Back in February 2009, I got an email from a strange address. The sender was called ‘Domain Admin’ and the domain in question was agingrebel.com. At first I thought it was spam and very nearly deleted it, but I’m glad I didn’t. On that day began a brief but incandescent connection with a complete stranger. It grabbed hold of me and shook me hard. Like a meteor, the Aging Rebel shot through my life, shone brightly and then disappeared.
Back then, I was publishing a book every two years. (It seemed like a good idea at the time.) I was never super successful, but I did get onto radio and television quite often, and I wrote a lot of op-ed pieces for papers around the world. All that writing meant that I got a lot of emails. Most of them were nice, but a lot were negative. One reader wrote that the atom bomb dropped on Hiroshima didn’t actually ‘hit’ a hospital, as I had claimed in The Bomb: A Life, it had exploded 1,000 feet above the hospital. Thanks for that clarification; I’m sure the victims are grateful. An official at NASA wrote me a very long and angry letter in response to my Dark Side of the Moon and threatened to sue me, apparently unaware of his country’s 1st Amendment. Jim Lovell, the astronaut played by Tom Hanks in Apollo 13, also expressed his displeasure, though in gentler fashion. I also got one email that read, rather succinctly, ‘Fuck you, you fucking bastard.’ No signature, no subject, but I have a good idea what it was about.
I thought ‘Domain Admin’ was probably a message from someone in the tin foil hat brigade, or perhaps from yet another reader inclined to nitpick. It was, however, something entirely different. It was fan mail, but from someone who had never actually read anything I’d written. My new best friend, who I came to know as ‘Rebel’, told me:
I am hardly an academic writer. If you go to www.agingrebel.com you will see that. Or, you can just take my word for it. I was just now reading a review of The Sixties Unplugged in the current issue of The American Historical Review. Gerd-Rainer Horn’s impression of your work sure seems fatuous. Probably you do not care but I thought I would offer you an unsolicited, encouraging word anyway. What can it hurt?
How interesting. Some guy in California was writing to lend support after reading a negative review of my book in the AHR. How kind. I hadn’t read that review from Horn and still haven’t to this day. I’ve always felt that I don’t need to read academic reviews because I already know what they’re going to say. Even though I spent 35 years in academia, I’ve never tried to write for that crowd; I’ve always wanted to communicate beyond the ivory towers. A lot of academics take umbrage with that and aren’t afraid to say so.
It turns out that Rebel was objecting to Horn’s review because Horn hadn’t lived through the Sixties. That’s a common complaint: ‘You weren’t there, man, you can’t possibly understand.’ In Rebel’s case, however, that line of argument had some merit. Not only was he there, he was also in thick of things:
I had a pretty good seat on the decade. I was a founding chapter president of SDS [Students for a Democratic Society] at a third tier college. I quit when I decided my fellow travelers were all spoiled, deluded fools. I still had a semester to go when I was drafted in June, 1968. I went, because I wondered why other young men should have to go and fight and not I. It sounds precious now but I thought like that back then.
The Sixties Unplugged seemed to harmonise with what Rebel was trying to say. As the title suggests, I wanted to unplug the decade’s amplifiers, in order to get a purer, more honest sense of what the period was like. Sixties sentimentalists had long promoted a heavily processed story, a fairy tale of heroes, villains, parties, protests, sex, drugs, and rock n’ roll. I wanted to send the message that things were not what they seem, that the heroes were often charlatans and that for a lot of people the decade was nothing more than making a living and getting by. Rebel seemed to get that, even before reading my book.
In that first email, he briefly riffed on his time in Vietnam:
I thought I was going to die. Often. I had a good friend named Jack Rambo. He was from Libby, Montana, wore glasses and he had a Masters in something like dinosaurs and a wife and a baby. He died very painfully in November, 1969 and now his name is an international joke. I knew many people who died
… And, the first time I ever really got stoned was in Vietnam. The Army kept feeding us methamphetamine to keep us awake and in the mood to kill and grass took the edge off that.
After his tour of duty, Rebel returned home to an America that seemed neither familiar nor welcoming. His story is the usual one of the scorned veteran of an unpopular war. According to the standard narrative, there were no parades, no hero’s welcome, no memorials in the parks. Some veterans recall being spat upon by peace protestors. The truth of this narrative has been widely questioned and sometimes dismissed as a myth, but Rebel insisted that there was, for him at least, a grain of truth:
I was standing on a corner in Hermosa Beach in 1989 arguing with a guy in a wheelchair named Ron Kovic [author of Born on the Fourth of July]. He figured out I had also been in-country and he stopped me just dead when he said, ‘Welcome home.’ That was the first time anyone had said that to me. When I first came home and tried to go back to college to finish my degree, my advisor told me, ‘I know I could never kill one of those little yellow people.’ And, I told him, ‘Yes you could.’ Then he and I weren’t pals anymore.
In a later email, Rebel recounted how a professor had refused to shake hands with him after learning that he’d fought in Vietnam. A sense of superiority is easy when one’s principles are never actually put to the test. That seems to have been what touched a nerve when Rebel read that review in the AHR:
Gerd-Rainer Horn sounds like one of those people who have been spitting on me ever since I came back from Vietnam. Let me just say, for what it is worth, it sounds like you are right and your critic is wrong. Nietzsche once told a joke, amazing though that seems. ‘Pride and memory were having an argument. Memory said, “It was like this.” And pride replied, ‘No, it couldn’t have been.”’ The sixties have been glorified for so long because so many who were young then now feel ashamed. I think that is the nerve you hit with your book. It is good to hit nerves. Good job. Keep the faith and enjoy your weekends. Your pal, Rebel
The Nietzsche quote actually went like this: ‘Memory says, “I did that.” Pride replies, “I could not have done that.” Eventually, memory yields.’ In other words, we shape the past according to what we want to believe occurred and forget the inconvenient truths. We all want the past to be comfortable, like a nice warm bed.
After reading that first email, I was intrigued. I went to agingrebel.com to investigate. I discovered that Rebel’s real name was Donald Charles Davis and that he was a biker, born in 1945. Not quite a Hell’s Angel, but someone of that ilk. He’d joined various biker gangs but never stayed a member for long. Perhaps joining wasn’t really his thing; perhaps, like Oscar Wilde, he didn’t want to belong to any club that would accept him as a member.
The Hells Angels seem to love me. The Sons of Silence seem to love me. The Mongols, mostly, seem to love me. They all seem to think I am one of them and they all want to kill each other.
From the way he tells it, his life was a high wire act. I guess he also enjoyed that.
His website, which has now disappeared, was dedicated to promoting a different image of the biker brigade, something more nuanced than the leather, chains, sweat, guns and violence cliché. Hell, this biker quoted Nietzsche. When I mentioned my surprise at those nuances, Rebel replied:
Bikers love Nietzsche by the way. I think the Warlocks down in Florida might actually make Prospects [new members] read him. You might be surprised how literate many bikers are. Not long ago, a Hells Angel quoted the money line from Stephen Crane’s The Blue Hotel to me. ‘Usually there are a dozen to forty women really involved in every murder.’
For a summary of Rebel’s life, I’ll leave it to him. Here’s the potted biography from his website:
The Aging Rebel has lived what cynics call an ‘interesting life’ that has included writing for two newspapers. He was hired by a daily in Massachusetts by mistake when he applied for a job on the loading dock. And, he was fired from another paper in Indiana when, as the Editor put it, that fine journal decided ‘to project an image of professionalism and respectability’. He has also been fired from jobs at magazines and has unsuccessfully pursued careers as an autoworker, laborer, ditch digger, warehouseman, window maker, house framer, art forger, novelist and telephone salesman.
Because he loves children, he has always done his best to keep the world from running out of babies. And, because he loves women, he is usually married. Generally unemployed, he likes motorcycles and lifting weights and his ambitions include winning the lottery. Some people say that he now lives, more or less, in El Lay.
That sounds like something straight out of a Carl Hiaasen novel. How much of it is actually true I don’t know, but it’s certainly entertaining. As a guy that’s had only one career and never been fired from a job, I confess that I have a secret fondness for people like Rebel who constantly fight the system. In Rebel’s case, perhaps that was the effect of the Vietnam War, or perhaps that’s just the guy he’s always been.
I replied and thanked Rebel for his support, and mentioned in passing that I owned a bike. Well, it was actually a scooter with a top speed of 30 mph. The one time I rode it wearing shorts with a baguette sticking out of my backpack is one of the fondest memories of my life. Ok, maybe there wasn’t a baguette. Maybe there was just sliced white loaf. See Nietzsche above.
Don’t be ashamed of your bike. Everybody has to have a first bike. Why, you’ll be wearing black leather and carrying a derringer in your boot in no time.
Since he hadn’t yet read anything by me, I offered to send him a few books.
Yes, please … The nicest part of me wants to warn you, ‘Dude, anybody can give it away.’ But the predatory part of me must strike before you change your mind. Do it now. Don’t think about it. Just do it, man, and nobody gets hurt. I would like to read anything you write.
I sent my new friend The Sixties Unplugged, Dark Side of the Moon, and The Bomb: A Life. Hey, praise me and I get really generous . Rebel came back quite quickly with his thoughts on my Sixties book and, in the process, provided some pretty pertinent advice to aspiring writers everywhere. He also injected my confidence with a Class A amphetamine. I don’t really like quoting people who praise me, but here goes:
It’s just a really nice book. … Not that you did not get some things wrong. You were most off the mark, from time to time, with sex, drugs and rock n’ roll, because you weren’t there. But even in those pages I learned things I hadn’t known before. And, I was there. And, in some sections of the book you actually changed how I remember certain places and times. Like magic. Maybe I should call you Witch. Having been there is overestimated anyway. Here’s a joke I can tell but you probably can’t. How many Vietnam Vets does it take to screw in a light bulb? You can’t know man! You can’t know! You weren’t there!
And, I will tell you this too, because you are an academic, so you probably never hear this. You know how to write. You get it. Not everybody does. Virtually no academics can write. Not even a little. Academia, with its emphasis on conformity and timidity, is an enemy of good writing. You know what scholarship sounds like: ‘Well, it might be argued, that under certain conditions, some people, possibly even Derrida, might be inclined to reason that….’ Eric Berne called this crap the ‘Berkeley Subjunctive’.
You cannot be taught to write. You either can do it or you can’t. I once heard one of the last of the fire breathing, dragon eating, depression era newspaper publishers give some guy with a Masters from the Columbia School of Journalism the best advice I’d ever heard on writing. Publisher’s name was Bill Parry. ‘Look! It’s simple, okay’, I heard Parry growl. ‘All you have to do is just tell a fucking story.’ Seventeen years of school and the kid couldn’t tell a story. You tell very good stories, DeGroot. Especially for a guy paddling in the placid Academic Sea. … So, I have decided that somebody needs to tell you that you do write well. … Keep the faith. Enjoy your weekends. Your pal, Rebel
He ended that email with a line that still haunts me. ‘You stay safe. I associate with honorable men. You have to work with snakes.’ It’s not true that he associated only with honourable men. There’s internet posts accusing him of being a liar, a cheat and a FBI informant. Did I work with snakes? Well, I’ve heard seminars called snake pits, but quite a few of my colleagues were good people. A few, however, were snakes.
My last email from Rebel was the longest, a stream of consciousness that would have made Kerouac proud. Very little punctuation, no linear path. He talked about a RICO case against a motorcycle gang, about his kids and what they were doing, about friends in prison and friends out on bail and about a book he was writing. (He published The Aging Rebel: Dispatches From The Motorcycle Outlaw Frontier in 2011.) I concluded that he was probably seriously stoned when he wrote that email, or that perhaps he was ADHD. Probably both.
At any rate, at the end of that rambling note came a few lines of lucidity that I subsequently quoted to my students when I lectured to them about writing history:
There was a time, long ago, when historians were supposed to be prose stylists. It was once the job of an historian to make the past into a story people could understand.
In my previous email, I had mentioned again my struggles with academic journals. I told Rebel how I had once been criticised in a journal for being too interesting. ‘DeGroot’s fluent prose and desire to tell a good story impedes rigorous analysis’, the critic wrote. To that, Rebel replied:
Oh, just blow me! I know you cannot really say anything to this sort of insufferable bullshit but the next time you read or hear that just think to yourself, I know somebody who could have you killed. Okay? If they really piss you off, go ahead and let me know. I know some Hell’s Angels in England.
I never took Rebel up on that offer, but I’ve always thought that it would make a great premise for a novel. And, whenever I read a bad review of something I’ve written, I do fantasise about Rebel riding to my rescue on his Harley.
That was the end of our correspondence. It had run its course. For a brief moment we had sublime symbiosis. I gave him some writing he enjoyed and also managed to show him that not all academics are timid conformists paddling in a placid sea. For me, he was the living embodiment of what I’ve always tried to argue in my articles and books: that things are not what they seem. He also taught me that praise from a literate Biker is a lot more valuable than good words in the American Historical Review. Was he a fantasist? Maybe a bit. But I don’t really care whether everything he told me was true. Rebel was a gifted storyteller and stories are the distilled essence of the human experience. He might not have been entirely truthful, but his emotions were genuine. He loved what I wrote and wasn’t afraid to tell me that. And for that I am immensely grateful. Every writer needs a Rebel.
Donald Charles Davis – The Aging Rebel – died on 19 June 2020, after crashing his bike.
Thanks for sharing this.