THE CREDITS FOR THE biker documentary Hells Angels Forever list five directors, six producers, three writers, four editors, and a crew of over sixty, which is to say that the production was long and a lot of people dropped out or were forced out. The project originated with Leon Gast, a documentarian who would go on to win an Academy Award for When We Were Kings, about the Muhammad Ali–George Foreman fight in Zaire. Gast was replaced on Hells Angels by Sandy Alexander, the president of the club’s New York chapter, who had never made a film before.
“They were talking off in a corner,” my father told me, right after it happened—I must have been eleven or twelve years old. “And then Sandy slapped him so hard it sounded like a gunshot. Leon fell down, and then he jumped up and started to run. Nobody’s seen him since.”
My father represented the club, but he was also a gentle man who rarely raised his voice, and he looked genuinely abashed by what he had seen. It wasn’t till I started to laugh that he began laughing, too, a little sheepishly. The rule in our house was that the Angels were characters; whatever they did had to be discussed with an air of wry amusement.
“The contract gave him complete creative control,” my father told me, “but I thought he understood.” Understood that things had to be done the Angels’ way. “I mean, who could be that stupid?”
“What’s going to happen to the movie?” I asked.
It turned out that Gast had left his equipment behind and the Angels were using it to carry on. “The inmates are running the asylum,” my father said, starting to look genuinely amused now, the unpleasantness of the slap forgotten. “Whatever happens will at least be interesting.”
A few years later, my parents went to a showing of an early cut of the film. I remember them getting dressed up to go out, remember that my siblings and I were left behind at home, resentful. The next morning, they described the movie to us, and I felt as if I’d missed the most important event in the world. “Your father has a scene with Herman Graber,” said my mother. Herman Graber, my father’s law partner, was always called by his full name to signal that he was a comic character, too, straight man for my father’s jokes. “Your father keeps cutting him off so he can hog the camera for himself.” We all laughed. Dad was a star.
I tried to get him to take me to one of the big block parties outside the clubhouse on East Third Street, but he wouldn’t consider it. “The Angels are absolute pussycats, except when they’re high. When they’re high you have to know how to handle them.”
“How?”
“I tell a joke.”
Instead, he took me to the clubhouse on weekend afternoons, and we stood around on the sidewalk, talking motorcycles and law with the Angels outside. Big Vinnie Girolama was usually there, his body so immense that his head looked small. There was a silver ring in his nose and a black pirate’s beard down his chest, and he was usually shirtless, his big stomach covered in gothic script, KILL OR BE KILLED, on the inside of his forearm. I stood as close to my father as possible, silent, watchful. These were the characters in our story, but in person they weren’t comic. They were something else I couldn’t quite allow myself to register.
My father would tell me to wait in the car and then he and Sandy Alexander would walk into the tenement entrance that led upstairs, past the signs saying KEEP OUT and ANYONE CAUGHT STEALING LIGHT BULBS WILL HAVE THEIR ARM BROKEN. I would go back to the car and sit for what felt like a very long time, feeling the minutes accumulate, wondering when he’d get back, then wondering if he’d ever come back, if he was gone forever. My whole body electric.
Is it okay to use the term separation anxiety at the age of seven, eight, nine? I want to put it closer to the way I experienced it: I knew deep in my bones that my father loved me, but if you told me he was never coming back, I would have believed you.
The only time I was allowed to follow them upstairs, I found myself in a room that was ordinary except for one magical detail: a big bird cage with a baby monkey sitting inside, looking highly aggrieved. While my father and Sandy conferred in low voices off by the window, I stuck my finger through the bars of the cage, until the monkey finally leaped forward and bit me. The pain of his razor-like teeth was sharp, stinging. Examining the tiny wound with its trace of blood, I became instantly certain that I’d contracted rabies: I could picture the disease traveling through my bloodstream like tiny bubbles. For weeks, I watched for signs of insanity. But I didn’t say a word to anyone.
A couple of years later—I must have been eleven—I went with my father to a rock concert on a ferry boat sailing up the Hudson, the climax of Hells Angels Forever. Two Angels lifted us aboard from the little launch that got us there, and then my father disappeared and I spent the rest of the night walking anxious circles around the ship, searching for him. My sense of panic mixed with the strange beauty of the event, the pink sunset and the darkness, the oily black shimmer of the river and the slow-moving lights of Manhattan. Men and women stood around listening to the music, wrapped in their indecipherable grown-up world. Angels danced what looked like war dances, fists in the air. I moved through it all, invisible.
When I finally found him, he explained that he had taken shelter in the pilothouse with the captain and crew against the crazed bacchanal outside. “We barricaded the door! No way we were going out in that insanity!”
There was nothing I could say after that. This was an Angels story, I realized, and the rule was that you had to laugh.
“Time to go home,” he said, taking my hand.
Jump ahead forty years. My father had been dead for a decade, and I’d forgotten all about Hells Angels Forever. I was living with my wife and children in Taiwan for the year, in an old Japanese colonial house that was succumbing to tropical rot: geckos scrambling over the ceilings, chasing each other; great rolling thunderstorms that would send ants climbing the walls in organized columns, like armies. I had terrible insomnia and would wander the house all night, so happy to be on this adventure and so deeply sad at the same time, for reasons I didn’t quite understand. It was as if the happiness was making me sadder and more frightened, lonelier, threatening to pull me in two. Standing in the dark of the living room on that particular night, listening to the clicking sound of the lizards on the ceiling, I suddenly missed my father so much that I opened my laptop and typed his name into the search bar. There was Hells Angels Forever on YouTube, and at twenty-nine minutes in, there was my father.
He is seated with Herman Graber at a conference table in their office: soft, heavy men in wide ties and long sideburns. Herman explains to the camera not to be fooled by the swastikas and Nazi regalia, that the Angels are patriots, enthusiastic supporters of the Vietnam War, what you might in fact call right-wingers. He pauses, blinks, concerned that he might have gone too far. “But not Fascists, no, nothing like that.”
My father cuts in. “Perhaps best suited to the most conservative wing of the Republican party—the Goldwater wing.”
Herman nods cautiously. My father suppresses a smile. He is forty-four, his face handsome but heavy, with big brown eyes that drift off into private thought, then return to the camera, mischievous. His expression is sweet and slightly wounded, as if he is worried that you won’t like him, that he’s said something to offend you. And then his hand straightens his tie, a gesture so familiar to me that I can almost feel that hand resting on my shoulder, very lightly, as it used to. My whole body grows warm with his presence.
At dawn, I got up and went to the window: egrets, shaggy and white, were in the pond behind the house. When the rest of the family woke up, I took them to our local Taoist temple to make an offering. It was something we hadn’t done before, though I knew how it worked: food for the deities and then ritual money for the ancestor, to be burnt in the brick stove.
“Why are we doing this?” asked my son, Jonah. I could see that he was afraid we would embarrass ourselves at the temple.
I did not tell him about the movie. “Your grandfather’s been dead ten years. He probably needs a little cash.”
My father once came home with a brown paper bag full of money. He dumped it out on the dining room table and then reached over and started counting the bills out into neat little stacks. When he was done he asked my mother to help him double-check his figures, and they started counting their way down the length of the table together. My parents were so often at odds that it looked like something deep and very beautiful was happening.
My father and I went to Saks Fifth Avenue the next day, all mirrors and marble columns. He hardly glanced as he pulled things down from the shelves, a salesman walking behind us to carry the clothes. Back then, I assumed that was how everyone dealt with money: burned through it in one single ecstatic cataclysm that left nothing behind. A few days later, I caught him writing on the outside of an envelope containing a bill: DECEASED RETURN TO SENDER.
At the Taoist temple, the other worshippers showed us how to make our offerings. We placed a plastic container of sliced pineapple on the table beside the shrine, lit incense sticks, and bowed to the deity, a delighted old man with a white beard and tall forehead. Then we bought stacks of ritual money, a sort of play money that looked better than the real thing: pink, red, yellow, and green paper, stamped with gold leaf and red ink. We took the bills over to the stove and counted them off in bunches, throwing them in and watching them blacken and curl.
I had been too resentful to say Kaddish for him after his death. It felt to me as if he were pulling one of his old disappearing acts, in which he left me waiting in the car and climbed the stairs into the Hells Angels clubhouse. But now I was trying to make it up to him, throwing bills into the stove as fast as I could. The heat from the opening was like a shove in the face, pushing me back. I held up a wad of pink and gold money; the wind from the fire snatched it from my hand, hungry.
THE ANGELS GAVE HIM his first motorcycle as a thank-you gift: not a big chopped hog but a dainty little orange Yamaha, befitting his civilian status. It was just the thing for him: he was extremely heavy, and it made him feel light and fast. In traffic, he’d shoot through the narrow gap between stopped cars, onto the sidewalk if he was in a real rush. He could get me to school in a few zigs and zags. He could park anywhere. His picture was in the Post with a little squib attached, something like “Hells Angel Lawyer Rides Around Town on Motorcycle.” But he was already studying motorcycle magazines, figuring out his next step. Soon he’d traded up to a gigantic German machine with a humped tank, the engine a slab of silver muscle. When he got on, his toes just barely touched the ground. We’d go for long rides upstate, faster and faster till the scenery blurred and my fingers hurt from gripping the little rail that ran around the back of the seat.
“It’s the best therapy there is,” my father told me.
We went on a cross-country motorcycle trip when I was sixteen, from New York to Los Angeles and back. I rode behind him, feet up on pegs above the mufflers, hands gripping a flimsy rail that looped around the rear of my seat. Long days of straight roads at tremendous speeds, the scenery an unreal streak, but through some visual quirk the pavement beneath my feet granularly precise, as if it were barely moving. At night, in a motel, my father in the other bed, snoring, I felt as if I were still flying through the darkness.
Before reaching L.A., we stopped in Las Vegas and stayed in a big fancy hotel attached to a casino. I wandered behind my father, who watched the players pulling the levers of slot machines. “Some of these people will go home wearing nothing but a barrel,” he said.
“Let’s try our luck,” I said to him.
“You always lose.” He walked on, and it became clear that he had no intention of sitting down at one of the machines. “Your grandfather had a gambling problem. Nana had to mortgage the house once.”
My grandfather had died when I was a baby and I had no memory of him, but I thought of my grandmother’s house in Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn, the tiny rooms and the little back porch with the clothesline. I don’t believe I’d ever seen her outside of that house. “So why are we here?” I asked.
“The buffet.”
In that restaurant, we moved down the length of the steam table, piling our plates. It was all-you-can-eat, so the more we consumed, the more it approached free, and that became the goal: we wanted to do damage, to get back some of what had been lost to the slot machines by the millions of gamblers who passed through town. My father ate even as we stood in line, and then he continued in silence at our table, unreachable, his personality shrunk back behind his eyes. Champagne glasses of chocolate mousse lined up in front of him like an assembly line: two swipes of his spoon, push the glass to the side, and on to the next. I tried to keep up, feeling myself filling like a helium balloon, beginning to rise in some dreamy, abstract way. I sank down in my seat. My eyes fluttered.
We spent a number of days repeating this pattern, wandering the casino and watching the foolishness, eating sickening amounts of food at virtually no cost, lying in our beds watching movies in the room, doing the dead man’s float in the indoor pool, facedown.
When we left Las Vegas, it was a relief to be moving again. And then one time, on a stretch of long straight highway, I looked over and saw him holding his hands up in the air, hovering a little above the handlebars as if he were performing a magic trick. I held my breath, trying to stay absolutely still. I could feel the delicate balance as we hurtled down the road like a missile, could feel it in my stomach.
At a gas station, I said to him, “Could you do me a favor and keep your hands on the handlebars next time?”
His face looked surprised, as if he were only now remembering what he’d done, and then I could see him thinking, putting the pieces together. “You don’t think I’d put you in any danger, do you?”
“No.” The idea was impossible. It’s not what I’d meant at all; I trusted him completely.
“Of course not,” he said, touching his hand to my cheek. “I would never put you in any danger. You know that.”
I did know that, but he kept on doing it, and we kept arguing about it afterward. “You did it again,” I’d say.
“I’m sorry, I forgot.” He looked crestfallen.
“You promised you wouldn’t.”
“My hands get tired.”
“Then we’ll stop and rest.”
“Now that I understand how much it bothers you, I won’t do it.”
But of course he did. Each time, I felt as if I were flying through the air, saw from way back inside my head how precarious, almost accidental, it was to be alive. I wanted to beat my fists on his back and scream that I hated him, that he was a menace, a liar, but I also knew that I had to stay absolutely still, that I had to use every bit of myself to transmit calm thoughts: hold on to the handlebars, the handlebars, hold on. Then, when it was over and the ride was done, and we were standing on the pavement in front of a motel or a restaurant, legs still vibrating from hours on the bike, I would feel a wave of guilt come over me. Because he had already forgotten.
YEARS BEFORE THAT, I remember going with my father to Junior’s Delicatessen one night, sitting at the counter and ordering cheesecake. We had eaten dinner somewhere else and were there just for dessert—though we’d already had dessert at that other place, too. In this kind of mood he was silent, preoccupied. The office was not doing well: a client had left him; another owed him money and wasn’t paying. While we waited, he took the tongs from one of the silver urns full of pickles, put a few on a little plate, and ate them in what must have been a single second. I remember there was a little green tomato—I didn’t like tomatoes. After that, he just reached into the urn with his hand. It was like some kind of line had been crossed. Head down, he ate mechanically, reaching in, pulling out a pickle and putting it in his mouth, reaching in again and pulling out another.
I had grown up with scenes like this, but they always made me panicky. I watched with a kind of frightened intensity.
“Hey, look at him,” the guy a couple of empty seats down from us said to the counterman, who had his back turned. “He’s eating the pickles with his fingers.”
It didn’t really help that by the time the counterman turned around, my father had finished every last pickle in the urn and was sitting quite still, a little stunned. That outraged the man even more. “I’m not eating from there,” he said, pointing to the urn.
“He’s not doing anything,” said the counterman.
“But he was.”
“Look at him, he’s not.”
My father watched them argue as if it had nothing at all to do with him, his eyes clouded.
That began a familiar cycle. His weight ballooned up from handsome to heavy, and then to very heavy, and then past that to the sort of extreme obesity where people see nothing but a fat man. The fancy clothes didn’t fit; he found old ones, and then they didn’t fit, either. He couldn’t button his shirt or his pants. He stopped wearing socks, tying his shoes, combing his hair, shaving, showering. The world began to treat us differently. When we walked into a candy store, the cash register guy’s eyes narrowed, trying to assess what form of trouble we were, whether we meant to shoplift. We got variations on that look wherever we went, on a continuum from mockery to dismissal. When we walked into an expensive steak house (because, weirdly, we changed none of our habits, as if nothing were happening to us and we looked the same), the face of the maître d’ flickered, and I knew we were in for a very long wait, with all the beautifully suited businessmen going in ahead of us.
I hated the well dressed.
There was the night he put on an enormous green windbreaker to take me to the opera. He knew most of Puccini by heart and had season tickets in the dead center of the orchestra—by which I mean we deserved to be there as much as anyone else. But he could barely get himself together to go.
“Can’t you wear something else?” my mother said to him, as he and I were getting ready to leave.
“Why?” he asked.
“It’s the opera. And that’s a windbreaker.”
“I need it because of my shirt,” he growled, and he pulled the windbreaker open in a kind of Superman gesture. Underneath was an old blue work shirt, open to his belly button because it was missing so many buttons.
“So change it,” she said.
“I don’t have anything else.” He zipped the windbreaker back up to his chin and we left for the Met. The car ride was silent. At a red light, he closed his eyes and actually dozed for a second. He wasn’t getting much sleep at night, watching TV till dawn.
“Light’s green,” I told him. His eyes opened, he stomped on the gas, and we shot forward. My anxiety seemed to have something to do with the dark and the streetlights, nothing at all to do with the shirt or the windbreaker, and once we were in our red-velvet seats I started to feel hopeful. The layer-cake theater, the chandeliers like frozen explosions in the space above our heads: this was the world I wanted to live in. Maybe the windbreaker would stay zipped and nobody would know; maybe we would be allowed to stay. But when the music started, my father began nodding off. I gave him a poke; he startled awake, but then he began to snore and I couldn’t wake him. An old man behind us, white haired and irate, reached forward and clopped him on the shoulder. “Stop that!” he hissed. “Where do you think you are?”
My father sat upright, eyes big. He didn’t turn around, simply stared straight ahead. I did the same, my heart pumping hard. The stage seemed a million miles away, the music just a form of noise.
The next afternoon, we stood outside the Hells Angels clubhouse, feeling bruised. My father’s eyes were red from lack of sleep. He was wearing the same windbreaker, but now it was open and I could see the shirt underneath, the same shirt with the missing buttons and the big stains. None of that mattered here. We felt safe among the choppers and the gigantic men in oily jeans and tattoos. In this atmosphere, we could be the normal ones, the representatives of middle-class decency. The operagoers in their finery were something else, what in the movie is called “Nixon’s America,” prejudiced and stupid.
We never talked about what happened at the opera. We talked a lot about anti-Semitism, incredibly, as if that explained why people stared at us when we walked into a store, why we had to wait so long for a table at Peter Luger. We talked about police overreach and the erosion of civil rights. We talked about the Angels, too, the incredible roar of their choppers, the scariness of their outfits. The Angels demanded respect; nobody messed with them. We were too eager to be liked; our feelings were fragile; we ached with our own vulnerability. It was a form of weakness we wanted to rid ourselves of, but we didn’t know how.
A couple of years later, we came home to our apartment and found all the stereo equipment gone. My father called a fence he knew and learned that a group of teenagers had done it; they lived in a public housing project just a short walk away. Then he called Sandy Alexander. Sandy, Vinnie, and a couple of other Angels came to the house. The plan was for them to accompany my father to the building where the kids lived. My father had already spoken to one of the parents; a time had been set up to meet and talk. That’s when I inserted myself into the proceedings. I wanted to be included. My stereo had been taken, too, I said. We couldn’t let ourselves be pushed around anymore. I had some vague idea of watching the kids grovel in fear. My father looked at me, annoyed, but said okay, I could come.
It felt all wrong from the start. The Angels were in their gear, wearing the vests with the death’s-head insignia, but they looked bored and impatient, as if this were a task and not revenge. They weren’t angry. They weren’t even scary, really. They were reasonable. It was so disappointing. Together, we went down to the street and walked to where the kids lived, in some project-y buildings a couple of blocks up Second Avenue. On the way, we passed the supermarket, the dry cleaners, the optometrist, the pet store, ordinary shops that seemed to exist in a haze of low-level boredom. We were in the wrong movie.
“We need to keep this low-key,” said Sandy, as we waited in the lobby for the elevator. The building was fairly new but already falling apart. Public housing. Bare of decoration. Dirty. I had never been any place that looked quite like it.
“Exactly,” said my father, clearly relieved that there was agreement. “They’re just a bunch of kids. They’ve got adults egging them on to do this.”
“Get the stuff back, that’s all,” said Big Vinnie. “No mess, no problems.”
The elevator was so rickety, I didn’t think we’d make it. It was a high floor, a long dirty hallway. A woman came to the door and let us in, a heavyset Hispanic woman who looked as if she had seen many trials. She took one disapproving glance at me and marched me into a back bedroom where a bunch of kids sat waiting tensely: the thieves. We nodded to each other, and I sat down in the circle. The room was a wreck; I remember glancing through the door and seeing the Angels seated at the dining room table talking like an interview committee to the woman. “They’re just kids,” said Sandy, “but there are adults who put them up to bad things.”
“Right,” said Vinnie, “they’re misguided. We know it’s not their fault.”
The woman listened stonily because she had no choice. The kids had trashed the room in which I sat, clearly: there was graffiti on the wall, a hole punched in the plasterboard. Why did their mother allow that? I was used to lots of nice things and there was nothing nice, just a pile of mattresses. The kids themselves sat around, silent, smirking, cowed.
Back out on the street, the Angels left us and walked uptown. My father and I walked home in silence together. The kids came later that day, carrying our things. But they were just things now. I didn’t want them anymore.
I WAS IN MY mid-teens when I first saw Hells Angels Forever. I remember the incredible excitement. My father appeared only twice, for all of three or four minutes, but to me he seemed to be everywhere in it, as if the movie were really about him and not the Angels, or the Angels were really about him in some magical way. There’s Sandy! There’s Vinnie! There’s a bunch of Angels shooting at bottles in a river! There’s the clubhouse. There were faces I couldn’t name, names I couldn’t place with faces. I’d heard stories about all of them, told in my father’s perpetually amused voice while sitting in one or another delicatessen at ten at night, eating a pastrami sandwich, feeling safe from the world, feeling useful and loved.
In an interview on-screen, an Angel says, “There ain’t a man alive who at one time or another hasn’t wanted to be a Hells Angel. I don’t care whether he’s a lawyer, judge, preacher, or what.”
Nowadays, I watch with more complicated emotions. The Angel who speaks those words is wearing a T-shirt that says WHITE POWER. Later, in a scene from the boat concert, an African American performer by the name of Bo Diddley sings a song called “Do Your Thing”: You got to do your thing, you got to do your thing. If it feels good, do it. I think about how he might have felt playing for a group of bikers in swastikas and white-power T-shirts, how he might have rationalized that decision. Then I think about how we rationalized our decisions, and I am equally perplexed. I was wandering the ship’s deck while Bo Diddley sang that song, looking for my father. Was he really in the pilothouse? Why didn’t he take me with him?
Meanwhile, “Do Your Thing” continues to play over a montage of Angels beating people up. The footage is from different places and times, but the violence always involves one guy wailing on somebody who offers no resistance, just waiting it out. Then the aggressor drifts off and another Angel starts punching.
Earlier in the film, Big Vinnie has a scene in which he crowds close to the camera. “If other people die, I laugh. Death amuses me. I’m bad. Ain’t nobody going to get me.” It is a moment of hubris: he died soon after, while in police custody—injuries from a beating, my father told me. I remember that we were outraged by the failure to get him medical care. I could visualize him lying comatose on the floor of his cell, dying. And yet that wasn’t the worst of it. What I did not know till I began researching this essay was that he was awaiting trial at the time for the murder of a woman thrown from the clubhouse roof one night during a party. I don’t know if my father was representing him on that case, though I assume so; he may have found it too disturbing to mention. To become characters in our story, the Angels always required some editing.
The films were finally released in 1983, but by then my father’s connections to the Angels were waning, primarily because of his own legal troubles. Nobody wants a lawyer who is in trouble with the law. Years later, while living on my own in Brooklyn, I stopped by my parents’ apartment and found my father slumped in a chair, his chin on his chest. My mother stood beside him. “Your father went to see the Hells Angels,” she said, “and they weren’t very nice to him.”
It had been years since he’d been down to the clubhouse. His law license had been suspended, and he had just gotten it back and was trying to rebuild his practice at an age when most people are thinking about retirement. The problem was that Vinnie was dead and Sandy Alexander was in prison on a long stretch for drug dealing.
“Somebody yelled at him to get the fuck out,” my mother said. My father’s head fell lower.
Sandy Alexander was at my father’s funeral. I saw him there in my parents’ living room, not at all different from when I was a boy, except he was in a jacket and tie. I hadn’t seen him in a long time. He’d been released from prison in 1994 and looked, well, surprisingly great: trim, fit, his hair still black and long, still with a goatee. He was in a black sports coat and tie, gray slacks, white shirt, very appropriate. I had only seen him in biker attire before that.
“To be a Hells Angel back then was the best thing in the world,” he said to me. “We owned the night.” His eyes were suddenly like little black disco balls, and I remember my father telling me years before that he had gone insane in prison. “We ruled the streets. I knew a woman who was a German countess,” he said, mentioning a name I didn’t know. “We’d drop acid and go to the Electric Circus and I’d wear jodhpurs and riding boots up to my knees, polished like mirrors, and I’d carry a riding crop.” He made a sharp motion with his hand, whipping the air, and laughed in a kind of malevolent, haunted-house way. “Your old man, he understood, he got it all.”
And then, just as suddenly, the princely hauteur was gone. He looked worried, at moments even frightened. He said he lived in Queens and was working as a dishwasher, he had heart trouble, he was taking all sorts of medication, there was something about his urine—he had the anxious self-absorption of the frail. He seemed broken more than anything else, and that seemed to me a perfectly natural response to life.