I might even be tempted to justify a thing like that -- but of course it would be wrong. . . And my attorney was Not a Crook and to the best of my knowledge, his mother was just as much "a saint" as Richard Nixon's.
Indeed. And now -- as an almost perfect tribute to every icepick ever wielded in the name of Justice -- I want to enter into the permanent record, at this point, as a strange but unchallenged fact that Oscar Z. Acosta was never disbarred from the practice of law in the state of California -- and ex-President Richard Nixon was.
There are some things, apparently, that not even lawyers will tolerate; and in a naturally unjust world where the image of "Justice" is honored for being blind, even a blind pig will find an acorn once in a while.
Or maybe not -- because Oscar was eventually hurt far worse by professional ostracism than Nixon was hurt by disbarment. The Great Banshee screamed for them both at almost the same time -- for entirely different reasons, but with ominously similar results.
Except that Richard Nixon got rich from his crimes, and Oscar Acosta got killed. The wheels of justice grind small and queer in this life and if they seem occasionally unbalanced or even stupid and capricious in their grinding, my own midnight guess is that they were probably fixed from the start. And any Judge who can safely slide into full pension retirement without having to look back on anything worse in the way of criminal vengeance than a few scorched lawns is a man who got off easy.
There is, after all, considerable work and risk -- and even a certain art -- to the torching of a half-acre lawn without also destroying the house or exploding every car in the driveway. It would be a lot easier to simply make a funeral pyre of the whole place and leave the lawn for dilettantes.
That's how Oscar viewed arson -- anything worth doing is worth doing well -- and I'd watched enough of his fiery work to know he was right. If he was a King-Hell Pyromaniac, he was also a gut politician and occasionally a very skilled artist in the style and tone of his torchings.
Like most lawyers with an IQ higher than sixty, Oscar learned one definition of Justice in Law school, and a very different one in the courtroom. He got his degree at some night school on Post Street in San Francisco, while working as a copy boy for the Hearst Examiner. And for a while he was very proud to be a lawyer -- for the same reasons he'd felt proud to be a missionary and lead clarinet man in the leper colony band.
But by the time I first met him in the summer of 1967, he was long past what he called his "puppy love trip with The Law." It had gone the same way of his earlier missionary zeal, and after one year of casework at an East Oakland "poverty law center" he was ready to dump Holmes and Brandeis for Huey Newton and a Black Panther style of dealing with the laws and courts of America.
When he came booming into a bar called Daisy Duck in Aspen and announced that he was the trouble we'd all been waiting for, he was definitely into the politics of confrontation -- and on all fronts: in the bars or the courts or even the streets, if necessary.
Oscar was not into serious street-fighting, but he was hell on wheels in a bar brawl. Any combination of a 250-pound Mexican and LSD-25 is a potentially terminal menace for anything it can reach -- but when the alleged Mexican is in fact a profoundly angry Chicano lawyer with no fear at all of anything that walks on less than three legs and a de facto suicidal conviction that he will die at the age of thirty-three -- just like Jesus Christ -- you have a serious piece of work on your hands. Specially if the bastard is already thirty-three and a half years old with a head full of Sandoz acid, a loaded .357 Magnum in his belt, a hatchet-wielding Chicano bodyguard on his elbow at all times, and a disconcerting habit of projectile-vomiting geysers of pure red blood off the front porch every thirty or forty minutes, or whenever his malignant ulcer can't handle any more raw tequila.
This was the Brown Buffalo in the full crazed flower of his prime -- a man, indeed, for all seasons. And it was somewhere in the middle of his thirty-third year, in fact, when he came out to Colorado -- with his faithful bodyguard, Frank -- to rest for a while after his grueling campaign for Sheriff of Los Angeles County, which he lost by a million or so votes. But in defeat, Oscar had managed to create an instant political base for himself in the vast Chicano barrio of East Los Angeles -- where even the most conservative of the old-line "Mexican-Americans" were suddenly calling themselves "Chicanos" and getting their first taste of tear gas at "La Raza" demonstrations, which Oscar was quickly learning to use as a fire and brimstone forum to feature himself as the main spokesman for a mushrooming "Brown Power" movement that the LAPD called more dangerous than the Black Panthers.
Which was probably true, at the time -- but in retrospect it sounds a bit different than it did back in 1969 when the sheriff was sending out fifteen or twenty helicopter sorties a night to scan the rooftops and backyards of the barrio with huge sweeping searchlights that drove Oscar and his people into fits of blind rage every time they got nailed in a pool of blazing white light with a joint in one hand and a machete in the other.
But that is another and very long story -- and since I've already written it once ("Strange Rumblings in Aztlan," RS81) and came close to getting my throat slit in the process, I think we'll just ease off and pass on it for right now.
The sad tale of Oscar's fall from grace in the barrio is still rife with bad blood and ugly paranoia. He was too stunned to fight back in the time-honored style of a professional politician. He was also broke, divorced, depressed and so deep in public disgrace in the wake of his "high speed drug bust" that not even junkies would have him for an attorney.
In a word, he and his dream of "one million brown buffalos" were finished in East L.A. . . and everywhere else where it counted, for that matter, so Oscar "took off" once again, and once again with a head full of acid.
But. . .
Peacocks Can't Live at This Altitude. . . New Home for Ebb Tide, False Dawn in Aztlan and a Chain of Bull Maggots on the Neck of the Fat Spic from Riverbank. . . May Leeches Crawl on his Soul until the Rivers Flow Up from the Sea and the Grass Grows Down into Hell. . . Beware of 300-Pound Samoan Attorneys Bearing Gifts of LSD-25
Follow not truth too near the heels, lest it dash out thy teeth.
-- George Herbert, Jacula Prudentum
Well. . . it is not an easy thing to sit here and keep a straight face while even considering the notion that there is any connection at all between Oscar's sorry fate and his lifelong devotion to defending the truth at all costs. There are a lot of people still wandering around, especially in places like San Francisco and East L.A., who would like nothing better than to dash out Oscar's teeth with a ball-peen hammer for all the weird and costly lies he laid on them at one point or another in his frenzied assaults on the way to his place in the sun. He never denied he was a lying pig who would use any means to justify his better end. Even his friends felt the sting. Yet there were times when he took himself as seriously as any other bush league Mao or Moses, and in moments like these he was capable of rare insights and a naive sort of grace in his dealings with people that often touched on nobility. At its best, the Brown Buffalo shuffle was a match for Muhammad Ali's.
After I'd known him for only three days he made me a solemn gift of a crude wooden idol that I am still not sure he didn't occasionally worship in secret when not in the presence of the dreaded "white ass gabancos." In a paragraph near the end of his autobiography, he describes that strangely touching transfer far better than I can.
"I opened my beat-up suitcase and took out my wooden idol. I had him wrapped in a bright red and yellow cloth. A San Bias Indian had given him to me when I left Panama. I called him Ebb Tide. He was made of hard mahogany. An eighteen-inch god without eyes, without a mouth and without a sexual organ. Perhaps the sculptor had the same hang-up about drawing the body from the waist down as I'd had in Miss Rollins' fourth-grade class. Ebb Tide was my oldest possession. A string of small, yellowed wild pig's fangs hung from its neck."
Ebb Tide still hangs on a nail just a
bove my living room window. I can see him from where I sit now, scrawling these goddamn final desperate lines before my head can explode like a ball of magnesium tossed into a bucket of water. I have never been sure exactly what kind of luck Ebb Tide was bringing down on me, over the years -- but I've never taken the little bastard down or even thought about it, so he must be paying his way. He is perched just in front of the peacock perch outside, and right now there are two high-blue reptilian heads peering over his narrow wooden shoulders.
Does anybody out there believe that?
No?
Well. . . peacocks can't live at this altitude anyway, like Doberman pinschers, sea snakes and gun-toting Chicano missionaries with bad-acid breath.
Why does a hearse horse snicker, hauling a lawyer away?
-- Carl Sandburg
Things were not going well in San Francisco or L.A. at that grim point in Oscar's time, either. To him, it must have seemed like open season on every Brown Buffalo west of the Continental Divide.
The only place he felt safe was down south on the warm foreign soil of the old country. But when he fled back to Mazatlan this time, it was not just to rest but to brood -- and to plot what would be his final crazed leap for the great skyhook.
It would also turn out to be an act of such monumental perversity not even that gentle presence of Ebb Tide could change my sudden and savage decision that the Treacherous bastard should have his nuts ripped off with a plastic fork -- and then fed like big meat grapes to my peacocks.
The move he made this time was straight out of Jekyll and Hyde -- the Brown Buffalo suddenly transmogrified into the form of a rabid hyena. And the bastard compounded his madness by hiding out in the low-rent bowels of Mazatlan like some half-mad leper gone over the brink after yet another debilitating attack of string warts and Herpes Simplex lesions. . .
This ugly moment came just as my second book, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, was only a week or so away from going to press. We were in the countdown stage and there is no way for anybody who hasn't been there to understand the tension of having a new book almost on the presses, but not quite there. The only thing that stood between me and publication was a last minute assault on the very essence of the story by the publishers' libel lawyers. The book was malignant from start to finish, they said, with grievous libels that were totally indefensible. No publisher in his right mind would risk the nightmare of doomed litigation that a book like this was certain to drag us all into.
Which was true, on one level, but on another it seemed like a harmless joke -- because almost every one of the most devastating libels they cited involved my old buddy, O. Z. Acosta; a fellow author, prominent Los Angeles attorney and an officer of many courts. Specifically they advised:
We have read the above manuscript as requested. Our principal legal objection is to the description of the author's attorney as using and offering for sale dangerous drugs as well as indulging in other criminal acts while under the influence of such drugs. Although this attorney is not named, he is identified with some detail. Consequently, this material should be deleted as libelous.
In addition, we have the following specific comments: Page 3: The author's attorney's attempt to break and enter and threats (sic) to bomb a salesman's residence is libelous and should be deleted. Page 4: This page suggests that the author's attorney was driving at an excessive speed while drunk all of which is libelous and should be deleted. Page 6: The incident in which the author's attorney advised the author to drive at top speed is libelous and should be deleted. The same applies to the attorney's being party to a fraud at the hotel. Page 31: The statement that the author's attorney will be disbarred is libelous and should be deleted. Page 40: The incident in which the author and his attorney impersonated police officers is libelous and should be deleted. Page 41: The reference to the attorney's -----* being a "junkie" and shooting people is libelous and should be deleted unless it may be proven true. Page 48: The incident in which the author's attorney offers heroin for sale is libelous and should be deleted.
We do not advise -------- to allow any material in this manuscript noted above as libelous to remain based upon expectancy of proving that'll is true by the author's testimony. Inasmuch as the author admits being under the influence of illegal drugs at most if not all times, proof of truth would be extremely difficult through him.
* Deleted at the insistence of Rolling Stone's attorney.
"Balls," I told them. "We'll just have Oscar sign a release. He's no more concerned about this 'libel' bullshit than I am.
"And besides, truth is an absolute defense against libel, anyway. . . Jesus, you don't understand what kind of a monster we're dealing with. You should read the parts I left out. . ."
But the libel wizards were not impressed -- especially since we were heaping all this libelous abuse on a fellow attorney. Unless we got a signed release from Oscar, the book would not go to press.
Okay, I said. But let's do it quick. He's down in Mazatlan now. Send the goddamn thing by air express and he'll sign it and ship it right back.
I think we are in Rats Alley where the dead men lost their bones,
-- T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land
Indeed. So they sent the release off at once. . . and Oscar refused to sign it -- but not for any reason a New York libel lawyer could possibly understand. He was, as I'd said, not concerned at all by the libels. Of course they were all true, he said when I finally reached him by telephone at his room in the Hotel Synaloa.
The only thing that bothered him -- bothered him very badly -- was the fact that I'd repeatedly described him as a 300-pound Samoan.
"What kind of Journalist are you?" he screamed at me. "Don't you have any respect for the truth? I can sink that whole publishing house for defaming me, trying to pass me off as one of those waterhead South Sea mongrels."
The libel lawyers were stunned into paranoid silence. "Was it either some kind of arcane legal trick," they wondered, "or was this dope-addled freak really crazy enough to insist on having himself formally identified for all time, with one of the most depraved and degenerate figures in American literature?"
Should his angry threats and demands conceivably be taken seriously? Was it possible that a well-known practicing attorney might not only freely admit to all these heinous crimes, but insist that every foul detail be documented as the absolute truth?
"Why not?" Oscar answered. And the only way he'd sign the release, he added, was in exchange for a firm guarantee from the lawyers that both his name and a suitable photograph of himself be prominently displayed on the book's dust cover.
They had never had to cope with a thing like this -- a presumably sane attorney who flatly refused to release any other version of his clearly criminal behavior, except the abysmal naked truth. The concession he was willing to make had to do with his identity throughout the entire book as a "300 pound Samoan." But he could grit his teeth and tolerate that, he said, only because he understood that there was no way to make that many changes at that stage of the deadline without tearing up half the book. In exchange, however, he wanted a formal letter guaranteeing that he would be properly identified on the book jacket
The lawyers would have no part of it. There was no precedent anywhere in the law for a bizarre situation like this. . . but as the deadline pressures mounted and Oscar refused to bend, it became more and more obvious that the only choice except compromise was to scuttle the book entirely. . . and if that happened, I warned them, I had enough plastic forks to mutilate every libel lawyer in New York.
That seemed to settle the issue in favor of a last-minute' compromise, and Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas was finally sent to the printer with Oscar clearly identified on the back as the certified living model for the monstrous "300-pound Samoan attorney" who would soon be a far more public figure than any of us would have guessed at the time.
Alcohol, Hashish, Prussic Acid, Strychnine are weak dilutions. The surest poison is time.
&nb
sp; -- Emerson, Society and Solitude
The libel lawyers have never understood what Oscar had in mind -- and, at the time, I don't understand it myself -- one of the darker skills involved in the kind of journalism I normally get involved with has to do with ability to write the Truth about "criminals" without getting them busted -- and, in the eyes of the law, any person committing a crime is criminal: whether it's a Hell's Angel laying an oil slick on a freeway exit to send a pursuing motorcycle cop crashing over the high side, a presidential candidate smoking a joint in his hotel room, or a good friend who happens to be a lawyer, an arsonist and a serious drug abuser.
The line between writing truth and providing evidence is very, very thin -- but for a journalist working constantly among highly paranoid criminals, it is also the line between trust and suspicion. And that is the difference between having free access to the truth and being treated like a spy. There is no such thing as "forgiveness" on that level; one fuck-up will send you straight back to sportswriting -- if you're lucky.
In Oscar's case, my only reason for describing him in the book as a 300-pound Samoan instead of a 250-pound Chicano lawyer was to protect him from the wrath of the L.A. cops and the whole California legal establishment he was constantly at war with. It would not serve either one of our interests, I felt, for Oscar to get busted or disbarred because of something I wrote about him. I had my reputation to protect.
The libel lawyers understood that much; what worried them was that I hadn't protected "my attorney" well enough to protect also the book publisher from a libel suit -- just in case my attorney was as crazy as he appeared to be in the manuscript they'd just vetoed. . . or maybe he was crazy like a fox, they hinted; he was, after all an attorney -- who'd presumably worked just as hard and for just as many long years as they had -- to earn his license to steal -- and it was inconceivable to them that one of their own kind, as it were, would give all that up on what appeared to be a whim. No, they said, it must be a trap; not even a "Brown Power" lawyer could afford to laugh at the risk of almost certain disbarment.
The Great Shark Hunt: Strange Tales From a Strange Time Page 72