Would you rather be slaving away at a boring ass 9 to 5 job or unburdened by the shackles of society and causing mayhem up and down Highway 101 on a sweet-ass hog? You can be sure as shit I’d go with the latter because nothing would be more thrilling than hanging with the Hells Angels like my literary hero Hunter S. Thompson.
Coincidentally, like in Thompson’s eponymous book I too was mercilessly stomped by members of their Oakland chapter.
The scene was uncanny! I flew out to the Bay Area to visit a friend and on our way to Tahoe, we stopped at a rural dive bar because I drank too much sparkling water. I knew from the gaggle of Harleys with three-foot-high handlebars in the parking lot that some real hardasses were inside and boy was I right.
I had no real reason to go up to one of them and ask what his patches meant and if he ever killed anyone, but I figured if I wasn’t going to get a book out of it, I could at least endear myself to the gang for bragging rights amongst my friends. He wasn’t keen on humoring me even after I told him I had a modified bike of my own. Not a Harley, but I feel like a Vespa Primavera with a custom luggage rack is in the chopper arena.
My time with the Angels was short, but I did learn a very important fact about the biker gang subculture: under no circumstances does a nonmember sit on one of their bikes even for like five seconds because you need a new Hinge profile pic. This was apparently my first and last mistake because I was barely on the ground when my face was greeted by several boots. After that, it was all blunt force trauma and slurs.
In hindsight, it would’ve been prudent to take a page out of the gonzo legend’s playbook and have a Luger on hand for such an occasion. Alas, the emergency whistle my mom packed for me didn’t prove as useful in the moments before I lost half my teeth.
Now that the doctors have removed the breathing tubes and the swelling around my eyes has improved, I think the only comparison I want between myself and a legendary journalist is that one day I’ll be bizarre and unruly on a talk show.