It was my time of loud Harley's and fast women. It was a time when I wore tough like a favorite pair of Levis. All I wanted was the wild wind in my face and the feeling of straddling more power than one young man should experience.
"Let's go to the Hell's Angels dance," Ben said one evening.
"Rough crowd," I thought, but my tough guy answered without hesitation, "sure, where are we going?"
"Tonight at the Avalon Ballroom in San Francisco. We'll ride together and show up in style."
"Let's go," I said. "It'll be my first concert."
Any excuse to fly down the freeway on my dream machine, a custom chopped 59' panhead, Harley-Davidson. What hadn't been chromed was painted canary yellow with fire engine red flames. I had worked graveyard in a gas station for a year to by that monster. Once I owned it, we were inseparable.
Forty miles into "The City" on a hot summer night, we found ourselves at the end of a line of Harley's parked in tight formation, four to a space, both sides of the street, for seven city block. It was Hawg heaven. To be among, and counted as one of so many custom choppers in one place, etched itself in my memory.
With much positioning, much macho revving of engines, and showman maneuvering, we parked and locked our machines. I wondered if my bike would still be there when we got back.
Along our seven-block power strut toward the Avalon, dangerously leather clad, waveringly drunken bikers, and want-to-be bikers, stood by, and lay passed out next to their chrome and steel machines. The closer we got to the front door the more dangerous the situation looked. Stepping down the last block we were forced to detour around groups of drunken masculinity, pushing each other around, slamming fists into each others faces, and wrestling on the pavement.
"What is lined against the wall?" I asked, as we closed in on the entrance.
"Looks like drunks to me," Ben said.
"There must be thirty of them."
"Lot of drunks at a Hell's Angels dance."
"But, it's only eight o'clock."
When we reached the line of blood-spattered, bikers slumped against the wall, I gasped at the true levity of the situation.
"They're not drunk at all," I whispered. "They are all beat to a pulp."
We still swaggered a little more cautiously toward the front door. Suddenly two fully leathered, Hells Angel line backers, pushed through the front doors, dragging another broken and bloodied body by his collar. They pulled the lump of flesh past us like a sack of grain and in drunken glee, drug him to the end of the line and carelessly slammed him against the wall.
"Let's get out of here," I my mind screamed, but I had been strutting my tough guy too long to turn and run, especially in front of Ben. There was no turning back.
At the door, we both paid five dollars, with a vague memory of donating to some kind of Hell's Angel philanthropy.
From the moment we walked through the door, my tough guy persona, something I had sported since getting my Harley, turned as we entered and patiently waited outside along the wall.
Thirty years ago, when this took place, the famous Avalon Ballroom, once a building of grace and style, was an ancient crumbling structure. The small foyer led to a wide grand stairwell, then gradually climbed a half-flight to a tattered carpeted landing. The stairs turned right and disappeared up to the main floor.
As we walked through the foyer, something big was tossed over the balcony that caught my eye. I looked in time to see another bloodied biker pitch hard onto the landing. As he crumpled into a battered mass, the same pair of burley Hells Angels, climbed the stairs, then grabbed the bloody pile of leather by the collar. They drug him unceremoniously down the remaining steps, around the bend in the foyer, and out the front door. A few moments later another body flew over the balcony, dropped six feet to the landing, and waited for the two linebackers.
Between unscheduled flights of broken bikers, Ben and I scampered up the stairs and into a scene only imagined in the twisted minds of science fiction writers. With a friendly grin, Ben at my side, we found a wall and backed up to it. While we nudged our way down the wall toward the main concert hall, groups of drunken biker factions continued to taunt and pick fights with one other. A number of times during the ten minutes we slowly moved down the wall, the entire room exploded into fist-slinging, beer-bottle-cracking, boot-kicking, pandemonium. Once the culprit's were beat to a pulp, and there was always more than one, they were drug over to the balcony and tossed over the railing.
With studied smiles and butts against the wall, Ben and I inched our way out of the room. All I wanted was to get back outside to my tough guy without losing my life.
Once we passed some imaginary line only the bikers knew, the tension lessened. Everyone in the concert hall was dancing wildly to the music of Jefferson Airplane with a light show and hundreds upon hundreds of hippies stoned on things I remember and cringe for the chances we all took.
When the Airplane took a break, the room roared in anticipation of the next act. I had never heard of Janice Joplin, but when she stepped on stage, she belted out a set that left me standing slack jawed. I had never heard her kind of blues. At the time, I didn't know that I was standing in the middle of a historical event. I heard live recordings were made of that night, but who knows for sure.
There was a man who held a ten-foot pipe with a smoking ball of dark resinous hash the size of my fist. Although he maintained possession of the bowl of the pipe, the far end was passed from one person to another. A cloud of expelled hash smoke settled on the crowd and mingled with the myriad of other burning substances, most illegal. To calm my frayed nerves, I stayed close to that bowl of hash for the first hour of our stay.
Half into the night, I stumbled into a large room that smelled like a pay toilet in a bus station. Covering the entire floor, laying three-deep, passed out revelers had been drug in and stacked on top one another like cordwood.
Late into the night, long before the party was over, Ben and I went outside, reconnected with our tough guys, and raced across the bay bridge to Oakland. It had been a night to remember and I was glad to be out of there in one piece with my Harley still in possession.
The second and last time I saw Janice Joplin was at a concert the next weekend in San Jose. Since we were Harley riders, Janice had us escorted to park our bikes next to the stage.
It wasn't long after that summer afternoon, listening to her belt out her bone chilling, heart wrenching blues, watching her take long pulls on a bottle of Southern Comfort stashed in her hip pocket, that Janice also went by the way of a number of other great entertainers of the time. She died from living fast in a historic period of overindulgence with dangerous drugs.
I survived, but I do not know how.