Anyway, this AmDream/Violence book needs a much tighter focus than we’ve given it so far. The open-ended possibility that we all endorsed at the rubber-tree restaurant in NY was a sort of Definitive Statement of everything that’s happening NOW, plus a total background to explain it all.
Contrary to all external evidence, I exist in a steaming funk—relating to this subject—about 20 hours a day. All the bad fantasies that I used in the Hell’s Angels book have now come true. My mail is evidence of all the rude speculations I made about the fantasies of suburban housewives. Did Margaret show you the file I sent her from the woman in Tinley Park, Illinois? You should look at that file—it’s only a few letters, but they add up to one of the most depressing documents ever set in any kind of type. Every time I get one of those things I look at Juan and wonder how I can possibly tell him what to watch out for. The dimensions of what we have fucked up in this country are beyond any coherent explanation. It’s beyond any reasonable rage and almost beyond despair—in words, at any rate. But the terrible depth of the cross-referenced reality that I’ve been building for six months leaves me still unprepared for the sort of shock I received this morning, about dawn, when I called one of my neighbors and said “Your cows have eaten my lettuce, they’re shitting on my porch, and I’m going to kill every one of the bastards if you don’t get them out of here in 10 minutes.”
At that point in my killing rage, I was advised that the laws of Colorado make it mandatory for a landowner (or dweller) to fence his land against the entrance of cattle—rather than requiring the owner of the cattle to fence them in. In other words, the burden is on the afflicted … at which point I said that I really wanted the cows in my yard, because it gave me an opportunity to practice random high-speed patterns on my motorcycle—running the cows hither and yon across the landscape, burning off valuable pounds of market meat in the process, and chasing the bastards till they foam at the mouth and fall in their tracks. (The bulls are tricky; they don’t always run, and when they charge you have to be very fast and cool with the gear-changes—or they’ll crush you.)
Anyway, that’s the style—the atavistic reality—that I’ve been running into in my effort to set up a local fort, if only so I can leave it. As a matter of fact I have come to the point where I think I should leave it. I think the trick, right now, is to move to L.A. for at least six months. And to see, first-hand, what sort of hole the freaks are digging for themselves. New York is intolerable and unrepresentative; Chicago is the most representative city in the country, but impossible to live in; which leaves us with L.A., which is still slightly open and possible like Chicago was when a whole generation of American writers abandoned it—for the best of reasons—and despite all the worthy reasons for burning L.A., it is still the main big city to watch, if you want to know what’s happening. All the others are salvage-jobs.
Well … this is a last effort to rescue this from the “nice but never-mailed letters” file. This is the bundle that haunts my typewriter to the left; to the right is the pile of things that “must be answered.” And the whole goddamn pile is a monument to whatever is hanging me up … and it must be pretty obvious all around that something is. I’m really not writing much; or, rather, I’m writing a hell of a lot and not submitting much … which amounts to the same thing. And it’s mainly because there’s no humor, no laughter, no redeeming quality of insulated absurdity in the terrible wisdom I’ve been filing for six months. It’s a fucking nightmare, and nothing in my repertoire of snide acrobatics has cut me loose from it. The July 20 issue of The New Republic is a fine example of the perils of clipping public documents. Try TRB’s 25th anniversary column for a laugh.87 I have commissioned a bumper sticker that says “Fear and Downhill.” I have also commissioned two others, which I won’t reveal here. Local issues are so sharp, in terms of what’s happening nationally, that I can’t avoid them. We’re fencing here, on pretty violent terms, and the local power structure is going far out of its way to view me as a colorful wildman from Woody Creek … (did I send you that letter, from the Aspen Times, where I called the local magistrate a “hate-infected wart on the appendix of humanity”?). Yesterday this human cyst fined a harmless drifter $250 (plus 90 days in jail) on a complaint of “obstructing traffic” in front of a local insurance agency. Four years ago I lived in Woody Creek—so broke that I didn’t have a phone or a TV or a radio or any other kind of contact—and so completely without funds that I could only afford to drive into town about once a week for a few commercial beers. The local merchants—these vicious pigs who are forming anti-hippie “vigilante groups” now, with the published blessing of the local judge and magistrate—wouldn’t cash a $5 check for me in the spring of 1964 … and now these same gutless dollar-animals go out of the way to ignore Me, my general image and my Martin Bormann letters in the local papers—so they can give me credit and reap the benefits of my patronage. These fucking curs, these hyenas, these swine … my credit here is unbounded, unlimited, unchallenged. …
Well … maybe the thing to do right now is to finish off The Rum Diary under the sub-title of: “Or—Why I Live in Woody Creek.” Which would bring me a bit closer to the things that bug me on a day-to-day basis—a memory voice, talking about how it was in San Juan in 1960 (when you still believed in the Sun), and now—after ten years of NY and Rio and San Francisco and Big Sur and the Rockies and the whole train of staying ahead of tomorrow’s Time covers … trying to get the crucial edge on that hollow, totem-pole system that doesn’t even exist anymore… but which is still so pervasive, and so awfully weighty, that even its enemies will be better off if it can be brought to its knees slowly, with a touch of the gradual, time-buying politics that will make a little room for a newer, more human structure.
Hunter
FROM OSCAR ACOSTA:
Thompson had sent Acosta an Aspen Times article quoting him as an opponent of the ski-resort company that already pretty much ran the town.
July 22, 1968
Los Angeles, CA
Hunter,
The only question I have about that article in the Aspen Times is—can’t you really afford another shirt? You’ve been wearing that same goddamn shirt now for over a year that I know of; the last time I saw Sandy, my last day in Aspen, she noticed that I had a shirt somewhat similar to that one of yours, only a different color, and she said she was going to get you one; I mean, is this your trade mark now? also, it seems to me you’ve grown about another inch balder.
The letter from Gerald Walker of The New York Times: What would be the reaction, do you think, if I had David Sanchez, Prime Minister of the Brown Berets, send him a very threatening letter; I mean, you know we do have people in New York, and they are not all “boys”; as to his crap about it not being newsworthy, that especially from The New York Times is simply a bunch of bullshit; you know as well as I that The New York Times creates the news itself. The point of the note that meant more to me was that he seemed to be saying that he did not want to get “you” personally involved in something like this, which is another story in itself, of course.
As to my flamenco dancer … it is over with. For reasons that would take me several days to explain … in any event, she leaves for Mexico this weekend. Once again, I am sad and lonely, but I am not dead yet.
I guess I simply will not be able to make it to Aspen this summer; I could take one week off, but it will take me a day and a half to drive there, a day and a half to drive back, leaving only four days for all the shit we got to discuss, for all the booze and dope we got to consume, that would require twenty-four hours a day, thus resulting in my returning to L.A. ten times more exhausted than when I left, so I think I better put it off till the fall sometime. In any event, I liked the fall in Aspen best of all; living in that color last fall will be an experience that will stay in my head for the rest of my life.
Hay nos vemos.
Oscar
CHICAGO—SUMMER OF ’68:
Thompson’s experiences at the chaotic
and bloody August 26–29 Democratic National Convention in Chicago were so unsettling that he created the alter ego “Raoul Duke” to tell the story.
August, 1968
Woody Creek, CO
Sometime after midnight on Wednesday I was standing in Grant Park about ten feet in front of the National Guard’s bayonet picket fence and talking to some Digger-types from Berkeley. There were three of them, wearing those Milwaukee truck-driver hats with mustaches instead of beards, and their demeanor—their vibes, as it were—made it clear that I was talking to some veteran counter-punchers. They were smelling around for a fight, but they weren’t about to start one; they had a whole park to kill time in, but for their own reasons they’d chosen to stand on the front line of the Mob, facing the Guardsmen across ten feet of empty sidewalk. Behind the line of bayonets, Michigan avenue was a crowded no-man’s land full of cops, TV cameras and barbed-wire covered jeeps … and on the other side of that moat was the Conrad Hilton, its entrance surrounded by a wall of blue police helmets and big sheets of plywood covering the windows of the street-level Haymarket Bar—where, several hours earlier, the plate glass had been shattered by human bodies pushed completely into the bar by the crazed police-charge.
The Berkeley Digger-types were convinced that the earlier action was only a preview of a clash that would probably come before dawn. “The bastards are getting ready to finish us off,” said one. I nodded, thinking he was probably right and not even wondering—as I do now—why he included me. I was, after all, a member of the official, total-access press. I had that prized magnetic badge around my neck—the same one that, earlier that day, had earned me a billy-club shot in the stomach when I tried to cross a police line: I’d showed the badge and kept on walking, but one of the cops grabbed my arm. “That’s not a press pass,” he said. I held it under his face. “What the hell do you think it is?” I asked … and I was still looking at the snarl on his face when I felt my stomach punched back against my spine; he used his club like a spear, holding it with both hands and hitting me right above the belt. That was the moment, in Chicago, when I decided to vote for Nixon.
The Berkeley trio had noticed the press tag at once, and asked who I worked for. “Nobody,” I said. “I’m just sort of getting the feel of things; I’m writing a book.” They were curious, and after a jangled conversation of bluffs, evasions, challenges and general bullshit, I introduced myself and we shook hands. “Thompson,” said one of them. “Yeah … you’re the guy who wrote that book on the Hell’s Angels, aren’t you?” I nodded. The one closest to me grinned and reached into his jacket, pulling out a messy-looking cigarette. “Here,” he said, “have a joint.”
He held it out to me, and suddenly, with no warning, I was into one of those definitive instants, a moment of the Great Fork. Here I was in Chicago, in a scene that had all the makings of a total Armageddon, with my adrenaline up so high for so long that I knew I’d collapse when I came down … ten feet in front of a row of gleaming bayonets and with plain-clothes cops all around me and cameras popping every few seconds at almost everybody … and suddenly this grinning, hairy-faced little bugger from Berkeley offers me a joint. I wonder now, looking back on it, if McGovern would have accepted a joint from McCarthy on the podium at the Amphitheatre … which reminds me that I think I read somewhere that McGovern’s daughter was arrested for possession of marijuana shortly before the convention (Unruh & Cranston88)… which hardly matters, because I felt, at that moment, a weird mixture of panic and anticipation. For two days and nights I’d been running around the streets of Chicago, writing longhand notebook wisdom about all the people who were being forced, by the drama of this convention, to take sides in a very basic way … (“once again,” I had written on Monday night, “we’re back to that root-question: Which Side Are You On?”). And now, with this joint in front of my face, it was my turn … and I knew, when I saw the thing, that I was going to smoke it; I was going to smoke a goddamned lumpy little marijuana cigarette in front of the National Guard, the Chicago police and all three television networks—with an Associated Press photographer standing a few feet away. By the time I lit the joint I was already so high on adrenaline that I thought I would probably levitate with the first puff. I was sure, as I looked across that sidewalk at all those soldiers staring back at me, that I was about to get busted, bayoneted and crippled forever. As always, I could see the headlines: “Writer Arrested on Marijuana Charges at Grant Park Protest.”
Yet the atmosphere in the Grant Park that night was so tense, so emotionally-hyped and flatly convinced that we could all be dead or maimed by morning … that it never occurred to me not to smoke that joint in a totally public and super-menacing scene where, as the demonstrators had chanted earlier, “The Whole World Is Watching.” It seemed, at the time, like a thing that had to be done. I didn’t want to be busted; I didn’t even agree with these people—but if the choice was between them or those across the street, I knew which side I was on, and to refuse that joint would have been—in my own mind—a fatal equivocation. As I lit the thing I realized that I’d lost the protection of the press pass, or at least whatever small immunity it carried in Chicago, if any. That billy-club jolt in the stomach had altered my notions of press-leverage.
With the joint in my hand, glowing in the night as I inhaled, I figured, well, I may as well get as numb as I can. Then, in a moment of fine inspiration, I took a nice lungful and handed the joint to the AP photographer standing next to me. His face turned to putty; I might as well have given him a live hand grenade …and then … then … like a man stepping up on the gallows, he put the thing to his lips and inhaled …
… and I knew I was home free, or at least I wasn’t going to be busted. He’d been standing there very cool and observant waiting for something to happen on the front lines while he stayed on the balls of his feet ready to run when the bayonets came; I could almost feel him over there, a heady presence, vaguely amused at this flagrant felony being committed under the eyes of the National Guard and taking sides, himself, by declining to photograph us … it would have been a fine Chicago Tribune – style photo: “Drug-Crazed Hippies Defy the Flag” …and then, it was his turn. When he put the joint to his lips and drew on it very skillfully I knew he had measured the balance of terror and decided that it was safe, under the circumstances, to smoke a joint in public.
I admired the man, and liked him even better than I had the night before when he’d bought me a drink out on Wells street. We had both been caught in a police charge, and instead of running with the mob we had both ducked into a bar, letting the cops sweep on by. Now, 24 hours later, he was sitting on another flash point, smoking a joint—a strange gig for a press photographer. They are a weird breed, estranged in every way from pointy-headed reporters and editorial writers. If reporters are generally liberal in their thinking, photographers are massively conservative. They are the true professionals of journalism: the End, the photo, justifies anything they have to say, do or think in order to get it. Police brutality, to a good press photographer, is nothing more or less than a lucky chance for some action shots. Later, when his prints are drying in the darkroom, he’ll defend the same cops he earlier condemned with his lens.
All this was running through my head as the joint came back to me and my sense of humor returned along with my sense of taste and I realized, after three or four tokes, that I was smoking really retrograde shit. “Jesus,” I said, “this is awful stuff, where did you get it, Lake Michigan?”
The fellow who’d given it to me laughed and said, “Hell, that’s THC. What you’re tasting is old Bull Durham.89 It’s chemical grass synthetic stuff. We soaked it in THC and dried it out.”
Bull Durham! Synthetic grass! I was tempted to jam the butt of the thing into the little bastard’s eye …all those terrible charges and I wasn’t even smoking grass, but some kind of neo-legal bastardized Bull Durham that tasted like swamp corn.
It was just about then that I got the first rush. THC, DMZ, OJT—
the letters didn’t matter, I was stoned. Those bayonets suddenly looked nine feet tall and the trees above the park seemed to press down on us; the lights across the street grew brighter, and bluer, and they seemed to track me as I wandered off to see what was happening in the rest of the park.
It didn’t take me long to realize that I’d blown my keen-eyed observer thing for that night, and that I should get the hell out of the park while I could still walk. The scene was bad enough with a perfectly straight head; peripheral vision was the key to survival—you had to know what was happening all around you and never get out of range of at least one opening to run through when the attack came. Which was no place to be with a fuzzy head…I aimed for the stoplight at Balboa street and lurched across to the Hilton bar. A 500 pound cop with blue fangs stopped me at the hotel entrance and demanded to see my non-magnetic hotel press pass. It was all I could manage to find the thing and show it to him, then I aimed myself across the lobby toward the bar, where it suddenly occurred to me—I had promised to meet Duke at midnight.
Now, as closing time neared, the bar was three-deep with last minute drinkers. The desperate scene outside seemed light-years away; only the plywood windows reminded those of us inside that the American Dream was clubbing itself to death just a few feet away.