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

by Hunter S. Thompson

  In retrospect it is hard to know exactly when Oscar decided to quit the Law just as finally as he’d once quit being a Baptist missionary—but it was obviously a lot earlier than even his few close friends realized, until long after he’d already made the move in his mind, to a new and higher place. The crazy attorney whose “suicidal behavior” so baffled the N.Y. libel lawyers was only the locustlike shell of a thirty-six-year-old neoprophet who was already long overdue for his gig at the top of the Mountain.

  There was no more time to be wasted in the company of lepers and lawyers. The hour had finally struck for the fat spic from Riverbank to start acting like that one man in every century “chosen to speak for his people.”

  None of this terminal madness was easy to see at the time—not even for me, and I knew him as well as anyone . . . But not well enough, apparently, to understand the almost desperate sense of failure and loss that he felt when he was suddenly confronted with the stark possibility that he had never really been chosen to speak for anybody, except maybe himself—and even that was beginning to look like a halfway impossible task, in the short time he felt he had left.

  I had never taken his burning bush trip very seriously—and I still have moments of doubt about how seriously he took it himself . . . They are very long moments, sometimes; and as a matter of fact, I think I feel one coming on right now . . . We should have castrated that brain-damaged thief! That shyster! That blasphemous freak! He was ugly and greasy, and he still owes me thousands of dollars!

  The truth was not in him, goddamn it! He was put on this earth for no reason at all except to shit in every nest he could con his way into—but only after robbing them first, and selling the babies to sand-niggers. If that treacherous fist-fucker ever comes back to life, he’ll wish we’d had the good sense to nail him up on a frozen telephone pole for his thirty-third birthday present.

  DO NOT COME BACK, Oscar! Wherever you are—stay there! There’s no room for you here anymore. Not after all this maudlin gibberish I’ve written about you . . . And besides, we have Werner Erhard now. So BURROW DEEP, you bastard, and take all that poison fat with you!

  Cazart! And how’s that for a left-handed whipsong?

  Never mind. There is no more time for questions—or answers either, for that matter. And I was never much good at this kind of thing anyway.

  The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers.

  —William Shakespeare, King Henry VI

  Well . . . so much for whipsongs. Nobody laughed when Big Bill sat down to play. He was not into filigree when it came to dealing with lawyers.

  And neither am I, at this point. That last outburst was probably unnecessary, but what the hell? Let them drink Drano if they can’t take a joke. I’m tired of wallowing around in this goddamn thing.

  What began as a quick and stylish epitaph for my allegedly erstwhile three-hundred-pound Samoan attorney has long since gone out of control. Not even Oscar would have wanted an obituary with no end, at least not until he was legally dead, and that will take four more years.

  Until then—and probably for many years afterward—the Weird Grapevine will not wither for lack of bulletins, warnings, and other twisted rumors of the latest Brown Buffalo sightings. He will be seen at least once in Calcutta, buying nine-year-old girls out of cages on the White Slave Market . . . and also in Houston, tending bar at a roadhouse on South Main that was once the Blue Fox . . . or perhaps once again on the midnight run to Bimini; standing tall on his own hind legs in the cockpit of a fifty-foot black cigarette boat with a silver Uzi in one hand and a magnum of smack in the other, always running ninety miles an hour with no lights and howling Old Testament gibberish at the top of his bleeding lungs . . .

  It might even come to pass that he will suddenly appear on my porch in Woody Creek on some moonless night when the peacocks are screeching with lust . . . Maybe so, and that is one ghost who will always be welcome in this house, even with a head full of acid and a chain of bull-maggots around his neck.

  Oscar was one of God’s own prototypes—a high-powered mutant of some kind who was never even considered for mass production. He was too weird to live and too rare to die—and as far as I’m concerned, that’s just about all that needs to be said about him right now. Nobody really needed Oscar Zeta Acosta. Or Rolling Stone. Or Jimmy Carter or the Hindenburg . . . or even the Sloat diamond.

  Jesus! Is there no respect in this world for the perfectly useless dead?

  Apparently not . . . and Oscar was a lawyer, however reluctant he might have been at the end to admit it. He had a lawyer’s cynical view of the Truth—which he felt was not nearly as important to other people as it was to him; and he was never more savage and dangerous than when he felt he was being lied to. He was never much interested in the concept of truth; he had no time for what he called “dumb Anglo abstracts.”

  Condemn’d to drudge, the meanest of the mean and furbish falsehoods for a magazine.

  —Lord Byron

  The truth, to Oscar, was a tool and even a weapon that he was convinced he could not do without—if only because anybody who had more of it than he did would sooner or later try to beat on him with it. Truth was Power—as tangible to Oscar as a fistful of $100 bills or an ounce of pure LSD-25. His formula for survival in a world full of rich gabacho fascists was a kind of circle that began at the top with the idea that truth would bring him power, which would buy freedom—to crank his head full of acid so he could properly walk with the King, which would naturally put him even closer to more and finer truths . . . indeed, the full circle.

  Oscar believed it, and that was what finally croaked him.

  I tried to warn the greedy bastard, but he was too paranoid to pay any attention . . . Because he was actually a stupid, vicious quack with no morals at all and the soul of a hammerhead shark.

  We are better off without him. Sooner or later he would have had to be put to sleep anyway . . . So the world is a better place now that he’s at least out of sight, if not certifiably dead.

  He will not be missed—except perhaps in Fat City, where every light in the town went dim when we heard that he’d finally cashed his check.

  One owes respect to the living; To the Dead one owes only the truth.

  —Voltaire

  __ __ __ __

  Muhammad Ali, Parts One and Two

  Hunter, an avid boxing fan, had a particular admiration for his fellow Louisville native Muhammad Ali, and what was conceived of as a fairly quick and straightforward story soon turned into another twenty-thousand-word epic—equal parts biography, explication, theorizing, and interview. While Ali was normally skeptical, suspicious, and stand-offish toward interviewers, he and Hunter did seem to find a particular rapport. Before any of this happened, though, they had to meet. Ali’s promoter—a fiercely old-school bon vivant, Harold Conrad—described Hunter’s entrance to Ali’s hotel in Manhattan in his 1982 memoir, Dear Muffo:

  He walks in late followed by the chauffeur with his luggage. I tell him Ali is waiting. He insists on checking in first.

  Now he is at the desk, reaching into his jacket for his credit card. Suddenly he is frantically going through all his pockets.

  “Holy shit, my wallet! Who the fuck took my wallet?” He screams for a bellboy to bring his luggage over, and he dumps it in the center of the lobby. One piece looks like a bedroll. Another is a strange looking satchel. There is also a tape recorder, an attaché case, and a large brown paper bag, and it’s all spread out on this beautiful marble floor, right in the center of traffic.

  Thompson attacks the attaché case and turns it upside down. No wallet. Now he attacks the satchel, and his hands keep flipping things up in the air like a juggler tossing Indian clubs. First a bottle of Heineken. It caroms gently off the bag and rolls across the lobby. Then a bottle of Wild Turkey, a shoe, and another bottle of Heineken.

  By now the doctor reaches the bowels of the satchel and comes up with a shaving kit. He opens it. Eureka! There is the wallet. He
had put it in his shaving kit. Doesn’t everybody?

  At last he checks in, and with much trepidation I take him up to Muhammad’s suite.

  I don’t know how the doctor did it, but he came through. The interview with Muhammad was one of the best I’ve ever seen, and I thought that overall “Last Tango in Vegas” was brilliant, even though he did call me a pig fucker.

  Last Tango in Vegas: Fear and Loathing in the Near Room and the Far Room

  May 4 and May 18, 1978

  When I’m gone, boxing will be nothing again. The fans with the cigars and the hats turned down’ll be there, but no more housewives and little men in the street and foreign presidents. It’s goin’ to be back to the fighter who comes to town, smells a flower, visits a hospital, blows a horn, and says he’s in shape. Old hat. I was the onliest boxer in history people asked questions like a senator.

  —Muhammad Ali, 1967

  Life had been good to Pat Patterson for so long that he’d almost forgotten what it was like to be anything but a free-riding, first-class passenger on a flight near the top of the world . . .

  It is a long, long way from the frostbitten midnight streets around Chicago’s Clark and Division to the deep-rug hallways of the Park Lane Hotel on Central Park South in Manhattan ... But Patterson had made that trip in high style, with stops along the way in London, Paris, Manila, Kinshasa, Kuala Lumpur, Tokyo, and almost everywhere else in the world on that circuit where the menus list no prices and you need at least three pairs of $100 sunglasses just to cope with the TV lights every time you touch down at an airport for another frenzied press conference and then a ticker-tape parade along the route to the presidential palace and another princely reception.

  That is Muhammad Ali’s world, an orbit so high, a circuit so fast and strong and with rarefied air so thin that only “The Champ,” “The Greatest,” and a few close friends have unlimited breathing rights. Anybody who can sell his act for $5 million an hour all over the world is working a vein somewhere between magic and madness ... And now, on this warm winter night in Manhattan, Pat Patterson was not entirely sure which way the balance was tipping. The main shock had come three weeks ago in Las Vegas, when he’d been forced to sit passively at ringside and watch the man whose life he would gladly have given his own to protect, under any other circumstances, take a savage and wholly unexpected beating in front of five thousand screaming banshees at the Hilton Hotel and something like sixty million stunned spectators on national network TV. The Champ was no longer The Champ: a young brute named Leon Spinks had settled that matter, and not even Muhammad seemed to know just exactly what that awful defeat would mean—for himself or anyone else; not even for his new wife and children, or the handful of friends and advisers who’d been working that high white vein right beside him for so long that they acted and felt like his family.

  It was definitely an odd lot, ranging from solemn Black Muslims like Herbert Muhammad, his manager—to shrewd white hipsters like Harold Conrad, his executive spokesman, and Irish Gene Kilroy, Ali’s version of Hamilton Jordan: a sort of all-purpose administrative assistant, logistics manager, and chief troubleshooter. Kilroy and Conrad are The Champ’s answer to Ham and Jody—but mad dogs and wombats will roam the damp streets of Washington, babbling perfect Shakespearean English, before Jimmy Carter comes up with his version of Drew “Bundini” Brown, Ali’s alter ego and court wizard for so long now that he can’t really remember being anything else. Carter’s thin-ice sense of humor would not support the weight of a zany friend like Bundini. It would not even support the far more discreet weight of a court jester like J.F.K.’s Dave Powers, whose role in the White House was much closer to Bundini Brown’s deeply personal friendship with Ali than Jordan’s essentially political and deceptively hard-nosed relationship with Jimmy ... and even Hamilton seems to be gaining weight by geometric progressions these days, and the time may be just about ripe for him to have a chat with the Holy Ghost and come out as a “born-again Christian.”

  That might make the nut for a while—at least through the 1980 reelection campaign—but not even Jesus could save Jordan from a fate worse than any hell he’d ever imagined if Jimmy Carter woke up one morning and read in the Washington Post that Hamilton had pawned the great presidential seal for $500 in some fashionable Georgetown hockshop ... or even with one of his good friends like Pat Caddell, who enjoys a keen eye for collateral.

  Indeed ... and this twisted vision would seem almost too bent for print if Bundini hadn’t already raised at least the raw possibility of it by once pawning Muhammad Ali’s “Heavyweight Champion of the World” gold-and-jewel-studded belt for $500—just an overnight loan from a friend, he said later; but the word got out, and Bundini was banished from The Family and the whole entourage for eighteen months when The Champ was told what he’d done.

  That heinous transgression is shrouded in a mix of jive-shame and real black humor at this point: The Champ, after all, had once hurled his Olympic gold medal into the Ohio River, in a fit of pique at some alleged racial insult in Louisville—and what was the difference between a gold medal and a jewel-studded belt? They were both symbols of a “white devil” ’s world that Ali, if not Bundini, was already learning to treat with a very calculated measure of public disrespect ... What they shared, far beyond a very real friendship, was a shrewd kind of street-theater sense of how far out on that limb they could go, without crashing. Bundini has always had a finer sense than anyone else in The Family about where The Champ wanted to go, the shifting winds of his instincts, and he has never been worried about things like Limits or Consequences. That was the province of others, like Conrad or Herbert. Drew B. has always known exactly which side he was on, and so has Cassius/Muhammad. Bundini is the man who came up with “Float like a butterfly. Sting like a bee,” and ever since then he has been as close to both Cassius Clay and Muhammad Ali as anyone else in the world.

  Pat Patterson, by contrast, was a virtual newcomer to The Family. A two-hundred-pound, forty-year-old black cop, he was a veteran of the Chicago vice squad before he hired on as Ali’s personal bodyguard. And, despite the total devotion and relentless zeal he brought to his responsibility for protecting The Champ at all times from any kind of danger, hassles, or even minor inconvenience, six years on the job had caused him to understand, however reluctantly, that there were at least a few people who could come and go as they pleased through the wall of absolute security he was supposed to maintain around The Champ.

  Bundini and Conrad were two of these. They have been around for so long that they had once called the boss “Cassius,” or even “Cash”—while Patterson had never addressed him as anything but “Muhammad” or “Champ.” He had come aboard at high tide, as it were, and even though he was now in charge of everything from carrying Ali’s money—in a big roll of $100 bills—to protecting his life with an ever-present chrome-plated revolver and the lethal fists and feet of a black belt with a license to kill, it had always galled him a bit to know that Muhammad’s capricious instincts and occasionally perverse sense of humor made it certifiably impossible for any one bodyguard, or even four, to protect him from danger in public. His moods were too unpredictable: one minute he would be in an almost catatonic funk, crouched in the backseat of a black Cadillac limousine with an overcoat over his head—and then, with no warning at all, he would suddenly be out of the car at a red light somewhere in the Bronx, playing stickball in the street with a gang of teenage junkies. Patterson had learned to deal with The Champ’s moods, but he also knew that in any crowd around The Greatest, there would be at least a few who felt the same way about Ali as they had about Malcolm X or Martin Luther King.

  There was a time, shortly after his conversion to the Black Muslim religion in the mid-Sixties, when Ali seemed to emerge as a main spokesman for what the Muslims were then perfecting as the State of the Art in racial paranoia—which seemed a bit heavy and not a little naive at the time, but which the White Devils moved quickly to justify . . .

  Yes.
But that is a very long story, and we will get to it later. The only point we need to deal with right now is that Muhammad Ali somehow emerged from one of the meanest and most shameful ordeals any prominent American has ever endured as one of the few real martyrs of that goddamn wretched war in Vietnam and a sort of instant folk hero all over the world, except in the U.S.A.

  That would come later . . .

  The Spinks disaster in Vegas had been a terrible shock to The Family. They had all known it had to come sometime, but the scene had already been set and the papers already signed for that “sometime”—a $16 million purse and a mind-boggling, damn-the-cost television spectacle with Ali’s old nemesis Ken Norton as the bogyman, and one last king-hell payday for everybody. They were prepared, in the back of their hearts, for that one—but not for the cheap torpedo that blew their whole ship out of the water in Vegas for no payday at all. Leon Spinks crippled a whole industry in one hour on that fateful Wednesday evening in Las Vegas—the Muhammad Ali Industry, which has churned out roughly $56 million in over fifteen years and at least twice or three times that much for the people who kept the big engine running all this time. (It would take Bill Walton 112 years on an annual NBA salary of $500,000 to equal that figure.)

  I knew it was too close for comfort. I told him to stop fooling around. He was giving up too many rounds. But I heard the decision and I thought, “Well, what are you going to do? That’s it. I’ve prepared myself for this day for a long time. I conditioned myself for it. I was young with him and now I feel old with him.”

  —Angelo Dundee, Ali’s trainer

  Dundee was not the only person who was feeling old with Muhammad Ali on that cold Wednesday night in Las Vegas. Somewhere around the middle of the fifteenth round, a whole generation went over the hump as the last Great Prince of the Sixties went out in a blizzard of pain, shock, and angry confusion so total that it was hard to even know how to feel, much less what to say, when the thing was finally over. The last shot came just at the final bell, when “Crazy Leon” whacked Ali with a savage overhand right that almost dropped The Champ in his tracks and killed the last glimmer of hope for the patented “miracle finish” that Angelo Dundee knew was his fighter’s only chance. As Muhammad wandered back to his corner about six feet in front of me, the deal had clearly gone down.