Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream

by Hunter Stockton Thompson

  5. A Terrible Experience with Extremely Dangerous Drugs.

  There was no way to cope with it. I stood up and gathered my luggage. It was important, I felt, to get out of town immediately.

  My attorney seemed to finally grasp this. “Wait!” he shouted. “You can’t leave me alone in this snake pit! This room is in my name.”

  I shrugged.

  “OK, goddamnit,” he said, moving toward the phone.

  “Look, I’ll call her. I’ll get her off our backs.” He nodded.

  “You’re right. She’s my problem.”

  I shook my head. “No, it’s gone too far.”

  “You’d make a pisspoor lawyer,” he replied. “Relax. I’ll handle this.”

  He dialed the Americana and asked for 1600. “Hi, Lucy,” he said. “Yeah, it’s me. I got your message ... what? Hell no, I taught the bastard a lesson he’ll never forget.., what? ...o, not dead, but he won’t be bothering anybody for a while—yeah, I left him out there; I stomped him, then pulled all teeth out..

  Jesus, I thought. What a terrible thing to lay on somebody a head full of acid.

  “But here’s the problem,” he was saying. “I have to leave here right away. That bastard cashed a bad check downstairs and gave you as a reference, so they’ll be looking for both of you ...yeah, I know, but you can’t judge a book by it’s cover, Lucy; some people are just basically rotten ...anyway, the pie as a reference, so they’ll be looking for both of us. The last thing in the world you want to do is call this hotel again; they’ll trace the call and put you straight behind bars ...no, I’m moving to the Tropicana right away; I’ll call you from there when I know my room number ...yeah, probably two hours; I have to act casual, or they’ll capture me too ...I think I’ll probably use a different name, but I’ll let you know what it is ...sure, just as soon as I check in ...what? of course; we’ll go to the Circus-Circus and catch the polar bear act; it’ll freak you right out . .

  He was nervously shifting the phone from ear to ear while he talked: “No . . .listen, I have to get off; they probably have the phone tapped ...yeah, I know, it was horrible, but it’s all over now...0 MY GOD! THEY’RE KICKING THEDOOR DOWN!” He hurled the phone down and began shout ing: “No! Get away from me! I’m innocent! It was Duke! I swear to God!” He kicked the phon against the wall, then leaned down to it and began yelling again: “No, I don’t know where she is! I think she went back to Montana. You’ll never catch Lucy! She’s gone!” He kicked the receiver again, then picked it up and held it about a foot away from his mouth as he uttered a long, quavering groan. “No! No! Don’t put that thing on me!” he screamed. Then he slammed the phone down.

  “Well,” he said quietly. “That’s that. She’s probably stuffing herself down the incinerator about now.” He smiled. “Yeah, I think that’s the last we’ll be hearing from Lucy.”

  I slumped on the bed. His performance had given me a bad jolt. For a moment I thought his mind had snapped-that he actually believed he was being attacked by invisible enemies.

  But the room was quiet again. He was back in his chair, watching Mission Impossible and fumbling Idly with the hash pipe. It was empty. “Where’s that opium?” he asked.

  I tossed him the kit-bag. “Be careful,” I mattered. “There’s not ’such left.”

  He chuckled,. “As your attorney,” he said, “I advise you not worry.” He nodded toward the bathroom. “Take a hit out of that little brown bottle in my shaving kit.”

  “What is it?”

  “Adrenochrome,” he said. “You won’t need much. Just a little tiny taste.”

  I got the bottle and dipped the head of a paper match intoit.

  “That’s about right,” he said. “That stuff makes pure mescaline seem like gingerbeer. You’ll go completely crazy if you take too much.”

  I licked the end of the match. “Where’d you get this?” I asked. “You can’t buy it.”

  “Never mind,” he said. “It’s absolutely pure.”

  I shook my head sadly. “Jesus! What kind of monster client have you picked up this time? There’s only one source for this stuff . .

  He nodded.

  “The adrenaline glands from a living human body,” I said. “It’s no good if youget it out of a corpse.”

  “I know,” he replied. “But the guy didn’t have any cash. He’s one of these Satanism freaks. He offered me human blood—said it would make me higher than I’d ever been in my life,” he laughed. “I thought he was kidding, so I told him I’d just as soon have an ounce or so of pure adrenochrome—or maybe just a fresh adrenalin gland to chew on.”

  I could already feel the stuff working on me. The first wave felt like a combination of mescaline and methedrmne. Maybe I should take a swim, I thought.

  “Yeah,” my attorney was saying. “They nailed this guy for child molesting, but he swears he didn’t do it. ‘Why should I fuck with chi Wren?’ he says; ‘They’re too small!’ ” He shrugged. “Christ, what could I say? Even a goddamn were wolf is entitled to legal counsel ...I didn’t dare turn the creep down. He might have picked up a letter opener and gone after my pineal gland.”

  “Why not?” I said. “He could probably get Melvin Belli for that.” I nodded, barely able to talk now. My body felt like I’d just been wired into a 220 volt socket. “Shit, we should get us some of that stuff.” I muttered finally. “Just eat a big handful and see what happens.”

  “Some of what?”

  “Extract of pineal.”

  He stared at me. “Sure,” he said. “That’s a good idea. One whiff of that shit would turn you into something out of a god damn medical encyclopedia! Man, your head would swell up like a watermelon, you’d probably gain about a hundred pounds in two hours ... claws, bleeding warts, then you’d notice about six huge hairy tits swefling up on your back .. .” He shook his head emphatically. “Man, I’ll try just about anything; but I’d never in hell touch a pineal gland.

  “Last Christmas somebody gave me a whole Jimson weed—the root must have wqighed two pound; enough for a year—but I ate the whole goddamn thiung in about twenty minutes.”

  The slightest hesitation made me want to grab him by the throat and force him to talk faster. “Right!” I said eagerly. “Jimson weed! What happened?”

  “Luckily, I vomited most of it right back up,” he said. “But even so, I went blind for three days. Christ I couldn’t even walk! My whole body turned to wax. I was such a mess that they had to haul me back to the ranch house in a wheelbarrow ... they said I was trying to talk, but I sounded like a raccoon.”

  “Fantastic,” I said. But I could barely hear him. I was so wired that my hands were clawing uncontrollably at the bed spread, jerking it right out from under me while he talked. My heels were dug into the mattress, with both knees locked ...I could feel my eyeballs swelling, about to pop out of the sockets.

  “Finish the fucking story!” I snarled. “What happened? What about the glands?”

  He backed away, keeping an eye on me as he edged across the room. “Maybe you need another drink,” he said nervously. “Jesus, that stuff got right on top of you, didn’t it?”

  I tried to smile. “Well ... nothing worse .. . no, this is worse .. .” It was hard to move my jaws; my tongue felt like burning magnesium. “No ... nothing to worry about,” I hissed. “Maybe if you could just ... shove me into the pool, or something..

  “Goddamnit,” he said. “You took too much. You’re about to explode. Jesus, look at your face!’

  I couldn’t move. Total paralysis now. Every muscle in my was contracted. I couldn’t even move my eyeballs, much turn my head or talk.

  “It won’t last long,” he said. “The first rush is the worst. ride the bastard out. If I put you in the pool right now, sink like a goddamn stone.”

  I was sure of it. Not even my lungs seemed to be functioning. I needed artificial respiration, but I couldn’t open my mouth to say so. I was going to die. Just sitting there on the bed, unable to move ...well at le
ast there’s no pain.

  Probably, I’ll black out in a few seconds, and after that it won’t matter.

  My attorney had gone back to watching television. The news was on again. Nixon’s face filled the screen, but his speech was hopelessly garbled. The only word I could make out was “sacrifice.” Over and over again: “Sacrifice ...sacrifice ...sacrificeI could hear myself breathing heavily. My attorney seemed to notice. “Just stay relaxed,” he said over his shoulder, with out looking at me. “Don’t try to fight it, or you’ll start getting brain bubbles ...strokes, aneurisms ...you’ll just wither up and die.” His hand snaked out to change channels.

  It was after midnight when I finally was able to talk and move around ...but I was still not free of the drug; the voltage had merely been cranked down from 220 to 110. I was a babbling nervous wreck, flapping around the room like a wild animal, pouring sweat and unable to concentrate on any one thought for more than two or three seconds at a time.

  My attorney put down the phone after making several calls. “There’s only one place where we can get fresh salmon,” he said, “and it’s closed on Sunday.”

  “Of course,” I snapped. “These goddamn Jesus freaks! They’re multiplying like rats!”

  He eyed me curiously.

  “What about the Process?” I said. “Don’t they have a place here? Maybe a delicatessen or something? With a few tables in back? They have a fantastic menu in London. I ate there once; incredible food…”

  “Get a grip on yourself,” he said. “You don’t want to even mention the Process in this town.”

  “You’re right,” I said. “Call Inspector Bloor. He knows about food. I think he has a list.”

  “Better to call room service,” he said. “We can get the crab looey and a quart of Christian Brothers muscatel for about twenty bucks.

  “No!” I said. “We must get out of this place. I need air. Let’s drive up to Reno and get a big tuna fish salad ... hell, it won’t take long. Only about four hundred miles; no traffic out there on the desert ...”

  “Forget it,” he said. “That’s Army territory. Bomb tests, nerve gas—we’d never make it.”

  We wound up at a place called The Big Flip about halfway downtown. I had a “New York steak” for $1.88. My attorney ordered the “Coyote Bush Basket” for $2.09 ... and after that we drank off a pot of watery “Golden West” coffee and watched four boozed-up cowboy types kick a faggot half to death between the pinball machines.

  “The action never stops in this town,” said my attorney as we shuffled out to the car. “A man with the right contacts could probably pick up all the fresh adrenochrome he wanted, if he hung around here for a while.”

  I agreed, but I wasn’t quite up to it, right then. I hadn’t slept for something like eighty hours, and that fearful ordeal with the drug had left me completely exhausted ...tomorrow we would have to get serious. The drug conference was scheduled to kick off at noon ... and we were still not sure how to handle it. So we drove back to the hotel and watched a British horror film on the late show.

  6. Getting Down to Business ...Opening Day at the Drug Convention

  “On behalf of the prosecuting attorneys of this county, I welcome you.”

  We sat in the rear fringe of a crowd of about 1500 in the main ballroom of the Dunes Hotel. Far up in front of the room, barely visible from the rear, the executive director of the National District Attorneys’ Association—a middle-aged, well-groomed, successful GOP businessman type named Pat rick Healy-was opening their Third National Institute on Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs. His remarks reached us by way of a big, low-fidelity speaker mounted on a steel pole in our corner. Perhaps a dozen others were spotted around the room, all facing the rear and looming over the crowd ... so hat no matter where you sat or even tried to hide, you were ways looking down the muzzle of a big speaker.

  This produced an odd effect. People in each section of the Lroom tended to stare at the nearest voice-box, instead of watching the distant figure of whoever was actually talking up front, on the podium. This 1935 style of speaker placement totally depersonalized the room. There was something is and authoritarian about it.

  Whoever set up that system was probably some kind of Sheriff’s auxiliary technician on leave from a drive-in theater in Muskogee, where the management couldn’t afford individual car speakers and relied on ten huge horns, mounted ontelephone poles in the parking area.

  A year earlier I had been to the Sky River Rock Festival in rural Washington, where a dozen stone-broke freaks from the Seattle Liberation Front had assembled a sound sys tem that carried every small note of an acoustic guitar—even a cough or the sound of a boot dropping on the stage—to half-deaf acid victims huddled under bushes a half mile away.

  But the best technicians available to the National DAs’ convention in Vegas apparently couldn’t handle it. Their sound system looked like something Ulysses S. Grant might have triggered up to address his troops during the Seige of Vicksburg. The voices from up front crackled with a fuzzy, high-pitched urgency, and the delay was just enough to keep the words disconcertingly out of phase with the speaker’s ges tures.

  “We must come to terms with the Drug Culture in this country! ... country ...country . . .” These echoes drifted back to the rear in confused waves. “The reefer butt is called a ‘roach’ because it resembles a cockroach . . .cockroach ... cockroach ...”

  “What the fuck are these people talking about?” my attorney whispered. “You’d have to be crazy on acid to think a joint looked like a goddamn cockroach!”

  I shrugged. It was clear that we’d stumbled into a prehis toric gathering. The voice of a “drug expert” named Bloomquist crackled out of the nearby speakers: “... about these flashbacks, the patient never knows; he thinks it’s all over and he gets himself straightened out for six months ... and then, darn it, the whole trip comes back on him.”

  Gosh darn that fiendish LSD! Dr. E. R. Bloomquist, MD, was the keynote speaker, one of the big stars of the conference. He is the author of a paperback book titled Marijuana, which—according to the cover—“tells it like it is.” (He is also the inventor of the roach/cockroach thoery ... )

  According to the book jacket, he is an “Associate Clinical Professor of Surgery (Anesthesiology) at the University of Southern Cllfcruia School of Medicine” ... and also “a well known authority on the abuse of dangerous drugs.: Dr. Bllomquist “has also appeared on national network television panles, has served as a consultant for government agencies, was a member of the Committee on Narcotics Addiction and Alcoholism of the Council on Mental Health of the American Medical Association.” His wisdom is massively reprinted and distributed, says the publisher. He is clearly one of the heavies on that circuit of second-rate academic hustlers who get paid anywhere from $500 to $1000 a hit for lecturing to cop crowds.

  Dr. Bloomquist’s book is a compendium of state bullshit. On page 49 he explains, the “four states of being” in the cannabis society: “Cool, Groovy, Hip & Square”—in that descending order. “The square is seldom if ever cool,” says Bloomquist. “He is ‘not with it,’ that is, he doesn’t know ‘what’s happening.’ But if he manages to figure it out, he moves up a notch to ‘hip.’ And if he can bring himself to approve of what’s happening, he becomes ‘groovy.’ And after that, with much luck and perseverence, he can rise to the rank of ‘cool.’ ”

  Bloomquist writes like somebody who once bearded Tim Leary in a campus cocktail lounge and paid for all the drinks. And it was probably somebody like Leary who told him, with a straight face, that sunglasses are known in the drug culture as “tea shades.”

  This is the kind of dangerous gibberish that used to be posted, in the form of mimeographed bulletins, in Police Department locker rooms.

  Indeed: KNOW YOUR DOPE FIEND. YOUR LIFE MAY DEPEND ON IT! You will not be able to see his eyes because of Tea-Shades, but his knuckles will be white from inner tension and his pants will be crustedwith semen from constantly jacking off when he
can’t find a rape victim. He will staggerr and babble when questioned. He will not respect your badge. The Dope Fiend fears nothing. He will attack, for no reason, with every weapon at his command—including yours. BEWARE. Any officer apprehending a suspected marijuana addict should use all necessary force immedately. One stitch in time (on him) wil usually save nine on you. Good luck.

  The Chief.

  Indeed. Luck is always important, especially in Las Vegas ... and ours was getting worse. It was clear at a glance that this Drug Conference was not what we’d planned on. It was far too open, too mixed. About a third of the crowd looked like they’d just stopped by, for the show, en route to a Frazier-Ali rematch at the Vegas Convention Center across town. Or maybe a benefit bout, for Old Smack Dealers, between Liston and Marshal Ky.

  The room fairly bristled with beards, mustaches and super-Mod dress. The DAs’ conference had obviously drawn a goodly contingent of undercover narcs and other twilight types. An assistant DA from Chicago wore a light-tan sleeve less knit suit: His lady was the star of the Dunes casino; she flashed through the place like Grace Slick at a Finch College class reunion. They were a classic couple; stone swingers.

  Just because you’re a cop, these days, doesn’t mean you can’t be With It. And this conference attracted some real peacocks. But my own costume—$40 FBI wingtips and a Pat Boone madras sportcoat—was just about right for the mass median; because for every urban-hipster, there were about twenty crude-looking rednecks who could have passed for assistant football coaches at Mississippi State.

  These were the people who made my attorney nervous. Like most Californians, he was shocked to actually see these people from The Outback. Here was the cop-cream from Middle America ... and, Jesus, they looked and talked like a gang of drunken pig farmers!