The Gang That Wouldn't Write Straight: Wolfe, Thompson, Didion, Capote, and the New Journalism Revolution (23 page)

A week prior to the Fourth of July weekend in 1965, Thompson asked the Angels if he could join them on their annual holiday run to Bass Lake, a camping area near Yosemite Park in the Sierra Nevadas. The Angels were wary about bringing a reporter along; the negative press about the Angels had put the cops on high alert in the area, and a large police presence was expected. Thompson’s request was granted, but he had to ride in his own car instead of on the BSA Lightning, the better to avoid getting into any legal trouble by association.

Barger told Thompson to meet the Angels at 8 A.M. on July 3 at El Adobe, from where members of the Oakland and San Francisco chapters would ride to Bass Lake. “I overslept,” Thompson wrote, “and in the rush to get moving I forgot my camera. There was no time for breakfast but I ate a peanut-butter sandwich while loading the car … sleeping bag and beer cooler in back, tape recorder in front, and under the driver’s seat an unloaded Luger. Press cards are nice things to have, but in riot situations a pistol is the best kind of safe-conduct pass.” He missed the Angels by twenty minutes; driving over the Bay Bridge, he spotted the Gypsy Jokers, a rival motorcycle club that was also headed to Bass Lake, “grouped around a gray pickup truck with a swastika painted on the side. They seemed to materialize out of the fog, and the sight was having a bad effect on traffic.”

Thompson joined up with some of the Hell’s Angels, and finally the posse headed out across the Central Valley toward Bass Lake, attracting local oglers all along the route. The situation was fraught from the start. Once they arrived at Bass Lake, the bikers discovered that a roadblock had been erected by the local police, preventing them from entering the lake area. A restraining order had been in effect against the Angels since 1963, when a group of bikers had invaded a vacant local church and walked out wearing vestments and priests’ frocks. Without a lakeside camping area, and with limited beer supplies, the Angels were touchy and not prone to conciliation. Thompson was of two minds: he was
eager to chronicle the discord, to be right in the thick of it, but careful to distinguish himself as a civilian, lest he get caught in the crossfire. “When I went on runs with them, I didn’t go dressed as an Angel,” said Thompson. “I’d wear Levi’s and boots but always a little different from theirs: a tan leather jacket instead of a black one, little things like that.”

The Angels moved to placid Willow Lake, where they could swim in their grease-stained jeans without any trouble (though at a considerable remove from the area’s tourists). Thompson had brought a cooler of beer with him, but it was all appropriated by the Angels before the end of the first day. “When we made that [Roger Corman] film
Hell’s Angels ’69
, we drank the whole crew’s beer in one day,” said Sonny Barger. “To Hunter, a case or two of beer was a big deal, but we had forty people or so.” After the Angels collected a little over $130 between them, Hunter volunteered to buy more beer for the Angels at a general store near the post office in town. Once there, however, he was accosted by a loose gang of local vigilantes bearing weapons, and the situation heated up in a hurry. Getting beaten by a mob, Hunter wrote in
Hell’s Angels
, is “like being caught in a bad surf: there is not much you can do except try to survive.” “Hunter was a real stone coward whenever things started heating up,” said Sonny Barger. “But he always wanted to be part of the action, wherever it was. When things started heating up, Hunter jumped into his trunk.”

The situation was neutralized when Sheriff Tiny Baxter redirected Thompson and a few Angels to a general store miles away from the main tourist site, where they encountered not vigilantes but looky-loo tourists. The beer finally secured, Barger and crew were temporarily mollified. Thompson, for his part, had crossed the Rubicon into the Angels’ antiestablishment camp; the strong-arm intimidation tactics they had encountered had stirred up his latent indignation, and now “I was so firmly identified with the Angels that I saw no point in trying to edge back to neutrality.” By nighttime, his car had become the locus of the party, stocked with beer and surrounded by a circle of Harleys. The Angels prided themselves on pulling all-nighters during the first evening of a run, but even a prodigious partier such as Thompson couldn’t hack it. Whenever he tried to steal sleep in his car, he would be awakened by the sound of prying hands reaching inside the window, trying to pop the trunk for another six-pack.

With a few minor exceptions, the Bass Lake run came off with little
incident. Mercifully, Thompson didn’t have to contend with any epic brawls between the Angels and their enemies. “He was trying to outdo Hemingway by living the life he was writing about,” said illustrator and frequent Thompson collaborator Ralph Steadman. “His attitude was, if you buy the ticket, you have to take the ride.”

Thompson figured he’d be on safer ground when he brought some of the Angels, including Barger and Terry the Tramp, to a Labor Day gathering at Ken Kesey’s La Honda compound. Despite Thompson’s reservations about bringing the Angels to La Honda (“I knew violent freaks when I saw them”), the Angels had in fact already spent some time there. A few months prior, Barger and a handful of fellow Angels had provoked the cops into a mad cat-and-mouse chase through the woods en route to Kesey’s place; when the bikes passed through the La Honda gates, the Pranksters closed them instantly, shutting out the heat.

Kesey, who was out on bail pending his trial for the two marijuana busts, had returned to La Honda like a man unburdened and eager to resume his position as the titular leader of the Merry Pranksters. For an ex-fugitive staring down the possibility of a long prison term, Kesey’s relationship with the Angels was a risky provocation, considering the close tabs the cops were keeping on the gang. In
Hell’s Angels
, Thompson claims to have introduced the Angels to the Pranksters; Tom Wolfe, in
The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test
, relates the same story. But a handful of the Angels had in fact known Kesey since the late 1950s, when he lived on Perry Lane.

At the 1965 Labor Day gathering, Thompson was accompanied by Sandy and his baby boy, Juan, along with a number of San Francisco Angels, including Terry the Tramp, Frenchy, and Barger. It was a surreal scene: a phalanx of San Mateo County cop cars stood watch on the edge of Kesey’s property, their headlights illuminating the cliff at the edge of the road leading to Kesey’s compound like lighthouse sentries. Undaunted, Kesey hung a fifteen-foot sign in front of the property that read
THE MERRY PRANKSTERS WELCOME THE HELL’S ANGELS.
For many of the Angels, the La Honda party was their initiation into psychoactive drugs, particularly LSD, which was still legal and always in abundant supply.

The Angels took to LSD readily, but its effects varied. “They were wandering around, counting the number of cosmos that could be seen on the head of a pin, and contemplating the philosophies of various Nazis,” said Ken Babbs. A few members, such as Terry the Tramp and
Magoo, had paranoid delusions. One night, Thompson writes in
Hell’s Angels
, Terry “was convinced that he’d died as a person and come back to life as a rooster which was going to be cooked on the bonfire just as soon as the music stopped. Toward the end of every dance he would rush over to the tape recorder, shouting ‘NO! No! Don’t let it stop!’” Despite Thompson’s claim in the book that “most of the Angels became oddly peaceful on acid,” Sonny Barger remembers a few nights in which the going got rough. “The Pranksters weren’t fighters, and so sometimes they would say things they shouldn’t say. A lot of Pranksters got beat up at times.”

Despite the occasional flare-up, the Angels consorted well with the Pranksters; Barger became friends with Ken Babbs and Carolyn Adams, aka “Mountain Girl,” Kesey’s mistress. Thompson, for his part, tended to keep his distance from the Angels at the La Honda parties, partaking in the merriment but chronicling it all on his tape recorder, including the gang rape that both Thompson and Wolfe would recount. “Hunter was an unassuming guy in those days,” said Ken Babbs. “He was just lurking around, collecting material for his book, though we really didn’t know what he was up to at the time.”

By the winter of 1965 Thompson had accumulated enough material on the Angels to begin writing the book. He now occupied a strange position in the Angels’ universe: an outsider on the inside. Thompson had become something of an unofficial publicist for the club, a go-between who fielded interview requests from reporters. Sonny Barger, who was well aware of the kind of scoop Thompson had on his hands, and that his book would be more accurate than anything previously published, was starting to demand recompense. First Barger asked for money, but when Thompson assured him that he was nearly broke, it became a keg of beer. “Hunter just didn’t understand me at all,” said Barger.

Thompson stalled on the keg; he wasn’t about to pay the Angels for their time. He stopped hanging out at El Adobe, shut himself into his apartment, and sat down at his rented IBM Selectric typewriter. It took him six months to write the first half of the book, far longer than he had anticipated; occasionally the stray Angel would drop by to drink his beer and have a look at some manuscript pages. Thompson didn’t want to step on anyone’s toes; although the book wasn’t necessarily an authorized history of the Angels, accuracy was crucial, lest he get his head stomped in. As his deadline loomed, Thompson panicked. He assumed
the contract would be canceled if the book wasn’t turned in on time. So he packed up his typewriter and a case of Wild Turkey and started driving south on the 101 freeway until he found a suitably isolated motel near the Monterey peninsula where he could work. Hunkering down, he wrote about forty thousand words in four days.

The book was completed, but there were other matters that still rankled, such as the book cover that Random House’s art department had cooked up, which Thompson ranked among “one of the worst goddamn covers of any book I had ever seen.” It would have to be reshot, but Thompson would do it right this time, with his own camera. He negotiated a deal with his publishers whereby they would pay for his traveling expenses and film if he could get the Angels to pose for a suitable photograph. It was time for another run, but unlike Bass Lake, which had transpired in the middle of Thompson’s yearlong tenure with the club, this time he was going in cold, having been out of touch with most of the Angels for almost six months. He gassed up his car and headed out to Squaw Rock near Mendocino, where the Angels were spending their Labor Day weekend.

At first things proceeded as they had at Bass Lake. The Angels conducted their usual rituals—staying up all night on the first night of the run and getting looped on beer and bennies, swimming in the lake fully clothed, pawing their mammas. Thompson kept up with them every step of the way this time, his camera around his neck and primed for the perfect cover shot. But Thompson’s comfort level turned to complacency. “I had violated my own rules about staying out all night on a run,” said Thompson. “But I had shot a lot of film that day, and I got lazy.” When Hell’s Angel Junkie George got into a dispute with his girlfriend and hit her across the face, Thompson barked that “only punks beat up girls.” Before he knew it, Junkie George had rabbit-punched him on the back of the head, and other Angels, including Frisco and Papa Ralph, piled on. “It was the ancient and honorable Angels ethic—all on one, and one on all,” said Thompson. As Thompson described it to
Playboy
magazine:

Just as Junkie George was about to apply the finishing touch—a boulder aimed straight for Thompson’s skull—Tiny the Tramp intervened. Thompson ran to his car and drove to the nearest police station, bleeding profusely like a hockey player after a vicious check, only to be told to leave because he was making a mess. He had to drive sixty miles out of town to a doctor he knew in Santa Rosa, but it turned out the doctor was vacationing in Arizona. Thompson made a beeline for the ER at the local hospital and found a number of Gypsy Jokers in the waiting room, laid out with broken bones and blood everywhere—the result of an altercation earlier in the day with a number of Hell’s Angels. Thompson, his nose completely out of whack, had no time to wait for a doctor with a backlog of bikers. So he drove to the nearest general store, bought a six-pack to anesthetize himself, and proceeded to reset his nose, “using the dome of the rearview mirror, trying to remember what my nose had looked like.”

Thompson’s editor at Random House, Jim Silberman, wasn’t at all surprised when his writer told him what happened. “I told Hunter, ‘Your method of research is to tie yourself to a railroad track when you know a train is coming to it, and see what happens,’” he said. “He wants a story in which something like that will happen. He’s looking for a provocation. He needed that ending, because he was really struggling with an ending for the book.”

Sonny Barger regarded the incident as a chance for Thompson to close out his book with a rousing and shocking climax. “He was there for a specific reason, to get beat up,” he said. “Hunter had been around long enough to know that’s what’s gonna happen if you get out of line, how far you could push it.” Thompson admitted that “at the time, I recognized it was valuable for the book,” though he denied that he was there specifically to provoke a fight. “Being stomped sort of goes with the territory, but I was pissed off when it happened.”

Hell’s Angels: A Strange and Terrible Saga
was published in February
1967. Early reviews were effusive. The book, Richard Elman wrote in the
New Republic
, “asserts a kind of Rimbaud delirium of spirit for nearly everybody to which, of course, only the rarest geniuses can come close.” The
New York Times’s
Leo Litwak praised Thompson’s sure-handed control of his material: “His language is brilliant, his eye is remarkable, and his point of view is reminiscent of Huck Finn’s.”