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

About fifty yards short of the highway he pointed out where the girl was hiding, and the two Angels went off through the woods to get her. We continued along the trail to the roadblock. There were three cars and at least ten cops, with a white-haired Highway Patrol captain in charge. Our stowaway was sitting in the back seat, and just as the captain began asking us what we were up to, another car came by and the boy shouted, That’s them! That’s them! I reached over and blew the horn, the other car stopped, the boy leaped out, and seconds later he was gone. The police thought something had been put over on them. You mean, that kid was in there all this time? one asked. Was he hurt? What’s going on in there?

Nothing, I said. It’s dull. Go in and see for yourself. You’ll be surprised.

The captain, who’d been mulling over the bogus press creden­tials I’d given him, then told us we couldn’t leave. A long argu­ment ensured, having to do with freedom of the press, a citizen’s right to buy beer at any legal hour, and the possibility that the Angels might go looking for beer on their own hook if we were turned back.

Where would you buy it? the captain asked. All the places are closed.

We’ll go as far as we have to, I said. There’s plenty of time.

They had a quick huddle and then said we could go — thinking, no doubt, that we’d have to drive sixty miles, to Madera, to find an open bar. As we left, one of the cops smiled and said, Have a good trip.

Ten minutes later we parked beside what appeared to be Tiny’s friend’s market, but it was hard to be sure. It was farther away than he’d said, and much bigger than his description. Because of this I was a little hesitant to go around back and start rapping on dark windows. If we had the wrong market it could be a serious mistake. But it seemed worth a try, so I rapped, keeping ready to sprint around the corner at the first sound of a gun being cocked. Nobody answered, so I rapped again. At any instant I expected to hear a woman shrieking, Henry! They’re here! Oh God, they’ve come for us! Shoot, Henry! Shoot! And even if Henry didn’t blow my head off, he’d be sure to call the police and we’d be busted for attempted burglary, trying to crash a beer market in the dead of night.

Finally I heard movement inside, and somebody yelled, Who is it?

A friend of Tiny’s, I said quickly. We need beer.

A light came on and a friendly face appeared. The man came out in his bathrobe and opened the store. He didn’t seem at all upset. Yeah, good old Tiny, he said. He’s a real gas, ain’t he? I agreed, and gave him the $35 the Angels had collected around the fire. Phil added $5 more, and we left with eight cases. The man held Tiny in such high esteem that he charged only $1.25 a six-pack, instead of the $1.50 we’d paid at the other place. When we got back to the roadblock, the captain flashed his light in the car and seemed shocked to see the beer. We’d been gone less than a half hour. Where’d you get it? he asked.

Down the road, I said.

He shook his head glumly and waved us into camp. Obviously, some dirty work was afoot. I felt a little sorry for him. Here he was, standing out on the highway all night, sworn to protect the citizens of Bass Lake, and the very people most likely to suffer looting if the Hell’s Angels ran wild were helping to get the hoodlums drunk.

We were received in camp with cheers and shouting. Our eight cases made the nut. The hoarders wisely fell back on their own stash, and sometime around four a big contingent from the south rolled in with several more cases. The rest of the night was more a question of endurance than enjoyment. Magoo, a twenty-six-year-old teamster from Oakland, stayed by the fire and kept stoking. When somebody warned him not to burn everything up on the first night, he replied, What the hell? There’s a whole forest. We got plenty of firewood. Magoo is one of the most interesting of the Angels because his mind seems wholly immune to the notions and tenets of twentieth century American life. Like most of the others, he is a high school dropout, but his gig with the teamsters gives him a decent income and he doesn’t have much to worry about. He drives a truck whenever he gets the call — sometimes six days a week and sometimes only one — and he says he enjoys the work, especially after a long layoff. One night in Oakland he showed up wearing a white shirt under his colors and seeming very pleased with himself: I did some righ­teous work today for the first time in a long time, he said. I unloaded thirty-five thousand pounds of frozen chickens, even stole one. It made me feel good to do some work for a change.