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

As dawn approached, there were less than twenty moving bodies in the camp. One of the Jokers I’d been talking to earlier had become fascinated with the word shunt. It caught his ear when I referred to them having been shunted off to a bad camp­site. He repeated the word with a grin, then went off to play with it for a while. Several hours later I heard him urge another Joker: Say, man, let’s go into town and shunt somebody. By four in the morning the word had grown like a tumor in his conscious­ness and he wandered around the fire, buttonholing people and asking, What would you do if I said I was gonna shunt you? Or Say, man, can you lend me some shunt until morning? I’m hurtin. Then he would laugh distractedly and stagger off toward the remains of the beer mountain, which by that time was built almost entirely of empties. Now and then one of the outlaws, unable to find a full can, would fly into a rage and start kicking the empties in all directions until somebody came to help him. And behind all the other sounds, as always, was the revving and booming of motorcycle engines. Some of the Angels would sit on their bikes for a while, letting them idle, then kill the engine and move out again to socialize. It seemed to give them new energy, like a battery charge. The last sound I heard that night was the peaceful idling of a hog right next to the car.

The next morning I woke up to the same noise, but this time it was deafening. Apparently some enemy had crept in during the night and screwed every one of the carburetor adjustments, causing them all to need retuning. There was a big crowd by the still-smoking bonfire, and in the middle of it I could see Barger talking to a bald little man who seemed to have the St. Vitus dance. He was a reporter from the Los Angeles Times and he was very much on edge, even though there were several deputies in camp. He was writhing and sweating like a man who’d burst into a cannibal fort to ask for the chiefs daughter. He introduced him­self as Jerry Cohen. Just as he started to explain what he wanted, Tiny rushed up to Barger, threw his arms around him and planted a sloppy wet kiss on his mouth. This is a guaranteed square-jolter, and the Angels are gleefully aware of the reaction it gets. They can’t stand it, says Terry. It blows their minds every time — especially the tongue bit. The sight of a photographer invariably whips the Angels into a kissing frenzy, but I have never seen them do it among themselves, when there was nobody around to shock. There is an element of something besides showbiz to it and in serious moments now and then one of the Angels will explain it as just one of the ways we let the world know we’re brothers.

It is an unnerving way to be greeted. One night after I’d known the Angels for many months I walked into the Hyde Inn in San Francisco and joined a cluster at the bar. While I was reaching in my pocket for some beer money I was nearly knocked off my feet by a flying body that wrapped itself around me before I could see who it was. Everything went black, and my first thought was that they’d finally turned on me and it was all over: then I felt the hairy kiss and heard the laughter. Ronnie, the Oakland secretary, seemed offended that I hadn’t caught him in mid-air, as he’d expected, and returned the kiss heartily. It was a serious social error and further proof to the outlaws that I was only about half bright. They considered me a slow learner, a borderline case with only splinters of real potential. My first plunge into folly was get­ting a limey bike, an insult that I only partially redeemed by destroying it in a high-speed crash and laying my head open. The wreck gave me a kind of minimum status that lasted until I blew the kissing act. After that they treated me with a gentle sort of detachment, as if I were somebody’s little brother with an incur­able disease — Let the poor fool have his way; God knows, it’s the least we can do for him. *