(lb)

That was Nixon's style – and if you forgot, he would kill you as a lesson to the others. Badgers don't fight fair, bubba. That's why God made dachshunds.

Nixon was a navy man, and he should have been buried at sea. Many of his friends were seagoing people: Bebe Rebozo, Robert Vesco, William F. Buckley Jr., and some of them wanted a full naval burial.

These come in at least two styles, however, and Nixon's immediate family strongly opposed both of them. In the traditionalist style, the dead president's body would be wrapped and sewn loosely in canvas sailcloth and dumped off the stern of a frigate at least 100 miles off the coast and at least 1,000 miles south of San Diego, so the corpse could never wash up on American soil in any recognizable form.

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The family opted for cremation until they were advised of the potentially onerous implications of a strictly private, unwitnessed burning of the body of the man who was, after all, the President of the United States. Awkward questions might be raised, dark allusions to Hitler and Rasputin. People would be filing lawsuits to get their hands on the dental charts. Long court battles would be inevitable – some with liberal cranks bitching about corpus delicti and habeas corpus and others with giant insurance companies trying not to pay off on his death benefits. Either way, an orgy of greed and duplicity was sure to follow any public hint that Nixon might have somehow faked his own death or been cryogenically transferred to fascist Chinese interests on the Central Asian Mainland.

It would also play into the hands of those millions of self-stigmatized patriots like me who believe these things already.

The family opted for cremation until they were advised of the potentially onerous implications of a strictly private, unwitnessed burning of the body of the man who was, after all, the President of the United States. Awkward questions might be raised, dark allusions to Hitler and Rasputin. People would be filing lawsuits to get their hands on the dental charts. Long court battles would be inevitable – some with liberal cranks bitching about corpus delicti and habeas corpus and others with giant insurance companies trying not to pay off on his death benefits. Either way, an orgy of greed and duplicity was sure to follow any public hint that Nixon might have somehow faked his own death or been cryogenically transferred to fascist Chinese interests on the Central Asian Mainland.

It would also play into the hands of those millions of self-stigmatized patriots like me who believe these things already.

If the right people had been in charge of Nixon's funeral, his casket would have been launched into one of those open-sewage canals that empty into the ocean just south of Los Angeles. He was a swine of a man and a jabbering dupe of a president. Nixon was so crooked that he needed servants to help him screw his pants on every morning. Even his funeral was illegal. He was queer in the deepest way. His body should have been burned in a trash bin.

These are harsh words for a man only recently canonized by President Clinton and my old friend George McGovern – but I have written worse things about Nixon, many times, and the record will show that I kicked him repeatedly long before he went down. I beat him like a mad dog with mange every time I got a chance, and I am proud of it. He was scum.

Let there be no mistake in the history books about that. Richard Nixon was an evil man evil in a way that only those who believe in the physical reality of the Devil can understand it. He was utterly without ethics or morals or any bedrock sense of decency. Nobody trusted him except maybe the Stalinist Chinese, and honest historians will remember him mainly as a rat who kept scrambling to get back on the ship.

It is fitting that Richard Nixon's final gesture to the American people was a clearly illegal series of 21 105-mm howitzer blasts that shattered the peace of a residential neighborhood and permanently disturbed many children. Neighbors also complained about another unsanctioned burial in the yard at the old Nixon place, which was brazenly illegal. "It makes the whole neighborhood like a graveyard," said one. "And it fucks up my children's sense of values."

Many were incensed about the howitzers but they knew there was nothing they could do about it not with the current president sitting about 50 yards away and laughing at the roar of the cannons. It was Nixon's last war, and he won.

The funeral was a dreary affair, finely staged for TV and shrewdly dominated by ambitious politicians and revisionist historians. The Rev. Billy Graham, still agile and eloquent at the age of 136, was billed as the main speaker, but he was quickly upstaged by two 1996 GOP presidential candidates: Sen. Bob Dole of Kansas and Gov. Pete Wilson of California, who formally hosted the event and saw his poll numbers crippled when he got blown off the stage by Dole, who somehow seized the No. 3 slot on the roster and uttered such a shameless, self-serving eulogy that even he burst into tears at the end of it.

Dole's stock went up like a rocket and cast him as the early GOP front-runner for '96. Wilson, speaking next, sounded like an Engelbert Humperdinck impersonator and probably won't even be re-elected as governor of California in November.

The historians were strongly represented by the No. 2 speaker, Henry Kissinger, Nixon's secretary of state and himself a zealous revisionist with many axes to grind. He set the tone for the day with a maudlin and spectacularly self-serving portrait of Nixon as even more saintly than his mother and as a president of many godlike accomplishments – most of them put together in secret by Kissinger, who came to California as part of a huge publicity tour for his new book on diplomacy, genius, Stalin, H. P. Lovecraft and other great minds of our time, including himself and Richard Nixon.

Kissinger was only one of the many historians who suddenly came to see Nixon as more than the sum of his many squalid parts. He seemed to be saying that History will not have to absolve Nixon, because he has already done it himself in a massive act of will and crazed arrogance that already ranks him supreme, along with other Nietzschean supermen like Hitler, Jesus, Bismarck and the Emperor Hirohito. These revisionists have catapulted Nixon to the status of an American Caesar, claiming that when the definitive history of the 20th century is written, no other president will come close to Nixon in stature. "He will dwarf FDR and Truman," according to one scholar from Duke University.

Gonzo Papers, Vol. 2: Generation of Swine: Tales of Shame and Degradation in the '80s is a book by the American writer and journalist Hunter S. Thompson, originally published in 1988. The book contains 100 of Thompson's columns that appeared from September 1985 to November 1988 in the San Francisco Examiner, which discuss the politics and culture of the 1980s, with significant coverage of the Iran-Contra Affair, and Gary Hart's run for president.

He predicts that the Democrats will self-destruct in the 1988 presidential campaign. He also makes bets about the Democratic Party candidates odds of winning their elections. People he dislikes are described as "money-sucking animals," "brainless freaks," "geeks," "greed-crazed lunatics" and so on. Thompson also quotes from the Bible's Book of Revelation in many instances.

It is the second volume of the four-volume The Gonzo Papers series. Besides the first six columns (which front-load the collection by setting up the overtly political aspect of the book's main topics), the columns are presented in chronological order.

One oft-quoted, and misquoted,[1] passage from Volume 2 is about the television broadcasting business, specifically television journalism:

The TV business is uglier than most things. It is normally perceived as some kind of cruel and shallow money trench through the heart of the journalism industry, a long plastic hallway where thieves and pimps run free and good men die like dogs, for no good reason.[2]

In any gathering of Hell's Angels, from five to a

possible hundred and fifty, there is no doubt who is running

the show: Ralph Sonny Barger, the Maximum Leader, a six-

foot, 170-pound warehouseman from East Oakland, the

coolest head in the lot, and a tough, quick-thinking dealer

when any action starts. By turns he is a fanatic, a

philosopher, a brawler, a shrewd compromiser and a final

arbitrator. To the Oakland Angels he is Ralph. Everybody

else calls him Sonny. . . although when the party gets wild

and loose he answers to names such as Prez, Papa and

Daddy. Barger's word goes unquestioned, although many

of the others could take him in two minutes if it ever came

to a fight. But it never does. He rarely raises his voice –

except in a rumble with outsiders. Any dissenters in the

ranks are handled quietly at the regular Friday-night

meetings, or they simply fade out of the picture and change

their life pattern so as never again to cross paths with any

group of Angels.

If the gathering at Tommy's was a little disorganized,

it was because Sonny was serving time in the Santa Rita

Rehabilitation Center, for possession of marijuana. With

Sonny in jail, the others were keeping the action to a

minimum – even though Tommy, in his quiet, disaffiliated

sort of way, was running the show pretty well. At twenty-six

he was a year younger than Barger: blond, clean-shaven,

with a wife and two children, making $180 a week as a

construction worker. He knew he was only filling in for the

Prez, but he also knew that the Oakland Angels had to

make a tough, full-strength appearance at the Labor Day

Run. Anything less would forfeit the spiritual leadership

back to southern California, to the San Bernardino (or

Berdoo) chapter the founding fathers, as it were who

started the whole thing in 1950 and issued all new charters

for nearly fifteen years. But mounting police pressure in the

south was causing many Angels to seek refuge in the Bay

Area. By 1965, Oakland was on its way to becoming the

capital of the Hell's Angels' world.

Prior to their ear-splitting departure, there was a lot

of talk about the Diablos and what manner of lunacy or

strange drug had caused them to commit such a sure-fatal

error as an attack on a lone Angel.* Yet this was a routine

beef, postponed and forgotten as they moved onto the

freeway for an easy two-hour run to Monterey. By noon it

was so hot that many of the riders had taken off their shirts

and opened their black vests, so the colors flapped out

behind them like capes and the on-coming traffic could

view their naked chests, for good or ill. The southbound

lanes were crowded with taxpayers heading out for a Labor

Day weekend that suddenly seemed tinged with horror as

the Angel band swept past. . . this animal crowd on big

wheels, going somewhere public, all noise and hair and

bust-out raping instincts. . . the temptation for many a

motorist was to swing hard left, with no warning, and crush

these arrogant scorpions.

• Within a month the Diablos had disbanded –

terrorized by a series of stompings, beatings and chain-

whippings; the Angels hunted them down one by one and

did them in. Things like that don't happen very often, Terry

explained later. Other clubs don't usually mess with us,

because when they do, that's the end of them.

At San Jose, an hour south of Oakland, the

formation was stopped by two state Highway Patrolmen,

causing a traffic jam for forty-five minutes at the junction of

17 and 101. Some people stopped their cars entirely, just

to watch. Others slowed to ten or fifteen miles an hour. As

traffic piled up, there were vapor locks, boil-overs and

minor collisions.

"The mayor appeared to be drunk when the others got off the plane

in Denver, so nobody paid much attention as he vomited once again and

fell over against the greasy plastic window. "

Ihat is from my notes on the night of Monday, Oct. 7. Which was

almost as bad as nights get. It was one of the worst and most hu-

mihating episodes in the history of commercial aviation, a nightmare

of failure and treachery that began as a routine 40-minute night flight

from Denver to Aspen on a jam-packed plane carrying 44 unwary pas-

sengers across the Continental Divide in weather that was rumored to

be menacing—a freakish early snowstorm was coming in from Mon-

tana, they said—but whoever was watching the weather for the airline

that night had apparently sized up the menace and found it to be ac-

ceptable.

We left at 6:51 p.m., just as the Monday Night Football game between

Washington and St. Louis was about to get under way. I had bet heavily

on the game, taking the Redskins and two points, at home, against the

Cardinals, who were 3-1 at the time and looking uppity. The Redskins

were 1-3 and playing like winos. There were rumors of dissension in

Washington: Quarterback Joe Theismann was said to be in the viscous

grip of Cathy Lee Crosby, and all-pro running back John Riggins was

allegedly suffering from the same drinking problem that caused him to

sleep on the floor during a black-tie George Bush speech last January

in Washington.

It was a sporting proposition, and I was not the only one on the plane

who was eager to get home and watch the game on TV. The flight was

due in at 7:30, which meant I could sprint off the plane to the ancient

red Jeep I had left in the airport parking lot a few days earUer, and

catch the last three quarters in the squalid comfort of the downvalley

tavern where I normally watch these things.

Howard Cosell is gone now, but so what? I am a gambler, and if the

games were called by Judge Crater, it would make no difference to me,

as long as I have a clear view of the action and know the score at all

times. Never mind the announcers. Somebody has to do it, and the best

we can hope for is one who won't get in the way.

That was Howard. He has no more business in the ABC press box

for Monday Night Football than I do. When you take the game seriously

They wrote tickets for everybody they could, said

Terry. Things like seats too low, bars too high, no mirror, no

hand hold for the passenger – and like always they

checked us for old warrants, citations we never paid and

every other goddamn thing they could think of. But the traffic

was really piling up, with people staring at us and all, and

finally, by God, a Highway Patrol captain showed up and

chewed those bastards good for 'creating a hazard' or

whatever he called it. We had a big laugh, then we took off

again.

We get treated good here [in Monterey]. Most other

places we get thrown out of town.

– Frenchy from Berdoo talking to a reporter not

many hours before the Angels were thrown out of town

Between San Jose and the turnoff to Monterey, 101

rolls gracefully through the rich farming foothills of the Santa

Cruz Mountains. The Hell's Angels, riding two abreast in

each lane, seemed out of place in little towns like Coyote

and Gilroy. People ran out of taverns and dry-goods stores

to stare at these fabled big-city Huns. Local cops waited

nervously at intersections, hoping the Angels would pass

quietly and not cause trouble. It was almost as if some far-

ranging band of Viet Cong guerrillas had appeared, trotting

fast in a tight formation down the middle of Main Street,

bound for some bloody rendezvous that nobody in town

even cared to know about as long as the dirty buggers kept

moving.

The Angels try to avoid trouble on the road. Even a

minor arrest in a country town at the start of the holiday

weekend can mean three days in jail, missing the party,

and a maximum fine when they finally come to court. They

know, too, that in addition to the original charge – usually a

traffic violation or disorderly conduct – they will probably be

accused of resisting arrest, which can mean thirty days, a

jail haircut and another fine of $150 or so. Now, after many

a painful lesson, they approach small towns the same way

a traveling salesman from Chicago approaches a known

speed trap in Alabama. The idea, after all, is to reach the

destination – not to lock horns with hayseed cops along the

way.

The destination this time was a big tavern called

Nick's, a noisy place on a main drag called Del Monte, near

Cannery Row in downtown Monterey. We went right through

the middle of town, recalls Terry, through the traffic and

everything. Most of the guys knew Nick's, but not me

because I was in jail the other time. We didn't make it till

about three because we had to wait in a gas station on 101

for some of the guys running late. By the time we got there I

guess we had about forty or fifty bikes. Berdoo was already

in with about seventy-five, and people kept coming all night.

By the next morning there were about three hundred from all

over.

The stated purpose of the gathering was the

collection of funds to send the body of a former Angel back

to his mother in North Carolina. Kenneth Country Beamer,

vice-president of the San Bernardino chapter, had been

snuffed by a truck a few days earlier in a desert hamlet

called Jacumba, near San Diego. Country had died in the

best outlaw tradition: homeless, stone broke, and owning

nothing in this world but the clothes on his back and a big

bright Harley. As the others saw it, the least they could do

was send his remains back to the Carolinas, to whatever

was send his remains back to the Carolinas, to whatever

family or memory of a home might be there. It was the thing

to do, Terry said.

you want information, not gibberish, and the smooth gray call of a

professional football creature like Frank Gifford.

John Madden can make a dull game vaguely interesting, in the same

way he can no doubt spice up a long trip on Amtrak, as he rides the

rails from town to town like some kind of Wandering Jew witn a gold-

plated potbelly and a stolen Xerox copy of his old Raiders piaybook.

But Madden is not objective, Hke me. In his heart he is still in Oak-

land, lurking around the old practice field in the marshes of Alameda

with' the ghosts of other bedrock outlaws like Freddy Biletnikoff and

Ted Hendricks and even a past wide receiver, who was arrested almost

constantly during every season for extremely savage crimes. Rape was

the least of them, as I recall, and it was not a one-time thing. The wide

receiver had a real taste for crime, and he indulged it with an erratic

kind of vigor that made him an albatross for Madden and a natural soul-

mate for my old friend, Al Davis, who remains the ultimate Raider.

They were serious people, and John Madden was definitely one of

them, for good or ill. Living with the Oakland Raiders in those days

was not much different than living with the Hell's Angels.

I was brooding on these things when the pilot came on the squawk-box

and said we were turning back to Denver, because of either ice on the

runway or failure of the plane's de-icing equipment, or maybe fog in

the valley. The real reason was never made clear.

The mayor, meanwhile, had denounced me in public for daring to

smoke a Dunhill on the plane, and the pig-eyed stewardess was threat-

ening to have me "met," as they say, by an armed FAA inspector when

the plane touched down in Aspen … or Montrose … or maybe even

Parker, Arizona.

Madden was right about airplanes. We are all hostages once the wheels

are up … and I was trying to explain this to the mayor, who was

threatening me with jail if I smoked another cigarette. It was against

the law, he said, but I knew he was lying. . . .

By this time we had botched our second aborted landing at the Aspen

airport and we had been wallowing around in the sky for two hours.

The long tin cabin smelled of fear and confusion and vomit. The stew-

ardess had taken the names of at least six people who had tried to get

back to the lavatory in the rear, but were harshly turned away because

the "seat-belt" sign was on. The woman defended her turf hke a wol-

verine. No smoking, no drinking, no moving about the cabin. …

The recent demise of a buddy lent the '64 affair a

tone of solemnity that not even the police could scoff at. It

was the sort of gesture that cops find irresistible: final

honors for a fallen comrade, with a collection for the mother

and a bit of the uniformed pageantry to make the show real.

In deference to all this, the Monterey police had let it be

known that they would receive the Angels in a spirit of

armed truce.

It was the first time in years that the outlaws had

been faced with even a semblance of civic hospitality – and

it turned out to be the last, for when the sun came up on that

bright Pacific Saturday the infamous Monterey rape was

less than twenty-four hours away from making nationwide

headlines. The Hell's Angels would soon be known and

feared throughout the land. Their blood, booze and semen-

flecked image would be familiar to readers of The New

York Times, Newsweek, The Nation, Time, True, Esquire

and the Saturday Evening Post. Within six months small

towns from coast to coast would be arming themselves at

the slightest rumor of a Hell's Angels invasion. All three

major television networks would be seeking them out with

cameras and they would be denounced in the U.S. Senate

by George Murphy, the former tap dancer. Weird as it

seems, as this gang of costumed hoodlums converged on

Monterey that morning they were on the verge of making it

big, as the showbiz people say, and they would owe most

of their success to a curious rape mania that rides on the

shoulder of American journalism like some jeering,

masturbating raven. Nothing grabs an editor's eye like a

good rape. We really blew their minds this time, as one of

the Angels explained it. According to the newspapers, at

least twenty of these dirty hopheads snatched two teen-age

girls, aged fourteen and fifteen, away from their terrified

dates, and carried them off to the sand dunes to be

repeatedly assaulted.

REPEATEDLY. . . ASSAULTED

AGED 14 AND 15. . .

STINKING, HAIRYTHUGS

A deputy sheriff summoned by one of the erstwhile

dates said he arrived at the beach and saw a huge bonfire

surrounded by cyclists of both sexes. Then the two sobbing,

near-hysterical girls staggered out of the darkness,

begging for help. One was completely nude and the other

had on only a torn sweater.

Here, sweet Jesus, was an image flat guaranteed to

boil the public blood and foam the brain of every man with

female flesh for kin. Two innocent young girls, American

citizens, carried off to the dunes and ravaged like Arab

whores. One of the dates told police they tried to rescue the

girls but couldn't reach them in the mob scene that erupted

once the victims were stripped of their clothing. Out there in

the sand, in the blue moonlight, in a circle of leering

hoodlums. . . they were penetrated, again and again.

The next morning Terry the Tramp was one of four

Angels arrested for forcible rape, which carries a penalty of

one to fifty years in the penitentiary. He denied all

knowledge of the crime, as did Mother Miles, Mouldy

Marvin and Crazy Cross – but several hours later, with

bond set at a lowly $1,100 each, they were lodged in the

Monterey County Jail in Salinas. . . out there in Steinbeck

country, the hot lettuce valley, owned in the main by smart

second-generation hillbillies who got out of Appalachia

while the getting was good, and who now pay other, less-

smart hillbillies to supervise the work of Mexican braceros,

whose natural fitness for stoop labor has been explained by

the ubiquitous Senator Murphy: They're built low to the

ground, he said, so it's easier for them to stoop.

security people, or maybe the real police, coming to seize me on charges

of defrauding an innkeeper. The brainless editor had once again failed

to cover my room-service bills for the week, and the desk was getting

rude.

We had been through this before, in better days, when I was keeping

a rooftop suite at the Mark Hopkins. They whined like curs every week

when the bill came in. And then they put commercial announcements

on the radio, saying I spent all the money for buUwhips.

It was nonsense, of course, but so what? Something Hke 366,000

people heard it on the radio at least once, and when I tried to cash a

check at the concierge's desk in the lobby, she laughed and called me

a pervert. "I know about you," she snapped. "You're crazy for guns

and whips."

"Never mind that," I told her. "What I need now is cash. I'm going

out to the Avenues to buy a hotel in the Yucatan."

That was a few nights ago, before the dog woman came and "CBS

News" got my number. Strangers shoved envelopes under the door, and

death threats came on the telephone. The hotel management became

edgy with my situation.

All day long strange people had been knocking and clawing on my

door … and now I had not just the Mitchell Brothers on my hands,

along with a locked-out woman who had already called in two bomb

threats the last time she clashed with the Mitchells … but I also had

Warren Hinckle, who had just covered the final rites for one-time

Supervisor Dan White, who had just committed suicide. Hinckle's

obituary was as tough and relentless as anything written about a dead

man since H.L. Mencken wrote the notice for William Jennings

Bryan.

We were all edgy. I had been on the road for too long, constantly

doing business for reasons that were never made clear. There were bills

for expensive motorcycle parts and an Oldsmobile windshield in Bir-

mingham. (I was frustrated by travel delays, and the University of Al-

abama—where I was supposed to lecture—had sent a car for me and I

bashed in the windshield in a frenzy, and they deducted the $290 from

my fee.)

By the time I started having trouble with the hotel accountants I was

not in a mood to be reasonable. The government of Tanzania was

offering me $1,000 a day to go there and help exterminate a herd of

"killer crocodiles" that was threatening to turn the Ruvuma into a river

Indeed. And since Senator Murphy has also called

the Hell's Angels the lowest form of animals, it presumably

follows that they are better constructed for the mindless

rape of any prostrate woman they might come across as

they scurry about, from one place to another, with their

dorks carried low like water wands. Which is not far from

the truth, but for different reasons than California's ex-

lightfoot senator might have us believe.

Nobody knew, of course, as they gathered that

Saturday at Nick's, that the Angels were about to make a

publicity breakthrough, by means of rape, on the scale of

the Beatles or Bob Dylan. At dusk, with an orange sun

falling fast into the ocean just a mile or so away, the main

event of the evening was so wholly unplanned that the

principal characters or victims attracted little attention

in the noisy crowd that jammed Nick's barroom and spilled

out to the darkening street. Terry says he noticed the girls

and their dates only as part of the overall scene. The main

reason I remember them is I wondered what that white

pregnant girl was doing with a bunch of suede dudes. But I

figured it was her business, and I wasn't hurtin for pussy

anyway. I had my old lady with me – we're separated now,

but then we were doin okay and she wouldn't have none of

me hustlin anything else while she was around. Besides,

hell, when you're seein old friends you haven't seen in a

year or two, you don't have time to pay much attention to

strangers.

The only thing Terry and all the other Angels agree

on in relation to the victims' first appearance is that they

sure as hell didn't look no fourteen and fifteen, man; those

girls looked every bit of twenty. (Police later confirmed the

girls' ages, but all other information about them – including

their names – was withheld in accordance with California's

policy of denying press access to rape victims.)

I can't even say if those girls were pretty or not, Terry

went on. I just don't remember. All I can say for sure is that

we didn't have no trouble at Nick's. The cops were there,

but only to keep people away. It was the same old story as

every place else we go: traffic piling up on the street

outside, local bad-asses prowling around, young girls

looking for kicks, and a bunch of Nick's regular customers

just digging the party. The cops did right by staying around.

Everywhere we go there's some local hoods who want to

find out how tough we are. If the cops weren't there we'd

end up having to hurt somebody. Hell, nobody wants trouble

on a run. All we want to do is to have some fun and relax.

It is said, however, that the Hell's Angels have some

offbeat ideas about fun and relaxation. If they are, after all,

the lowest form of animals, not even Senator Murphy could

expect them to gather together in a drunken mass for any

such elevated pastimes as ping pong, shuffleboard and

whist. Their picnics have long been noted for certain

beastly forms of entertainment, and any young girl who

shows up at a Hell's Angels bonfire camp at two o'clock in

the morning is presumed, by the outlaws, to be in a

condition of heat. So it was only natural that the two girls

attracted more attention when they arrived at the beach

than they had earlier in the convivial bedlam at Nick's.

One aspect of the case overlooked in most

newspaper accounts had to do with elementary logistics.

How did these two young girls happen to be on a deserted

midnight beach with several hundred drunken motorcycle

thugs? Were they kidnapped from Nick's? And if so, what

were they doing there in the first place, aged fourteen and

fifteen, circulating all evening in a bar jammed wall to wall

with the state's most notorious gang of outlaws? Or were

they seized off the street somewhere – perhaps at a

stoplight – to be slung over the gas tank of a bored-out

Harley and carried off into the night, screaming hysterically,

while bystandersgaped in horror?

42 Generation of Swine

of bones and blood, but day after day I was forced by a strange chain

of circumstance to postpone my departure from San Francisco.

The pounding on my door on the day of the great expense account crisis

was not, in fact, the cops or some vicious collection agency—but a

blindly persistent geek from CBS-TV. He had a camera crew in tow,

he said, and he was ready to do the interview.

It had something to do with The Examiner and new adventures in

journaUsm, but I told him I wanted no part of it. I wanted no part of

the New York Times story, or the Newsweek story, or McNeil-Lehrer,

or all the other media pack rats who have been covering this newspaper

to the point that it is interfering with our work.

I could see the CBS man through the warped convex glass of the

peephole, and I yelled at him:

"Get away from here, you giddy little creep! Never bother the working

press. Spiro Agnew was right. You people should all be put in a cage

and poked with sharp bamboo sticks."

I called hotel security and complained that a drug dealer was hanging

around in the hallway outside my door. They took him away within

minutes, still jabbering about freedom of the press. I went back to bed

and smoked Indonesian cigarettes until the evening news came on.

Hinckle and his animal had arrived about sundown, traveling nervous

and semi-incognito in a white Mercedes sedan with the Mitchell Brothers

and a woman from Oakland who said she was looking for work, and

also that her husband wanted to stab me in the head if he ever got the

chance.

The woman from Oakland was not a stranger to me, or to anyone

else in the hotel. She had been prowling the hallways for days, spooking

the maids and scrawhng pentagrams on my door. A few months earlier

she had lent me her husband's motorcycle, and he went wild with rage

when he came home and found it was gone.

It was madness, but I felt I could handle it more or less by myself

until she turned up at the hotel that afternoon in the same car with

Hinckle and the infamous Mitchell Brothers. They sent her away for a

while, but soon she was pounding savagely on the door, a wronged

woman out of control.

We all cowered stupidly as the hammering on the door continued.

Hinckle feigned sleep and Jim Mitchell called his wife on the phone.

Police strategists, thinking to isolate the Angels, had

reserved them a campsite far out of town, on an empty

stretch of dunes between Monterey Bay and Fort Ord, an

Army basic-training center. The reasoning was sound; the

beasts were put off in a place where they could whip

themselves into any kind of orgiastic frenzy without

becoming dangerous to the citizenry – and if things got out

of hand, the recruits across the road could be bugled out of

bed and issued bayonets. The police posted a guard on

the highway, in case the Angels got restless and tried to get

back to town, but there was no way to seal the camp off

entirely, nor any provision for handling local innocents who

might be drawn to the scene out of curiosity or other, darker

reasons not mentioned in police training manuals.

The victims told police they had gone to the beach

because they wanted to look at the cyclists. They were

curious – even after several hours at Nick's, which was so

crowded that evening that most of the outlaws took to

pissing in the parking lot rather than struggle inside to the

bathroom.

Hell, those broads didn't come out there for any

singsong, said Terry. They were loaded and they wanted to

get off some leg, but it just got to be too many guys. To start

with, it was groovy for em. Then more and more guys came

piling over the dunes. . . 'yea, pussy,' you know, that kinda

thing. . . and the broads didn't want it. The suede dudes just

split; we never saw em again. I don't know for sure how it

ended. All I knew then was that they had some mamas out

there in the dunes, but me and my old lady went and

crashed pretty early. Iwas so wasted I couldn't even make it

with her.

No family newspaper saw fit to quote the Angel

version, but six months later, playing pool in a San

Francisco bar, Frenchy remembered it this way: One girl

was white and pregnant, the other was colored, and they

were with five colored studs. They hung around Nick's

about three hours on Saturday night, drinking and talking

with our riders, then they came out to the beach with us –

them and their five boyfriends. Everybody was standing

around the fire, drinking wine, and some of the guys were

talking to them hustling em, naturally and pretty soon

somebody asked the two chicks if they wanted to be turned

on – you know, did they want to smoke some pot? They

said yeah, and then they walked off with some of the guys

to the dunes. The spade went with a few guys, and then she

wanted to quit, but the pregnant one was really hot to trot;

the first four or five guys she was really draggin into her

arms, but after that she cooled off too. By this time, though,

one of their boyfriends had got scared and gone for the

cops – and that's all it was.

The next morning, said Terry, I rode in with

somebody I forget who to some drive-in on the

highway, where we got some breakfast. When we got back

to the beach they had a roadblock set up with those two

broads sittin there in the cop car, lookin at everybody. I

didn't know what was goin on, but then a cop said, 'You're

one,' and they slapped the cuffs on me. Those goddamn

girls were gigglin, righteously laughin. . . you know, 'Ha ha,

that's one of em.' So off Iwent to the bucket, for rape.

When we got to the jail I said, 'Hey, I want to be

checked. Let's see a doctor. I ain't had no intercourse in

two days.' But they wouldn't go for it. Marvin and Miles and

Crazy Cross were already there and we figured we were

deep in the shit until they told us bail was only eleven

hundred dollars. Then we knew they didn't have much of a

case.

Meanwhile, out on Marina Beach, the rest of the

Angels were being rounded up and driven north along

Highway 156 toward the county line. Laggards were

thumped on the shoulders with billy clubs and told to get

moving. Side roads were blocked by state troopers while

dozens of helmeted deputies – many from neighboring

counties – ran the outlaws through the gauntlet. Traffic was

disrupted for miles as the ragged horde moved slowly

along the road, gunning their engines and raining curses on

everything in sight. The noise was deafening and it is hard

to imagine what effect the spectacle must have had on the

dozens of out-of-state late-summer tourists who pulled over

to let the procession come through. Because of the

proximity of an Army base, they undoubtedly thought they

around and impossible to ignore. You can't get away from TV. It is

everywhere.The hogg is in the tunnel.

I was reminded of all these things, once again, when I finally limped

back home—after 15 days in the eerie confines of an airless cubicle in

a high-rise on Market Street—to find the TV business working overtime

in my front yard.

It was 9 o'clock at night, with a full moon, when we came up the

driveway in Weird John's cab from the airport, and I felt the chill of

winter. Daylight-savings time was over, the football season was half-

gone, and there was frost on all the windshields.

The Jeep and the Volvo were almost hidden in a maze of frozen

weeds, and a big blue peacock was squatting nervously on the trunk of

the Bavaria. There was no sign of the Range Rover, which meant that

Jay had probably gone off to Texas with the Nazis.

Years ago I made the decision to keep the whole place looking like

an abandoned sawmill—which has worked out well for the trapping and

disciplining of trespassers, but it is not a natural contexf for massive

high-tech machinery. . . .

So it was a serious shock to see THE DISH, a huge white saucer that

seemed suspended in midair and tilted up at the moon Uke a NASA

receptor on Mars. It was the tallest thing on the ranch, a 16-foot electric

white Birdview dish antenna, perched on a jagged, grassy knoll about

100 yards back from the main house and blocking my view of the mule

pasture.

Motorcycle tracks led back through the snow in the direction of the

cistern, then veered off sharply toward the raw mud and concrete base

of the new installation—which was in fact the full-bore all-channels 19-

satellite Earth Station that I'd ordered from the electric people, before

I went to San Francisco.

I am, after all, the media critic; and TV falls into that category, so I

thought I should have all the channels, including Spanish Reuters and

the morning news from Bermuda, which is as far across the Earth's

curvature as our commercial satellites can see.

This had been my problem, all along. I was living too far up in the

Rockies, with atavistic technology. The local cable company had refused

to even talk about running a line up Woody Creek—as a "special favor"

they said—for me or anyone else. My two closest neighbors are Don

Henley the musician and ABC sportscaster Bob Beattie … and we

were making way for a caravan of tanks, or at least

something impressive and military – and then to see an

army of hoodlums being driven along the road like a herd of

diseased sheep – ah, what a nightmare for the California

Chamber of Commerce.

At the county line on U.S. 101 a reporter from the

San Francisco Chronicle talked with Tommy, and with

another Angel, named Tiny, a six-foot-six, 240-pound

outlaw with a shoulder-length pigtail who later gained

nationwide fame for his attack on a Get Out of Vietnam

demonstration in Berkeley.

We're ordinary guys, said Tommy. Most of us work.

About half are married, I guess, and a few own their homes.

Just because we like to ride motorcycles, the cops give us

trouble everywhere we go. That rape charge is phony and it

won't stick. The whole thing was voluntary.

Shit, our bondsman will have those guys out in two

hours, said Tiny. Why can't people let us alone, anyway? All

we want to do is get together now and then and have some

fun – just like the Masons, or any other group.

But the presses were already rolling and the eight-

column headline said: HELL'S ANGELS GANG RAPE.

The Masons haven't had that kind of publicity since the

eighteenth century, when Casanova was climbing through

windows and giving the brotherhood a bad name. Perhaps

the Angels will one day follow the Freemasons into

bourgeois senility, but by then some other group will be

making outrage headlines: a Hovercraft gang, or maybe

some once-bland fraternal group tooling up even now for

whatever the future might force on them.

What is the trend in Kiwanis? There are rumors in

Oakland of a new militancy in that outfit, a radical ferment

that could drastically alter the club's image. In the drift and

flux of these times it is easy enough to foresee a Sunday

morning, ten or twenty years hence, when a group of

middle-aged men wearing dark blazers with Hell's Angels

crests on the pockets will be pacing their mortgaged living

rooms and muttering sadly at a headline saying: KIWANIS

GANG RAPE: FOUR HELD, OTHERS FLEE,

RINGLEADER SOUGHT.

And in some shocked American city a police chief will be

saying – as the Monterey chief said in 1964 of the Hell's

Angels – They will not be welcomed back, because of the

atmosphere created.

The Making of the Menace, 1965

2

The daily press is the evil principle of the modern

world, and time will only serve to disclose this fact with

greater and greater clearness. The capacity of the

newspaper for degeneration is sophistically without limit,

since it can always sink lower and lower in its choice of

readers. At last it will stir up all those dregs of humanity

which no state or government can control.

Politicians, like editors and cops, are very keen on

outrage stories, and State Senator Fred Farr of Monterey

County is no exception. He is a leading light of the Carmel-

Pebble Beach set and no friend of hoodlums anywhere,

especially gang rapists who invade his constituency. His

reaction to the Monterey headlines was quick and loud.

Farr demanded an immediate investigation of the Hell's

Angels and all others of that breed, whose lack of status

caused them to be lumped together as other disreputables.

In the cut-off world of big bikes, long runs and classy

rumbles, this new, state-sanctioned stratification made the

Hell's Angels very big. They were, after all, Number One –

like John Dillinger.

Attorney General Thomas C. Lynch, then new in his

job, moved quickly to mount an investigation of sorts. He

sent questionnaires to more than a hundred sheriffs, district

attorneys and police chiefs, asking for information on the

Hell's Angels and other disreputables. He also asked for

suggestions as to how the law might deal with them.

Six months went by before all the replies were

condensed into a fifteen-page report that read like a plot

synopsis of Mickey Spillane's worst dreams. But in the

matter of solutions it was vague. The state was going to

centralize information on these thugs, urge more vigorous

prosecution, put them all under surveillance whenever

possible, etc.

A careful reader got the impression that even if the

Angels were the monsters they seemed to be, there was

not much the cops could do – and that indeed Mr. Lynch

was well aware he'd been put, for political reasons, on a

pretty weak scent.

The report was colorful, interesting, heavily biased

and consistently alarming – just the sort of thing to make a

clanging good item for the national press. There was plenty

of mad action, senseless destruction, orgies, brawls,

perversions and a strange parade of innocent victims that,

even on paper and in careful police language, was enough

to tax the credulity of the dullest police reporter. The

demand was so heavy in newspaper and magazine circles

that the Attorney General's office had to order a second

printing. Even the Hell's Angels got a copy; one of them

stole mine. The heart of the report was a section titled

Hoodlum Activities, a brief account of outlaw activities

dating back for almost a decade. To wit:

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