Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas

  So, for now, well … Merry Xmas & all that crap. Sandy talks constantly of both you and Ann. Keep in mind that we have a decent guest-room and say hello to Benti when you see him—and Kuralt, that swine. Christmas is a rotten hype & all we can do is ride it out. Say hello to Ann for me, and send word. …

  Ciao,

  Hunter

  —also Hello to John, wherever he is …

  TO THE EDITOR, ASPEN NEWS AND ASPEN TIMES:

  Signing himself “Adolph,” Thompson sent his local newspaper an anti–Vietnam War satire worthy of Jonathan Swift’s “Modest Proposal” to end hunger in 1729 London by feeding the orphans to the poor.

  December 14, 1969

  Woody Creek, CO

  Dear Editor,

  My reason for writing this letter is unfortunate, but I can no longer live in Aspen without doing something about the absence of feeling about the war in Vietnam. I am not the only one who feels this way.

  Accordingly, I want to explain our action before we do it, because I realize a lot of people won’t understand. On Xmas eve we are going to burn a dog with napalm (or jellied gasoline made to the formula of napalm) on a street where many people will see it. If possible, we will burn several dogs, depending on how many we find on that day. We will burn these dogs wherever we can have the most public impact.

  Anybody who hates the idea of burning dogs with napalm should remember that the American army is burning human beings with napalm every day in Vietnam. If you think it is wrong to burn a dog in Aspen, what do you think about burning people in Asia?

  We think this will make the point, once people see what napalm does. It hurts humans much worse than it hurts dogs. And if anybody doubts this, they can volunteer to take the place of whatever dogs we have when the time comes. Anybody who wants to try it should be standing in front of the Mountain Shop about four o’clock on Xmas eve, and he should be wearing a sign that says, “Napalm Dog.” If this happens, we will put the jellied gasoline on the person, instead of an animal. Frankly, I’d rather burn a human warmonger than a dog, but I doubt if any of these will show up.

  Sincerely,

  “Adolph”

  (for obvious reasons I can’t

  state my real name)

  TO JOHN WILCOCK, LOS ANGELES FREE PRESS:

  This essay-length missive to the editor of the Los Angeles Free Press explained “Freak Power” and outlined the political strategy Thompson would use the next year in his campaign for sheriff of Pitkin County.

  December 17, 1969

  Woody Creek, CO

  Dear John …

  Your query about me writing something for the Xmas issue came at a weird time: I had just finished a wild election campaign here, and with a day’s rest I took off for LA and a 2-week freakout to clear my head. So by the time I got back here I hadn’t slept for six straight weeks (except for naps here and there) and I needed about 2 weeks of sleep to get my head together. So I obviously can’t get you anything for the Xmas Issue, unless it’s running unconscionably late—like [Paul] Krassner’s 10th anniversary issue of The Realist.

  The best I can do is lay off a quick rambling first draft on some subject that I hope to come up with by the time I get to the next paragraph of this letter. At the moment I can’t think of a fucking thing to tell you except that I’m always in the market for fine mescaline. I know you don’t fool with dope, but maybe some of your enemies do—and if you run into any of them in the next month or so, I hope you’ll pass this message along.

  Other than that, I suppose you might be interested in the LA hotel situation. As you know, I’ve always favored the Continental, where you visited me in the course of that wretched publicity tour for Random House. I’ve been back there several times since then, and the place gets weirder and weirder. This recent visit may turn out to be my last, if only because I paid for the whole thing with a credit card that will soon be taken away from me. There was also a heavy mescaline factor, which led to crazed behavior in the room and around the roof-top pool. We spent one evening hurling honeydew melon rinds off the 10th floor balcony & down to the Strip below. It took a long time for them to reach the street, and when they did they exploded with a heavy smacking sound. I got these melons at the Farmers Market one afternoon, for no particular reason except that I knew they would taste good. But when I returned to the room it was full of freaks and loud music; there were candles burning and strange posters taped to the wall … and before long we ran amok. Fortunately we had the sense to hurl the garbage at a sharp angle, so that when pigs began sweeping the hotel, they began far enough away from our area so that we had time to move out very leisurely.

  None of which really matters. I just wanted to let you know that the Continental is still a decent place to stay—although [real estate mogul and former singer] Gene Autry has sold it to the Hyatt House chain and the prices are up about 50%. But they can’t shake the freak-image: The hallways still rumble with the sound of rock bands rehearsing, the elevators are still full of Halloween people and the late-night balconies are still a fine sideshow. At one point, on this last visit, I looked down and saw a man in jockey underwear climbing across the front of the hotel like a white chimp, crawling from balcony to balcony in a very confident way, as if he knew exactly where he was going and had been there many times before. Maybe it was the manager, investigating routine complaints … whoever it was seemed very agile; he was moving about eight floors up from the street, with nothing below except space and sure death if he fell.

  On other fronts, I suppose I might mention the recent Aspen election. We made a serious attempt to elect a 29-year-old bike-racing head as mayor … and after a savage, fire-sucking campaign we lost by only six (6) votes, out of 1200. Actually, we lost by one (1) vote, but five of our absentee ballots didn’t get here in time—primarily because they were mailed (to places like Mexico and Nepal and Guatemala) five days before the election.

  Yeah … this is probably worth talking about for a moment. Because we came very close to winning control of the town, and by coming so close I think we may have learned—and proved—some things that might be helpful in other places. Frankly, when we decided to run a serious candidate I didn’t think we had a chance in hell … and, besides, I’ve been telling myself for two years to forswear, at all costs, any personal involvement in local politics. My life-style is not entirely suited to lengthy power-struggles with any small-town establishment. One of the most obvious facts of our campaign was that every cop in town would be fired, at once, if we won … the Chief being no exception. Beyond that, I promised to run for Sheriff next year—against the incumbent—if Joe Edwards actually won the Mayor’s race this year.

  So the fatbacks were looking at a double-barreled nightmare every time they saw an Edwards poster, or a hair-freak wearing one of our “pocket-posters”—a red hand with two fingers raised in a Victory (not “peace”) symbol. We almost used the clenched red fist, but at the last moment we decided that it would be too heavy for a lot of the people we would have to keep on our side if we wanted to win.

  There, in a nut, is the problem. We were out-numbered, so our only hope of victory lay in convincing a hell of a lot of people that we normally never see or talk to that we were, in fact, RIGHT. We began with a hastily-organized effort, about six people, to work the streets and the bars, as quietly as possible, persuading heads to register. This was the hardest part of the gig, because it had to be done weeks ahead of the actual campaign—before Edwards announced and before we could begin whipping the fatbacks with anything public. The idea was to first mobilize our hidden vote—Freak Power—and then, using that as a power base, go after the small but very vocal “liberal vote.” I was convinced that we could win by putting these two blocs together … and as it turned out I was right: That combination would have won by at least 100 votes out of 1200—but it never occurred to me that most of the local “liberals” would back off at the last moment, leaving us with what amounted, in the end, to an “under-30 vote” and a
hundred or so defectors from the old, failed-liberal camp who said, “Fuck it, let’s run flat out this time …”

  Their help was invaluable. They not only voted for Edwards, but they came out front in newspaper ads and went on the air (the local radio station) and said exactly why they were going to do it. Beyond that, their money contributions paid for more than half our campaign; the rest came from small contributions and the sale of our pocket posters … and when it was all over, we came out a few dollars ahead, despite our total failure to concern ourselves with finances while the campaign was happening. I spent about half my time at the radio station (there was no TV), dragging people in to tape Edwards endorsements—dragging Edwards in to make policy statements—and making sure the next day’s schedule would carry a heavy load of our ads. Nobody ever worried about the cost, and in the end we paid every penny of the bill—despite the rotten cop-out of the radio station’s owner, who finally endorsed our opponent in the main local paper, which he also owns.

  Early on, our opponent—a 55-year-old lady shopkeeper—grabbed the crucial noon-hour time-slot for a paid and heavily-slanted “question and answer session.” There was nothing we could do about losing that chunk of prime time … but we neutralized it by getting a local, Murry Roman style rapper to do a brutal take-off on the (L.A.) Ralph Williams Ford commercials, selling Aspen, instead of used cars … and running it immediately after the old lady’s Q&A sessions, with a background of Herbie Mann’s “Battle Hymn of the Republic.” It was a wild, inspired piece of work—a masterpiece of audio/political zappery, and I dug it so much that I made myself a tape. If they run contests for that sort of thing, this one would be a sure winner. On the station logs it appears as “Bill Greed commercial,” and in retrospect it seems like the clearest of all our statements.

  Not even our supporters liked it. The satire, they said, was too heavy, too rude and angry to make any voting points with the so-called “neutral types” we knew we had to convince, in order to win. Even Joe Edwards, our candidate, was afraid of it. After the first day, the opening flute notes of that Battle Hymn on the radio caused heads to snap around and all conversation to stop … while everybody listened to Bill Greed’s crazed and venal sales pitch—an awful, artful mockery of every effort that had ever been made, then and now, to “sell Aspen!”

  Which gets us back to the whole point of the campaign: The argument that a gang of big-city greedheads are selling this place out from under the people who came here to live in quiet, noncommercial peace, like decent human beings—and to escape the urban horrors that plagued them in L.A., the Bay Area, Chicago and New York. Most of us are living here because we like the idea of being able to walk out our front doors and smile at what we see. On my own front porch I have a palm tree growing in a blue toilet bowl … and on occasion I like to wander outside, stark naked, and fire my .44 Magnum at various iron gongs I’ve mounted on the nearby hillside. I like to load up on mescaline and turn my amplifier up to 110 decibels for a taste of “White Rabbit”57 while the sun comes up on the snow-peaks along the Continental Divide. And when I drive into town, still hung on those peaks, I like the idea of calling for a Tuborg in a place where the bartender says, “Wow, man! You need an anchor rope … do you have any more of that shit?”

  Which is not entirely the point. The world is full of places where a man can run wild on drugs and loud music and fire-power—but not for long. I lived a block above Haight street for two years, but by the end of ’66 the whole neighborhood had become a cop-magnet and a bad sideshow. Between the narks and the psychedelic hustlers, there was not much room to live.

  What happened in the Haight echoed earlier scenes in North Beach and The Village, among others … and it proved, once again, the basic futility of seizing turf you can’t control. The pattern never varies: a low-rent area suddenly blooms new and loose and human—and then fashionable, which attracts the press and the cops at about the same time. Cop problems attract more publicity, which then attracts fad-salesmen and hustlers—which means money, and that attracts junkies and jack-rollers. Their bad action causes more publicity and—for some perverse reason—an influx of bored upward-mobile types who dig the menace of “white ghetto” life and whose expense-account tastes drive local rents and street-prices up and out of reach of the original settlers …who are forced, once again, to move on.

  One of the most hopeful developments of the failed Haight/Ashbury scene was the exodus to rural communes. Most of the communes failed—for reasons that everybody can see now, in retrospect (like that scene in Easy Rider, where all those poor freaks were trying to grow their crops in dry sand)—but the few that succeeded, like the Hog Farm in New Mexico, kept a whole generation of heads believing that the future lay somewhere outside the cities—where one good scene after another had been first settled, then publicized, then busted. The pattern had become almost a ritual.

  Which gets back to Aspen, where hundreds of H/A refugees tried to settle in the wake of that ill-fated “summer of love” in 1967. That summer was a wild and incredible freak show here, but when winter came the crest of that wave broke and drifted on the shoals of local problems such as jobs, housing and deep snow on the roads to shacks that had, a few months earlier, been easily accessible. Many of the West Coast refugees moved on, but several hundred stayed; they hired on as carpenters, waiters, bartenders, dish-washers …and a year later they were part of the permanent population. By mid-’69 they occupied most of Aspen’s so-called “low-cost housing”—first the tiny mid-town apartment hovels, then out-lying shacks, and finally the trailer courts.

  So, by the autumn of ’69, it was obvious—to anybody who had any dealings with the dope/young/freak culture—that a serious voter-registration effort might yield up a formidable power-base for a new kind of candidate. Aspen’s last mayoral election, in 1967, had been decided on a plurality of some 50 votes, out of a total of 650. This time, we knew, the total would—or could—be more than 1000 … and, given the kaleidoscope realities of a three-way race, we thought a Freak Power candidate might have a good chance of winning.

  Which was true—except that I assured Joe Edwards, in the course of persuading him to run, that he would certainly have the support of our never-tested “underground vote,” but also of the older “liberal” bloc, which agreed with us on nearly every issue. Edwards was the perfect coalition candidate: He was a 29-year-old head and bike-racer, whose only known success in a year of law practice had been a far-out, wild-eyed suit against the city for “harassment of hippies.” Beyond that, he was on the platform committee of a newly formed liberal-action group called the Citizens for Community Action—which seemed to guarantee their support. Both Edwards and the CCA were pro-hippie, anti-development and generally opposed, on all fronts, to the plastic money-fuckers who’ve been selling every chunk and parcel of this valley they’ve been able to get their hands on for the past ten years.

  A series of CCA meetings had distilled the issues—and a small but very articulate voting base—for a genuine, grass-roots revolt. The program, in a nut, was to drive the real estate goons completely out of the valley: to prevent the State Highway Dept. from bringing a 4-lane highway into town and in fact to ban all auto traffic from every downtown street. Turn them all into grassy malls, where everybody—even freaks—can do whatever’s right. The cops would become trash collectors and maintenance men for a fleet of municipal bicycles, for anybody to use. No more huge, space-killing apartment buildings to block the view, from any downtown street, of anybody who might want to look up and see the mountains. No more land-rapes, no more busts for “flute-playing” or “blocking the sidewalk” … fuck the tourists, dead-end the highway, zone the greedheads out of existence, and in general create a town where people can live like human beings, instead of slaves to some bogus sense of Progress that is driving us all mad.

  Obviously, we had a heavy program … and in retrospect I have to wonder how in hell we came within six votes of winning the whole gig. One of our problems, on e
lection day, was that all of our poll-watchers were bearded. Even our liberal sympathizers objected to the image we were presenting to “the public.” But in fact we had no choice: The lame-duck mayor had spent half the previous day on the radio, screeching threats of prison terms and gang-beatings for any hair-freak who dared to show up at the polls. I tried to have him arrested for “intimidating voters”; his broadcasts were a clear violation of the law—but the D.A. told me to get fucked. “You’ll have to police the election yourselves,” he said—and so we did. But the only people willing to be Edwards poll-watchers tended to be weird-looking.

  The Mayor was running his own candidate, the local magistrate, and by the final week of the campaign he knew he was in bad trouble. It was obvious, by then, that Joe Edwards—the Left candidate—had built such a tidal wave of momentum that the Right was already croaked … and that the only question, on election day, was how far the freak tide would carry. The fatbacks’ only hope, in the end, was the old lady/shopkeeper whose platform consisted of an endorsement by the local Contractors’ Association and her claim that all she really wanted was to “be the town’s den-mother.”

  She was the “middle-road candidate,” the androgynous Ike-figure of all our nightmares … and although she won only one of the three wards, she won that one (a new, Orange County style sub-division) so heavily that her Agnewville vote finally cancelled our wins in the other two wards. The final tally wasn’t in until after midnight, and by then our headquarters was a madhouse of bad mescaline freakouts and loonies screaming for dynamite. I had the presence of mind to remain un-armed—which proved wise, because by the end of election night I was in a killing rage.