Hell's angels by Hunter S. Thompson

Author:Hunter S. Thompson [Thompson, Hunter S.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Motorcycle gangs
Publisher: Laffont
Published: 2000-12-15T00:00:00+00:00

Willow Cove was a natural Dunkirk. I watched the two remaining deputies; the moment they left, I was leaving too. . . their departure could only mean that things had gotten out of hand somewhere else and that the Angel campsite would be next. I didn't want to be there when the vigilantes came whooping through the trees.

But the deputies didn't leave, and just before dark Barger's patrol came back in good spirits. Dirty Ed, it seemed, had been riding peacefully beside the lake when five friendly-looking youths, on foot, had flagged him down. Always conscious of public relations, he had stopped to chat. What followed, according to one version, was an unconscionable bushwhacking:

Are you going to compete in the scrambles tomorrow, one of them asked.

Just as Ed was about to answer no, the sixth man snuck up behind him.

He knocked me clean off my bike, cringed Ed. Hit me with an eight-foot length of two-inch pipe. My head exploded. I thought I'd been hit by a locomotive!

The six young men had been drinking. The only reason I can figure for them doing it was to make a name for themselves, complains Ed. They were 'Joe Citizens,' and had been drinking for about five days. The other 'citizens' in the campground were afraid we would come back and stomp them. Some of them were so scared they started folding their tents and moving out. 'Rather Switch Than Fight,' they said.

This absurd and fraudulent account appeared in what is known in the trade as a newsstand quickie, titled The Real Story Behind the Hell's Angels and Other 'Outlaw' Motorcycle Groups. It was whipped up by the photographer who was arrested later that weekend for obstructing justice, and although it contained some excellent photos, the text was apparently put together by somebody like Whittaker Chambers.

Yet Dirty Ed now insists -- for public consumption -- that the Real Story version is pretty close to the truth, although he chuckles indulgently at lines like The six young men had been drinking. . . Rather Switch Than Fight . . . and the lunatic assertion that he somehow sensed, without ever seeing it, the exact length and width of the pipe that laid his scalp open. Twenty years on the outlaw circuit have not done much to mellow his view of the press and the world of devious squares he thinks it represents. He would no more trust a reporter than he would a cop or a judge. To him they are all the same -- the running dogs of whatever fiendish conspiracy has plagued him all these years. He knows that somewhere behind that moat, the Main Cop has scrawled his name on a blackboard in the Big Briefing Room -- with a notation beside it: Get this boy, give him no peace, he's incorrigible, like an egg-sucking dog.

Dirty Ed has been a motorcycle outlaw for all of his adult life. He works as a bike or auto mechanic around the East Bay cities, but he is not professionally ambitious.

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