Facing The Hells Angels In the Nostalgic 60′s

In January of 1969, I had graduated from college in Southern California. At the time I had a job at a Shell gas station on the graveyard shift as an attendant at one of these “Open 24 Hours” service stations. This was back in the days when nobody did self-service by filling up his own gas tank. No. You merely sat in your warm or air-conditioned car, did not move a single inch, and waited to be served like a king. When a car rolled up, I would charge out into the cold night and fill up the tank or whatever those morons wanted. It was amazing how many people only wanted to buy only a dollar’s worth of gas. Gas cost as little as 24.9 – 30.9¢ per gallon in those days. So $ 1.00 bought as much gas as about $ 13.00 does today. For that dollar bill, a person would get all his windows washed all the way around, the hood would be lifted so I could check his oil level and then daintily carry the dip stick around to his window with my hand under it so that not a drop would fall on his precious car to show him all was well or to get him to buy a can of oil for an inflated price. In addition, I inspected his fan belt to see if I could rip him off on one of those, checked his battery, and filled up his windshield washer fluid with water if it was low. Lastly, I checked the air pressure in all his tires and added the correct amount of air should he be short. All this, mind you, for $ 1.00 of gas.

But wait! There is more. The oil companies back then had some kind of gimmick going on to get people to buy gas from their station instead of the one across the street. Unless you were there to see this, what I am about to tell you would not be comprehensible today. For example, there was always some kind of contest going on. Every time somebody bought gas, he would be given something to collect, like a plastic coin or something, so he could instantly win a new car, or thousands of dollars, or more likely, nothing. The likelihood of winning anything was equal to being struck by lightning three days in a row at precisely 3:01 pm while being in a bomb shelter. Yet it kept them coming back for more gas.

But there is more. Come in and buy gas, and you could also haul off bottles of Coke, a dining room drinking glass, or a precision, plastic-handled steak knife for example. Every time you pulled in, you got another glass or steak knife to add to your collection. To this day, I am still cutting steak with a set of those knives. I have had them for 40 years. They are like early Ginsu knives that can cut through a stainless steel muffler. But we are not done yet. There were stamps. Stamps were everywhere. The most common, and the kind they gave away back East, were the S&H Green Stamps. Every time you spent a dollar, you would be given 10 of those green stamps to lick and paste into a book – about 50 stamps on one side of a page both front and back. There were approximately 10 pages per book, or 1000 stamps. It took a while to collect enough to fill out a book. Everybody carried that book around in his glove compartment in hopes of getting some kind of trinket. When you loaded up that bulging book, then you could take it down to an S&H Green Stamp Store and redeem it, or multiple numbers of other books of stamps, for some kind of prize. The more books of stamps you had, the bigger and more valuable the junk. But in Southern California, they gave away Blue Chip Stamps. The Blue Chip Stamp people gave away stamps at the same rate as the S&H Green Stamp people – 10 per $ 1.00. That is, until there was a . Now a Gas War was something to behold. People prayed for and lived for Gas Wars. We couldn’t wait till the battle lines were formed on some corner where there were four gas stations who decided to start discounting gas and almost giving it away. Sometimes two or more gas stations within competing range of one another would also try to outdo each other. If a station posted a sign out on the sidewalk with a lower price than the guy across the street, people raced in. If one owner saw people flocking across the street, he would go out and drop his price a penny, and the cars would move back across the street. The gas prices would sometimes drop more than once a day. A 5¢ decrease in gas today isn’t even worth driving across the street for, but if gas was 27.9¢ a gallon and they kept lowering it and lowering it till it got to 20.9¢ per gallon, that was significant. It was a 25% drop. That would be like $ 3.25 per gallon gas going down to $ 2.44per gallon. I remember one time that I had a 1970 VW Bug that got 32 mpg and had a 10 gallon gas tank. I once filled it up for $ 2.25 and drove that thing over 300 miles before doing it again.

But we still are not done. A Gas War was made even more significant when one of the competing stations would give away 10 times the regular amount of Blue Chip stamps than was normal. 10 times! So if a guy had a 20 gallon tank in his car, he could fill the car with gas in a Gas War not for $ 5.58 but for $ 4.18. Plus, he would either get a few gallons of Coke, a fancy glass or steak knife, a coin for a new car lottery, have his oil/fan belt/battery/windshield washer checked and serviced, get his tires properly inflated, have all his windows washed, get 500 Blue Chip stamps! One could fill up half a stamp book on one tank of gas and take home all that other crap as well. People were going down to the Blue Chip Redemption Center weekly to cash in on all kinds of merchandise. There was nothing like those days.

I remember well the Fall of 1973 when all of the above came to a screeching halt in . Just one day. Not a week or a month. . There was a so-called oil crisis back then, and I recall standing in a line of cars that was at least one mile long waiting to drive into a gas station to get gas. People were in the street cursing, and fist fights would break out if someone cut in line. Now the day before this oil crisis, a gas station couldn’t get you in there fast enough so they could unload all that Coke, air, oil, glasses, fan belts, water, steak knives, stamps, battery maintenance, and the chance to win millions. But the next day here I am trying to figure out why it was taking all night for me to get gas until I finally pulled up to the gas pump late that night. Whereas a regiment of smiling, polite men dressed in matching, clean uniforms and bent on doing service like bond slaves would pour out of any gas station office, attack your car, and perform the unbelievable ritual I just described above on the previous day, on this cold night I saw – let me say this again – guy sitting alone in the gas station office in front of the big window, resting on his backside with his feet upon the desk and for every person who drove up to fill tank and bring him the money inside the office where he waited in warmth. All of a sudden, in just one day, the gas station attendant was totally unconcerned, not smiling, his attitude had dramatically changed, and he wasn’t ever going to move a single inch again. Self-serve signs went up as fast as the price of the gas. And from until this, neither he nor any other gas station attendant has pumped a drop of gas for anybody except in the state of Oregon where it is to pump your own gas. Up there, for making the poor under-employed devils of Oregon walk out to your car and put the gas in for you, the gas has a nice labor charge tacked on to it.

So one night I am sitting up late almost asleep in this Shell gas station waiting for one of the kings of California to drive in so that for $ 1.00 I can heap a pile of gifts upon him while he sits waiting for the oil-fan belt-windshield washer-tire-glass-steak knife-window washing-battery checking-tire pressure-lottery coin routine to end. It was deep into the morning when a California Highway Patrol officer came up the driveway and parked right in front of my window. The bell rang and poked me awake when he rolled over the tire hose. I jumped up and ran out to meet him. He then gave me this word of advice. He said that there had been a lot of robberies in the area lately, and he was keeping an eye out for graveyard shift attendants like myself. He said that the way it worked with these people is that they would come in, draw a gun, rob the joint, and then take the attendant for a walk outside and around to the bathroom where he would be shot and killed so that there were no witnesses. He said, “If I were you, I would carry a heavy wrench in my back pocket. If someone comes in here, draws a gun, robs you, and then wants you to take a nice leisure walk with him to the restroom, don’t do it. Withdraw that wrench and take your chances out here in the open because if you go in that bathroom, it is over.”

When he left, I thought to myself, “Oh…..okay. So that’s how it works. Well, just let some sad-sack come in here while I’m around and try to give me some crap. I’ll learn him. He’s gonna wish he had taken early retirement from a life of crime if he comes in here and starts brandishing big iron in my presence.” So I strolled to the back where an entire storehouse of Craftsman tools were neatly arranged for mechanical enterprise and hefted myself a couple of them to see which one felt like it was made for a thick skull. I waved and hatcheted them around a few times and brought them over my head like I was swinging a car battery and beating the crap out of someone who had just pulled a shotgun from out of his pants. Just to make it all sound even more authentic like the guys in the gas station, with each chop of a crowbar to someone’s head, I practiced intoning a few words I had heard from some of the scholars there at the garage whose vocabulary had been taught to them by the thugs down at the Reform school. I found a crescent wrench that felt just about right and jammed it in my right rear pocket. For several nights, I rehearsed seizing it deftly and withdrawing it authoritatively while swinging it with all my might so that I could stamp the word “Craftsman” right off the head of the tool and permanently onto somebody’s face and skull. It was going to be a sorry day for the sucker who came in there and thought I was going to nonchalantly promenade to the restroom or intended to borrow any of the boss’s tools without my authorization.

Speaking of the boss’s tools, here is the place to bring out another salient point that will become important later. The boss of the Shell station was very anal about his armory of tools. He told me when I was first hired that late at night there would be a parade of people driving around California who would come into the station with the intention of playing , that is, adding some of the boss’s tools to their own personal collections. They would drive in late, said he, and want to borrow a tool to fix something on their cars. They would want a screw driver or a wrench or a socket or a hammer or something. And they would pretend to start in on repairs right there. But all the while they were watching me, said he, and waiting for me to get distracted with another car and that whole oil-gas-window-fan belt-tire-steak knife-battery-contest-glass-Coke-Blue Chip Stamp routine. At the opportune moment, they would leap into their car drive off down the street and conveniently forget to give back the boss’s tool after having placed it in their Midnight Tool Bag. This was an old trick, and the boss had been relieved of many costly tools over the years. So he got up in my face and sternly breathed down my neck while warning me upon pain of dismissal, “Don’t you let touch them tools. . .” The boss only had a mechanical aptitude, not an academic one. So I made a mental note of that and swore to it. was going to the boss’s tools. Not ever. Over my dead body would the boss’s tools be used by anyone other than myself while I was enshrined to be his steward. There would be hell to pay for anyone who tried that trick on me.

So a few days passed, and I was keeping a wary and waking eye out for both murdering thieves and tool-takers lest I be overtaken in a dead sleep. But the nights were long and I was not used to staying fully aware till the crack of dawn. So usually about 2-3 am I was approaching the Twilight Zone. Hence, one morning I was sitting upright in the office chair peering out into the night with my eyes welded shut. All of a sudden I was jolted awake by the thunderous sound of a platoon of motorcycles roaring into the station. I abruptly jacked to attention trying to comprehend just exactly where I was and noted immediately that the Hell’s Angels of California were uponme and were circling the pumps like sharks around chum. Half staggering out the door and patting my backside for that wrench – just in case I had to open a couple cans of whoop-ass on somebody – I was trying to come to life quickly in case I had to get rough. The leader of the pack came straight for me and stopped just short of crushing my foot with his 700 pound motorcycle. Lucky for him. His hair was long and scraggly, and his pock-marked face looked like the surface of the moon underneath a mane of beard. He looked like he had killed people. I swallowed hard as if a cue ball had gone down my throat. He had grease on his face, hands, and pants. His fingernails were black underneath. He threw his massive leg over his steed and walked directly up to me like Gorilla Monsoon. He parked his scarred, hole-ly face and fetid breath just inches from my nose. Out of the corner of my eye, I noticed that his scuzzy compatriots had parked over by the restrooms and were casing that location. Some were already headed in there to wait for me. All of them were suspiciously looking around. I figured this was it, the moment I had fortunately been mentally and physically preparing for by imaginatively hammering and slashing criminals into mince. “Don’t go in the restrooms. Take your chances out here” was going through my mind. So somebody was about to get a big surprise tonight. If you mess with the bull, you are going to get the horns.

The Hell’s Angel guy looked me directly in the eye like he meant to add another notch to his handlebars and croaked out, “Listen, man, I got a problem. There’s something loose on this bike. I need some tools. Do you have some wrenches I can borrow?” Oh, so we’re gonna play “Tool Time,” huh? By now, others were approaching and standing nearer. It took me about a second to give him a no uncertain answer to his question about the likelihood of him or anybody else using the boss’s tools, but before I did, I took measure of the situation and the predicament I was in. This all happened almost instantly, but it went like slow motion in my mind. I went over the boss’s words one more time to give myself new resolve in what I was about to say, “Don’t let touch them tools,” Then I recalled the Highway Patrol saying, “Don’t go into the restroom. Take your chances out here,” So I said – , “I am not taking any bovine waste material off of you or anybody else. It is time for you to get your leeward clefts back on those cheap pieces of scrap and hit the road, you filthy bags of human waste, before I have to unpack an entire case of whoop-ass right here and right now.”

Then without further hesitation and like a bolt of lightning, my hand fired to the back of my pants and that pocket that secretly lodged that wrench he did not see. I am surprised to this day how smooth that move was. My hand landed precisely on the ice-cold handle of that crescent wrench. With one move, I withdrew that wrench and brought it over my head as fast as I could and landed it squarely and gently directly into the palm of his open hand – with the handle toward him – and said, “Listen, not only do I have wrench, but do you see that wall and those red tool boxes over there with all those wrenches, screwdrivers, and sockets? You can use those too. In fact, I’ll tell you what I am going to do. Do you see that lift there? You can even use that…free of charge.”