terry, I rode in with somebody — I forget who — to some drive-in on the highway, where we got some breakfast. When we got back to the beach they had a road­block set up with those two broads sittin there in the cop car, lookin at everybody. I didn’t know what was goin on, but then a cop said, ‘You’re one,’ and they slapped the cuffs on me. Those goddamn girls were gigglin, righteously laughin. . . you know, ‘Ha ha, that’s one of em.’ So off I went to the bucket, for rape.

When we got to the jail I said, ‘Hey, I want to be checked. Let’s see a doctor. I ain’t had no intercourse in two days.’ But they wouldn’t go for it. Marvin and Miles and Crazy Cross were already there and we figured we were deep in the shit until they told us bail was only eleven hundred dollars. Then we knew they didn’t have much of a case.

Meanwhile, out on Marina Beach, the rest of the Angels were being rounded up and driven north along Highway 156 toward the county line. Laggards were thumped on the shoulders with billy clubs and told to get moving. Side roads were blocked by state troopers while dozens of helmeted deputies — many from neighboring counties — ran the outlaws through the gauntlet. Traffic was disrupted for miles as the ragged horde moved slowly along the road, gunning their engines and raining curses on everything in sight. The noise was deafening and it is hard to imagine what effect the spectacle must have had on the dozens of out-of-state late-summer tourists who pulled over to let the pro­cession come through. Because of the proximity of an Army base, they undoubtedly thought they were making way for a caravan of tanks, or at least something impressive and military — and then to see an army of hoodlums being driven along the road like a herd of diseased sheep — ah, what a nightmare for the California Chamber of Commerce.

At the county line on U.S. 101 a reporter from the San Fran­cisco Chronicle talked with Tommy, and with another Angel, named Tiny, a six-foot-six, 240-pound outlaw with a shoulder-length pigtail who later gained nationwide fame for his attack on a Get Out of Vietnam demonstration in Berkeley.

We’re ordinary guys, said Tommy. Most of us work. About half are married, I guess, and a few own their homes. Just because we like to ride motorcycles, the cops give us trouble everywhere we go. That rape charge is phony and it won’t stick. The whole thing was voluntary.

Shit, our bondsman will have those guys out in two hours, said Tiny. Why can’t people let us alone, anyway? All we want to do is get together now and then and have some fun — just like the Masons, or any other group.

But the presses were already rolling and the eight-column headline said: HELL’S ANGELS GANG RAPE. The Masons haven’t had that kind of publicity since the eighteenth century, when Casanova was climbing through windows and giving the brotherhood a bad name. Perhaps the Angels will one day follow the Freemasons into bourgeois senility, but by then some other group will be making outrage headlines: a Hovercraft gang, or maybe some once-bland fraternal group tooling up even now for whatever the future might force on them.

What is the trend in Kiwanis? There are rumors in Oakland of a new militancy in that outfit, a radical ferment that could drasti­cally alter the club’s image. In the drift and flux of these times it is easy enough to foresee a Sunday morning, ten or twenty years hence, when a group of middle-aged men wearing dark blazers with Hell’s Angels crests on the pockets will be pacing their mortgaged living rooms and muttering sadly at a headline saying: KIWANIS GANG RAPE: FOUR HELD, OTHERS FLEE, RINGLEADER SOUGHT.

And in some shocked American city a police chief will be saying — as the Monterey chief said in 1964 of the Hell’s Angels — They will not be welcomed back, because of the atmosphere created.

The Making of the Menace, 1965