Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and Other American Stories

by Hunter S. Thompson

  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 crusted with semen from constantly jacking off when he can’t find a rape victim. He will stagger 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 immediately. One stitch in time (on him) will 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 sleeveless 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!

  I tried to console him. “They’re actually nice people,” I said, “once you get to know them.”

  He smiled: “Know them? Are you kidding? Man, I know these people in my goddamn blood!”

  “Don’t mention that word around here,” I said. “You’ll get them excited.”

  He nodded. “You’re right. I saw these bastards in Easy Rider, but I didn’t believe they were real. Not like this. Not hundreds of them!”

  My attorney was wearing a double-breasted blue pinstripe suit, a far more stylish outfit than my own . . . but it made him exceedingly nervous. Because to be stylishly dressed in this crowd meant that you were probably an undercover cop, and my attorney makes his living with people who are very sensitive in that area. “This is a fucking nightmare!” he kept muttering. “Here I am infiltrating a goddamn Pig conference, but sure as hell there’s some dope-dealing bomb freak in this town who’s going to recognize me and put the word out that I’m out here partying with a thousand cops!”

  We all wore name tags. They came with the $100 “registration fee.” Mine said I was a “private investigator” from L.A.—which was true, in a sense; and my attorney’s name-tag identified him as an expert in “Criminal Drug Analysis.” Which was also true, in a sense.

  But nobody seemed to care who was what, or why. Security was too loose for that kind of gritty paranoia. But we were also a bit tense because we’d given the registrar a bad check for our dual registration fee. It was a check from one of my attorney’s pimp/drug underworld clients that he assumed, from long experience, was absolutely worthless.

  7.

  If You Don’t Know, Come to Learn . . . If You Know, Come to Teach

  —motto on invitations to

  National DAs’ Convention

  in Vegas, April 25–29, 1971

  The first session—the opening remarks—lasted most of the afternoon. We sat patiently through the first two hours, although it was clear from the start that we weren’t going to Learn anything and it was equally clear that we’d be crazy to try any Teaching. It was easy enough to sit there with a head full of mescaline and listen to hour after hour of irrelevant gibberish. . . . There was certainly no risk involved. These poor bastards didn’t know mescaline from macaroni.

  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 344-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.

  Here were more than a thousand top-level cops telling each other “we must come to terms with the drug culture,” but they had no idea where to start. They couldn’t even find the goddamn thing. There were rumors in the hallways that maybe the Mafia was behind it. Or perhaps the Beatles. At one point somebody in the audience asked Bloomquist if he thought Margaret Mead’s “strange behavior,” of late, might possibly be explained by a private marijuana addiction.

  “I really don’t know,” Bloomquist replied. “But at her age, if she did smoke grass, she’d have one hell of a trip.”

  The audience roared with laughter at this remark.

  My attorney leaned over to whisper that he was leaving. “I’ll be down in the casino,” he said. “I know a hell of a lot better ways to waste my time than listening to this bullshit.” He stood up, knocking his ashtray off the arm of his chair, and plunged down the aisle toward the door.

  The seats were not arranged for random movement. People tried to make a path for him, but there was no room to move.

  “Watch yourself!” somebody shouted as he bulled over them.

  “Fuck you!” he snarled.

  “Down in front!” somebody else yelled.

  By now he was almost to the door. “I have to get out!” he shouted. “I don’t belong here!”

  “Good riddance,” said a voice.

  He paused, looking around—then he seemed to think better of it, and kept moving. By the time he got to the exit the whole rear of the room was in turmoil. Even Bloomquist, far up front on the stage, seemed aware of a distant trouble. He stopped talking and peered nervously in the direction of the noise. Probably he thought a brawl had erupted—maybe a racial conflict of some kind, something that couldn’t be helped.

  I stood up and plunged toward the door. It seemed like as good a time as any to flee. “Pardon me, I feel sick,” I said to the first leg I stepped on. It jerked back, and I said it again: “Sorry, I’m about to be sick . . . sorry, sick . . . beg pardon, yes, feeling sick. . . .”


  This time a path opened very nicely. Not a word of protest. Hands actually helped me along. They feared I was about to vomit, and nobody wanted it—at least not on them. I made it to the door in about forty-five seconds.

  My attorney was downstairs at the bar, talking to a sporty-looking cop about forty whose plastic name-tag said he was the DA from someplace in Georgia. “I’m a whiskey man, myself,” he was saying. “We don’t have much problem with drugs down where I come from.”

  “You will,” said my attorney. “One of these nights you’ll wake up and find a junkie tearing your bedroom apart.”

  “Naw!” said the Georgia man. “Not down in my parts.”

  I joined them and ordered a tall glass of rum, with ice.

  “You’re another one of these California boys,” he said. “Your friend here’s been tellin’ me about dope fiends.”

  “They’re everywhere,” I said. “Nobody’s safe. And sure as hell not in the South. They like the warm weather.”

  “They work in pairs,” said my attorney. “Sometimes in gangs. They’ll climb right into your bedroom and sit on your chest, with big Bowie knives.” He nodded solemnly. “They might even sit on your wife’s chest—put the blade right down on her throat.”

  “Jesus God almighty,” said the southerner. “What the hell’s goin’ on in this country?”

  “You’d never believe it,” said my attorney. “In L.A. it’s out of control. First it was drugs, now it’s witchcraft.”

  “Witchcraft? Shit, you can’t mean it!”

  “Read the newspapers,” I said. “Man, you don’t know trouble until you have to face down a bunch of these addicts gone crazy for human sacrifice!”

  “Naw!” he said. “That’s science fiction stuff!”

  “Not where we operate,” said my attorney. “Hell, in Malibu alone, these goddamn Satan-worshippers kill six or eight people every day.” He paused to sip his drink. “And all they want is the blood,” he continued. “They’ll take people right off the street if they have to.” He nodded. “Hell, yes. Just the other day we had a case where they grabbed a girl right out of a McDonald’s hamburger stand. She was a waitress. About sixteen years old . . . with a lot of people watching, too!”

  “What happened?” said our friend. “What did they do to her?” He seemed very agitated by what he was hearing.

  “Do?” said my attorney. “Jesus Christ man. They chopped her goddamn head off right there in the parking lot! Then they cut all kinds of holes in her and sucked out the blood!”

  “God almighty!” The Georgia man exclaimed . . . “And nobody did anything?”

  “What could they do?” I said. “The guy that took the head was about six-seven and maybe three hundred pounds. He was packing two Lugers, and the others had M-16s. They were all veterans. . . .”

  “The big guy used to be a major in the Marines,” said my attorney. “We know where he lives, but we can’t get near the house.”

  “Naw!” our friend shouted. “Not a major!”

  “He wanted the pineal gland,” I said. “That’s how he got so big. When he quit the Marines he was just a little guy.”

  “O my god!” said our friend. “That’s horrible!”

  “It happens every day,” said my attorney. “Usually it’s whole families. During the night. Most of them don’t even wake up until they feel their heads going—and then, of course, it’s too late.”

  The bartender had stopped to listen. I’d been watching him. His expression was not calm.

  “Three more rums,” I said. “With plenty of ice, and maybe a handful of lime chunks.”

  He nodded, but I could see that his mind was not on his work. He was staring at our name-tags. “Are you guys with that police convention upstairs?” he said finally.

  “We sure are, my friend,” said the Georgia man with a big smile.

  The bartender shook his head sadly. “I thought so,” he said. “I never heard that kind of talk at this bar before. Jesus Christ! How do you guys stand that kind of work?”

  My attorney smiled at him. “We like it,” he said. “It’s groovy.”

  The bartender drew back; his face was a mask of repugnance.

  “What’s wrong with you?” I said. “Hell, somebody has to do it.”

  He stared at me for a moment, then turned away.

  “Hurry up with those drinks,” said my attorney. “We’re thirsty.” He laughed and rolled his eyes as the bartender glanced back at him. “Only two rums,” he said. “Make mine a Bloody Mary.”

  The bartender seemed to stiffen, but our Georgia friend didn’t notice. His mind was somewhere else. “Hell, I really hate to hear this,” he said quietly. “Because everything that happens in California seems to get down our way, sooner or later. Mostly Atlanta, but I guess that was back when the goddamn bastards were peaceful. It used to be that all we had to do was keep ’em under surveillance. They didn’t roam around much. . . .” He shrugged. “But now, Jesus, nobody’s safe. They could turn up anywhere.”

  “You’re right,” said my attorney. “We learned that in California. You remember where Manson turned up, don’t you? Right out in the middle of Death Valley. He had a whole army of sex fiends out there. We only got our hands on a few. Most of the crew got away; just ran off across the sand dunes, like big lizards . . . and every one of them stark naked, except for the weapons.”

  “They’ll turn up somewhere, pretty soon,” I said. “And let’s hope we’ll be ready for them.”

  The Georgia man whacked his fist on the bar. “But we can’t just lock ourselves in the house and be prisoners!” he exclaimed. “We don’t even know who these people are! How do you recognize them?

  “You can’t,” my attorney replied. “The only way to do it is to take the bull by the horns—go to the mat with this scum!”

  “What do you mean by that?” he asked.

  “You know what I mean,” said my attorney. “We’ve done it before, and we can damn well do it again.”

  “Cut their goddamn heads off,” I said. “Every one of them. That’s what we’re doing in California.”

  “What?”

  “Sure,” said my attorney. “It’s all on the Q.T., but everybody who matters is with us all the way down the line.”

  “God! I had no idea it was that bad out there!” said our friend.

  “We keep it quiet,” I said. “It’s not the kind of thing you’d want to talk about upstairs, for instance. Not with the press around.”

  Our man agreed. “Hell no!” he said. “We’d never hear the goddamn end of it.”

  “Dobermans don’t talk,” I said.

  “What?”

  “Sometimes it’s easier to just rip out the backstraps,” said my attorney. “They’ll fight like hell if you try to take the head without dogs.”

  “God almighty!”

  We left him at the bar, swirling the ice in his drink and not smiling. He was worried about whether or not to tell his wife about it. “She’d never understand,” he muttered. “You know how women are.”

  I nodded. My attorney was already gone, scurrying through a maze of slot machines toward the front door. I said goodbye to our friend, warning him not to say anything about what we’d told him.

  8.

  Back Door Beauty . . . Finally a Bit of Serious Drag Racing on the Strip

  Sometime around midnight my attorney wanted coffee. He had been vomiting fairly regularly as we drove around the Strip, and the right flank of the Whale was badly streaked. We were idling at a stoplight in front of the Silver Slipper beside a big blue Ford with Oklahoma plates . . . two hoggish-looking couples in the car, probably cops from Muskogee using the Drug Conference to give their wives a look at Vegas. They looked like they’d just beaten Caesar’s Palace for about $33 at the blackjack tables, and now they were headed for the Circus-Circus to whoop it up. . . .

  . . . but suddenly, they found themselves next to a white Cadillac convertible all covered with vomit and a 300-pound Samoan
in a yellow fishnet T-shirt yelling at them:

  “Hey there! You folks want to buy some heroin?”

  No reply. No sign of recognition. They’d been warned about this kind of crap: Just ignore it. . . .

  “Hey, honkies!” my attorney screamed. “Goddamnit, I’m serious! I want to sell you some pure fuckin’ smack!” He was leaning out of the car, very close to them. But still nobody answered. I glanced over, very briefly, and saw four middle-American faces frozen with shock, staring straight ahead.

  We were in the middle lane. A quick left turn would be illegal. We would have to go straight ahead when the light changed, then escape at the next corner. I waited, tapping the accelerator nervously. . . .

  My attorney was losing control: “Cheap heroin!” he was shouting. “This is the real stuff! You won’t get hooked! Goddamnit, I know what I have here!” He whacked on the side of the car, as if to get their attention . . . but they wanted no part of us.

  “You folks never talked to a vet before?” said my attorney. “I just got back from Veet Naam. This is scag, folks! Pure scag!”

  Suddenly the light changed and the Ford bolted off like a rocket. I stomped on the accelerator and stayed right next to them for about two hundred yards, watching for cops in the mirror while my attorney kept steaming at them: “Shoot! Fuck! Scag! Blood! Heroin! Rape! Cheap! Communist! Jab it right into your fucking eyeballs!”

  We were approaching the Circus-Circus at high speed and the Oklahoma car was veering left, trying to muscle into the turn lane. I stomped the Whale into passing gear and we ran fender to fender for a moment. He wasn’t up to hitting me; there was horror in his eyes. . . .

  The man in the back seat lost control of himself . . . lunging across his wife and snarling wildly: “You dirty bastards! Pull over and I’ll kill you! God damn you! You bastards!” He seemed ready to leap out the window and into our car, crazy with rage. Luckily the Ford was a two-door. He couldn’t get out.