"Thompson, Hunter S - Hell's Angels v3.0" - читать интересную книгу автора (Thompson Hunter S)
We're good old stock
With a Cobble rock,
And a length of gaspipe too.
We can lick the Brooklyn Guards
If they only show their cards,
We can run like the devil
When the ground is level
For about four hundred yards.
And the girls, the little dears,
They're in love up to their ears,
When they see the style
And smell the hair oil
Of the Bowery Grenadiers.
-- From "The Bowery Grenadiers," words and music by John Allison*
* й Copyright 1957, Hollis Music, Inc., New York. Used by permission
My dealings with the Angels lasted about a year, and never really ended. I came to know some of them well and most of them well enough to relax with. But at first -- due to numerous warnнings -- I was nervous about even drinking. I met a half dozen Frisco Angels one afternoon in the bar of a sleazy dive called the DePau Hotel, located in the south industrial section of the San Francisco waterfront and on the fringe of the Hunger's Point ghetto. My contact was Frenchy* one of the smallest and shrewdest of the outlaws, who was then part owner of a transmission-repair garage called the Box Shop, across Evans Avenue from the degraded premises of the DePau. Frenchy is twenty-nine, a skilled mechanic and an ex-submariner in the Navy. He is five foot five and weighs 135 pounds, but the Angels say he is absolutely fearless and will fight anybody. His wife is a willowy, quiet young blonde whose taste runs more to folk music than to brawls and wild parties. Frenchy plays the guitar, the banjo and the tiple.
* Frenchy from Frisco, not Frenchy from Berdoo
The Box Shop is always full of cars, but not all of them belong to paying customers. Frenchy and a rotating staff of three or four other Angels run the place, working anywhere from four to twelve hours a day most of the time, but occasionally taking off for a bike trip, an extended party or a run down the coast on a sailboat.
I talked to Frenchy on the phone and met him the next day at the DePau, where he was playing pool with Okie Ray, Crazy Rock and a young Chinaman called Ping-Pong. Immediately upon entering the bar, I took off my Palm Beach sport coat, in deference to the starkly egalitarian atmosphere which the cusнtomers seemed to prefer.
When the pool game ended, Frenchy sat down at the bar, and asked what I wanted to know. We talked for more than an hour, but his style of conversation made me nervous. He would pause now and then, letting a question hang, and fix me with a sad little smile. . . an allusion to some private joke that he was sure I underнstood. The atmosphere was heavy with hostility, like smoke in an airless room, and for a while I assumed it was all focused on me -- which most of it was when I made my initial appearance, but the focus dissolved very quickly. The sense of menace remained; it is part of the atmosphere the Hell's Angels breathe. . . Their world is so rife with hostility that they don't even recognize it. They are deliberately hard on most strangers, but they get bad reactions even when they try to be friendly. I have seen them try to amuse an outsider by telling stories which they consider very funny -- but which generate fear and queasiness in a listener whose sense of humor has a different kind of filter.
Some of the outlaws understand this communications gap, but most are puzzled and insulted to hear that "normal people" conнsider them horrible. They get angry when they read about how filthy they are, but instead of shoplifting some deodorant, they strive to become even filthier. Only a few cultivate a noticeable body odor. Those with wives and steady girl friends bathe as often as most half-employed people, and make up for it by fouling their clothes more often.* This kind of exaggeration is the backbone of their style. The powerful stench they are said to exude is not so much body odor as the smell of old grease in their crusty uniforms. Every Angel recruit comes to his initiation wearing a new pair of Levis and a matching jacket with the sleeves cut off and a spotless emblem on the back. The ceremony varies from one chapter to another but the main feature is always the defiling of the initiate's new uniform. A bucket of dung and urine will be collected during the meeting, then poured on the newcomer's head in a solemn baptismal. Or he will take off his clothes and stand naked while the bucket of slop is poured over them and the others stomp it in.
* The Angels' old ladies are generally opposed to B.O. "My old man went for two months once without taking a shower," a girl from Richmond recalls. "He wanted to see what it would be like to live up to the reputation people gave us. . . I've got sinus and I can't smell that good anyhow, but it finally got so bad I sez, 'Go pull out the other mattress -- I ain't gonna sleep with you till you shower.' "
These are his "originals," to be worn every day until they rot. The Levi's are dipped in oil, then hung out to dry in the sun -- or left under the motorcycle at night to absorb the crankcase dripнpings. When they become too ragged to be functional, they are worn over other, newer Levi's. Many of the jackets are so dirty that the colors are barely visible, but they aren't discarded until they literally fall apart. The condition of the originals is a sign of status. It takes a year or two before they get ripe enough to make a man feel he has really made the grade.
Frenchy and the other Angels at the DePau wanted to know if I'd located them by following the smell. Later that night, at the weekly meeting, I noticed that several were wearing expensive wool shirts and ski jackets under their colors. When the bars closed at two, five of the outlaws came over to my apartment for an all-night drinking bout. The next day I learned that one was an infamous carrier of vermin, a walking crab farm. I went over my living room carefully for signs of body lice and other small aniнmals, but found nothing. I waited nervously for about ten days, thinking he might have dropped eggs that were still incubating, but no vermin appeared. We played a lot of Bob Dylan music that night, and for a long time afterward I thought about crabs every time I heard his voice.
That was in early spring of 1965. By the middle of summer I had become so involved in the outlaw scene that I was no longer sure whether I was doing research on the Hell's Angels or being slowly absorbed by them. I found myself spending two or three days each week in Angel bars, in their homes, and on runs and parties. In the beginning I kept them out of my own world, but after several months my friends grew accustomed to finding Hell's Angels in my apartment at any hour of the day or night. Their arrivals and departures caused periodic alarums in the neighborhood and sometimes drew crowds on the sidewalk. When word of this reached my Chinese landlord he sent emisнsaries to find out the nature of my work. One morning I had Terry the Tramp answer the doorbell to fend off a rent collection, but his act was cut short by the arrival of a prowl car sumнmoned by the woman next door. She was very polite while the Angels moved their bikes out of her driveway, but the next day she asked me whether "those boys" were my friends. I said yes, and four days later I received an eviction notice. The appearance of the rape omen was a clear and present danger to property values; the block had to be purified. It was not until much later, after I'd moved, that I realized the woman had been thoroughly frightened. She'd seen groups of Angels going in and out of my apartment now and then, but once she got a look at them and heard the terrible sound of their machines, she felt a burning in her nerves every time she heard a motorcycle. They menaced her day and night -- whirring and booming below her window -- and it never crossed her mind that the occasional blast of an outlaw chopper was any different from the high-pitched wailing of the little bikes at the dental fraternity a half block away. In the afterнnoon she would stand on her front steps, watering the sidewalk with a garden hose and glaring at every Honda that came over the hill from the nearby medical center. At times the whole street seemed alive with Hell's Angels. It was more than any taxpaying property owner should have to bear. Actually, their visits were marked by nothing more sinister than loud music, a few bikes on the sidewalk, and an occasional shot out the back window. Most of the bad action came on nights when there was no Angels around: one of my most respectable visitors, an advertising exнecutive from New York, became hungry after a long night of drink and stole a ham from the refrigerator in a nearby apartнment; another guest set my mattress afire with a flare and we had to throw it out the back window; another ran wild on the street with a high-powered Falcon air horn normally carried on boats for use as a distress signal; people cursed him from at least twenty windows and he narrowly escaped injury when a man in pajamas rushed out of a doorway and swung at him with a long white club.
On another night a local attorney drove his car across the sidewalk and over the ledge of my entranceway, where he leaned on his horn and tried to knock down the door with his bumper. A visiting poet hurled a garbage can under the wheels of a passing bus, causing a noise like a bad accident. My upstairs neighbor said it sounded like a Volkswagen being crushed. "It jolted me right out of bed," he said. "But when I looked out the window all I could see was the bus. I thought the car must have hit it head on and gone underneath. There was an awful dragging sound. I thought people were mashed down there in the wreckage."
One of the worst incidents of that era caused no complaints at all: this was a sort of good-natured firepower demonstration, which occurred one Sunday morning about three-thirty. For reaнsons that were never made clear, I blew out my back windows with five blasts of a 12-gauge shotgun, followed moments later by six rounds from a .44 Magnum. It was a prolonged outburst of heavy firing, drunken laughter and crashing glass. Yet the neighbors reacted with total silence. For a while I assumed that some freakish wind pocket had absorbed all the noise and carried it out to sea, but after my eviction I learned otherwise. Every one of the shots had been duly recorded on the gossip log. Another tenant in the building told me the landlord was convinced, by all the tales he'd heard, that the interior of my apartment was reduced to rubble by orgies, brawls, fire and wanton shooting. He had even heard stories about motorcycles being driven in and out the front door.
No arrests resulted from these incidents, but according to neighborhood rumor they were all linked to the Hell's Angels, operating out of my apartment. Probably this is why the police were so rarely summoned; nobody wanted to be croaked by an Angel revenge party.
Shortly before I moved out, a clutch of the landlord's Mandarin-speaking relatives came to inspect the place, apparently for the purpose of compiling a bill of damages. They seemed puzzled, but hugely relieved, to find no grave destruction. There were no signs of a Hell's Angel's presence, and the only motorcycle in sight was on the sidewalk. When they left they stopped to look at it, chattering rapidly in their own tongue. I was a little worried that they might be talking about seizing my bike in lieu of back rent, but the one member of the group who spoke English assured me that they were admiring its "elegance."
The landlord himself had only a dim understanding of the Hell's Angels' threat to his property. All complaints had to be translated into Chinese, and I suspect he found them inscrutable. With a personal frame of reference unfazed by the English-speaking mass media, he could have no way of knowing why my neighbors were so agitated. The people he sent to hustle me when the rent was overdue were similarly blank on the subject of outlaw motorcyclists. They were terrified of my Doberman pup, but they didn't blink an eye that morning when they rang the doorbell and came face to face with Terry the Tramp.
He had been up all night and was groggy from pills and wine. It was a cold wet day, and on the way to my place he had stopped at a Salvation Army store and bought the shaggy remains of a fur coat for thirty-nine cents. It looked like someнthing Marlene Dietrich might have worn in the twenties. The ragged hem flapped around his knees, and the sleeves were like trunks of matted hair growing out of the armholes of his Hell's Angels vest. With the coat wrapped around him, he appeared to weigh about three hundred pounds. . . something primitive and demented, wearing boots, a beard, and round black glasses like a blind man.
Letting him answer the doorbell seemed like a final solution to the rent problem. As he stomped down the hallway we opened a new round of beers and waited to hear the terrified cries and the sound of running feet. But all we heard was a quick mumbled conversation, and seconds later Terry was back in the living room. "Hell, they never even flinched," he said. "To them I'm just another American. The two old ladies just grinned at me, and the little guy that spoke English was so polite I got shook up. I said you were gone and I didn't know when you'd be back, but they said they'd wait."
He'd been back in the room about thirty seconds when we heard a commotion in the street. The police had come for the bikes, and Terry hurried outside. The ensuing debate drew a crowd of about two dozen, but the Chinese paid no attention. They had come to talk about money, and they were not about to be lured off the scent by a senseless squabble between cops and something that looked like it had burrowed straight through the earth from Mongolia.
Most people who stopped to watch the argument had recogнnized the emblem on Terry's back, so they were able to view the scene from many different levels of involvement -- although the only real question was whether Terry and Mouldy Marvin (who stayed inside) would be fined $15 each for blocking a driveway, or the law might opt for mercy and allow the bikes to be moved ten feet up the hill to a legal parking space.
The cops were obviously enjoying the whole thing. A rouнtine parking complaint had led to a dramatic confrontation (before a good crowd) with one of the most notorious of the Hell's Angels. The worst they could do was write two citations totaling $30, but it required twenty minutes to make the fateful decision. Finally, the cop who'd grabbed the initiative in the first moments of the drama brought it all to an end by abruptly pocketing his citation book and turning his back on Terry with a sigh of weary contempt. "All right, all right," he snapped. "Just get the goddamn things out of the way, will ya? Christ, I should have em both towed in, but. . ." The cop was young, but he had a fine stage presence. It was like watching Bing Crosby shame the Amboy Dukes by refusing to press charges against one of their warlords accused of spitting on the bells of St. Mary's.
4
They're the Wild Bill Hickoks, the Billy the Kids -- they're the last American heroes we have, man.
| © 2025 Библиотека RealLib.org (support [a t] reallib.org) |