Too good to leave in the comments: Scooter and the Hell's Angel Heavy chug-a-lug

Scooter, 1980

Responding to a story I wrote about him, Scooter, as always, comes up with some pithy insights and anecdotes. I can't let this tale merely languish in the comments. Here is even more information on the summer of 1973; this time, Scooter goes head to head with the Hell's Angel Heavy:

Scooter, the anonymous reader

Scooter writes:

I don't think the Dart lasted a week after Mel registered it. Yes, it met an immovable object during a foggy Seattle night with similar interior cabin conditions. Mel, the future Cap'n Vic, and I tooled around Wallingford's side streets when out of the fogs appeared a great slab of retaining wall. We weren't traveling all that fast, I'd guess about 20mph, but Mel didn't have time to pull his foot from the gas pedal, just *%!* and BLAM. We backed off the sidewalk and heard the clank of the fan beating against the radiator. Mel limped the car home to your garage and he learned later that the collision had bent the fan pulley's crank pretty badly. Estimates to repair were much higher than the few hundred bucks he had paid for the car, so off to the scrap heap.

Yeah, there is no shortage of stories about this crew. Is there a statute of limitations on roguish indiscretions of the young and the embarrassment they may cause our families?

I have racked my brain about Downer escapades and the only one that comes to mind is my encounter with the lapsed Hells Angel, Heavy. He and his wife had fled a Northern CA chapter for Kent, WA in an attempt to go straight. Heavy got his moniker due to his girth. He weighed a good 290 and was about 5'7" tall. The Downer's knuckleheaded regulars were in awe of Heavy because of his affiliation with the 1%ers and his drinking prowess. When I arrived Heavy was taking on all comers in a chugging contest with 12oz schooners of beer. He was wiping people out, beating everyone by half a glass or more. Challengers were spewing brew through their nostrils and almost crying. These were actually trying to swallow the brew which just agitates the froth and overcomes the imiber. Even after the Freshman 15, I couldn't have weighed more than 165 but I volunteered to take Heavy on.

I knew I could whip him because I had actually trained with Coca Cola whose fizz was far more vicious than tap brewski's mellow buzz and I knew not to swallow. I just opened the gullet and poured. I beat him the first time out by a couple of gulps. He said that I had taken him by surprise and given the talentless hacks he'd been competing with before me, I believed him. They cued up another set of schooners for us at the end of the bar and a dozen or so defeated brew hounds started chortling that Heavy was sure to beat me in the rematch. They counted off and I beat Heavy in a bang bang close call. All the dimwits said Heavy won and I blared "that's bullshit, I won and Heavy knows I won" to which Heavy said "All right, Kid, you're faster, but let’s settle down and see who can really hold his mud." Wasn't likely that I would win that fight, a 40oz vs. a keg, so I wisely declined.

We kept drinking and I loved that Heavy copped to losing to me. Later he took me to his pad in the Chateau Padiddleeyak Apartments where he showed me his colors and lamented that he couldn't really retire from the Angels though he didn't think they would look for him in Kent. I actually liked Heavy but I don’t remember seeing him again. It was late summer and you, Phil, Jed, and I were off to B'ham and our bleak house on Iron Street where things started getting really real.

---o0o---

Scooter and $2 all you can drink beer day at the Sundowner circa 1973

1973 stands out in my mind among many of the years I have stomped through. Life was very good. I was in my second year working as a full time volunteer at a community center, for $40 a week, mostly doing draft counseling, writing some grants, working on the crisis/help hotline of The Sixth Chamber, handholding people on bad acid trips, referring people to doctors, and talking people out of committing suicide until they could actually talk to someone who knew what theywere doing.

I was living at a new apartment complex east of Kent, Wash., with another fellow worker at The Sixth Chamber. He was on public assistance, and had a welfare aparment--two floor, two bedroom. We split the subsidized rent of $37.50 a month. Although I did kick in my $18.75 a month, along with me came my dearest friend, Scooter. Scooter was broke, jobless, probably depressed, and parked himself on our couch for the three months between college terms.

Scooter didn't work that summer, but somehow scraped by. Once a week, however, there was an escape. The Sundowner Tavern, virtually located within our apartment complex, ran a special on Thursday: all the draft beer you can drink for $2. The doors opened at around noon, and the special continued until closing time (2 A.M.). You can imagine the potent forces that coalesced sometime around midnight. A gigantic welfare complex where no one worked, and a fair number of the denizens were on "mental disability." Endless beer, virtually free, and wackjobs with time on their hands, and a grudge against the world. Considering how bad it could have been, I don't remember that many fights or arrests, and the ones I do remember usually involved another friend of ours, Mel. Somehow Scooter survived the couch, the lack of mon and food, and still succeeded in having at least a couple of girlfriends on the line. He would serve one more term surfing my couch in utter poverty--in the fall of 1978, when he joined us in New York City, a city where he still rests his bootheels.

I am hoping Scooter is lurking here and can amplify this story. I know it has to be better than I am telling it. There must be some juicy anecdotes that have slipped my mind...