LAST TIME I WENT TO SINAGOGE
ALL THE HEEBS TURNED INTO SUSHI
58 Generation of Swine
Southern states combining for Super Tuesday, you've got nine whites
in the race, and Jesse. So Jesse wins 15 primaries on Super Tuesday.
That's it. I've got nothing else to say. No more stories on the Kennedy
thing."
"So," I said, "out of nowhere comes a strong-willed Czechoslovakian
woman who is now credited by top-level Washington gossip as being
perhaps the only legitimate reason that Sen. Edward M. Kennedy of
Massachusetts has suddenly decided to drop out of the presidential race
where he is a 2-1 favorite over all the other candidates?"
"Yep," Skinner replied. "That's what they'll be saying at Duke Zie-
bert's tomorrow, when Bob Strauss and Hamilton Jordan eat lunch."
"What about you?" I asked.
"Not me. I'm going to the race track tomorrow," he said. "There are
more important things than who's going to be the next president of the
United States."
Most nights are slow in the politics business, but every once in a while
you get a fast one, a blast of wild treachery and weirdness that not even
the hard boys can handle.
It is an evil trade, on most days, and nobody smart will defend
it . . . except maybe Ronald Reagan, who seems dumber than three
mules. But he is, after all. The President. He can drop bombs on any
town in the world and have anybody who bothers him arrested.
That is not a bad gig, in this world, and it raises certain questions
about dumbness. It is hke calling Herschel Walker a fool for earning a
million dollars a year for doing nothing at all.
There is no need for the president of the United States to be smart.
He can be hovering on the grim cusp of brain death and still be the
most powerful man in the world. He can arrest the chief of the Mafia
and sell the Washington Monument to Arabs and nobody will question
his judgment.
These things happen . . . and he is, after all, our leader, a man widely
admired by the public. Year-end polls show him always to be the "best-
dressed," the most popular, and the most-desired donor to all sperm
banks. They laughed at Thomas Edison, but they whimper Hke dogs
when they come to the gate of the White House.
Frank Sinatra is said to be smart, but he was fired and cut off from
every casino in New Jersey when he tried to play blackjack by rules he
learned in Nevada.
Canceled. Get out of town by . . . We never really liked you any-
distilled the report. But the Times is neither written nor
edited by fools, and anyone who has worked on a
newspaper for more than two months knows how technical
safeguards can be built into even the wildest story, without
fear of losing reader impact. What they amount to,
basically, is the art of printing a story without taking legal
responsibility for it. The word alleged is a key to this art.
Other keys are so-and-so said (or claimed ), it was
reported and according to. In fourteen short newspaper
paragraphs, the Ti mes story contained nine of these
qualifiers. The two most crucial had to do with the
Hollywood lead and the 'alleged gang rape' last Labor Day
of two girls, 14 and 15 years old, by five to ten members of
the Hell's Angels gang on the beach at Monterey (my
italics). Nowhere in the story was it either reported or
implied that the Monterey charges had long since been
dropped – according to page one of the report being
quoted. The result was a piece of slothful, emotionally
biased journalism, a bad hack job that wouldn't have raised
an eyebrow or stirred a ripple had it appeared in most
American newspapers. . . but the Times is a heavyweight
even when it's wrong, and the effect of this article was to put
the seal of respectability on a story that was, in fact, a
hysterical, politically motivated accident.
Had Time and Newsweek never touched the story,
the New York-based mass media would have jumped on it
anyway. A social cancer had been uncovered by the
nation's leading newspaper. And then. . . one week later
way. . . . Not even Bruce Springsteen could help Frank in Atlantic City.
They chased him out like a wino. It was an ugly thing to see.
Yet even Frank Sinatra worships The President. He croons love songs
to The President's wife, and his friends take tea in the East Wing.
We live in troubled times. Bull fruits roam the streets of St. Lx)uis and
even the Secretary of State was threatened with being forced to submit
to a lie-detector test for reasons of routine security. Mike Ditka is jailed
for drunken driving in Chicago, on the day of the Bears' greatest victory
since 1942. "I'm finished in this town," Skinner said. "I'm going back
to Bangkok. The Year of the Rat never ended."
came the Time-Newsweek double-barreled blast that really
put the Angels over the top. What followed was an orgy of
publicity. The long-dormant Hell's Angels got eighteen
years' worth of exposure in six months, and it naturally went
to their heads.
Until the Monterey rape they were bush-league
hoods known only to California cops and a few thousand
cycle buffs. For whatever it was worth, they were the state's
biggest and most notorious motorcycle gang. Among
outlaws their primacy was undisputed – and nobody else
cared.
Then, as a result of the Monterey incident, they
made the front page of every daily in California, including
the Los Angeles, Sacramento and San Francisco papers –
which are scanned and clipped each day by researchers
fo r Time a nd Newsweek. Some of the stories said the
victims had been roasting weenies on the beach with their
two dates who fought like tigers to save them when an
advance party of some four thousand Hell's Angels
suddenly surrounded the campfire and said things like:
Don't worry, kid, we're just going to break the girls in for
you. (And then, according to one account: The bearded one
pressed his hairy lips to hers. She screamed and
struggled. He and another Angel picked her up and hauled
her, screaming, into the darkness. A piercing scream was
followed by a deep-throated curse. . . )
Hunter S. Thompson 59
way. . . . Not even Bruce Springsteen could help Frank in Atlantic City.
They chased him out like a wino. It was an ugly thing to see.
Yet even Frank Sinatra worships The President. He croons love songs
to The President's wife, and his friends take tea in the East Wing.
We live in troubled times. Bull fruits roam the streets of St. Lx)uis and
even the Secretary of State was threatened with being forced to submit
to a lie-detector test for reasons of routine security. Mike Ditka is jailed
for drunken driving in Chicago, on the day of the Bears' greatest victory
since 1942. "I'm finished in this town," Skinner said. "I'm going back
to Bangkok. The Year of the Rat never ended."
December 23, 1985
The Dim and Dirty Road
"Blot out his name, then, record one lost soul more,
One task more declined, one more footpath untrod. "
—Robert Browning, "The Lx)st Leader"
led Kennedy was in the news again last week, but nobody seemed to
be able to make sense of it. Even his own staff people were shocked by
his apparently sudden decision to pull out of the 1988 presidential race,
at a time when even the GOP national committee had polls showing
him as a 2-to-l favorite to finally win the Democratic nomination.
Winter book numbers, at the time, had Kennedy at 44 percent, Gary
Hart at 22 percent and Mario Cuomo at 18. . . . But nobody in the
business would have bet on those numbers; two years is a long time to
live as a front-runner in this league.
Many were cynical, saying they'd heard it all before—four times in
the last 15 years—and that probably it was just another evil Kennedy
HELL'S ANGELS RAPE TEEN-AGERS
4,000 CYCLISTS INVADE MONTEREY
Yet only two of the eighteen specific outrages cited
in the Lynch report occurred after Labor Day of 1964, and
both of these were bar brawls. So the story was just as
available to the press on the day after the Monterey rape as
it was six months later, when the Attorney General called a
press conference and handed it out in a neat white
package, one to each news hawk. Until then nobody had
shown much interest. . . or they hadn't had time, for in the
fall of 1964 the press was putting every available talent on
the national-election story. It was, after all, a real humdinger.
All manner of crucial issues were said to be hanging in the
balance, and somebody had to keep tabs on the national
pulse.
Not even Senator Goldwater seized on the Hell's
Angels issue. Crime in the streets was a winner for him;
millions of people felt threatened by gangs of punks,
roaming, on foot, through streets in the immediate vicinity of
their homes in urban slums. Democrats called this a racist
slur. . . but what would they have said if Goldwater had
warned the voters about an army of vicious, doped-up
Caucasian hoodlums numbering in the thousands. . . based
in California but with chapters proliferating all over the
nation and even the globe far faster than a man could keep
track of them. . . and so highly mobile with their awesome
machines that huge numbers of them might appear almost
anywhere, at any moment, to sack and destroy a
communit
trick. He'll be lying out there in the weeds, they said, waiting for the
right time to pounce.
Well . . . maybe so , . . but others called the move wise, then cursed
The Senator in private for pulling them through 16 years of ruinous
political agony for a flawed dream that was doomed from the start. "He
should have emigrated to Australia 10 years ago," said a professional
pol who once worked for him. "Once he put that woman in the water,
it was all over."
Which is probably true. Chappaquiddick was hard to explain—except
as a flagrant and genuinely hideous example of bad driving.
The details remain hazy, for reasons that were never made clear or
even acceptable—but in the end it was mainly a matter of a grown man
on his own turf in his own car, who couldn't drive in a straight line
across a short bridge.
That was the nut of the problem. He could soar with the condors and
crawl with the wildest of swine—but when the deal went down he was
simply a bad driver. There are people in Washington who will tell you
that Ted Kennedy would be president of the United States today, if
he'd ever learned to drive.
I have had my own problems with bad roads and wrong cars, from time
to time, and tonight it happened again.
The moon is full, and there is not a cloud in the sky. No stars are
visible because of the deep white glow of the moonlight on the snow,
which triples the ambient light and makes it possible to drive without
headlights on these back roads. . . .
Which is a good thing for mihtants, Indians and dope fiends. Not
everybody needs headlights. There are those among us who can race
through the frozen mountains like slot cars, with no lights at all, and
never even drift on a curve, or come up too fast on a bull elk.
Indeed. There is no need to mention this business of driving without
headhghts except that the lights suddenly went out on my recently rebuilt
and totally overhauled Volvo tonight, and I had to run the last five miles
to the ranch by nothing but the light of the moon.
It was one of those decisions that would probably make most people
nervous. I was driving out from town, after dinner, with some people
from Miami—and my first hint of trouble came when I sensed that the
moon was brighter than my headlights. . . .
Which is wrong, as Mr. Nixon said, and it immediately raised ques-
tions in my own mind about the true credibility of my night vision. When
Filthy Huns breeding like rats in California and spreading
east. Listen for the roar of the Harleys. You will hear it in
the distance like thunder. And then, wafting in on the
breeze, will come the scent of dried blood, semen and
human grease. . . the noise will growlouder and then they
will appear, on the west horizon, eyes bugged and
bloodshot, foam on the lips, chewing some rooty essence
smuggled in from a foreign jungle. . . they will ravish your
women, loot your liquor stores and humiliate your mayor
on a bench on the village square. . .
Now there was an issue. The mumbo jumbo about
crime in the streets was too vague. What Goldwater
needed was an up-to-date concept like crime on the
highways, motorized crime, with nobody safe from it. And
the first time the Democrats challenged him, he could have
produced photos of the dirtiest Hell's Angels and read from
newspaper accounts of the Monterey rape and other
stories: . . .they hauled her, screaming, into the darkness ; .
. .the bartender, barely conscious, crawled toward the bar
while the Angels beat a tattoo on his ribs with their feet. . .
Unfortunately, neither candidate picked up the
Monterey story, and with no other takers, it quickly slipped
from sight. From September 1964 to March of the next year
the Hell's Angels fought a quiet, unpublicized series of
skirmishes with police in both Los Angeles and the Bay
Area. The massive publicity of the Monterey rape had
made them so notorious in California that it was no longer
any fun to be part of the act. Every minute on the streets
was a calculated risk for any man wearing a Hell's Angels
jacket. The odds were worse than even – except in
Oakland* – and the penalty for getting caught was likely to
be expensive. At the peak of the heat a former Frisco
Angel told me: If I was fired from my job tomorrow and went
back to riding with the Angels, I'd lose my driver's license
within a month, be in and out of jail, go way in debt to
bondsmen and be hounded by the cops until I left the area.
At the time I pegged him as a hopeless paranoid. Then I
bought a big motorcycle and began riding around San
Francisco and the East Bay. The bike was a sleek factory-
style BSA, bearing no aesthetic resemblance to an outlaw
Harley, and my primary road garb was a tan sheepherder's
jacket, the last thing a Hell's Angel might wear. Yet within
three weeks after buying the bike, I was arrested three
times and accumulated enough points to lose my California
driver's license – which I retained on a more or less day-to-
day basis, only because of a fanatic insistence on posting
large amounts of bail money and what seemed like a
never-ending involvement with judges, bailiffs, cops and
lawyers, who kept telling me the cause was lost. Before
buying the motorcycle, I had driven cars for twelve years, in
all but four states of the nation, and been tagged for only
two running violations, both the result of speed traps – one
in Pikeville, Kentucky, and the other somewhere near
Omaha. So it was a bit of a shock to suddenly face loss of
my license for violations incurred in a period of three
weeks
your headlight beams start looking like the dim glow of some antique
Aladdin's lamp—and then even dimmer, like votive candles—it is time
to seek professional advice.
Never mind the unholy moonlight. What happens next week when
it's gone? Not even Sitting Bull could drive at top speed in total darkness.
Maybe the time has come to see an eye doctor; one of these quacks
who runs ads on TV saying to come in and take all the tests . . . $49.95,
guaranteed to correct all your blindness, make you see Hke a mountain
goat.
I was flirting with these ominous notions—too many years on dark
roads, too many scars on the retinas—when my headlights went out
altogether and the road became like the ocean, as if I were driving a
boat.
There are no street lights on the sea. We all drive by maps, or buoys
and distant markers, and nobody has any headlights. I have run up on
sandbars at night going 40 mph when I thought I was right in the middle
of the channel.
It is an ugly feeling. First there is a bad hissing sound, as the bow
runs up on the sand, and then the passengers start screaming. They are
always worried about sharks, when you run them aground at midnight.
It requires quick work on the power-tilt to get the prop out of the water
before it destroys itself on the rocks.
After that, you just sit for a while, and nobody has much to say . . .
because everybody knows what comes next. Does the radio work? Are
we doomed? Can we call the Coast Guard for a tow?
Probably not. No answer on Channel 19. Get out in the warm salt-
water, up to your knees and your neck, and drag the bugger off by
yourself.
Even a small Mako, like mine, can weigh 3,000 pounds and that is
an evil burden to be hauling around in the ocean at midnight. It will
move about two inches every six minutes, depending on the rise of the
tide. It is Hke dragging a Buick with four flat tires across a gravel parking
lot.
These things happen to people who drive at night with no lights, on
the ocean or anywhere else.
Ted Kennedy is in town this week, along with Donald Trump and Anand
Kashoggi, with his squadron of black-shirted bodyguards. People are
afraid. There is also Prince Faisal, who comes every Christmas with his
Off With Their Heads
"The only way for a reporter to look at a politician is down. "
—H.L. Mencken
/Vspen—Ted Kennedy is gone now, and all his hoary ghosts have gone
with him. He left town the day after Christmas, on the same plane with
Barbara Walters and George Hamilton—or at least that's what they
said at the airport. Another rumor had him hitting the road at midnight
with two French girls and a half-gallon of gin in a modified four-wheel-
drive Ferrari Boxer that he had borrowed from Anand Kashoggi, the
richest man in the world.
Nobody knows, for sure. He either drove to Denver or flew to Dallas
or checked into a private club on the outskirts of Salt Lake City. . . . The
Mormons are tolerant people, in some areas, and Teddy is one of their
favorites. He can do no wrong in Utah, with women or anything else.
His big brothers are worshiped like half-living gods in places like Vernal
and Provo, where whiskey is hated and the river is more mud than
water.