Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas

We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold. The sky above the Great Red Shark, our convertible, was suddenly full of huge bats, swooping and screeching around us as we blasted toward Las Vegas at a hundred miles an hour. My attorney, a 300-pound Samoan, didn't see them yet, but he would. The poor bastard would see them soon enough. We were on our way to find the American Dream, on assignment from a sporting magazine to cover the fabulous Mint 400 desert race. Our trunk was a mobile police narcotics lab: two bags of grass, seventy-five pellets of mescaline, five sheets of high-powered blotter acid, a salt shaker half full of cocaine, and a whole galaxy of uppers, downers, screamers, laughers… and also a quart of tequila, a quart of rum, a case of Budweiser, a pint of raw ether, and two dozen amyls. This was the only way to do it.

Our arrival in Las Vegas was a gauntlet of pure terror. By the time we reached the registration desk at the Mint Hotel, the acid had taken full control. The lobby bar had devolved into a reptile zoo, the carpet a blood-soaked sponge, and the desk clerk's face was swelling into the horrible green jowls of a Moray Eel. “My name is Doctor Gonzo,” my attorney told the eel-woman as he dragged me away. “Prepare our suite at once. We'll be in the bar.” We found ourselves surrounded by lizards in sport coats, gnawing on the necks of cocktail waitresses. “Order some golf shoes,” I whispered. “Otherwise, we'll never get out of this place alive.” Somehow, we secured our credentials and the key to our suite, a sound-proof haven where we could finally ride out the storm with a quart of rum and nine fresh grapefruits.

The race itself was a meaningless spectacle, a thundering chaos of dust and noise that was impossible to cover. We made a token appearance, terrorizing retired naval officers in their dune buggies before retreating to the true heart of the city's madness. The mission had failed; the story was a lost cause. All that remained was the Journey itself. We plunged into the city's electric heart, our minds reeling on ether. The Circus-Circus casino was the vortex, what the whole hep world would be doing on Saturday night if the Nazis had won the war. Above the gambling tables, trapeze artists and muzzled wolverines flew through the air while we staggered through the turnstiles, behaving like village drunkards from some early Irish novel - a total loss of all basic motor skills, the brain recoiling in horror as the body flapped and stumbled on its own. “I think I'm getting the Fear,” my attorney said, his voice tight. “Nonsense,” I told him. “We've found the main nerve.”

The peak of the madness came in our trashed hotel suite. My attorney, lost in a savage acid trip, submerged himself in the bathtub, demanding I play “White Rabbit” at top volume. “When it comes to that fantastic note where the rabbit bites its own head off,” he screamed, “I want you to throw that fuckin radio into the tub with me!” His eyes were gripped shut, his body rigid in the oily green water. Instead of electrocuting him, I hurled a massive grapefruit into the tub, and he erupted like a shark after meat. The room was a ruin of shattered mirrors, burned mattresses, and grapefruit rinds. It was in that moment of quiet desperation, the '60s felt truly over. 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. 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.

Fleeing the city with a monumental, unpaid bill seemed the only option. But just as I prepared to run, a telegram arrived. My attorney, already back in L.A., had secured us a new assignment: covering the National District Attorneys' Conference on Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs, right here in Vegas. The sheer, savage irony was too perfect to ignore. We were to infiltrate the infiltrators. I traded the wrecked Red Shark for a pristine white Cadillac convertible and checked into the Flamingo, which was teeming with the enemy - a thousand cops in plaid Bermuda shorts and rubberized beach sandals, gathered to strategize the destruction of our kind. We were the Menace, not in disguise, but as stone-obvious drug abusers with a flagrantly cranked-up act that we intended to push all the way to the limit.

Our cover was nearly blown by Lucy, a deeply disturbed religious zealot my attorney had picked up on the plane and dosed with acid. She was a walking bomb of Christian guilt and psychotic rage, obsessed with gifting her demonic portraits of Barbra Streisand to the singer herself. The fear of a Mann Act conviction and a brutal rape charge hung over us like a guillotine. We managed to cut her loose, abandoning her at the airport with a story about a deadly showdown in the desert, but the paranoia lingered. Her specter haunted us as we sat in the back of the conference ballroom, listening to drug "experts" spew prehistoric gibberish about "reefer butts" and "tea shades."

The conference was a farce, a gathering of baffled fools trying to understand a world they couldn't even see. We terrorized a DA from Georgia with tales of Satanic cults in Malibu who drank human blood, then took to the Strip for one final, high-speed drag race against a carload of shocked tourists from Oklahoma. “Cheap heroin!” my attorney screamed at them from our vomit-streaked Cadillac. “This is the real stuff! You won't get hooked!” We left them stalled in an intersection, their faces frozen in horror. There was nothing left for us in this town. The American Dream was a bust, a cruel joke played on a generation of failed seekers. I dropped my attorney at the airport at dawn and drove the mauled Cadillac back to the VIP lot one last time. As I limped onto the plane, surrounded by the same cops from the conference, I felt like a monster reincarnation of Horatio Alger… a Man on the Move, and just sick enough to be totally confident.