Bull and Magoo, Hells Angels in Nebraska, 1968

Another time when no words say the most

With Laura Kurtz and my 1959 BSA 650 outside the Stanford residential house of Dick and Ann Scowcroft, May 1972, four years after meeting Bull and Magoo in Nebraska. Wearing the fur-collared green jacket bought in a Winnipeg, Manitoba thrift-shop in November 1968 after seven weeks of labor for INCO. Photo by the novelist April Smith.

May 17, 2025

Bull and Magoo

Around midnight—mid-November of 1968—Omaha, Nebraska where the concrete and guard-rails of Interstate 80 cross those of Highway 75—a Saturday night cold enough for snowflakes to flick in the wind, I was 18 and stuck with one gloved thumb out in the dark’s dim but open prospects.

I WAS IN AUTUMN OF 1968 a “vocational hitchhiker.” I was again like Walt and Jack and Woody, “getting to know America”, ‘thumbing untrodden Turnpikes’ between islands of Howard Johnson’s and Truck Stops. Where I had to go was less departure and destination than the Road In-Between.

All of the past two-and-a-half months had arrived through happenstance. What I have to tell you today mostly concerns hours with Bull and Magoo, transplants to Nebraska from the Hell’s Angels of northern California, but the road to them is complicated. Let’s go.

In early September I’d left hometown of Bellingham, Washington in a vehicle characterized by 40s. It was a 1947 Chevrolet, bought for $40 from a farmer in Whatcom County out of my earnings among the Green Beans processed at Kale’s Cannery, and faster than 40 miles per hour troubled its flathead-six motor into straining and shuddering.

Therefore I’d had to sit behind this Chevy’s steering-wheel at least 12 hours each day “to get anywhere” in my intended journey to Mazatlan, Mexico for a self-funded writing-retreat. Passes along Interstate 5 through the Cascades of Oregon taxed “the poor, Blue-Gray Sled” (but how can a sled climb?) into an unbroken groan. Then, South of the immortal Weed, California, I still had to sit and squint long, long spells in order to “make” anything close 500 miles a day.

I developed a “stye”, or some kind of infection, related to my right eye. A few miles before grinding into Mexico, then, I stopped for treatment from an Ophthalmologist in Chula Vista. He provided an effective wash and ointment. He could give advice about Mexico because he kept a house there. His most emphatic advice was: “Whatever you do down there, son, do NOT do ANYTHING that might put you in Jail! Stay away from any situation like that! Like your life depends on it.”

Well, in Tijuana, as the old Blue-to-Gray Wheeled Sled slow-rolled between potholes, a Cop blew his whistle sharply. His khaki shirt fit him tightly and his cap also looked too small. My two years of High School Spanish understood that I’d failed to stop for the a Red (“Rojo!”) light. “A what?” Nevertheless, I paid the $20 street-fine and let the Officer out next to a Liquor-Store. He informed me as well that I had an old car.

That night the Chevy developed a flat tire in the deep, dark quiet of country alongside Highway 2. Mexican’s cheerfully repaired the flat and refused payment. Still, Mazatlan seemed far-off … and I forsook it … for an eventual drive of around 2000 miles North and East and North … to my blood-father’s home in Winnipeg.

Adventures along that route—Phoenix in 118•, Larimer Street and Plato’s Republic in Denver, swimming in the Mississippi off the banks of Mark Twain’s Hannibal—can be overlooked except to note that in crossing Kansas I picked up a poet named Marc and his girlfriend/partner in raising marijuana among the horizon-to-horizon Cornfields there. We greeted Sunday’s dawn over the Gateway Arch in St. Louis and I agree to look him up in East Orange, New Jersey.

The wonderful Chevy’s motor at last froze once I’d reached my blood father and his second wife, Rene, in suburban Fort Garry of Winnipeg. Paul’s enabling phone-call got me work in the INCO complex of Thompson, Manitoba, almost 500 miles North of Winnipeg toward Hudson Bay, a train-trip loaded with immigrant laborers from eastern Europe.

I worked in INCO’s Refinery—six days of 8-hour Shifts per Week, rotating between Day and ‘Evening’ and Graveyard—breaking ‘Rocks' of the ore at the peak-and-fall of one conveyor-belt—”handling” trays of the treated into and out of vats—and reading Celine’s Journey to the End of the Night and writing in my Journal between Shifts. Stag-Movies were on offer for Saturday night to us trailer-residents. Seven weeks accumulated enough savings for me to play the Beatles’ “Birthday” loud on my portable player and to set our next morning, hitchhiking, South in early November.

THERE FOLLOWED days of travel—a week of writing while “holed-up” in the YMCA of Sioux Falls, South Dakota—and then more days on the Picaresque Road—South, West, North, and again East. Highlight of the stay in Sioux Falls was reading Desolation Angels in a stall of Main Library’s Men’s Room—being engaged in curious conversation by a kindly-voice man who kept asking personal questions just outside the stall—and then learning from a newspaper headline two days later that ‘SODOMY RING BUSTED IN MAIN LIBRARY’. In Kansas City, Missouri two School-Teachers who still were “shaken” by the assassination of their “candidate”, Bobby Kennedy, served a generous dinner. New Mexico’s High Plateau showed the stars as they were etched on cloudy blue-velvet. To get out of Denver I rode a Greyhound East and discovered a friend in Billy Barth, drummer for the Insect Trust band (Robert Palmer) after Billy sang lines from Bob Dylan’s “She Belongs To Me.”

Coincidences from the energies intersecting in that year, that era, were literally endless, the more widely you moved.

In East Orange I stayed in the basement of the poet Marc’s parents’ house. He walked with a cane then— battling the “jumps” and other emaciating ravages that ensued with addiction to injectable amphetamines. “I tell you, man, shooting speed is worse than anything Dante ever dreamt up!” From East Orange I wound by bus and train into marvelously complicated New York City and drop-off of the manuscript of a long short-story, titled ‘A Miscarriage’, written in my last year at High Schools of Whatcom County and revised in Sioux Falls, to The Paris Review in (somehow) the Borough of Queens. As the 10-year-old protagonist of the Novel that I wrote twice when ages 15 and 16, Among Ashes, much mimicked mannerisms of Holden Caulfield in J.D. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye, so the grizzled, bony, 50-something-year-old protagonist of ‘A Miscarriage’ thought and talked like stream-of-consciousness in James Joyce’s Ulysses and J. P. Donleavy’s The Ginger Man and Richard Farina’s Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Me. I liked him. His real-life model was a buyer of beer, wine and liquor for us in Bellingham who also improvised stories that grew more colorful by the drink.

“Oh, you’re doing a Kerouac thing,” the woman who accepted my manuscript at the Queens residence said.

“Kind of,” I said.

In East Orange I read whole, over a few days, a book I’d sampled earlier, Hunter Thompson’s Hell’s Angels: A Strange and Terrible Saga of the Outlaw Gangs, and admired its fast-moving prose and its sympathy for characters while doubting its sometime resorts into sensationalistic style.

Marc in his parents’ Van dropped me beside an on-ramp leading to conjunction northward, away from New Jersey’s Tollways’ tangle. I could “I-80” West to Wyoming and then veer toward Seattle and and the apartment on Capital Hill that a friend from Bellingham had offered to share. “You can write here,” Greg had said, “and there are some pretty good things happening.” I shook Marc’s hand. “You’re already better, man. You’re walking. Walking without a cane!” “Yeah, sure,” he said, “tell it to my spine. But I’m glad you stopped in.”

This November was my fastest land-crossing of the U.S. or Canada. Rides were long—rides with truckers and salesmen and vacationing families and by late-night Saturday—about 40 hours after setting out—I was to Omaha. Maybe it was the cold that excited sympathy from drivers. Maybe it was relief that the Presidential Election was decided—Nixon over Humphrey—without another assassination. Anyway, I’d raced past Exits to Rockaway, DuBois, Punksatawney (what a name!), Youngstown, Cleveland, Toledo, Gary and Chicago, Moline and Rock Island, Des Moines, and Council Bluffs.

Where I was stuck, though, this second night out, was the least promising spot so far within rock-throwing distance of I-80. I’d chosen to go with a trucker to his route’s dead-end in Omaha, as cities grow fewer and farther West of the Mississippi. This On-Ramp was out-of-sight of any Restaurant-with-Gas-Station that would me talk to drivers going West. It was cold, too. Windy, too. And as those afore-mentioned snowflakes flicked down and sideways in the dark, I rubbed gloved hands together and muttered: “I don’t know. I don’t know about his one, Don. Maybe good luck is running out.”

Elation, then—as Elation doth ever recur to the Stranded Hitchhiker—when a curve-bottomed sedan from the late 1950s swerved to a stop up the Ramp. “Thank you!” I shouted, hailing this latest good fortune of braked tail-lights, and fast-trundled with both hands full—sleeping-bag under left-arm with Royal portable typewriter in that hand, suitcase-handle and portable record-player grip in my right hand.

The passenger’s-side door to the back-seat swung open. Inside I could make out, as I blinked in the wind and its little snowflakes, two women.

“Get in!” the driver said. “It’s goddamn cold out there! What are you doing out there?”

“I’ve got quite a lot,” I said,

“I’ll open the trunk.” The driver sprang from his with wonderul alacrity, his build corresponding with a gymnast’s agility. He was bearded, I saw, and maybe in his latter 20s. “I don’t understand people who like cold!” he said.

“Oh, I don’t like it!” I said/ “And I thank you-all very much.”

My gear secure in the slammed trunk, I smiled and nodded and thanked again as I slid sideways onto the back seat next to the two women. The interior was smoky and smelled of both perfume and alcohol. “You’ll be like three stuffed-animals back there,” the driver said. “What?” said the smaller of the two, next to me, with a sharpness that betokened intimacy. “You’re all in a row. Like in the Carnival. Like bugs in a rug.”

“Oh, sure,” the smaller one said.

“We’re only going to Lincoln,” the driver said to me.

“That’s fine. Every step counts. I really appreciate your stopping,”

“I bet you’re not going to Lincoln. Lincoln, Nebraska,” the driver said as if to pronounce the place Squaresville, U.S.A.

“No. Actually, Seattle,”

“Seattle!” “Seattle!” Both women exclaimed. “That far!”

““Fraid so. But actually it is where I want to go.”

“Well, you better have a drink, if you’re going to Seattle,” the driver said.

The four of them were passing a Pint bottle from within the smoke-clouded car. The smaller woman handed it to me. I thought it rude to ask what they were drinking.

I tipped the bottle and smelled the drink before tasting its stiff and even biting piquancy. “Wow!” I said. “What is it? Mint?”

“Peppermint Schnapps. Mint Schnapps, we call it. You ain’t never had it?”

“Nope.”

“You like it?”

“Yes. I like it.”

“We like it. Well, you better have some more. For Seattle!”

“We had better like it, since it’s all you two bought,” said the woman seated behind the driver.

“Hey,” the guy sitting ahead of me in the front seat said, “you said you were happy with Peppermint Schnapps.”

“But I didn’t say I liked it.”

“Jesus!”

The driver laughed. “We’re just one big happy family. The Peppermint Schnapps Family. I’m going to really grow me a beard. Mustache. Pointed beard. Get me a—what do you call they those little scarves they stuff in their throats.”

‘An ascot,” the taller woman, seated directly behind the driver said.

“You are carryin’ quite a lot, for someone hitch-hiking to Seattle from where—,”

“New York City, essentially. New Jersey, but right by New York City.”

“Was that a typewriter? You had with your sleeping-bag. And something else with your suitcase.”

“Magoo the Investigator,” the woman beside me said.

“Yeah, good eye,” I said. “It’s a typewriter. And the other thing is portable record-player.”

“Really?” the driver said. The heater from the dashboard blew warm air more clouding our crowded interior. “You hitchhike—with a portable record-player? I’ve never heard of that. I’ve barely heard of a portable record-player.”

“I know. It’s a hassle. But they kind of keep me me.”

“Keep you you—that’s good too. So you’re a writer?”

“Aim to be. Kind of why I’m hitch-hiking.”

“We don’t like writers,” the guy seated ahead of me, his hair thick and black and like furze above his denim jacket, said. I couldn’t tell if he was joking.

“Aw, Bull—you’re still just pissed off at Hunter.”

“You are right there, Mister. Mister Magoo, friend of Hunter’s.”

“Well, yeah, I still like him. He’s not us. Never was. But I liked him and I still like him.”

“And you like his bullshit book?”

“Wait,” I said, hunching forward, needing to know. “Your name is Magoo and your name is Bull and you’re talking about a Hunter. Is that Hunter Thompson and are you thee Bull and Magoo in his book about Hell’s Angels?”

Pause. Each of the women laughed differently. Bull looked over at the driver named Magoo. “Shit,” he said with an acceptant kind of rue.

Magoo laughed with a whoop once he’d received this kind of go-ahead from his partner. “That’s us! You are riding with the very two, Mister Magoo and Mister Bull, drinking Schnapps and having laughs, to goddamn Lincoln. Nebraska.”

We started on the second—in my presence—Pint of Hiram Walker Peppermint Schnapps.

The four were unanimous that “this boy” should have a big meal before leaving their company.

“Coffee and Toast—that’s all you’ve had since you left the East Coast?” Magoo said.

“But three times. Once in a Howard Johnson’s and then in two Cafés. It’s a way to talk with people.”

“And your Budget maybe ain’t the biggest,” Magoo said.

They treated me to Breakfast in the Cafeteria of the Continental Trailways Bus-Station. In the booth we took Magoo and his girlfriend sat opposite my inside position next to Bull’s girlfriend and Bull. Magoo’s face and eyes were mischievous and he had a shadow-beard. His girlfriend was compact and impish, too. She wore Pansie-like turquoise-and-yellow earrings and a green-and-orange striped watch-cap. Bull was clean-shaven. His jaw was large and forward and he had a forelock. His girlfriend was tall and slender and about 30.

They all insisted that I have two Breakfasts—Ham and Eggs with Hash-Browns, and the Pancakes with a Side of Bacon with Home Fries.

“I’ll try, but I hope that you can help me.”

“We’ll see how you do, and then if we can help you.”

“I can help,” Magoo’s friend said.

“This lady is the Bottomless Pit. She has an Endless Appetite. And she stays Petite. Petite.”

“Let me ask you, if you don’t mind,” I ventured once more. “How did you all wind up in Lincoln, Nebraska?”

Magoo said: “My brother, who has a Shop for those Big Trucks you been riding in, needed help. He had work for me. And the Bay Area and all of California—we had too much attention. Sonny is my Cousin, but—it was just too hot and crazy.”

“You’re a writer, and you want to tell the truth, so I’m going to tell you: Too many Cops. Cops stalking us and wanting to make a name, and Cops wanting the wrong things.”

“Nebraska ain’t bad,” Magoo said. “With the company we keep, it ain’t bad at all.”

They insisted next that I catch some sleep instead of going back out into that cold, dark night. “Even if it’s quit snowing, no one can see you out there,”

We drove to the house of Bull’s girlfriend. She and Magoo and then Bull urged me to take a shower before lying down. “Oh, that would be great! Make a big difference!”

“Plus, I think Linda wants to put you in with her kids,” Magoo said. “I think that’s right. Is that right, Bull.”

“It’s the only place he can sleep. Unless he want to sleep with us.”

In the bathroom toothbrushes stood in separate cups and towels hung neatly. The shower washed grime from my neck and felt splendid. I steppped into the children’s bedroom and found Linda and two youngsters standing between the beds. “Don, this is Pamela and William. Pamela is seven and William is four. You two, this is Don, a new friend of ours who’s traveling to the West Coast. He needs to sleep, so I’m putting him with William. If that’s alright with you.”

“Sure,” William said.

“It’s alright,” Pamela said.

“Good to meet you,” I said, “and thank you too for your hospitality. Everyone has been great.”

“Sure,” Pamela said and her four-year-old brother repeated.

I lay with my back next to William as far as I could to the edge of the bed.

Drinking continued in the living-room, one wall and half-a-hallway from the children’s bedroom. Saturday night, so Bull brought out Whiskey to go with his and Magoo’s beers. Making Boilermakers even though Magoo had work—”Yes, on a goddamn Sunday—the next morning. Linda and Katy stuck with the Schnaps. At first the talk among them remained friendly, leavened with kidding and japing and Magoo’s gravelly-toned whoop of a laugh, but then Bull began to complain.

His voice, already thick and serious, grew bitter. It asked questions that he couldn’t answer.

“I know you want kids,” he said to Linda. “I know you want more kids. And I can’t give them to you.”

“No, Bull. That’s not so. You say it, but it’s not so.”

“It is so! Goddamn it is so! I know it’s so.”

“So?” Magoo interjected.

“Shut up, Magoo. This is between Linda and me.”

“You don’t have a thing to worry about, Bull,” Linda said. “Between you and me, That way.”

“I’m a man!” Bull said. “Ain’t I your man? And don’t you want children from your man? Now goddamn it you be honest, not nice and hoity-toity, Linda, for once!”

“Am I hoity-toity? I am about as far from hoity-toity and really as down-to-earth as my grandmother, Bull. No! You are just getting yourself worked up. Over nothing.”

“It’s not nothing! It’s a problem! I feel it! How can I be a father to your children if I can’t give you more children. Our children. I feel it, and I want your children to know I feel it!”

He rose and boot-steps stamped the rug and hallway carpet.

“No, Bull—don’t you do that!” Linda said.

His fist banged on the bedroom room. Then his shoulder thudded against the neighboring wall.

“No, Bull—get away from that door!”

“You get away from me, Linda! I want them to know. They’re my children, your children, and they must be wondering what kind of man I am! You stay away, too, Magoo. Little Mister Magoo who loves writers!”

Bang! Bang! More thuds from shoulder to wall. The four-year-old William next to me was stiff and trembling like a stick in a storm. His sister, Pamela, climbed into the bed beside me. “We’re scared,” she whispered. “When he gets like this it scares us.”

“I don’t like it,” William muttered. “I’m afraid,”

“It’s alright,” I said, reaching my right arm to hold the seven-year-old’s shoulder above the little brother sandwiched between us in the dark bedroom. “Nothing to fear. He just feels bad. He just wants you to know.”

“I can’t make you kids! I can’t make a baby! What kind of a man is that!”

“No! No, Bull, you stop being such a Wuss! You think I’d be with a man who was not a man? You’re a man, my man, and now get away from the door!”

Bang! Bang! Thud and thud of shoulder to wall!

“It’s alright. It’s alright,” I repeated to the shivering brother and sister. “It’s really because he loves you, and he’s hung up. Really be sure that you’re alright,” I whispered with urgency.

Bang! Shoulder thudding to wall and complaints and remonstrances over and over outside the bedroom till Bull at last wailed, breaking down finally, and Linda and Magoo and Katy led him back to the couch.

“You’re a hell of a man,” Magoo said. “A—hell—of—a—-man. You’re the worse son-of-a-bitch I know. And you and Linda are gonna have kids. More kids.”

The next morning—Sunday morning daylight—was quiet as a vault within the house. I’d been so fatigued after no-sleep-except-sitting-up since Friday—and so relieved from tension at Bull’s banging and sobs—that I out like a log while Magoo left for his job. Pamela had returned to her bed by the time sharp triplets of knocks sounded on the bedroom door. Bull called through it: “Magoo said I should take you out to the Interstate. If you want a ride.”

Bull drove me out through the neighborhood of little houses with steep-pitched roofs and then along Highway 34 to catch I-80 West. Whiskers now showed on the cheeks above his strong jaw. His profile was like a brooding rock. His torso was a heavyset Linebacker’s in the denim of Hell’s Angels colors that he now wore. Ice still wedged in corners of the windshield. My hangover from the Schnapps alone edged jags into my brain from its taste on my teeth.

“This ‘ll get it,” Bull said as he braked softly to the road’s shoulder before Off-Ramps and On-Ramps of the great, dividing I-80 ahead. “This is about the best place. Magoo said.”

“Well, thank you,” I said, opening my door to step round and grab suitcase, sleeping-bag, type-writer, and portable record-player from the back-seat. “Thank you all for your great generosity. It was a pleasure to get to know you.”

Bull nodded in acknowledgement without turning his head.