Hell's Angels

Малыш Иисус, Хромой, Слепой Боб, Пузо, Канюк, Зорро, Костлявый Зад, Чистяк, Тайни, Бродяга Терри, Френчи, Торпеда Марвин, Мать Майлз, Грязный Як Эд, Чак-Дак, Толстяк Фредди, Гнусный Фил, Жеребец Чарли-Совратитель Малолетних, Безумный Крест, Пых, Маго, Скотина и еще по крайней мере пара сотен таких же, у которых руки чешутся от безделья и которые жаждут приключений: длинные волосы развеваются по ветру, бороды и банданы – хлопают, отлетают туда же, в ушах – серьги… перчатки с обрезанными пальцами – устрашающая пародия на дамские митенки, свернутые цепи, свастики и отдраенные «харлеи», блистающие хромом… И в это же время на 101-й водители, нервничая, сворачивают с дороги, чтобы пропустить боевой отряд, пролетающий мимо, как шаровая молния, оставляющая позади лишь грязь и руины…

California has laws against „outraging the public decency,” but for some reason they
are rarely applied to the Hell’s Angels, whose very existence is a mockery of all public
decency.
„When you walk into a place where people can see you, you want to look as
repulsive and repugnant as possible,” said one. „We are complete social outcasts – outsiders
against society. And that’s the way we want to be. Anything good, we laugh at. We’re
bastards to the world and they’re bastards to us.”
„I don’t really care if people think we’re bad,” said another. „I think this is what
really keeps us going. We fight society and society fights us. It doesn’t bother me.”
There are very few Angels who won’t go far out of their way to lay a bad jolt on the
squares – preferably to the extent of unbalancing their metabolism and causing them to
shriek in their sleep for days afterward – but there is also a certain amount of humor
involved. Funny Sonny once explained the Angels’ bizarre garb as „a kind of a joke – you
know, like a giant masquerade.”
Which is true to some extent, but not everybody digs the Angels’ sense of humor…
which can range all the way from belly laughs at Jackie Gleason jokes to quiet giggling at
the sight of a man’s face being shredded with a broken beer bottle.

Some of the Hell’s Angels’ most spectacular crimes are technically misdemeanors,
such as „lewd and lascivious behavior” and „disturbing the peace.” These are routine
offenses, generally appearing on police blotters as „vag lewd.” Thousands of people are
booked every year for obscenity in public places, for fighting in bars, and racing vehicles in
populous areas. But when five hundred delegates from some apparently subhuman species
converge on a peaceful community and begin pissing in the streets, hurling beer cans at
each other and racing loud motorcycles around the village square… the shock effect on the
citizenry is more severe than a Dillinger-style machine-gun assault on the local bank –
which is, after all, insured. Few men will break down and weep at the prospect of the
Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation having to pay off a claim… but reports of a hundred
filthy thugs en route to a mountain resort can throw the whole population into armed
panic.

To see a lone Angel screaming through traffic – defying all rules, limits
and patterns – is to understand the motorcycle as an instrument of anarchy, a tool of
defiance and even a weapon. A Hell’s Angel on foot can look pretty foolish. Their sloppy
histrionics and inane conversations can be interesting for a few hours, but beyond the
initial strangeness, their everyday scene is as tedious and depressing as a costume ball for
demented children. There is something pathetic about a bunch of men gathering every
night in the same bar, taking themselves very seriously in their ratty uniforms, with
nothing to look forward to but the chance of a fight or a round of head jobs from some
drunken charwoman.
But there is nothing pathetic about the sight of an Angel on his bike. The whole –
man and machine together – is far more than the sum of its parts. His motorcycle is the one
thing in life he has absolutely mastered. It is his only valid status symbol, his equalizer, and
he pampers it the same way a busty Hollywood starlet pampers her body. Without it, he is
no better than a punk on a street corner. And he knows it. The Angels are not articulate
about many things, but they bring a lover’s inspiration to the subject of bikes. Sonny
Barger, a man not given to sentimental rambling, once defined the word „love” as „the
feelin you get when you like somethin as much as your motorcycle. Yeah, I guess you could
say that was love.”
The fact that many Angels have virtually created their bikes out of stolen, bartered
or custom-made parts only half explains the intense attachment they have for them. You’ve
got to see an outlaw straddle his hog and start jumping on the starter pedal to fully
appreciate what it means. It is like seeing a thirsty man find water. His face changes; his
whole bearing radiates confidence and authority. He sits there for a moment with the big
machine rumbling between his legs, and then he blasts off… sometimes in a cool, muted
kind of way, and sometimes with a roaring wheel-stand that rattles nearby windows – but
always with style, with elan. And by cutting out in the grand manner at the end of each
barroom night, he leaves the others with the best possible image of himself.

There are literary critics who insist that Ernest Hemingway was a tortured queer and
that Mark Twain was haunted to the end of his days by a penchant for interracial buggery.
It is a good way to stir up a tempest in the academic quarterlies, but it won’t change a word
of what either man wrote, nor alter the impact of their work on the world they were
writing about. Perhaps Manolete was a hoof fetishist, or suffered from terrible hemorrhoids
as a result of long nights in Spanish horn parlors… but he was a great matador, and it is
hard to see how any amount of Freudian theorizing can have the slightest effect on the
reality of the thing he did best.

Отключение электричества в Нью-Йорке — не первый случай, когда Ангелы Ада вышли сухими из воды, поставив в тупик силы, следящие за соблюдением приличий. Они невероятно изворотливы. Представители административных властей сравнивают их коварство с поведением бекаса, этого хитрого и коварного чудовища, которое многие видели, но не многим удавалось поймать в силки. А не удается его поймать потому, что бекас обладает способностью превращаться, в случае необходимости, в кого-нибудь другого. Единственные животные, также способные на такие проделки, — оборотни, и Ангелы Ада, у которых много общего.

Диспетчер судорожно проверяет сообщения, поступающие со всей Северной Калифорнии, но безрезультатно. Полицейские машины с воем и скрежетом носятся взад и вперед по хайвеям, обыскивая каждый бар. По нулям. Восемьдесят самых гнусных и отъявленных хулиганов штата шатаются пьяными где-то между Сакраменто и Рино, изголодавшись по изнасилованиям и грабежам. Еще один совершенно новый и абсолютно неожиданный облом для административных властей Калифорнии… просто взять и потерять целую колонну этих содомитов прямо на главном хайвее… и сколько голов, разумеется, полетит с плеч долой.