Hell's Angels: A Strange and Terrible Saga

Compelling story about how a class of individuals cope with the conflicting demands of masculinity, the psychological impacts of some combination of anomie and trauma, and the cruel and judgmental eyes of society.

Reminds me of my childhood growing up in poverty and surrounded by drug addicts in a way few other books have. Thompson really lived with these folks and so came to understand, as I believe I have, their relationship to society, their callousness and their desperation, their violence and their helplessness.

It’s a remarkable book told by a patient man. And yet he is a flawed man in many ways. He does not relate to people so much as observe them. And observe them with a callousness that at once permits insight but deprives him of anything recognizable as humanity. And I think that’s why he fit in with the Hells Angels in the first place. What are the angels but a collection of outcasts who hurt too much to really connect with another human being. And what is Thompson but a drug addled outcast whose tendency to hold the world apart with a sort of arms length skepticism inhibits his ability to really connect with another human being. I suspect the Angels saw in Thompson someone who was not too dissimilar from themselves. Whose flaws were so pronounced that they knew at once he was also not welcome in polite company.

The most insightful chapters of the book focus on two subjects: (1) how the angels see themselves and (2) how the angels relate to the student movement of the sixties.

On the first count, Thompson is remarkable for not relying on any tropes but rather investigating how the Angels actually see themselves and then portraying it unflinchingly. He shows that these are out of control people, aware that the world has passed them by, desperately searching for a high that can take away the pain, whether that be from drugs or violence or some combination of the two. He demonstrates these people view themselves a losers, both in the worlds of society where they are poor outcasts shunted from any locale worth going to, and in the world of crime, where they are given poor quality drugs at inflated prices and lack the organization or sophistication to get ahead. These folks distrust the world because they think it is fucking them and in fact they are right. There is nothing for them but their ability to take heedless risks on bikes - activities that frequently get them severely injured or killed. They clump together not so much like soldiers in the mafia, to project power, but like some helpless herd of skunks, that use some combination of foul smell and lashing out to keep the world away. Thompson sees the destructive force that arises not from strength but desperation.

He also investigated the Angels relationship to the student movement in general and Ginsberg in particular. Here we have Thompson at his most idealistic. He seems to feel, deep in his bones, that there is potential for these two groups that reject social norms to coalesce. In an amazing phrase, he notes that the Angels are “rejecting the future” while the students “reject the past.” Their only true commonality that they reject the present. But what could have been? He seems to intuit that the Angels have a tendency to fetishize conservative power mongers, power mongers who would surely exterminate the Angels if only they could. History proves Thompson right. For instance, low life’s aligned themselves with the fascists only to then be summarily murdered once the fascists were in power. The observation is profound. The angels distrust any motive but the raw exercise of power because they have learned that’s what the world is. So when they see a leader who leads that way, they follow. They fail to grasp that the do not fit within such a leaders vision of society. That perhaps they would be more welcomed by the idealistic nonviolent student leaders than the staunch conservatives. Thompson seems to glimpse an alliance that might have been. But is enough of a realist to know that these particular individuals are too deeply hurt to grasp at the available olive branch.

Now the elephant in the room. The author is clearly untroubled by things like rape and not only witnesses but describes a situation in which a woman was violently raped by multiple men in a bar. He reflects that she did not seem angered but rather walked around as if in a stupor. He seems to think there’s nothing wrong with this. In this he is only saying out loud what many people in society permit to occur. Is it worse to callously write about something than to merely look the other way? Probably, but I doubt either has any impact on the degree to which these traumatizing events occur. And at least by putting into print what he saw, Thompson forces us to confront reality as it is - and for the reader with eyes wide open, he portrays trauma in a way that few others have. That he draws the wrong conclusions reveals more a failure of perspective than a failure of observation. Trauma is terrible because it breaks the human affected by it. And when Thompson obtusely notes that these women appear to allow these things to happen to them without complaint, he is showing us how trauma works. And people don’t normally do that. Because they don’t even bother to observe it. We must not look away, but must understand what he did not.

Four stars. A flawed book by a flawed man that is remarkable because only a flawed man would be able to fit in enough to get the story.