Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: Excerpts

I re-read Hunter S. Thompson’s classic, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream, the other day at the beach. Sitting on my blanket, sunglasses on, roaring with laughter all by myself. You yearn for rehab just reading about the debauchery. One of my favorite anecdotes involves “the attorney”, high on mescaline and ether and rum and every other substance on the planet, getting stuck on an indoor merry-go-round and being absolutely terrified. Clinging to a pole as though he was in a truly dangerous situation, Thompson watching him circle around and around and around, unable to help.

Here are some fragments I love.

p. 11

“You Samoans are all the same,” I told him. “You have no faith in the essential decency of the white man’s culture. Jesus, just one hour ago we were sitting over there in that stinking baiginio, stone broke and paralyzed for the weekend, when a call comes through from some total stranger in New York, telling me to go to Las Vegas and expenses be damned – and then he sends me over to some office in Beverly Hills where another total stranger gives me $300 raw cash for no reason at all … I tell you, my man, this is the American Dream in action! We’d be fools not to ride this strange torpedo all the way out to the end.”

p. 21

The radio was screaming: “Power to the People – Right On!” John Lennon’s political song, ten years too late. “That poor fool should have stayed where he was,” said my attorney. Punks like that just get in the way when they try to be serious.”

“Speaking of serious,” I said. “I think it’s about time to get into the ether and the cocaine.”

p. 22

“KILL THE BODY AND THE HEAD WILL DIE”

This line appears in my notebook, for some reason. Perhaps some connection to Joe Frazier. Is he still alive? Still able to talk? I watched that fight in Seattle – horribly twisted about four seats down the aisle from the Governor. A very painful experience in every way, a proper end to the sixties. Timothy Leary a prisoner of Eldridge Cleaver in Algeria, Bob Dylan clipping coupons in Greenwich Village, both Kennedys murdered by mutants, Owsley folding napkins on Terminal Island, and finally Cassius/Ali belted incredibly off his pedestal by a human hamburger, a man on the verge of death. Joe Frazier, like Nixon, had finally prevailed for reasons that people like me refused to understand – at least not out loud.

p . 41

Saturday midnight … Memories of this night are extremely hazy. All I have, for guide-pegs, is a pocketful of keno cards and cocktail napkins, all covered with scribbled notes. Here is one: “Get the Ford man, demand a Bronco for race-observation purposes … photos? … Lacerda/call … why not a helicopter? … Get on the phone, lean on the fuckers … heavy yelling.”

Another says: “Sign on Paradise Boulevard – ‘Stopless and Topless’ … bush-league sex compared to L.A.; pasties here – total naked public humping in L.A. … Las Vegas is a society of armed masturbators/gambling is the kicker here/sex is extra/weird trip for high rollers … house-whores for winners, hand jobs for the bad luck crowd.”

p. 45

This is the main advantage of ether: it makes you behave like the village drunkard in some early Irish novel.

p. 46

The Circus-Circus is what the whole hep world would be doing on Saturday night if the Nazis had won the war. This is the Sixth Reich …

Right above the gambling tables the Forty Flying Carazito Brothers are doing a high-wire trapeze act, along with four muzzled Wolverines and the Six Nymphet Sisters from San Diego … so you’re doing on the main floor playing blackjack, and the stakes are getting high when suddenly you chance to look up, and there, right smack above your head is a half-naked fourteen-year-old girl being chased through the air by a snarling wolverine, which is suddenly locked in a death battle with two silver-painted Polacks who come swinging down from opposite balconies and meet in mid-air on the wolverine’s neck …

This madness goes on and on, but nobody seems to notice.

p. 48

“Look over there,” I said. “Two women fucking a polar bear.”
“Please,” he said. “Don’t tell me those things. Not now.”

p. 56

One of the things you learn, after years of dealing with drug people, is that everything is serious.

p. 63

Ignore that nightmare in that bathroom. Just another ugly refugee from the Love Generation, some doom-struck gimp who couldn’t handle the pressure.

p. 66

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 explanation, no mix of words or music or memories can touch that sense of knowing that you were there and alive in that corner of the 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 really 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 toll-gate, 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.

Magnificent. Fear and Loathing came out in 1971, remember, so those days he discussed were only a couple of years in the rear-view mirror. Not much time at all. But those paragraphs read as though they were written with a decade or two of retrospect and reflection. What he is describing is the very short space between Easy Rider and Two-Lane Blacktop. Easy Rider contains the prophecy of the moment’s end. “We blew it.” A couple of years only until Two-Lane Blacktop and the cultural mood, the culture itself, has been altered entirely. Something burned itself out.

p. 86

I’m a fucking sinner! Venal, mortal, carnal, major, minor – however you want to call it, Lord … I’m guilty.
But do me this one last favor: just give me five more high-speed hours before you bring the hammer down; just let me get rid of this goddamn car and off of this horrible desert.
Which is not really a hell of a lot to ask, Lord, because the final incredible truth is that I am not guilty. All I did was take your gibberish seriously … and you see where it got me? My primitive Christian instincts have made me a criminal.
Creeping through the casino at six in the morning with a suitcase full of grapefruit and “Mint 400” T-shirts, I remember telling myself, over and over again, “You are not guilty.” This is merely a necessary expedient, to avoid a nasty scene. After all, I made no binding agreements; this is an institutional debt – nothing personal. This whole goddamn nightmare is the fault of that stinking, irresponsible magazine. Some fool in New York did this to me. It was his idea, Lord, not mine.
And now look at me: half-crazy with fear, driving 120 miles an hour across Death Valley in some car I never even wanted. You evil bastard! This is your work! You’d better take care of me, Lord … because if you don’t you’re going to have me on your hands.

p. 89

No sympathy for the devil; keep that in mind. Buy the ticket, take the ride … and if it occasionally gets a little heavier than what you had in mind, well … maybe chalk it off to forced consciousness expansion: Tune in, freak out, get beaten. It’s all in Kesey’s Bible …. The Far Side of Reality.
And so much for bad gibberish: not even Kesey can help me now.

p. 95

This is how the world works. All energy flows according to the whims of the Great Magnet. What a fool I was to defy him. He knew. He knew all along. It was He who sacked me in Baker. I had run far enough, so He nailed me … closing off all my escape routes, hassling me first with the CHP and then with this filthy phantom hitchhiker … plunging me into fear and confusion.
Never cross the Great Magnet. I understood this now … and with understand came a sense of almost terminal relief. Yes, I would go back to Vegas. Slip the Kid and confound the CHP by moving East again, instead of West. This would be the shrewdest move of my life. Back to Vegas and sign up for the Drugs and Narcotics conference; me and a thousand pigs. Why not? Move confidently into their midst. Register at the Flamingo and have the White Caddy sent over at once. Do it right; remember Horatio Alger…

p. 103

I tend to sweat heavily in warm climates. My clothes are soaking wet from dawn to dusk. This worried me at first, but when I went to a doctor and described my normal daily intake of booze, drugs and poison he told me to come back when the sweating stopped. That would be the danger point, he said – a sign that my body’s desperately overworked flushing mechanism had broken down completely. “I have great faith in the natural processes,” he said. “But in your case … well … I find no precedent. We’ll just have to wait and see, then work with what’s left.”

p. 143

I suspect we could have done the whole thing on acid … except for some of the people; there were faces and bodies in that group who would have been absolutely unendurable on acid. The sight of a 355-pound police chief from Waco, Texas, necking openly with his 290-pound wife (or whatever woman he had with him) when the lights were turned off for a Dope Film was just barely tolerable on mescaline – which is mainly a sensual/surface drug that exaggerates reality, instead of altering it – but with a head full of acid, the sight of two fantastically obese human beings far gone in a public grope while a thousand cops all around them watched a movie about the “dangers of marijuana” would not be emotionally acceptable. The brain would reject it: The medulla would attempt to close itself off from the signals it was getting from the frontal lobes … and the middle-brain, meanwhile, would be trying desperately to put a different interpretation on the scene, before passing it back to the medulla and the risk of physical action.
Acid is a relatively complex drug, in its effects, while mescaline is pretty simple and straightforward – but in a scene like this, the difference was academic. There was simply no call, at this conference, for anything but a massive consumption of Downers: Reds, Grass and Booze, because the whole program had apparently been set up by people who had been in a Seconal stupor since 1964.

p. 155

The “high side” of Vegas is probably the most closed society west of Sicily – it makes no difference, in terms of the day to day life-style of the place, whether the Man at the Top is Lucky Luciano or Howard Hughes. In an economy where Tom Jones can make $75,000 a week for two shows a night at Caesar’s, the palace guard is indispensable, and they don’t care who signs their paychecks. A gold mine like Vegas breeds its own army, like any other gold mine. Hired muscle tends to accumulate in fast layers around money/power poles … and big money, in Vegas, is synonymous with the Power to protect it.

p. 157

The waitress had the appearance of a very old hooker who had finally found her place in life.

p. 173

The only hope now, I felt, was the possibility that we’d gone to such excess, with our gig, that nobody in a position to bring the hammer down on us could possibly believe it. Particularly not since we’d signed in with the Police Conference. When you bring an act into this town, you want to bring it in heavy. Don’t waste any time with cheap shucks and misdemeanors. Go straight for the jugular. Get right into felonies.

p. 178

But what is sane? Especially here in “our own country” – in this dumbstruck era of Nixon. We are all wired into a survival trip now. No more of the speed that fueled the Sixties. Uppers are going out of style. This was the fatal flaw in Tim Leary’s trip. He crashed around America selling “consciousness expansion” without ever giving a thought to the grim meat-hook realities that were lying in wait for all the people who took him too seriously. After West Point and the Priesthood, LSD must have seemed entirely logical to him … but there is not much satisfaction in knowing that he blew it very badly for himself, because he took too many others down with him.
Not that they didn’t deserve it: No doubt they all Got What Was Coming To Them. All those pathetically eager acid freaks who thought they could buy Peace and Understanding for three bucks a hit. But their loss and failure is ours, too. What Leary took down with him was the central illusion of a whole life-style that he helped to create … a generation of permanent cripples, failed seekers, who never understood the essential old-mystic fallacy of the Acid Culture: the desperate assumption that somebody – or at least some force – is tending that Light at the end of the tunnel.

Brutally honest.

p. 191

“You found the American Dream?” he said. “In this town?”
I nodded. “We’re sitting on the main nerve right now,” I said.

p. 202

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 tranquilizers. 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.

p. 202

I was so far beyond fatigue that I was beginning to feel nicely adjusted to the idea of permanent hysteria.

And finally, the Grand Pooh-Bah Passage:

p. 179

One of the crucial moments of the Sixties came on that day when the Beatles cast their lot with the Maharishi. It was like Dylan going to the Vatican to kiss the Pope’s ring.
First “gurus.” Then, when that didn’t work, back to Jesus. And now, following Manson’s primitive/instinct lead, a whole new wave of clan-type commune Gods like Mel Lyman, ruler of Avatar, and What’s His Name who runs “Spirit and Flesh.”
Sonny Barger never quite got the hang of it, but he’ll never know how close he was to a king-hell breakthrough. The Angels blew it in 1965, at the Oakland-Berkeley line, when they acted on Barger’s hardhat, con-boss instincts and attacked the front ranks of an anti-war march. This proved to be an historic schism in the then Rising Tide of the Young Movement of the Sixties. It was the first open break between the Greasers and the Longhairs, and the importance of that break can be read in the history of SDS, which eventually destroyed itself in the doomed effort to reconcile the interests of the lower/working class biker/dropout types and the upper/ middle Berkeley/student activities.
Nobody involved in that scene, at the time, could possibly have foreseen the Implications of the Ginsberg/Kesey failure to persuade the Hell’s Angels to join forces with the radical Left from Berkeley. The final split came at Altamont, four years later, but by that time it had long been clear to everybody except a handful of rock industry dopers and the national press. The orgy of violence at Altamont merely dramatized the problem. The realities were already fixed; the illness was understood to be terminal, and the energies of The Movement were long since aggressively dissipated by the rush to self-preservation.

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4 Responses to Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: Excerpts

  1. mutecypher says:

    I can’t really think of anyone who writes with the kinetic cerebral prismatic ferocity of Hunter. You’re always inside his mind, even when he’s trying to get inside someone else’s mind. He was a rabid, rugged individualist whose concerns were the times, the community, and the country. And intoxication. Gone 10 years now.

    “Some may never live, but the crazy never die.”

    • sheila says:

      Yeah, he is really one of a kind.

      So hilarious – one guy on FB mentioned his favorite line from the book: “She had teeth like baseballs and eyes like jellied fire.”

      I mean …

      And his social commentary is second to none.

      I can’t believe he’s gone. That was such an upsetting event.

  2. Elliott says:

    In the eighties, as a preppie kid outside Boston, the reverberations of whatever happened in the sixties was loud and real. Most of it was secondary-text: analyzed and assimilated, my friends with younger parents had Beatles albums, my elementary school had a May Day celebration, there were self-styled deadheads at my prep school. It was like an unexplored country: outside of my parents’ experience.

    I got as close as I ever will to the real thing in 1983, spending a day in Rajneeshpuramville, Oregon, watching the Bhagwan parade in one of his Rolls-Royces down a hot dusty street crowded with his swooning devotees in their hand-dyed pink and orange. It was spectacular, and confusing, and not at all an instance of the idealism it was meant to represent.

    A friend of mine has parents who were in San Fransisco in the mid-to-late sixties. Her father, who was on a career-of-banking path at the time, said that in the summer of love the city was full of idealistic, intelligent young people trying to do something new and different, and that the next year the people seemed as idealistic if less intelligent, but that the third year, the city was full of a bad, dangerous crowd taking advantage of whatever and whomever they could. Later on, I had a friend who’s mom was there then. She was not an investment banker, but a poor kid from the central valley. She said the same thing about those three years.

    What I am trying to get at here is this idea of History and what it’s made of. That something momentous happened in the sixties is indisputable. That it was obvious at the time to perceptive people of all walks of live is evidenced by the parents of my friends who saw it. What it was, who was there, and what has become of it is very hard to express, though. H. S. Thompson communicates something essential about that time. Joan Didion does as well. It is interesting to me because it is so elusive, there is no one event, and because its cultural impact so touched my life.

    • sheila says:

      Elliott –

      Wow, your comment is so deep that I read it about 3 times in a row. Thank you so much! The stories those people tell of San Fran at that time is just chilling – how the peace and love morphed into something more psychotic (too many people strung out on drugs, too many crackpots let loose in the streets). Didion definitely captured it like no other in her couple of essays about that time.

      My family was Boston-Irish, busy joining the military or going into academia – so most of them just skipped the whole hippie movement. I think a couple of my uncles got into it, but not to a serious degree. They all loved the music – I grew up with the music made in the late 60s – but it was just really separate from my world and my parents’ world.

      It fascinates me – almost like a trainwreck.

      // That something momentous happened in the sixties is indisputable. That it was obvious at the time to perceptive people of all walks of live is evidenced by the parents of my friends who saw it. What it was, who was there, and what has become of it is very hard to express, though. //

      Yes.

      In the Criterion Collection edition of the Maysles film Gimme Shelter – about the Stones at Altamont – there are a couple of great essays about what that event represented – the “death of the sixties” – all that. That peace and love was not enough to withstand the violence of the times.

      But what I really like in Hunter Thompson’s excerpt here is his observation that Altamont just dramatized it – and rock music industry types and the press picked up on “death of the sixties” – when people on the ground (like himself, like Didion) had realized it 5 years before as it was happening.

      That had not occurred to me at all and it’s an interesting shading of the whole fascinating Altamont conversation.

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