Fear and Loathing at Rolling Stone: The Essential Hunter S. Thompson

by Hunter S. Thompson

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  Oscar Zeta Acosta’s Obituary

  Three years after the disappearance of Oscar Acosta—presumably somewhere in Mexico—Hunter wrote an extended roast-obituary-tribute of his old friend and counselor, whom he referred to variously as his attorney, his “Samoan attorney,” and, in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, “Dr. Gonzo.” Oscar was a familiar figure around the Rolling Stone office in San Francisco (he carved his middle name, “Zeta,” into a wooden shelf in the men’s room), and initially threatened to prevent the publication of the Vegas book partly due to his being described as a “three-hundred-pound Samoan,” but eventually relented. To this day, no trace of Acosta has ever been found.

  Fear & Loathing in the Graveyard of the Weird: The Banshee Screams for Buffalo Meat

  December 15, 1977

  Nobody knows the weirdness I’ve seen

  On the trail of the brown buffalo

  —Old Black Joe

  I walk in the night rain until the dawn of the new day. I have devised the plan, straightened out the philosophy, and set up the organization. When I have the 1 million Brown Buffalos on my side I will present the demands for a new nation to both the U.S. Government and the United Nations . . . and then I’ll split and write the book. I have no desire to be a politician. I don’t want to lead anyone. I have no practical ego. I am not ambitious. I merely want to do what is right. Once in every century there comes a man who is chosen to speak for his people. Moses, Mao, and Martin [Luther King Jr.] are examples. Who’s to say that I am not such a man? In this day and age the man for all seasons needs many voices. Perhaps that is why the gods have sent me into Riverbank, Panama, San Francisco, Alpine, and Juarez. Perhaps that is why I’ve been taught so many trades. Who will deny that I am unique?

  —Oscar Acosta, The Autobiography of a Brown Buffalo

  Well . . . not me, old sport. Wherever you are and in whatever shape—dead or alive or even both, eh? That’s one thing they can’t take away from you . . . Which is lucky, I think, for the rest of us: because (and, yeah—let’s face it, Oscar) you were not real light on your feet in this world, and you were too goddamn heavy for most of the boats you jumped into. One of the great regrets of my life is that I was never able to introduce you to my old football buddy, Richard Nixon. The main thing he feared in this life—even worse than Queers and Jews and Mutants—was people who might run amok; he called them “loose cannons on the deck,” and he wanted them all put to sleep.

  That’s one graveyard we never even checked, Oscar, but why not? If your classic “doomed nigger” style of paranoia had any validity at all, you must understand that it was not just Richard Nixon who was out to get you—but all the people who thought like Nixon and all the judges and U.S. attorneys he appointed in those weird years. Were there any of Nixon’s friends among all those superior court judges you subpoenaed and mocked and humiliated when you were trying to bust the grand jury selection system in L.A.? How many of those Brown Beret “bodyguards” [in the La Raza Movement] you called “brothers” were deep-cover cops or informants? I recall being seriously worried about that when we were working on that story about the killing of Chicano journalist Ruben Salazar by an L.A. County sheriff’s deputy. How many of those bomb-throwing, trigger-happy freaks who slept on mattresses in your apartment were talking to the sheriff on a chili-hall pay phone every morning? Or maybe to the judges who kept jailing you for contempt of court, when they didn’t have anything else?

  Yeah, and so much for the “paranoid Sixties.” It’s time to end this bent séance—or almost closing time, anyway—but before we get back to raw facts and rude lawyer’s humor, I want to make sure that at least one record will show that I tried and totally failed, for at least five years, to convince my allegedly erstwhile Samoan attorney, Oscar Zeta Acosta, that there was no such thing as paranoia: at least not in that cultural and political war zone called “East L.A.” in the late 1960s and especially not for an aggressively radical “Chicano Lawyer” who thought he could stay up all night, every night, eating acid and throwing “Molotov cocktails” with the same people he was going to have to represent in a downtown courtroom the next morning.

  There were times—all too often, I felt—when Oscar would show up in front of the courthouse at nine in the morning with a stench of fresh gasoline on his hands and a green crust of charred soap flakes on the toes of his $300 snakeskin cowboy boots. He would pause outside the courtroom just long enough to give the TV press five minutes of crazed rhetoric for the evening news, then he would shepherd his equally crazed “clients” into the courtroom for their daily war-circus with the judge. When you get into bear baiting on that level, paranoia is just another word for ignorance . . . They really are out to get you.

  The odds on his being dragged off to jail for “contempt” were about fifty-fifty on any given day—which meant he was always in danger of being seized and booked with a pocket full of “bennies” or “black beauties” at the property desk. After several narrow escapes, he decided that it was necessary to work in the courtroom as part of a three-man “defense team.”

  One of his “associates” was usually a well-dressed, well-mannered young Chicano whose only job was to carry at least 100 milligrams of pure speed at all times and feed Oscar whenever he signaled; the other was not so well dressed or mannered; his job was to stay alert and be one step ahead of the bailiffs when they made a move on Oscar—at which point he would reach out and grab any pills, powders, shivs, or other evidence he was handed, then sprint like a human bazooka for the nearest exit.

  This strategy worked so well for almost two years that Oscar and his people finally got careless. They had survived another long day in court—on felony arson charges, this time, for trying to burn down the Biltmore Hotel during a speech by then governor Ronald Reagan—and they were driving back home to Oscar’s headquarters pad in the barrio (and maybe running sixty or sixty-five in a fifty m.p.h. speed zone, Oscar later admitted) when they were suddenly jammed to a stop by two LAPD cruisers. “They acted like we’d just robbed a bank,” said Frank, looking right down the barrel of a shotgun. “They made us all lie face down on the street and then they searched the car, and—”

  Yes. That’s when they found the drugs: twenty or thirty white pills that the police quickly identified as “illegal amphetamine tablets, belonging to attorney Oscar Acosta.”

  The fat spic for all seasons was jailed once again, this time on what the press called a “high-speed drug bust.” Oscar called a press conference in jail and accused the cops of “planting” him—but not even his bodyguards believed him until long after the attendant publicity had done them all so much damage that the whole “Brown Power Movement” was effectively stalled, splintered, and discredited by the time all charges, both arson and drugs, were either dropped or reduced to small print on the back of the blotter.

  I am not even sure, myself, how the cases were finally disposed of. Not long after the “high-speed drug bust,” as I recall, two of his friends were charged with murder one for allegedly killing a smack dealer in the barrio, and I think Oscar finally copped on the drug charge and pled guilty to something like “possession of ugly pills in a public place.”

  But by that time his deal had already gone down. None of the respectable Chicano pols in East L.A. had ever liked him anyway, and that “high-speed drug bust” was all they needed to publicly denounce everything Left of huevos rancheros and start calling themselves Mexican-American again. The trial of the Biltmore Five was no longer a do-or-die cause for La Raza, but a shameful crime that a handful of radical dope fiends had brought down on the whole community. The mood on Whittier Boulevard turned sour overnight, and the sight of a Brown Beret was suddenly as rare as a cash client for Oscar Zeta Acosta—the ex-Chicano lawyer.

  The entire ex-Chicano political community went as public as possible to make sure that the rest of the city understood that they had known all along that this dope-addict rata who had somehow been one of their most
articulate and certainly their most radical, popular, and politically aggressive spokesmen for almost two years was really just a self-seeking publicity dope freak who couldn’t even run a bar tab at the Silver Dollar Cafe, much less rally friends or a following. There was no mention in the Mexican-American press about Acosta’s surprisingly popular campaign for sheriff of L.A. County a year earlier, which had made him a minor hero among politically hip Chicanos all over the city.

  No more of that dilly-dong bullshit on Whittier Boulevard. Oscar’s drug bust was still alive on the Evening News when he was evicted from his apartment on three days’ notice and his car was either stolen or towed away from its customary parking place on the street in front of his driveway. His offer to defend his two friends on what he later assured me were absolutely valid charges of first degree murder were publicly rejected. Not even for free, they said. A dope-addled clown was worse than no lawyer at all.

  It was dumb gunsel thinking, but Oscar was in no mood to offer his help more than once. So he beat a strategic retreat to Mazatlán, which he called his “other home,” to lick his wounds and start writing the Great Chicano Novel. It was the end of an era! The fireball Chicano lawyer was on his way to becoming a half-successful writer, a cult figure of sorts—then a fugitive, a freak, and finally either a permanently missing person or an undiscovered corpse.

  There are not many gypsies on file at the Missing Persons Bureau—and if Oscar was not quite the classic gypsy, in his own eyes or mine, it was only because he was never able to cut that high-tension cord that kept him forever attached to his childhood home and hatchery. By the time he was twenty years old, Oscar was working overtime eight days a week at learning to live and even think like a gypsy, but he never quite jumped the gap.

  Although I was born in El Paso, Texas, I am actually a small-town kid. A hick from the sticks, a Mexican boy from the other side of the tracks. I grew up in Riverbank, California; Post Office Box 303; population 3969. It’s the only town in the entire state whose essential numbers have remained unchanged. The sign that welcomes you as you round the curve coming in from Modesto says The City of Action.

  We lived in a two-room shack without a floor. We had to pump our water and use kerosene if we wanted to read at night. But we never went hungry. My old man always bought the pinto beans and the white flour for the tortillas in one-hundred-pound sacks which my mother used to make dresses, sheets, and curtains. We had two acres of land which we planted every year with corn, tomatoes, and yellow chiles for the hot sauce. Even before my father woke us, my old ma was busy at work making the tortillas at five a.m. while he chopped the logs we’d hauled up from the river on the weekends.

  Riverbank is divided into three parts, and in my corner of the world there were only three kinds of people: Mexicans, Okies, and Americans. Catholics, Holy Rollers, and Protestants. Peach pickers, cannery workers, and clerks. We lived on the West Side, within smelling distance of the world’s largest tomato paste cannery.

  The West Side is still enclosed by the Santa Fe Railroad tracks to the east, the Modesto-Oakdale Highway to the north, and the irrigation canal to the south. Within that concentration only Mexicans were safe from the neighborhood dogs, who responded only to Spanish commands. Except for Bob Whitt and Emitt Brown, both friends of mine who could cuss in better Spanish than I, I never saw a white person walking the dirt roads of our neighborhood.

  —Oscar Acosta, The Autobiography of a Brown Buffalo, 1972

  Oscar Zeta Acosta—despite any claims to the contrary—was a dangerous thug who lived every day of his life as a stalking monument to the notion that a man with a greed for the Truth should expect no mercy and give none . . .

  . . . and that was the difference between Oscar and a lot of the merciless geeks he liked to tell strangers he admired: class acts like Benito Mussolini and Fatty Arbuckle.

  When the great scorer comes to write against Oscar’s name, one of the first few lines in the Ledger will note that he usually lacked the courage of his consistently monstrous convictions. There was more mercy, madness, dignity, and generosity in that overweight, overworked, and always overindulged brown cannonball of a body than most of us will meet in any human package even three times Oscar’s size for the rest of our lives—which are all running noticeably leaner on the high side, since that rotten fat spic disappeared.

  He was a drug-addled brute and a genuinely fiendish adversary in court or on the street—but it was none of these things that finally pressured him into death or a disappearance so finely plotted that it amounts to the same thing.

  What finally cracked the Brown Buffalo was the bridge he refused to build between the self-serving elegance of his instincts and the self-destructive carnival of his reality. He was a Baptist missionary at a leper colony in Panama before he was a lawyer in Oakland and East L.A., or a radical-chic author in San Francisco and Beverly Hills . . . But whenever things got tense or when he had to work close to the bone, he was always a missionary. And that was the governing instinct that ruined him for anything else. He was a preacher in the courtroom, a preacher at the typewriter, and a flat-out awesome preacher when he cranked his head full of acid.

  That’s LSD-25, folks—a certified “dangerous drug” that is no longer fashionable, due to reasons of extreme and unnatural heaviness. The CIA was right about acid: some of their best and brightest operatives went over the side in the name of Top Secret research on a drug that was finally abandoned as a far too dangerous and unmanageable thing to be used as a public weapon. Not even the sacred minnock of “national security” could justify the hazards of playing with a thing too small to be seen and too big to control. The professional spook mentality was far more comfortable with things like nerve gas and neutron bombs.

  But not the Brown Buffalo—he ate LSD-25 with a relish that bordered on worship. When his brain felt bogged down in the mundane nuts-and-bolts horrors of the Law or some dead-end manuscript, he would simply take off in his hot rod Mustang for a week on the road and a few days of what he called “walking with the King.” Oscar used acid like other lawyers use Valium—a distinctly unprofessional and occasionally nasty habit that shocked even the most liberal of his colleagues and frequently panicked his clients.

  I was with him one night in L.A. when he decided that the only way to meaningfully communicate with a judge who’d been leaning on him in the courtroom was to drive out to the man’s home in Santa Monica and set his whole front lawn on fire after soaking it down with ten gallons of gasoline . . . and then, instead of fleeing into the night like some common lunatic vandal, Oscar stood in the street and howled through the flames at a face peering out from a shattered upstairs window, delivering one of his Billy Sunday–style sermons on morality and justice.

  The nut of his flame-enraged text, as I recall, was this mind-bending chunk of eternal damnation from Luke 11:46—a direct quote from Jesus Christ:

  “And he said, Woe unto you also, ye lawyers, for ye lade men with burdens grievous to be borne, and ye yourselves touch not the burdens with one of your fingers.”

  The Lawn of Fire was Oscar’s answer to the Ku Klux Klan’s burning cross, and he derived the same demonic satisfaction from doing it.

  “Did you see his face?” he shouted as we screeched off at top speed toward Hollywood. “That corrupt old fool! I know he recognized me, but he’ll never admit it! No officer of the court would set a judge’s front yard on fire—the whole system would break down if lawyers could get away with crazy shit like this.”

  I agreed. It is not my wont to disagree with even a criminally insane attorney on questions of basic law. But in truth it never occurred to me that Oscar was either insane or a criminal, given the generally fascist, Nixonian context of those angry years.

  In an era when the vice president of the United States held court in Washington to accept payoffs from his former vassals in the form of big wads of $100 bills—and when the president himself routinely held secretly tape-recorded meetings with his top aides in the Ov
al Office to plot illegal wiretaps, political burglaries, and other gross felonies in the name of a “silent majority,” it was hard to feel anything more than a flash of high, nervous humor at the sight of some acid-bent lawyer setting fire to a judge’s front yard at four o’clock in the morning.

  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.