A heavy stare, then speaking very slowly: “Are you saying, Mister Duke . . . that you were attacked out here?”
“Well . . .no . . . not literally attacked, officer, but seriously menaced. I stopped to piss, and the minute I stepped out of the car these filthy little bags of poison were all around me. They moved like greased lightning!”
Would this story hold up?
No. They would place me under arrest, then routinely search the car—and when that happened all kinds of savage hell would break loose. They would never believe all these drugs were necessary to my work; that in truth I was a professional journalist on my way to Las Vegas to cover the National District Attorneys Conference on Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs.
“Just samples, officer. I got this stuff off a road man for the Neo-American Church back in Barstow. He started acting funny, so I worked him over.”
Would they buy this?
No. They would lock me in some hell-hole of a jail and beat me on the kidneys with big branches—causing me to piss blood for years to come . . .
Luckily, nobody bothered me while I ran a quick inventory on the kit-bag. The stash was a hopeless mess, all churned together and half crushed. Some of the mescaline pellets had disintegrated into a reddish-brown powder, but I counted about thirty-five or forty still intact. My attorney had eaten all the reds, but there was quite a bit of speed left . . . no more grass, the coke bottle was empty, one acid blotter, a nice brown lump of opium hash and six loose amyls . . . Not enough for anything serious, but a careful rationing of the mescaline would probably get us through the four-day National District Attorneys Drug Conference.
On the outskirts of Vegas I stopped at a neighborhood pharmacy and bought two quarts of tequila, two fifths of Chivas Regal and a pint of ether. I was tempted to ask for some amyls. My angina pectoris was starting to act up. But the druggist had the eyes of a mean Baptist hysteric. I told him I needed the ether to get the tape off my legs, but by that time he’d already rung the stuff up and bagged it. He didn’t give a fuck about ether.
I wondered what he would say if I asked him for $22 worth of Romilar and a tank of nitrous oxide. Probably he would have sold it to me. Why not? Free enterprise . . . Give the public what it needs—especially this bad-sweaty, nervous-talkin’ fella with tape all over his legs and this terrible cough, along with angina pectoris and these godawful Aneuristic flashes every time he gets in the sun. I mean this fella was in bad shape, officer. How the hell was I to know he’d walk straight out to his car and start abusing those drugs?
How indeed? I lingered a moment at the magazine rack, then got a grip on myself and hurried outside to the car. The idea of going completely crazy on laughing gas in the middle of a DAs’ drug conference had a definite warped appeal. But not on the first day, I thought. Save that for later. No point getting busted and committed before the conference even starts.
Another day, another convertible . . . & another hotel full of cops
The first order of business was to get rid of the Red Shark. It was too obvious. Too many people might recognize it, especially the Vegas police; although as far as they knew, the thing was already back home in L.A. It was last seen running full bore across Death Valley on Interstate 15. Stopped and warned in Baker by the CHP . . . then suddenly disappeared . . .
The last place they would look for it, I felt, was in a rental-car lot at the airport. I had to go out there anyway, to meet my attorney. He would be arriving from L.A. in the late afternoon.
I drove very quietly on the freeway, gripping my normal instinct for great speed and sudden lane changes—trying to remain inconspicuous—and when I got there I parked the Shark between two old Air Force buses in a “utility lot” about half a mile from the terminal. Very tall buses. Make it hard as possible for the fuckers. A little walking never hurt anybody.
By the time I got to the terminal I was pouring sweat. But nothing abnormal. I tend to sweat heavily in warm climates. My clothes are soaking wet from dawn to dusk. This worried me at first, but when I went to a doctor and described my normal daily intake of booze, drugs, and poison, he told me to come back when the sweating stopped. That would be the danger point, he said—a sign that my body’s desperately overworked flushing mechanism had broken down completely. “I have great faith in the natural processes,” he said. “But in your case . . . well . . . I find no precedent. We’ll just have to wait and see, then work with what’s left.”
I spent about two hours in the bar drinking Bloody Marys for the V-8 nutritional content and watching the flights from L.A. I’d eaten nothing but grapefruit for about twenty hours and my head was adrift from its moorings.
You better watch yourself, I thought. There are limits to what the human body can endure. You don’t want to break down and start bleeding from the ears right here in the terminal. Not in this town. In Las Vegas they kill the weak and deranged.
I realized this, and kept quiet even when I felt symptoms of a terminal blood sweat coming on. But this passed. I saw the cocktail waitress getting nervous, so I forced myself to get up and walk stiffly out of the bar. No sign of my attorney.
Down to the VIP car-rental booth, where I traded the Red Shark in for a White Cadillac Convertible. “This goddamn Chevy has caused me a lot of trouble,” I told them. “I get the feeling that people are putting me down—especially in gas stations, when I have to get out & open the hood manually.”
“Well . . .of course,” said the man behind the desk. “What you need, I think, is one of our Mercedes 600 Towne-Cruiser Specials, with air-conditioning. You can even carry your own fuel, if you want; we make that available . . .”
“Do I look like a goddamn Nazi?” I said. “I’ll have a natural American car, or nothing at all!”
They called up the white Coupe de Ville at once. Everything was automatic. I could sit in the red-leather driver’s seat and make every inch of the car jump, by touching the proper buttons. It was a wonderful machine: ten grand worth of gimmicks and high-priced Special Effects. The rear windows leaped up with a touch, like frogs in a dynamite pond. The white canvas top ran up and down like a roller coaster. The dashboard was full of esoteric lights & dials & meters that I would never understand—but there was no doubt in my mind that I was into a superior machine.
The Caddy wouldn’t get off the line quite as fast as the Red Shark, but once it got rolling—around eighty—it was pure smooth hell . . . all that elegant, upholstered weight lashing across the desert was like rolling through midnight on the old California Zephyr.
I drove straight to the hotel after renting the car. There was still no sign of my attorney, so I decided to check in on my own—if only to get off the street and avoid a public breakdown. I left the Whale in a VIP parking slot and shambled self-consciously into the lobby with one small leather bag—a handcrafted, custom-built satchel that had just been made for me by a leathersmith friend in Boulder.
Our room was at the Flamingo, in the nerve-center of the Strip: right across the street from Caesar’s Palace and the Dunes—site of the Drug Conference. The bulk of the conferees were staying at the Dunes, but those of us who signed up fashionably late were assigned to the Flamingo.
The place was full of cops. I saw this at a glance. Most of them were just standing around trying to look casual, all dressed exactly alike in their cut-rate Vegas casuals: plaid Bermuda shorts, Arnie Palmer golf shirts, and hairless white legs tapering down to rubberized “beach sandals.” It was a terrifying scene to walk into—a super stakeout of some kind. If I hadn’t known about the conference my mind might have snapped. You get the impression that somebody was going to be gunned down in a blazing crossfire at any moment—maybe the entire Manson Family.
My arrival was badly timed. Most of the national DAs and other cop-types had already checked in. These were the people who now stood around the lobby & stared grimly at newcomers. What appeared to be the Final Stakeout was only about two hundred vacationing cops with nothing better to do. They didn’t even
notice each other.
I waded up to the desk and got in line. The man in front of me was a police chief from some small town in Michigan. His Agnew-style wife was standing about three feet off to his right while he argued with the desk clerk: “Look, fella—I told you I have a postcard here that says I have reservations in this hotel. Hell, I’m with the District Attorneys conference! I’ve already paid for my room.”
“Sorry, sir. You’re on the ‘late list.’ Your reservations were transferred to the . . .ah . . . Moonlight Motel, which is out on Paradise Boulevard and actually a very fine place of lodging and only sixteen blocks from here, with its own pool and . . .”
“You dirty little faggot! Call the manager! I’m tired of listening to this dogshit!”
The manager appeared and offered to call a cab. This was obviously the second or maybe even the third act in a cruel drama that had begun long before I showed up. The police chief’s wife was crying; the gaggle of friends that he’d mustered for support were too embarrassed to back him up—even now, in this showdown at the desk, with this angry little cop firing his best and final shot. They knew he was beaten; he was going against the RULES, and the people hired to enforce those rules said “no vacancy.”
After ten minutes of standing in line behind this noisy little asshole and his friends, I felt the bile rising. Where did this cop—of all people—get the nerve to argue with anybody in terms of Right & Reason? I had been there with these fuzzy little shitheads—and so, I sensed, had the desk clerk. He had the air of a man who’d been fucked around, in his time, by a fairly good cross-section of mean-tempered rule-crazy cops . . .
So now he was just giving their argument back to them: it doesn’t matter who’s right or wrong, man . . . or who’s paid his bill & who hasn’t . . . what matters right now is that for the first time in my life I can work out on a pig. “Fuck you, officer, I’m in charge here, and I’m telling you we don’t have room for you.”
I was enjoying this whipsong, but after a while I felt dizzy, bad nervous, and my impatience got the better of my amusement. So I stepped around the Pig and spoke directly to the desk clerk. “Say,” I said, “I hate to interrupt, but I have a reservation and I wonder if maybe I could just sort of slide through and get out of your way.” I smiled, letting him know I’d been digging his snake-bully act on the cop party that was now standing there, psychologically off-balance and staring at me like I was some kind of water-rat crawling up to the desk.
I looked pretty bad: wearing old Levi’s and white Chuck Taylor All-Star basketball sneakers . . . and my ten-peso Acapulco shirt had long since come apart at the shoulder seams from all that road-wind. My beard was about three days old, bordering on standard wino trim, and my eyes were totally hidden by Sandy Bull’s Saigon-mirror shades.
But my voice had the tone of a man who knows he has a reservation. I was gambling on my attorney’s foresight . . . but I couldn’t pass a chance to put the horn into a cop:
. . . and I was right. The reservation was in my attorney’s name. The desk clerk hit his bell to summon the bag boy. “This is all I have with me, right now,” I said. “The rest is out there in that White Cadillac convertible.” I pointed to the car that we could all see parked just outside the front door. “Can you have somebody drive it around to the room?”
The desk clerk was friendly. “Don’t worry about a thing, sir. Just enjoy your stay here—and if there’s anything you need, just call the desk.”
I nodded & smiled, half watching the stunned reaction of the cop crowd right next to me. They were stupid with shock. Here they were arguing with every piece of leverage they could command, for a room they’d already paid for—and suddenly their whole act gets sideswiped by some crusty drifter who looks like something out of an upper-Michigan hobo jungle. And he checks in with a handful of credit cards! Jesus! What’s happening in this world?
What indeed? The bag boy grinned. The desk clerk grinned. And the cop crowd eyed me nervously. They had just been blown off the track by a style of freak they’d never seen before. I left them there to ponder it, fuming & bitching at the gates of some castle they would never enter.
Getting Down to Business . . . Opening Day at the Drug Conference
“On behalf of the prosecuting attorneys of this country, I welcome you.”
We sat in the rear fringe of a crowd of about 1,500 in the main ballroom of the Dunes Hotel. Far up in front of the room, barely visible from the rear, the executive director of the National District Attorneys Association—a middle-aged, well-groomed, successful GOP businessman type named Patrick Healy—was opening their Third National Institute on Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs. His remarks reached us by way of a big, low-fidelity speaker mounted on a steel pole in our corner. Perhaps a dozen others were spotted around the room, all facing the rear and looming over the crowd . . . so that no matter where you sat or even tried to hide, you were always looking down the muzzle of a big speaker.
This produced an odd effect. People in each section of the ballroom tended to stare at the nearest voice-box, instead of watching the distant figure of whoever was actually talking far up front on the podium. This 1935 style of speaker placement totally depersonalized the room. There was something ominous and authoritarian about it. Whoever set up that sound system was probably some kind of sheriff’s auxiliary technician on leave from a drive-in theater in Muskogee, Oklahoma, where the management couldn’t afford individual car speakers and relied on ten huge horns, mounted on telephone poles in the parking area.
But the best technicians available to the National DAs convention in Vegas apparently couldn’t handle it. Their sound system looked like something Ulysses S. Grant might have rigged up to address his troops during the siege of Vicksburg. The voices from up front crackled with a fuzzy, high-pitched urgency, and the delay was just enough to keep the words disconcertingly out of phase with the speaker’s gestures.
“We must come to terms with the Drug Culture in this country . . . country . . . country! . . .” These echoes drifted back to the rear in confused waves. “The reefer butt is called a ‘roach’ because it resembles a cockroach . . . cockroach . . . cockroach . . .”
“What the fuck are these people talking about?” my attorney whispered. “You’d have to be crazy on acid to think a joint looked like a goddamn cockroach!”
I shrugged. It was clear that we’d stumbled into a prehistoric gathering. The voice of a “drug expert” named Bloomquist crackled out of the nearby speakers: “. . . about these flashbacks, the patient never knows; he thinks it’s all over and he gets himself straightened out for six months . . . and then, darn it, the whole trip comes back on him.”
Gosh darn that fiendish LSD! Dr. E. R. Bloomquist, MD, was the keynote speaker, one of the big stars of the conference. He is the author of a paperback book titled Marijuana, which—according to the cover—“tells it like it is.” (He is also the inventor of the roach/cockroach theory . . .)
According to the book jacket, he is an “Associate Clinical Professor of Surgery (Anesthesiology) at the University of Southern California School of Medicine” . . . and also “a well known authority on the abuse of dangerous drugs.” Dr. Bloomquist “has appeared on national network television panels, has served as a consultant for government agencies, was a member of the Committee on Narcotics Addiction and Alcoholism of the Council on Mental Health of the American Medical Association.” His wisdom is massively reprinted and distributed, says the publisher. He is clearly one of the heavies on that circuit of second-rate academic hustlers who get paid anywhere from $500 to $1,000 a hit for lecturing to cop-crowds.
Dr. Bloomquist’s book is a compendium of stale bullshit. On page 49 he explains the “four states of being” in the cannabis society: “Cool, Groovy, Hip & Square”—in that descending order. “The square is seldom if ever cool,” says Bloomquist. “He is ‘not with it,’ that is, he doesn’t know ‘what’s happening.’ But if he manages to figure it out, he moves up a notch to ‘hip.’ And
if he can bring himself to approve of what’s happening, he becomes ‘groovy.’ And after that, with much luck and perseverence, he can rise to the rank of ‘cool.’ ”
Bloomquist writes like somebody who once bearded Tim Leary in a campus cocktail lounge and paid for all the drinks. And it was probably somebody like Leary who told him with a straight face that sunglasses are known in the drug culture as “tea shades.”
This is the kind of dangerous gibberish that used to be posted, in the form of mimeographed bulletins, in Police Dept. locker rooms.
Indeed:
Know Your Dope Fiend. Your Life May Depend On It! You will not be able to see his eyes because of Tea-Shades, but his knuckles will be white from inner tension and his pants will be crusted with semen from constantly jacking off when he can’t find a rape victim. He will stagger and babble when questioned. He will not respect your badge. The Dope Fiend fears nothing. He will attack, for no reason, with every weapon at his command—including yours. Beware. Any officer apprehending a suspected marijuana addict should use all necessary force immediately. One stitch in time (on him) will usually save nine on you. Good luck.
“The Chief.”
“If you don’t know, come to learn . . . if you know, come to teach.”
—motto on invitations to National DAs convention in Vegas,
April 25–29, 1971
The first session—the opening remarks—lasted most of the afternoon. We sat patiently through the first two hours, although it was clear from the start that we weren’t going to learn anything, and it was equally clear that we’d be crazy to try any teaching. It was easy enough to sit there with a head full of mescaline and listen to hour after hour of irrelevant gibberish . . . There was certainly no risk involved. These poor bastards didn’t know mescaline from macaroni.
I suspect we could have done the whole thing on acid . . . except for some of the people; there were faces and bodies in that group who would have been absolutely unendurable on acid. The sight of a 344-pound police chief from Waco, Texas, necking openly with his 290-pound wife (or whatever woman he had with him) when the lights were turned off for a Dope Film was just barely tolerable on mescaline—which is mainly a sensual/surface drug that exaggerates reality, instead of altering it—but with a head full of acid, the sight of two fantastically obese human beings far gone in a public grope while a thousand cops all around them watched a movie about the “dangers of marijuana” would not be emotionally acceptable. The brain would reject it: the medulla would attempt to close itself off from the signals it was getting from the frontal lobes . . . and the middle-brain, meanwhile, would be trying desperately to put a different interpretation on the scene, before passing it back to the medulla and the risk of physical action.