Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and Other American Stories

by Hunter S. Thompson

  “When the train . . . come in the station . . . I looked her in the eye . . .”

  Grim music in this airport.

  “Yes, it’s hard to tell it’s hard to tell, when all your love’s in Vain. . . .”

  Every now and then you run up on one of those days when everything’s in vain . . . a stone bummer from start to finish; and if you know what’s good for you, on days like these you sort of hunker down in a safe corner and watch. Maybe think a bit. Lay back on a cheap wooden chair, screened off from the traffic, and shrewdly rip the poptops out of five or eight Budweisers . . . smoke off a pack of King Marlboros, eat a peanut-butter sandwich, and finally toward evening gobble up a wad of good mescaline . . . then drive out, later on, to the beach. Get out in the surf, in the fog, and slosh along on numb-frozen feet about ten yards out from the tideline . . . stomping through tribes of wild sandpeckers . . . riderunners, whorehoppers, stupid little birds and crabs and saltsuckers, with here and there a big pervert or woolly reject gimping off in the distance, wandering alone by themselves behind the dunes and driftwood. . . .

  These are the ones you will never be properly introduced to—at least not if your luck holds. But the beach is less complicated than a boiling fast morning in the Las Vegas airport.

  I felt very obvious. Amphetamine psychosis? Paranoid dementia?—What is it? My Argentine luggage? This crippled, loping walk that once made me a reject from the Naval ROTC?

  Indeed. This man will never be able to walk straight. Captain! Because one leg is longer than the other. . . . Not much. Three eighths of an inch or so, which counted out to about two-eighths more than the Captain could tolerate.

  So we parted company. He accepted a command in the South China Sea, and I became a Doctor of Gonzo Journalism . . . and many years later, killing time in the Las Vegas airport this terrible morning, I picked up a newspaper and saw where the Captain had fucked up very badly:

  SHIP COMMANDER BUTCHERED

  BY NATIVES AFTER

  “ACCIDENTAL” ASSAULT

  ON GUAM

  (AOP)—Aboard the U.S.S. Crazy Horse: Somewhere in the Pacific (Sept. 25)—The entire 3465-man crew of this newest American aircraft carrier is in violent mourning today, after five crewmen including the Captain were diced up like pineapple meat in a brawl with the Heroin Police at the neutral port of Hong See. Dr. Bloor, the ship’s chaplain, presided over tense funeral services at dawn on the flight deck. The 4th Fleet Service Choir sang “Tom Thumb’s Blues” . . . and then, while the ship’s bells tolled frantically, the remains of the five were set afire in a gourd and hurled into the Pacific by a hooded officer known only as “The Commander.”

  Shortly after the services ended, the crewmen fell to fighting among themselves and all communications with the ship were severed for an indefinite period. Official spokesmen at 4th Fleet Headquarters on Guam said the Navy had “no comment” on the situation, pending the results of a top-level investigation by a team of civilian specialists headed by former New Orleans district attorney James Garrison.

  . . . Why bother with newspapers, if this is all they offer? Agnew was right. The press is a gang of cruel faggots. Journalism is not a profession or a trade. It is a cheap catch-all for fuckoffs and misfits—a false doorway to the backside of life, a filthy piss-ridden little hole nailed off by the building inspector, but just deep enough for a wino to curl up from the sidewalk and masturbate like a chimp in a zoo-cage.

  14.

  Farewell to Vegas . . . ‘God’s Mercy on You Swine!’

  As I skulked around the airport. I realized that I was still wearing my police identification badge. It was a flat orange rectangle, sealed in clear plastic, that said: “Raoul Duke, Special Investigator, Los Angeles.” I saw it in the mirror above the urinal.

  Get rid of this thing, I thought. Tear it off. The gig is finished . . . and it proved nothing. At least not to me. And certainly not to my attorney—who also had a badge—but now he was back in Malibu, nursing his paranoid sores.

  It had been a waste of time, a lame fuckaround that was only—in clear retrospect—a cheap excuse for a thousand cops to spend a few days in Las Vegas and lay the bill on the taxpayers. Nobody had learned anything—or at least nothing new. Except maybe me . . . and all I learned was that the National District Attorneys’ Association is about ten years behind the grim truth and harsh kinetic realities of what they have only just recently learned to call “the Drug Culture” in this foul year of Our Lord, 1971.

  They are still burning the taxpayers for thousands of dollars to make films about “the dangers of LSD,” at a time when acid is widely known—to everybody but cops—to be the Studebaker of the drug market; the popularity of psychedelics has fallen off so drastically that most volume dealers no longer even handle quality acid or mescaline except as a favor to special customers: Mainly jaded, over-thirty drug dilettantes—like me, and my attorney.

  The big market, these days, is in Downers. Reds and smack—Seconal and heroin—and a hellbroth of bad domestic grass sprayed with everything from arsenic to horse tranquillizers. What sells, today, is whatever Fucks You Up—whatever short-circuits your brain and grounds it out for the longest possible time. The ghetto market has mushroomed into suburbia. The Miltown man has turned, with a vengeance, to skin-popping and even mainlining . . . and for every ex-speed freak who drifted, for relief, into smack, there are 200 kids who went straight to the needle off Seconal. They never even bothered to try speed.

  Uppers are no longer stylish. Methedrine is almost as rare, on the 1971 market, as pure acid or DMT. “Consciousness Expansion” went out with LBJ . . . and it is worth noting, historically, that downers came in with Nixon.

  I limped onto the plane with no problem except a wave of ugly vibrations from the other passengers . . . but my head was so burned out, by then, that I wouldn’t have cared if I’d had to climb aboard stark naked and covered with oozing chancres. It would have taken extreme physical force to keep me off that plane. I was so far beyond simple fatigue that I was beginning to feel nicely adjusted to the idea of permanent hysteria. I felt like the slightest misunderstanding with the stewardess would cause me to either cry or go mad . . . and the woman seemed to sense this, because she treated me very gently.

  When I wanted more ice cubes for my Bloody Mary, she brought them quickly . . . and when I ran out of cigarettes, she gave me a pack from her own purse. The only time she seemed nervous was when I pulled a grapefruit out of my satchel and began slicing it up with a hunting knife. I noticed her watching me closely, so I tried to smile. “I never go anywhere without grapefruit,” I said. “It’s hard to get a really good one—unless you’re rich.”

  She nodded.

  I flashed her the grimace/smile again, but it was hard to know what she was thinking. It was entirely possible, I knew, that she’d already decided to have me taken off the plane in a cage when we got to Denver. I stared fixedly into her eyes for a time, but she kept herself under control.

  I was asleep when our plane hit the runway, but the jolt brought me instantly awake. I looked out the window and saw the Rocky Mountains. What the fuck was I doing here? I wondered. It made no sense at all. I decided to call my attorney as soon as possible. Have him wire me some money to buy a huge albino Doberman. Denver is a national clearing house for stolen Dobermans; they come from all parts of the country.

  Since I was already here, I thought I might as well pick up a vicious dog. But first, something for my nerves. Immediately after the plane landed I rushed up the corridor to the airport drugstore and asked the clerk for a box of amyls.

  She began to fidget and shake her head. “Oh, no,” she said finally. “I can’t sell those things except by prescription.”

  “I know,” I said. “But you see, I’m a doctor. I don’t need a prescription.”

  She was still fidgeting. “Well . . . you’ll have to show me some I.D.,” she moaned.

  “Of course.” I jerked out my wallet and let her see the police badge while
I flipped through the deck until I located my Ecclesiastical Discount Card—which identifies me as a Doctor of Divinity, a certified Minister of the Church of the New Truth.

  She inspected it carefully, then handed it back. I sensed a new respect in her manner. Her eyes grew warm. She seemed to want to touch me. “I hope you’ll forgive me, Doctor,” she said with a fine smile. “But I had to ask. We get some real freaks in this place. All kinds of dangerous addicts. You’d never believe it.”

  “Don’t worry,” I said. “I understand perfectly. But I have a bad heart and I hope—”

  “Certainly!” she exclaimed—and within seconds she was back with a dozen amyls. I paid without quibbling about the ecclesiastical discount. Then I opened the box and cracked one under my nose immediately, while she watched.

  “Just be thankful your heart is young and strong,” I said. “If I were you I would never . . . ah . . . holy shit! . . . what? Yes, you’ll have to excuse me now; I feel it coming on.” I turned away and reeled off in the general direction of the bar.

  “God’s mercy on you swine!” I shouted at two Marines coming out of the men’s room.

  They looked at me, but said nothing. By this time I was laughing crazily. But it made no difference. I was just another fucked-up cleric with a bad heart. Shit, they’ll love me down at the Brown Palace. I took another big hit off the amyl, and by the time I got to the bar my heart was full of joy. I felt like a monster reincarnation of Horatio Alger . . . a Man on the Move, and just sick enough to be totally confident.

  By Hunter S. Thompson

  Hell’s Angels (1966)

  Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1971)

  Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72 (1973)

  The Great Shark Hunt (1979)

  The Curse of Lono (1983)

  Generation of Swine (1988)

  Songs of the Doomed (1990)

  Screwjack (1991)

  Better Than Sex (1994)

  The Proud Highway (1997)

  The Rum Diary (1998)

  Fear and Loathing in America (2000)

  Kingdom of Fear (2003)

  Hey Rube (2004)

  Hunter S. Thompson was born in Louisville, Kentucky. A hell-raiser from the first, during his twenties Thompson moved quickly through a series of magazine and newspaper jobs – from TIME and The National Observer to a bowling magazine in Puerto Rico, where he wrote his first book, a novel called The Rum Diary that remained unpublished until the late ’90s.

  Thompson is best known as the godfather of Gonzo Journalism. Taking the New Journalism of the ’60s one step further, Thompson got to the heart of the action by becoming the star of his own reporting – whether by cycling with America’s toughest motorcycle gang, the Hell’s Angels, or downing a frightening collection of psychedelics in the name of the American Dream. In 1970, Hunter S. Thompson ran for Sheriff of Aspen, Colorado, the nearest city to his 100-acre farm in Woody Creek, and only narrowly lost. He contributed articles to Rolling Stone for many years, and ran a weekly sports column for ESPN Online. His books include Hell’s Angels, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72, The Great Shark Hunt, The Curse of Lono, Songs of the Doomed, Better than Sex, Generation of Swine, The Proud Highway, The Rum Diary, Fear and Loathing in America, Screwjack, The Kingdom of Fear, and Hey Rube. Hunter S. Thompson died in 2005.

  Speeding through the desert in a bright red Chevy convertible with nothing but a trunk full of drugs and the true grit to use them, Raoul Duke (Thompson’s alter ego) and his attorney Doctor Gonzo head to Las Vegas in search of the American Dream. Sent on assignment for a sports magazine, Duke and Gonzo quickly abandon their professional burdens for the thrilling promise of their trunk’s illicit contents, moving through Vegas in hallucinatory hopes of smoking, swallowing, and snorting their way to the “fantastic possibilities” of American life. However, as drug delusion and reality become inseparable, Duke and Gonzo soon find that the Dream is closer to a Nightmare…

  With rip-roaring humor and ferocious intensity, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas vividly recounts the strange visions, bizarre encounters, and maddening paranoia that Duke and Gonzo face throughout their psychedelic journey, while providing an incisive commentary on the prevailing fantasies of American affluence and success. Even as he describes the drugs numbing Duke’s mind into foggy oblivion, Thompson captures the desperation and disillusionment of early 1970s America with brilliant clarity and precision. At once a confession and an indictment, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas is a brilliant exposé on the frenzied lunacy of the dope decade.

  www.odysseyeditions.com

  Copyright © 1971 by Hunter S. Thompson

  All rights reserved. This edition published by arrangement with The Estate of Hunter S. Thompson.

  Jacket, ebook design & production by Enhanced Editions

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  Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas by ‘Raoul Duke’ first appeared in ROLLING STONE magazine, issue 95, November 11, 1971, and 96, November 25, 1971.