Apostrophe S

I finished “Hell’s Angels” book on the plane ride back from my college roommate’s wedding. (Congratulations again Stephen and Lin. Don’t get lost in the Bahamas!) It’s my third Thompson book.

Written a few years before Thompson’s most famous book, “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas,” “Hell’s Angels” describes in great detail the author’s year-long experience with the famous outlaw motorcycle gangs of California in the mid-’60s. Honestly, I didn’t know that much about the Angels before this read, other than the whole Altamont thing and the character in “Raising Arizona,” who is almost certainly a charicature of what the so-called “1-percenters” embodied.

Over the years, the Hell’s Angels title has certainly been watered down. Now there are chapters in many countries and thousands upon thousands of motorcycle riders enthusiastically claim membership. But in the 1960s, the only real Hell’s Angels were located in a few urban areas in California, such as Oakland, Sacramento, and the like. Thompson drank, partied and interviewed various members of several chapters over the course of a year, eventually earning their trust and then eventually getting stomped by them.

While there is probably more fact in this book than most of his others, Thompson’s raw and entertaining prose is ever present. In one passage, he describes a the purity of some Benzadrine pills that he consumed at one Angels gathering.

When I realized that the first two were having no effect, I took several more, and then more. By dawn I had eaten twelve — which, if they’d been honest, would have caused me to gnaw down trees like a beaver. As it was, they only helped me to stay on my feet about four hours longer than I would have otherwise.

The book is a much fairer take on the Angels in an era when most news media outlet headlines treated them like subhuman, invading Huns. While none of the characters are by any means noble creatures with true purpose in the society they live in, Thompson is able to lift back some of the mystique that they apply to themselves and that law enforcement gladly shovels upon them. They are violent, they are criminal and they don’t have the best hygiene. But they don’t do it because they’re trying to be criminals. They do it because they treat the law like it only kind of exists, more as an obstacle to avoid than rules to live by. They chain-whipped people when the Angels thought they deserved it, but they weren’t wanton murderers or rapists. Most of the damage they did happened when they were just trying to party. But I’ll let Thompson sum it up best:

The Angels are prototypes. Their lack of education has not only rendered them completely useless in a highly technical economy, but it has also given them the leisure to cultivate a powerful resentment … and to translate it into a destructive cult which the mass media insists on portraying as a sort of isolated oddity, a temporary phenomenon that will shortly become extinct now that it’s been called to the attention of the police.

In any case, the California outlaw motorcycle gang culture of the 1960s can be added to the long list of things that America has given to the great memory of humanity.

Next book, Night Fisher by R. Kikuo Johnson

[This article is part of the 26 Books project that I'm doing this year.]