We'll take our vengeance now!
McConn, enroute from L.A. to some
rumored home,
killing the hours till the bars opened
stranded on Point Richmond when they closed
the night before,
thinking finally he had come among friends
or at least one.
We rang for Luboff
on the pay phone, but there was
no contact
Some tortured beast of a bad loser has already
croaked him, said McConn
We'll have a drink.
But the Mariners' Tavern was not open
for twenty minutes, so we read
a newspaper
and saw where just about everybody
had been fucked in the face
or some other orifice
or opening, or possibility
for one good reason or another
by the time the Chronicle went to press
before last midnight.
We rang for the editor
but the switchboard clamped him off.
Get a lawyer, I said. These swine have gone
far enough.
But the lawyers were all in bed
Finally we found one, limp from an orgy and
too much sleep
Eating cheese blintzes with sour cream and gin
on a redwood balcony with a
fine exposure.
Get your ass up, I said. It's Sunday and
the folks are in church. Now is the time to
lay a writ on them,
Cease and Desist
Specifically Luboff and the big mongers,
the slumfeeders, the perverts
and the pious.
The legal man agreed
We had a case and indeed a duty to
Right these Wrongs, as it were
The Price would be four thousand in front and
ten for the nut.
I wrote him a check on the Sawtooth
National Bank,
but he hooted at it
While rubbing a special oil on
his palms
To keep the chancres from itching
beyond endurance
On this Sabbath.
McConn broke his face with a running
Cambodian chop, then we
drank his gin, ate his blintzes
But failed to find anyone
to rape
and went back to the Mariners' Tavern
to drink in the sun.
Later, from jail
I sent a brace of telegrams
to the right people,
explaining my position.
Spider Magazine vol. I, no. 7, October 13, 1965
"Genius 'Round the World Stands Hand in Hand, and
One Shock of Recognition Runs the Whole Circle 'Round"
-- ART LlNKLETTER
I live in a quiet place where any sound at night means something is about to happen: You come awake fast -- thinking, what does that mean?
Usually nothing. But sometimes. . . it's hard to adjust to a city gig where the night is full of sounds, all of them comfortably routine. Cars, horns, footsteps. . . no way to relax; so drown it all out with the fine white drone of a cross-eyed TV set. Jam the bugger between channels and doze off nicely. . .
Ignore that nightmare in the bathroom. Just another ugly refugee from the Love Generation, some doom-struck gimp who couldn't handle the pressure. My attorney has never been able to accept the notion -- often espoused by reformed drug abusers and especially popular among those on probation -- that you can get a lot higher without drugs than with them.
And neither have I, for that matter. But I once lived down the hill from Dr. ------ on ------ Road,* a former acid guru who later claimed to have made that long jump from chemical frenzy to preternatural consciousness. One fine afternoon in the first rising curl of what would soon become the Great San Francisco Acid Wave I stopped by the Good Doctor's house with the idea of asking him (since he was even then a known drug authority) what sort of advice he might have for a neighbor with a healthy curiosity about LSD.
* Names deleted at insistence of publisher's lawyer.
I parked on the road and lumbered up his gravel driveway, pausing enroute to wave pleasantly at his wife, who was working in the garden under the brim of a huge seeding hat. . . a good scene, I thought: The old man is inside brewing up one of his fantastic drug-stews, and here we see his woman out in the garden, pruning carrots, or whatever. . . humming while she works, some tune I failed to recognize.
Humming. Yes. . . but it would be nearly ten years before I would recognize that sound for what it was: Like Ginsberg far gone in the Om ------ was trying to humm me off.
That was no old lady out there in that garden; it was the good doctor himself -- and his humming was a frantic attempt to block me out of his higher consciousness.
I made several attempts to make myself clear: Just a neighbor come to call and ask the doctor's advice about gobbling some LSD in my shack just down the hill from his house. I did, after all, have weapons. And I liked to shoot them -- especially at night, when the great blue flame would leap out, along with all that noise. . . and, yes, the bullets, too. We couldn't ignore that. Big balls of lead/alloy flying around the valley at speeds up to 3700 feet per second. . . But I always fired into the nearest hill or, failing that, into blackness. I meant no harm; I just liked the explosions. And I was careful never to kill more than I could eat.
"Kill?" I realized I could never properly explain that word to this creature toiling here in its garden. Had it ever eaten meat? Could it conjugate the verb "hunt?" Did it understand hunger? Or grasp the awful fact that my income averaged around $32 a week that year?
No. . . no hope of communication in this place. I recognized that -- but not soon enough to keep the drug doctor from humming me all the way down his driveway and into my car and down the mountain road. Forget LSD, I thought. Look what it's done to that poor bastard.
So I stuck with hash and rum for another six months or so, until I moved into San Francisco and found myself one night in a place called "The Fillmore Auditorium." And that was that. One grey lump of sugar and BOOM. In my mind I was right back there in the doctor's garden. Not on the surface, but underneath -- poking up through that finely cultivated earth like some kind of mutant mushroom. A victim of the Drug Explosion. A natural street freak, just eating whatever came by. I recall one night in the Matrix, when a road-person came in with a big pack on his back, shouting: "Anybody want some L. . . S. . . D. . . ? I got all the makin's right here. All I need is a place to cook."
The manager was on him at once, mumbling, "Cool it, cool it, come on back to the office." I never saw him after that night, but before he was taken away, the road-person distributed his samples. Huge white spansules. I went into the men's room to eat mine. But only half at first, I thought. Good thinking, but a hard thing to accomplish under the circumstances. I ate the first half, but spilled the rest on the sleeve of my red Pendleton shirt. . . And then, wondering what to do with it, I saw one of the musicians come in. "What's the trouble," he said.
"Well," I said. "All this white stuff on my sleeve is LSD." He said nothing. Merely grabbed my arm and began sucking on it. A very gross tableau. I wondered what would happen if some Kingston Trio/young stockbroker type might wander in and catch us in the act. Fuck him, I thought. With a bit of luck, it'll ruin his life -- forever thinking that just behind some narrow door in all his favorite bars, men in red Pendleton shirts are getting incredible kicks from things he'll never know. Would he dare to suck a sleeve? Probably not. Play it safe. Pretend you never saw it. . .
Strange memories on this nervous night in Las Vegas. Five years later? Six? It seems like a lifetime, or at least a Main Era -- the kind of peak that never comes again. San Francisco in the middle sixties was a very special time and place to be a part of.
Maybe it meant something. Maybe not, in the long run. . . but no explanations, no mix of words or music or memories can touch that sense of knowing that you were there and alive in that corner of time and the world. Whatever it meant. . .
History is hard to know, because of all the hired bullshit, but even without being sure of "history" it seems entirely reasonable to think that every now and then the energy of a whole generation comes to a head in a long fine flash, for reasons that nobody really understands at the time -- and which never explain, in retrospect, what actually happened.
My central memory of that time seems to hang on one or five or maybe forty nights -- or very early mornings -- when I left the Fillmore half-crazy and, instead of going home, aimed the big 650 Lightning across the Bay Bridge at a hundred miles an hour wearing L. L. Bean shorts and a Butte sheepherder's jacket. . . booming through the Treasure Island tunnel at the lights of Oakland and Berkeley and Richmond, not quite sure which turn-off to take when I got to the other end (always stalling at the tollgate, too twisted to find neutral while I fumbled for change). . . but being absolutely certain that no matter which way I went I would come to a place where people were just as high and wild as I was: No doubt at all about that. . .
There was madness in any direction, at any hour. If not across the Bay, then up the Golden Gate or down 101 to Los Altos or La Honda. . . You could strike sparks anywhere. There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning. . .
And that, I think, was the handle -- that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we didn't need that. Our energy would simply prevail. There was no point in fighting -- on our side or theirs. We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave. . .
So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark -- that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back.
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, New York, Random House, 1972
Jacket Copy for Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas:
A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream
The book began as a 250-word caption for Sports Illustrated. I was down in LA, working on a very tense and depressing investigation of the allegedly accidental killing of a journalist named Ruben Salazar by the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Dept -- and after a week or so on the story I was a ball of nerves & sleepless paranoia (figuring that I might be next). . . and I needed some excuse to get away from the angry vortex of that story & try to make sense of it without people shaking butcher knives in my face all the time.
My main contact on that story was the infamous Chicano lawyer Oscar Acosta -- an old friend, who was under bad pressure at the time, from his super-militant constituents, for even talking to a gringo/gabacho journalist. The pressure was so heavy, in fact, that I found it impossible to talk to Oscar alone. We were always in the midst of a crowd of heavy street-fighters who didn't mind letting me know that they wouldn't need much of an excuse to chop me into hamburger.
This is no way to work on a very volatile & very complex story. So one afternoon I got Oscar in my rented car and drove him over to the Beverly Hills Hotel -- away from his bodyguards, etc. -- and told him I was getting a bit wiggy from the pressure; it was like being on stage all the time, or maybe in the midst of a prison riot. He agreed, but the nature of his position as "leader of the militants" made it impossible for him to be openly friendly with a gabacho.
I understood this. . . and just about then, I remembered that another old friend, now working for Sports Illustrated, had asked me if I felt like going out to Vegas for the weekend, at their expense, and writing a few words about a motorcycle race. This seemed like a good excuse to get out of LA for a few days, and if I took Oscar along it would also give us time to talk and sort out the evil realities of the Salazar Murder story.
So I called Sports Illustrated -- from the patio of the Polo Lounge -- and said I was ready to do the "Vegas thing." They agreed. . . and from here on in there is no point in running down details, because they're all in the book.
More or less. . . and this qualifier is the essence of what, for no particular reason, I've decided to call Gonzo Journalism. It is a style of "reporting" based on William Faulkner's idea that the best fiction is far more true than any kind of journalism -- and the best journalists have always known this.
Which is not to say that Fiction is necessarily "more true" than Journalism -- or vice versa -- but that both "fiction" and "journalism" are artificial categories; and that both forms, at their best, are only two different means to the same end. This is getting pretty heavy. . . so I should cut back and explain, at this point, that Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas is a failed experiment in Gonzo Journalism. My idea was to buy a fat notebook and record the whole thing, as it happened, then send in the notebook for publication -- without editing. That way, I felt, the eye & mind of the journalist would be functioning as a camera. The writing would be selective & necessarily interpretive -- but once the image was written, the words would be final; in the same way that a Cartier-Bresson photograph is always (he says) the full-frame negative. No alterations in the darkroom, no cutting or cropping, no spotting. . . no editing.
But this is a hard thing to do, and in the end I found myself imposing an essentially fictional framework on what began as a piece of straight/crazy journalism. True Gonzo reporting needs the talents of a master journalist, the eye of an artist/photographer and the heavy balls of an actor. Because the writer must be a participant in the scene, while he's writing it -- or at least taping it, or even sketching it. Or all three. Probably the closest analogy to the ideal would be a film director/producer who writes his own scripts, does his own camera work and somehow manages to film himself in action, as the protagonist or at least a main character.
The American print media are not ready for this kind of thing, yet. Rolling Stone was probably the only magazine in America where I could get the Vegas book published. I sent Sports Illustrated 2500 words -- instead of the 250 they asked for -- and my manuscript was aggressively rejected. They refused to even pay my minimum expenses. . .
But to hell with all that. I seem to be drifting away from the point -- that Fear & Loathing is not what I thought it would be. I began writing it during a week of hard typewriter nights in a room at the Ramada Inn -- in a place called Arcadia, California -- up the road from Pasadena & right across the street from the Santa Anita racetrack. I was there during the first week of the Spring Racing -- and the rooms all around me were jammed with people I couldn't quite believe.
Heavy track buffs, horse trainers, ranch owners, jockeys & their women. . . I was lost in that swarm, sleeping most of each day and writing all night on the Salazar article. But each night, around dawn, I would knock off the Salazar work and spend an hour or so, cooling out, by letting my head unwind and my fingers run wild on the big black Selectric. . . jotting down notes about the weird trip to Vegas. It had worked out nicely, in terms of the Salazar piece -- plenty of hard straight talk about who was lying and who wasn't, and Oscar had finally relaxed enough to talk to me straight. Flashing across the desert at 110 in a big red convertible with the top down, there is not much danger of being bugged or overheard.
But we stayed in Vegas a bit longer than we'd planned to. Or at least I did. Oscar had to get back for a nine o'clock court appearance on Monday. So he took a plane and I was left alone out there -- just me and a massive hotel bill that I knew I couldn't pay, and the treacherous reality of that scene caused me to spend about 36 straight hours in my room at the Mint Hotel. . . writing feverishly in a notebook about a nasty situation that I thought I might not get away from.
These notes were the genesis of Fear & Loathing. After my escape from Nevada and all through the tense work week that followed (spending all my afternoons on the grim streets of East LA and my nights at the t
ypewriter in that Ramada Inn hideout). . . my only loose & human moments would come around dawn when I could relax and fuck around with this slow-building, stone-crazy Vegas story.
By the time I got back to the Rolling Stone Hq. in San Francisco, the Salazar story was winding out at around 19,000 words, and the strange Vegas "fantasy" was running on its own spaced energy and pushing 5000 words -- with no end in sight and no real reason to continue working on it, except the pure pleasure of unwinding on paper. It was sort of an exercise -- like Bolero and it might have stayed that way -- if Jarin Wenner, the editor of Rolling Stone, hadn't liked the first 20 or so jangled pages enough to take it seriously on its own terms and tentatively schedule it for publication-- which gave me the push I needed to keep working on it.
So now, six months later, the ugly bastard is finished. And I like it -- despite the fact that I failed at what I was trying to do. As true Gonzo Journalism, this doesn't work at all -- and even if it did, I couldn't possibly admit it. Only a goddamn lunatic would write a thing like this and then claim it was true. The week the first section of Fear & Loathing appeared in Rolling Stone I found myself applying for White House press credentials -- a plastic pass that would give me the run of the White House, along with at least theoretical access to the big oval room where Nixon hangs out, pacing back & forth on those fine thick taxpayers' carpets and pondering Sunday's pointspread. (Nixon is a serious pro football freak. He and I are old buddies on this front: We once spent a long night together on the Thruway from Boston to Manchester, disecting the pro & con strategy of the Oakland-Green Bay Super Bowl game. It was the only time I've ever seen the bugger relaxed -- laughing, whacking me on the knee as he recalled Max McGee's one-handed catch for the back-breaking touchdown. I was impressed. It was like talking to Owsley about Acid.)
The trouble with Nixon is that he's a serious politics junkie. He's totally hooked. . . and like any other junkie, he's a bummer to have around: Especially as President.