Indeed. And they were at least half right -- which is not a bad average for lawyers -- because Oscar Z. Acosta, Chicano lawyer, very definitely could not afford the shitrain of suicidal publicity that he was doing everything possible to bring down on himself. There are a lot of nice ways to behave like a criminal -- but hiring a camera to have yourself photographed doing it in the road is not one of them. It would have taken a reputation as formidable as Melvin Belli's to survive the kind of grossly illegal behavior that Oscar was effectively admitting by signing that libel release. He might as well have burned his lawyer's license on the steps of the Superior Court building in downtown L.A.
That is what the Ivy League libel lawyers in New York could not accept. They knew what that license was worth -- at least to them; it averaged out to about $150 an hour -- even for a borderline psychotic, as long as he had the credentials.
And Oscar had them -- not because his father and grandfather had gone to Yale or Harvard Law; he'd paid his dues at night school, the only Chicano in his class, and his record in the courtroom was better than that of most of his colleagues who called him a disgrace to their venal profession.
Which may have been true, for whatever it's worth. . . but what none of us knew at the time of the Great Madness that came so close to making Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas incurably unfit for publication was that we were no longer dealing with O.Z. Acosta, Attorney-at-Law -- but with Zeta, the King of Brown Buffalos.
Last Train for the Top of the Mountain, Last Leap for the Great Skyhook. . . Good Riddance to Bad Rubbish. . . He Was Ugly & Vicious and He Sold Little Babies to Sand-Niggers. . . Mutant Rumors on the Weird Grapevine, Wild Ghosts on the Bimini Run, Lights In Fat City. . . No End to the Story and No Grave for the Brown Buffalo
In retrospect it is hard to know exactly when Oscar decided to quit the Law just as finally as he'd once quit being a Baptist missionary -- but it was obviously a lot earlier than even his few close friends realized, until long after he'd already made the move in his mind, to a new and higher place. The crazy attorney whose "suicidal behavior" so baffled the N.Y. libel lawyers was only the locustlike shell of a thirty-six-year-old neo-prophet who was already long overdue for his gig at the top of the Mountain.
There was no more time to be wasted in the company of lepers and lawyers. The hour had finally struck for the fat spic from Riverbank to start acting like that one man in every century "chosen to speak for his people."
None of this terminal madness was easy to see at the time -- not even for me, and I knew him as well as anyone. . . But not well enough, apparently, to understand the almost desperate sense of failure and loss that he felt when he was suddenly confronted with the stark possibility that he had never really been chosen to speak for anybody, except maybe himself -- and even that was beginning to look like a halfway impossible task, in the short time he felt he had left.
I had never taken his burning bush trip very seriously -- and I still have moments of doubt about how seriously he took it himself. . . They are very long moments, sometimes; and as a matter of fact I think I feel one coming on right now. . . We should have castrated that brain-damaged thief! That shyster! That blasphemous freak! He was ugly and greasy and he still owes me thousands of dollars!
The truth was not in him, goddamnit! He was put on this earth for no reason at all except to shit in every nest he could con his way into -- but only after robbing them first, and selling the babies to sand-niggers. If that treacherous fist-fucker ever comes back to life, he'll wish we'd had the good sense to nail him up on a frozen telephone pole for his thirty-third birthday present.
DO NOT COME BACK OSCAR! Wherever you are -- stay there! There's no room for you here anymore. Not after all this maudlin gibberish I've written about you. . . And besides, we have Werner Erhard now. So BURROW DEEP, you bastard, and take all that poison fat with you!
Cazart! And how's that for a left-handed whipsong?
Nevermind. There is no more time for questions -- or answers either, for that matter. And I was never much good at this kind of thing, anyway.
The first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers.
-- William Shakespeare, King Henry VI
Well. . . so much for whipsongs. Nobody laughed when Big Bill sat down to play. He was not into filigree when it came to dealing with lawyers.
And neither am I, at this point. That last outburst was probably unnecessary, but what the hell? Let them drink Drano if they can't take a joke. I'm tired of wallowing around in this goddamn thing.
What began as a quick and stylish epitaph for my allegedly erstwhile 300-pound Samoan attorney has long since gone out of control. Not even Oscar would have wanted an obituary with no end, at least not until he was legally dead, and that will take four more years.
Until then -- and probably for many years afterward -- the Weird Grapevine will not wither for lack of bulletins, warnings and other twisted rumors of the latest Brown Buffalo sightings. He will be seen at least once in Calcutta, buying nine-year-old girls out of cages on the White Slave Market. . . and also in Houston, tending bar at a roadhouse on South Main that was once the Blue Fox. . . or perhaps once again on the midnight run to Bimini; standing tall on his own hind legs in the cockpit of a fifty-foot black Cigarette boat with a silver Uzi in one hand and a magnum of smack in the other, always running ninety miles an hour with no lights and howling Old Testament gibberish at the top of his bleeding lungs. . .
It might even come to pass that he will suddenly appear on my porch in Woody Creek on some moonless night when the peacocks are screeching with lust. . . Maybe so, and that is one ghost who will always be welcome in this house, even with a head full of acid and a chain of bull-maggots around his neck.
Oscar was one of God's own prototypes -- a high-powered mutant of some kind who was never even considered for mass production. He was too weird to live and too rare to die -- and as far as I'm concerned, that's just about all that needs to be said about him right now. I was tempted for a while to call that poor bastard Drake, down in Coconut Grove, to check a little deeper into that savage tale about Oscar and the Battle of Biscayne Bay -- the one that ended with at least one murder and the total destruction of Drake's $48,000 Cigarette boat -- but I just don't think I need it right now. . .
Nobody needs it, in fact -- but then nobody really needed Oscar Zeta Acosta either. Or Rolling Stone. Or Jimmy Carter or the Hindenberg. . . or even the Sloat Diamond.
Jesus! Is there no respect in this world for the perfectly useless dead?
Apparently not. . . and Oscar was a lawyer, however reluctant he might have been at the end to admit it. He had a lawyer's cynical view of the Truth -- which he felt was not nearly as important to other people as it was to him; and he was never more savage and dangerous than when he felt he was being lied to. He was never much interested in the concept of truth; he had no time for what he called "dumb Anglo abstracts."
Condemn'd to drudge, the meanest of the mean and furbish falsehoods for a magazine.
-- Lord Byron
The truth, to Oscar, was a tool and even a weapon that he was convinced he could not do without -- if only because anybody who had more of it than he did would sooner or later try to beat on him with it. Truth was Power -- as tangible to Oscar as a fistful of $100 bills or an ounce of pure LSD-25. His formula for survival in a world full of rich Gabaucho fascists was a kind of circle that began at the top with the idea that truth would bring him power, which would buy freedom -- to crank his head full of acid so he could properly walk with the King, which would naturally put him even closer to more and finer truths. . . indeed, the full circle.
Oscar believed it, and that was what finally croaked him.
I tried to warn the greedy bastard, but he was too paranoid to pay any attention. . . Because he was actually a stupid, vicious quack with no morals at all and the soul of a hammerhead shark.
We are better off without him. Sooner or later he would have had to be put t
o sleep anyway. . . So the world is a better place, now that he's at least out of sight, if not certifiably dead.
He will not be missed -- except perhaps in Fat City, where every light in the town went dim when we heard that he'd finally cashed his check.
One owes respect to the living: To the Dead one owes only the truth.
-- Voltaire
Rolling Stone, #254, December 15, 1977
The Hoodlum Circus and the
Statutory Rape of Bass Lake
Man, when you were fifteen or sixteen years old did you ever think you'd end up as a Hell's Angel? How did I get screwed up with you guys anyway?. . . Christ, I got out of the Army and came back to Richmond, started ridin a bike around, wearin my chinos and clean sports shirts, even a crash helmet. . . And then 1 met you guys. I started gettin grubbier and grubbier, dirtier and dirtier, I couldn't believe it. . . Then I lost my job, started spendin all my time either goin on a run or gettin ready for one -- Christ, 1 still can't believe it.
-- Fat D., a Richmond Hell's Angel
Whaddayou mean by that word "right"? The only thing we're concerned about is what's right for us. We got our own definition of "right."
-- A Hell's Angel sunk in philosophy
According to Frenchy, the run would take off at eight A.M. from the El Adobe, a tavern on East Fourteenth Street in Oakland. (Until the autumn of 1965 the El Abode was the unofficial headquarters of the Oakland chapter and a focal point for all Hell's Angels acitivity in northern California -- but in October it was demolished to make way for a parking lot, and the Angels moved back to the Sinners Club.)
Early weather forecasts said the whole state would be blazing hot that day, but dawn in San Francisco was typically foggy. I overslept, and in the rush to get moving I forgot my camera. There was no time for breakfast but I ate a peanut-butter sandwich while loading the car. . . sleeping bag and beer cooler in back, tape recorder in front, and under the driver's seat an unloaded Luger. I kept the clip in my pocket, thinking it might be useful if things got out of hand. Press cards are nice things to have, but in riot situations a pistol is the best kind of safe-conduct pass.
By the time I left my apartment it was almost eight, and somewhere on the fog-shrouded Bay Bridge between San Francisco and Oakland, I heard the first radio bulletin:
The Sierra community of Bass Lake is bracing this morning for a reported invasion of the notorious Hell's Angels motorcycle gang. Heavily armed police and sheriff's deputies are stationed on all roads leading to Bass Lake. Madera County sheriff, Marlin Young, reports helicopters and other emergency forces standing by. Neighboring law enforcement agencies, including the Kern County sheriff's Canine Patrol, have been alerted and are ready to move. Recent reports say the Hell's Angels are massing in Oakland and San Bernardino. Stay tuned for further details.
Among those who made a point of staying tuned that morning were several thousand unarmed taxpayers en route to spend the holiday in the vicinity of Bass Lake and Yosemite. They had just got under way, most of them still irritable and sleepy from last-minute packing and hurrying the children through breakfast. . . when their car radios crackled a warning that they were headed right into the vortex of what might soon be a combat zone. They had read about Laconia and other Hell's Angels outbursts, but in print the menace had always seemed distant -- terrifying, to be sure, and real in its way, but with none of that sour-stomach fright that comes with the realization that this time it's you. Tomorrow's newspapers won't be talking about people being beaten and terrorized three thousand miles away, but right exactly where you and your family are planning to spend the weekend.
The bridge was crowded with vacationers getting an early start. I was running late by twenty or thirty minutes, and when I got to the toll plaza at the Oakland end of the bridge I asked the gatekeeper if any Hell's Angels had passed through before me. "The dirty sonsabitches are right over there," he said with a wave of his hand. I didn't know what he was talking about until some two hundred yards past the gate, when I suddenly passed a large cluster of people and motorcycles grouped around a gray pickup truck with a swastika painted on the side. They seemed to materialize out of the fog, and the sight was having a bad effect on traffic. There are seventeen eastbound toll gates on the bridge, and traffic coming out of them is funneled into only three exits, with everyone scrambling for position in a short, high-speed run between the toll plaza and the traffic dividers about a half mile away. This stretch is hazardous on a clear afternoon, but in the fog of a holiday morning and with a Dread Spectacle suddenly looming beside the road the scramble was worse than usual. Horns sounded all around me as cars swerved and slowed down; heads snapped to the right; it was the same kind of traffic disruption that occurs near a serious accident, and many a driver went off on the wrong ramp that morning after staring too long at the monster rally that -- if he'd been listening to his radio -- he'd been warned about just moments before. And now here it was, in the stinking, tattooed flesh. . . the Menace.
I was close enough to recognize the Gypsy Jokers, about twenty of them, milling around the truck while they waited for late-running stragglers. They were paying no attention to the traffic but their appearance alone was enough to give anyone pause. Except for the colors, they looked exactly like any band of Hell's Angels: long hair, beards, black sleeveless vests. . . and the inevitable low-slung motorcycles, many with sleeping bags lashed to the handlebars and girls sitting lazily on the little pillion seats.
The outlaws are very comfortable with their inaccessibility. It saves them a lot of trouble with bill collectors, revenge seekers and routine police harassment. They are as insulated from society as they want to be, but they have no trouble locating each other. When Sonny flies down to Los Angeles, Otto meets him at the airport. When Terry goes to Fresno, he quickly locates the chapter president, Ray -- who exists in some kind of mysterious limbo and can only be found by means of a secret phone number, which changes constantly. The Oakland Angels find it convenient to use Barger*s number, checking now and then for messages. Some use various saloons where they are well known. An Angel who wants to be reached will make an appointment either to meet somewhere or to be at a certain phone at a designated time.
One night I tried to arrange a contact with a young Angel named Rodger, a one-time disc jockey. It proved to be impossible. He had no idea where he might be from one day to the next. "They don't call me Rodger the Lodger for nothing," he said. "I just make it wherever I can. It's all the same. Once you start worrying about it, you get hung up -- and that's the end, man, you're finished." If he'd been killed that night he'd have left no footprints in life, no evidence and no personal effects but his bike -- which the others would have raffled off immediately. Hell's Angels don't find it necessary to leave wills, and their deaths don't require much paperwork. . . A driver's license expires, a police record goes into the dead file, a motorcycle changes hands and usually a few "personal cards" will be taken out of wallets and dropped into wastebaskets.
Because of their gypsy style of life, their network has to be functional. A lost message can lead to serious trouble. An Angel who might have fled will be arrested; a freshly stolen bike will never reach the buyer; a pound of marijuana might miss a crucial connection; or at the very least, a whole chapter will never get word of a run or a big party.
The destination of a run is kept secret as long as possible -- hopefully, to keep the cops guessing. The chapter presidents will figure it out by long-distance telephone, then each will tell his people the night before the run, either at a meeting or by putting the word with a handful of bartenders, waitresses and plugged-in chicks who are known contacts. The system is highly efficient, but it has never been leakproof, and by 1966 the Angels had decided that the only hope was to keep the destination a secret until the run was actually under way. Barger tried it once, but the police were able to track the outlaws by radioing ahead from one point to another. Radio tracking is only a device to give the cops an edge, a sense of con
fidence and control. Which it does, as long as no lapses occur. . . but it is safe to predict that on one of these crowded holidays a convoy of Angels is going to disappear like a blip shooting off the edge of a radar screen. All it will take is one of those rare gigs the outlaws are forever seeking: a ranch or big farm with a friendly owner, a piece of rural turf beyond the reach of the fuzz, where they can all get drunk and naked and fall on each other like goats in the rut, until they all pass out from exhaustion.
It would be worth buying a police radio, just to hear the panic:
"Group of eighty just passed through Sacramento, going north on U.S. Fifty, no violence, thought to be headed for Lake Tahoe area. . ." Fifty miles north, in Placerville, the police chief gives his men a pep talk and deploys them with shotguns on both sides of the highway, south of the city limits. Two hours later they are still waiting and the dispatcher in Sacramento relays an impatient demand for a report on Placerville's handling of the crisis. The chief nervously reports no contact and asks if his restless troops can go home and enjoy the holiday.
The dispatcher, sitting in the radio room at Highway Patrol headquarters in Sacramento, says to sit tight while he checks around. . . and moments later his voice squawks out of the speaker: "Schwein! You lie! Vere are dey?"