Secret Historian: The Life and Times of Samuel Steward, Professor, Tattoo Artist, and Sexual Renegade (43 page)

Through an introduction by Paul Gebhard, Steward next cautiously befriended the experimental filmmaker Kenneth Anger, who like Steward had been contributing sexually themed materials to the Institute for Sex Research for many years. Anger had published
Hollywood Babylon
, a scandal-ridden picture book about mass celebrity, occultism, and kinky sex, in France in 1958.
^*
Well before then, however, he had made a name for himself as an experimental filmmaker. Steward greatly admired his short films
Fireworks
(1947) and
Scorpio Rising
(1963), having first seen
Fireworks
in the Kinsey collection, and later having reviewed
Scorpio Rising
in both
Amigo
and
Der Kreis
. Alfred Kinsey had visited Sicily with Anger in the mid-1950s, in part to view the ruins of “Thelema Abbey,” the drug-and-sex farmhouse commune of the occultist, poet-philosopher, and sexual revolutionary Aleister Crowley. Kinsey’s interest in Crowley had been casual, and based only on his notorious sexual practices, but Anger was a longtime Crowley devotee.

Shortly after being introduced, Anger came to the Anchor to have Steward tattoo the word
Lucifer
across his chest in large Old English letters, and to have a similar
Lucifer
emblazoned across the chest of his young companion, a musician named Bobby. Because Ed Hardy was at that point keen to meet Anger, Steward arranged an evening with him in the Haight, during which Hardy lit up “a couple of high-powered joints” and the three men got high. Steward “got quite disoriented,” Hardy later recalled. “Interestingly, the person who [had] let us in the flat was a young guy with very long hair and a top hat, who looked like Jerry Garcia did in those days. He seemed to live in a part of the house with no furniture except a set of drums. Anger introduced him as Bobby, and it turned out later that it was Bobby Beausoleil.”

At nineteen, Beausoleil was just the sort of “bad boy” Steward found most attractive: a product of reform school, he had already played in a rock band, appeared in several porn films, and was now said to be the “star” of Anger’s work in progress,
Lucifer Rising
. But when Beausoleil left Anger in September 1967, he stole Anger’s car and allegedly stole most of the
Lucifer Rising
footage as well.
^*
Drawing on his friendship with Mick Jagger, Anger subsequently began a new
Lucifer Rising
^*
in London, and there, through Steward, he met and befriended Sir Francis Rose. When Jagger dropped out of the production, Anger recast the film to include Rose along with Jagger’s girlfriend Marianne Faithfull and the filmmaker Donald Cammell, who had written the film
Performance
(1970) and was just then directing (with Nicolas Roeg) Jagger in it. The soundtrack for the twenty-eight-minute
Lucifer Rising
, which took years to complete, was composed in prison by Bobby Beausoleil—for, by 1969, the time the film was finally finished, he had been arrested and convicted for the Topanga Canyon murder of Gary Hinman in the presence of two of Charles Manson’s “wives.”

In
Lucifer Rising
, Steward’s old friend Francis Rose, playing the character “Lord Chaos,” stands in a subterranean lair, surrounded by various robed attendants and wearing an ermine cape. In a film otherwise populated by youthful beauties of both sexes, he appears aged and perhaps mentally ill: he has lank, shoulder-length gray hair, grizzled muttonchop whiskers, droopy eyelids, and spittle-coated lips. His presence is entirely disturbing; shots of him are cross-cut with shots of bubbling lava; his scene ends with a closeup of an elephant foot crushing a snake.

•

As 1967 came to a close, Steward had an encounter at his tattoo shop that he never discussed in his memoirs, and which is recorded only in his Stud File:

Steward had been visited at his shop throughout 1966 and ’67 by various members of the Hells Angels, including the gang’s leader, Ralph “Sonny” Barger. Barger and his gang dealt widely in heroin, and two of his top gang members, Terry the Tramp and George Wetherns, sold most of the LSD and other psychedelics then available in Haight-Ashbury. Because the hippie movement had promoted the use of LSD as an aid to spiritual meditation and creative self-expression, the trade in psychedelics during the 1967 “Summer of Love” had suddenly become big business, and by cornering the LSD market the Angels had made a small fortune. When interest in LSD subsequently slacked off, the Angels shifted to sales of cocaine and methamphetamine, and in doing so initiated a period of great violence within and around the organization. By the time Steward opened the Anchor, Barger had already been arrested three times for assault with a deadly weapon; along with cocaine, he and most of the other Angels were now using PCP. As a result, the motorcyclists were widely feared for their sudden acts of extreme violence, which included “gang bang” rapes. Steward had dealt with many a rough character during his decade on South State Street, but he had never before witnessed such drug-crazed acts of violent rage, and he was justifiably terrified of the gang, even though they needed him for his tattooing skills and professed on a regular basis to be his friends.

Since the Angels had quickly become the financial mainstay of his business, Steward maintained a cautious friendship with the gang, and over time forged friendships with three of its top members: “Sonny” Barger, “Moldy Marvin” Tilbert, and “Saint” John Morton. Steward found the last of the three particularly engaging, for Morton was a former tattoo artist with more than a hundred tattoos on his body, and he had great appreciation for Steward’s exceptionally high-quality work.

Steward befriended these three just as the motorcycle gang was beginning its ascent to quasi-mythic status. A year later, in 1967, when Hunter Thompson’s
Hells Angels
became a runaway bestseller, the gang entered the popular imagination as contemporary American renegade heroes, and as a result became much more wary of would-be fans. By then Steward, for his part, had become deeply ambivalent about them, for apart from being dangerous, ignorant, violent, racist, sexist, and homophobic, they also seemed to him physically repellent: With their greasy hair, appalling hygiene, and foot-long beards, they were a far cry from the trim, muscular, leather-jacketed motorcyclists whom he had met and sometimes bedded in Chicago and San Francisco over the past two decades, and who had populated his erotic fantasies for years.

Steward became even further repulsed when he learned that many of the “secret” tattoos he was applying to the Angels were actually testaments to their participation in various beatings, rapes, maimings, and murders. In a magazine article for
Vector
in August 1970, he also noted that other tattoos made a proprietary claim: “many of their mamas [are] marked…on the
gluteus maximus
, or even above the celestial gate, with such phrasings as ‘Property Of’ followed by the member’s gang-name.” Tattoos also served as grim memorials: Barger’s first wife, Elsie, had attempted to abort her unborn child by pumping air into her vagina, which resulted in an agonizing death; Barger subsequently had her cross-shaped headstone tattooed onto his right arm in her memory.

Many years later, Barger described how Steward had stood out from the local tattooing competition:

Steward worked as the “official” tattoo artist for the Hells Angels from 1967 through 1971, regularly tattooing Angels not only from the Oakland membership, but also from Livermore, Stockton, Fresno, San Francisco, and San Bernardino.
^*
In doing so he became intimately trusted by “Sonny” Barger, as well as several other leading club members, for all were very particular about the designs of their various emblems, all valued and respected his skill as a craftsman, and all relied on him for his discretion. “Not only did they want the skull with wings, but other designs which were arcane and esoteric—at least until the Angels started getting all their publicity,” Steward wrote in his memoirs. “They got swastikas and iron crosses, the jagged ‘SS’ symbol, the 1% (someone had said only 1% of all motorcyclists were outlaws). They got pilot’s wings—brown to mean they had screwed a man, red for cunnilingus on a menstruating old lady, or black—the same on a black woman. Or they got ‘13’ for the letter ‘M’ (13th down the alphabet) meaning marijuana, ‘DFFL’—Dope Forever, Forever Loaded; ‘666’—the number of the beast in the Apocalypse, since a preacher had called them that—and other symbols transient in meaning.” There were other designs Steward tattooed onto members that he did not discuss in his memoirs, for they were secret symbols the meaning of which he was forbidden to divulge. He did, however, note being amazed when Sonny Barger asked to have “a long philosophical quotation from Khalil Gibran [tattooed] on his inner right forearm.”
^*

Steward, known among the bikers simply as “Doc,” nonetheless remained uneasy in their company, and with good reason. “The Angels were terrifying,” he wrote in his memoirs. “[But] gradually I acquired a kind of special status so that I could indulge in kidding and badinage with them, whereas the same words from a stranger would have resulted in a broken jaw.” Despite his skill in handling them, he confessed in an unpublished draft of his memoirs that “their presence [in the shop always] put me on the thin edge between disaster and catastrophe…They kept my insides awash with adrenalin whenever they came a-callin.”

On certain occasions Steward was drawn into their acts of violence. Late one evening, for instance—long after Steward had closed up the shop and taken the public bus back home to his bungalow in Berkeley—his phone rang; it was Barger, asking Steward to come back to Oakland to open up the Anchor for a special late-night tattooing job. Steward had no choice but to dress and hurry back to the storefront. There he found “four or five” Angels waiting for him, along with a banged-up young man with a blackened eye and a bloody nose. When Steward asked what was going on, one of the Angels explained that they had discovered their captive wearing a Hells Angels tattoo even though he did not belong to the organization. The Angels wanted the tattoo blacked out completely before they gave the man the rest of what he had coming.

Steward opened the shop, but insisted that for legal reasons the man needed to sign a release. After the man signed a statement saying he had been tattooed of his own free will, Steward “blacked out the design, with each of the Angels taking turns in jabbing the needle into the skin. Afterwards they threw the man into a small enclosed truck and climbed in after him. I heard later that they drove him into the country, knocked him around some more, sodomized him, stripped him naked, and dropped him on the freeway.” Sonny Barger not only confirmed this story, but also noted that such incidents had taken place within his organization more than once—something Steward neglected to mention in his memoirs. Barger enthusiastically recalled in his own memoirs that after capturing a man who had stolen his motorcycle, he and the rest of his gang had taken turns bullwhipping him, and then had beaten him with a spiked dog collar and broken all his fingers with a ball-peen hammer. “Despite all the news articles and studies by [popular] psychologists about the Hells Angels,” Steward concluded years later, “the fact remains that they were tough and mean and had to be handled with care.”

Don Ed Hardy has suggested that while Steward may have disliked the Angels, he also took a justifiable pride in his ability to handle them and move among them. “I tattooed some Hells Angels in San Francisco in the mid-seventies, but never hung out with them socially,” Hardy noted; “occasionally I would meet one in Phil’s shop but was not privy to a lot of contact with them. They live in their own world and it is not open to outsiders. Phil delighted in associating with ‘rough trade,’ and was socially very adept in getting along with a huge range of humanity.”

Steward, of course, had other reasons for getting along with the Angels apart from the business they brought to his shop. After “Dan,” Steward had no further sexual dealings with the Angels; but he did like to use recreational drugs such as marijuana and barbiturates. While he had no use for cocaine, PCP, methamphetamine, or LSD, he did enjoy having ready access to these other substances, and in at least one instance he traded some anti-police artwork for a jar full of “reds.” Moreover, with Angels for friends, Steward felt safer on the streets of Oakland. “They were mean mothers,” he later told an interviewer. “Some of them were O.K.; many of them were f[i]lthy. But I had a number of good friends amongst the group, and they were protective of you, too, if they liked you.”

•

While Steward relied primarily on Johnny Hardin for sex during the later 1960s, and while he occasionally found a new sex contact down at the tattoo parlor (including a retired policeman with whom he had an ongoing liaison for several years), he met a man in 1968 who would eventually provide him with just as many new hustlers as Renslow, and who would, like Renslow, come to figure significantly in his Phil Andros fiction. J. Brian Donahue
^*
(who went by the professional name of J. Brian) was only twenty-nine when Steward met him, but he was already running a highly successful male escort service named Golden Boys and publishing photographs of his hustlers in a self-produced glossy magazine of the same name. Brian had hustled since the age of twenty, and had started his erotic photography business in 1963, at the age of twenty-four, after completing two and a half years at San Jose State College. Initially selling his photographs by the packet at newsstands in San Francisco’s homosexual neighborhoods, he had quickly distinguished himself from his competition for his naturalistic nudes of males just above the age of consent—young “golden boy” Californians who seemed to possess the frank self-awareness of a new, less inhibited generation. He later confided to an interviewer that the secret of his success was in choosing his models with care and then treating them like friends. “I find nothing dirty or disgraceful or disgusting in pornography,” he went on; “to me [the word
pornography
] means no more than the use of explicit sexual content…Pornography and obscenity are
not
the same thing, are not necessarily even related.”