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

By eleven it was plain that every girl in camp was not only spoken for, but taken. Off in the bushes there were sounds of gig­gling and groaning and twigs snapping, but the hundred or so outlaws who remained around the bonfire were discreetly oblivi­ous. Many had worked off excess energy in the traditional war games. On some earlier run they had formed two secret battle societies: The Lodge and U-Boat 13. At any moment, at the sound of a prearranged signal the U-Boat mob would rush on some hapless Lodge partisan, crushing him under a pile of bodies. Other Lodgers would then come to the rescue, adding to the pile-up. It looked like a scramble for a loose ball in a game between the Chicago Bears and the Green Bay Packers, except at Bass Lake the human heaps involved fifty or sixty people. I remember seeing Puff, who weighs about 225, sprint for about twenty yards and dive headfirst into the pile with a beer in each hand. For some reason there were no injuries. The outlaws are not athletic in the sense that any are ex-lettermen, but nearly all of them stay in good shape. They don’t work at it, but the way most of them live they don’t have to. What work they get paid for is usually physical anyway, and when they’re not working they exist on hamburgers, donuts and whatever else they can hustle. Many swell up with beer, but the swelling bears little resem­blance to the stylish pot of the desk-bound world. Even the few fat Angels are built more like beer barrels than water balloons.

There are those who claim the outlaws don’t need food because they get all their energy from pep pills. But this is a bit far-fetched. The substitution doesn’t work, as anyone who ever tried it can tell you. There are drugs to stimulate latent energy, but they are worthless and enervating unless the energy is there in the first place. Taken in excess on an empty stomach, pep pills induce a kind of nervous stupor characterized by fatigue, depres­sion, chills and soaking sweats. The Angels deal freely on the black market, and if any pill really worked as a substitute for food they would use it in large quantities, for it would vastly simplify their lives. As it is, they take their nourishment wherever they can. Girls cook for them, waitresses give them credit at greasy diners, and there are always the married men, whose wives rarely balk at feeding five or six of the brethren at any hour of the day or night. According to the code, there is no such thing as one Angel imposing on another. A hungry outlaw will always be fed by one of the others who has food. . . and if times are lean all around, a foraging party will hit a supermarket and steal everything they can carry. Few clerks will try to stop a dangerous hoodlum rushing out the door with two hams and three quarts of milk. The outlaws are not apologetic about stealing food, even though it goes against their pride. They prefer to think they don’t have to — but whenever they do, they aren’t sneaky. While one is gathering hams or steaks another will create a disturbance to draw the clerks. A third will fill a rucksack full of cans and vegetables on the other side of the store. . . and then they will all flee at the same time through different exits. There is nothing difficult about it. All it takes is gall, a threatening appearance and a surly disre­gard for whatever the neighbors might think. As for the police, by the time they reach the scene of the crime the food is already being cooked, twenty blocks away.

The outlaws are not articulate when it comes to the strengths and weaknesses of the world they function in, but their instincts are finely honed. They have learned from experience that some crimes are likely to be punished, and some aren’t. A Hell’s Angel who wants to make a long-distance call, for instance, will usually go to a pay phone. He will deposit enough money for the first three minutes, acknowledge the operator’s signal at the end of that time and talk for as long as he wants. When he finally fin­ishes, the operator will tell him how many coins he should put in the black box. . . but instead of paying, he laughs, spits obsceni­ties into the phone and hangs up. Unlike the normal, middle-class, hard-working American, a motorcycle outlaw has no vested interest in the system that is represented by the voice of a tele­phone operator. The values of that system are completely irrele­vant to him. He doesn’t give a damn, and besides, he knows the phone company can’t catch him. So he completes his call, abuses the operator and goes off to get happily wasted.