I Worked in a Hell’s Angels Biker Bar

Here’s what I learned about men

Photo by Todd Lapin on Flickr

I turned twenty-one while living in the Haight Ashbury neighborhood of San Francisco. It was 1998 and the AIDS epidemic was still ravaging though it was hard to tell in my little world where everyone acted like it was the seventies, perhaps because of the iconic Ben and Jerrys’ ice cream spot constant reminders, or head shops brandishing everything but the pot.

Ostensibly I was there to attend a tiny, ultra-liberal funky college called the New College of California, formerly “Antioch West,” sister school to the birthplace of the PC movement, but in reality, I just wanted to live in that gorgeous city. I’d grown up on Anne Rice novels but hated the weather in New Orleans, so the mist and melancholic rains were a perfect fit. I was seventeen when I arrived, having graduated early from a wildly non-traditional high school, and worked in coffee shops to garner cash for oatcakes and coffee loaded with enough cream and sugar to make it seem like an actual meal. I was broke all the time.

Knowing slinging drinks could generate vast wads of cash, the literal day after I became legal, I enrolled in a bartending school that guaranteed employment to those who passed. Within two weeks, I was offered multiple options.

“It’s easy to place girls like you,” the teacher said.

The comment made me uneasy, though I couldn’t place why.

“It’s just that,” he added, “some places ask for all the cute girls.”

“Oh, okay.” The explanation hung there, awkward and somehow inappropriate, though I wouldn’t understand why until months later.

My first job was in an iconic Irish pub in the Outer Richmond called The Hockey Haven, but that only lasted until they fired me for, as the female owner explained, “being too young.”

“It’s just that,” her Irish brogue lilted, “with locking up on your own and that… the men are not going to leave you alone.”

Since the firing happened over the phone, I pleaded with her on the other end of the line. “Isn’t there anything I can do? Maybe close with someone else?”

“I’m sorry doll. We just can’t afford to have a girl like you. I should have realized that.”

I’d never been fired from anything before, ever, so the experience was horrible. I’d felt I’d done something desperately wrong but couldn’t figure out what. The bar had been booming since I arrived, the owner even crediting me for some of the younger neighborhood crowd joining on random Tuesdays. In retrospect, it seems there must have been questionable legality to the firing since they’d hired me with full knowledge of my status as a brand-new 21-year-old.

The bartending school wasn’t worried. “I’ll send you over Al’s place,” the teacher said. “He’s always asking for new girls.”

Again with the weird comments that made my skin feel kinda sticky and gross, but since I couldn’t place the source of the gross stickiness, I went ahead and checked out the place, which the school had referred to as, “a little rough around the edges. One of those Hell’s Angels-type establishments.”

It certainly was one of those Hell’s Angels-type establishments, though I’d never met a Hell’s Angel before and wasn’t accustomed to the kind of bar union dockworkers apparently liked to frequent, which is precisely what this China Basin gem was. There was an utter lack of focus on even basic bar aesthetics, even the lights weren’t kept particularly dim, and gleamed across the Formica tops of the tables. Al, the owner, was a short, stout man with long hair that cascaded halfway down his back in a ponytail. His skin and eyes were dark and weathered but I could place his age at around fifty.

“Glad you’re here,” he said, looking me up and down. Without a question or any semblance of interview, he began to train me in setup and duties.

“So, ah…” I finally ventured. “Are you saying I got the job?”

“Of course you got the job,” he looked at me like I was crazy. “Just look at you. The other girl we had to let go, she really just wasn’t working out.”

Then, he proceeded to introduce me to his daughter, my boss when he wasn’t around. She scowled at me and didn’t take my hand when offered, though I couldn’t tell if this was out of spite or not noticing it hanging there. “You start tonight,” she called as Al finished up.

“Just one last thing,” he added, pointing to a filthy notepad hanging against the wall next to the phone. “If anything happens? Call them, not the cops. They’re good guys and will be here faster.”

The security was 100% neighborhood Hell’s Angels and, at the time, I felt like I’d just won a front-row seat to an entire culture I knew nothing about but looked pretty freaking cool from the outside.

When I arrived for my shift, the bar was surrounded by men just off the docks and some regulars who worked nearby. Three women, all of whom looked like they’d just gotten off photoshoots at the Playboy mansion, teetered among them in platforms, wearing nothing but brightly colored lingerie. The image was bizarre but clearly happened all the time, the men chatting with the women as if nothing was amiss in the situation.

“My dad told you about it.” Al’s daughter asked, not making eye contact or expressing the question as an actual question, more a statement of fact.

“Uh…” I lifted the bartop and joined her. “What, exactly is it?”

“Five nights a week,” she said. “The girl’s auction off their lingerie. It’s a way for the guys to let off steam — for tips.”

“Oh.” I wanted to ask what happened when the lingerie was purchased, but I bit my tongue. This wasn’t penned as a strip bar, so I doubted the removal of said underwear happened in full view.

I worked at Al’s place for a couple of months, during which I got to know a lot of the regulars and generally went home with two or three hundred dollars a night in tips. The guys seemed respectful in that old-school way where they wanted to ensure I was “safe” in some amorphous way only “strong men” could provide. They opened doors for me and complimented my eyes to my face and my ass behind my back, pretending I couldn’t hear them. Some of them begged me to get out from behind the bar and “onto the stage with the other girls” where I could get far more money if I, too, donned lace and tall shoes and talked about God knows what while fluttering my lashes.

I was meat, the other girls were meat, but there was an awful lot of ceremony in creating the illusion we were far more than that, this strange dance between “honor” for us as something precious, and laughter about all the things they’d do to us as soon as eye contact was broken. The strangest part of this was the way Al’s daughter, my boss, who was as short and stout as her father, older than the rest of us, and the epitome of a surly bartender treated me and the others as a result of this lascivious attention. It was like I was there to steal from her and the bar like I was an idiot, criminal, or both. I couldn’t figure why she hated me so much.

Things got bad when Al started to ask me, “to the movies,” or wanted to take me to, “a nice dinner.” My favorite regular, a businessman from somewhere in the Middle East, was the cultural translator who helped me navigate what was actually happening around me since he’d been frequenting the place for years.

“Al’s not in the Hell’s Angels, officially, but a lot of the locals are,” he’d explained. “That’s the connection, plus a lot of the union guys are either customers or puppets that make extra cash for them. Women aren’t allowed, they’re property.”

“I thought Al had been married? To his daughter’s mom?”

The businessman dismissed this with a wave. “They’re basically polygamists. And when they’re not? They’re paying these girls to spend time with them.” He dipped his chin to indicate the lingerie models.

I often wondered why this guy came in but never asked because I suspected the “puppets” he’d referred to had something to do with him, as well.

“Why are you here, anyway?” he asked one day. “I mean, I get it,” he glanced down at me as if this were some kind of claim. “But you’re smart. Like, college material. You don’t need to be wasting your time on a place like this.”

The thing is, I liked working at that place. It was raw and kind of disgusting, but fascinating and so different from anything I’d known. But the third time I’d avoided saying “yes” to Al’s “gentlemanly” requests to take me “on a date,” I could see the real danger beneath the veneer. He stopped giving me the best shifts and stopped working next to me when he came, instead placing me under the supervision of the daughter who hated me.

“You don’t know how to behave,” she said by way of some weird sort of explanation. “You should have listened to him.”

I can only imagine she meant I should have gone out with her fifty-year-old dad or slept with him, or something. What I didn’t realize was it was her job to fire me for not having done so. Two nights in a row she counted and double-counted the till, then had Al check twice and sigh heavily as if scripted, declaring, “it’s short.”

I made so much in tips it would have been insane for me to steal from them, never mind the fact the daughter had told me she was keeping an eye on me for doing so, all of which I explained to the bartending school when they claimed they couldn’t find me another position since Al branded me a thief.

“If Al’s hitting on the girls…,” the teacher said, and I suddenly realized what kind of a claim I was making, “that’s definitely not okay.”

After this, they placed me in a nightclub and I worked like this for another year or so. It took me a while to realize this was my first real foray into sexual harassment at work. What the whole experience showed me was a high beam spotlight into a truly insidious form of toxic masculinity — how the objectification of women as something of “value,” like some sort of precious diamond, is simply commodification at its core. That’s the thing about value: it only exists when someone places it there. As soon as it goes away, the commodity becomes a thing again, something without worth and easy to discard, just like the lingerie purchased off those women’s backs.

Thanks to Michael McDonagh for editing assistance.