Fear and Loating in Las Vegas. A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream

told me, while they were waiting, that it was going to cost them $30,000 ...and I guess it did, but what the hell? That’s cheap, compared to what would have happened If they hadn’t got themselves sprung.

“They finally let me send a telegram to my old man and he wired me 125 bucks . . .but it took seven or eight days. I’m not sure how long I was in there, because the place didn’t have any windows and they fed us every twelve hours ... You lose track of time when you can’t see the sun.

“They had seventy-five guys in each cell-big rooms with a bowl out in the middle. They gave you a pallet when came in, and you slept wherever you wanted. The guy next to me had been in there for thirty years, for robbing a gas station.

“When I finally got out, the cop on the desk took another twenty-five bucks out of what my father sent me, on top of what I owed for the vagrancy fine. What could I say? He just took it. Then he gave me the other $75 and said they had a cab waiting for me outside, for the ride to the airport ...and when I got in the cab the driver said, ‘We’re not making any stops, fella, and you’d better not move until we get to the terminal.’

“I didn’t move a goddamn muscle. He’d have shot me. I’m sure of that. I went straight to the plane and I didn’t say a word to anybody until I knew we were out of Nevada. Man, it’s one place I’ll never go back to.”

11. Fraud? Larcent? Rape? ...A Brutal Connection with the Alice from Room Service

I was brooding on this tale as I eased the White Whale into Flamingo parking lot. Fifty

bucks and a week in jail for standing on a corner and acting curious ... Jesus, what kind of incredible penalties would they spew out on me? I eked off the various charges-but in skeleton, legal-lan re form they didn’t seem so bad:

Rape? We could surely beat that one. I’d never even coveted the goddamn girl, much

less put my hands on her flesh. Fraud? Larceny? I could always offer to “settle.” Pay

it off. Say I was sent out here by Sports Illustrated and then drag the Time. Inc. lawyers

into a nightmare lawsuit. Tie them up for years with a blizzard of writs and appeals.

Attach all their assets in places like Juneau and Houston, then constantly file for change

of venue to Quito, Nome and Aruba ... keep the thing moving, run them in circles,

force them into conflict with the accounting department:

TIME SHEET FOR ABNER H. DODGE,

CHIEF COUNSEL

Item $44,066.12...Special outlay, to wit: We pursued the defendant, R. Duke, throughtout the Western Hemosphere and finally brought him to bay in a village on the north shore of an island known as Culebra in the Caribbean, where his attorney obtained a ruliong that all further proceedings should be conducted in the language of the Carib tribe. We sent three men to Berlitz for this purpose, but nineteen hours before the date scheduled for opening arguments, the defendant fled to Colombia, where he established residence in a fishing village called Guajira near the Venezuelan border, where the official language of jurisprudence is an obscure dialect known as “Guajiro.” After many monthe we were able to establish jurisdiction in this place, but by that time the defendant had moved his residence to a virtually inaccessible port at the headwaters of the Amazon River, where he cultivated powerful connec tions with a tribe of headhunters called ’ ”Jibaros.” Our stringer in Manaus was dispatched upriver, to locate and hire a native attorney conversant in Jibaro, but the search has been hampered by serious communications problems. There is in fact grave concern, in our Rio office, that the widow of the aforementioned Manaus stringer might obtain a ruinous judgment-due to bias in local courts-far larger than any thing a jury in our own country would consider reasonable or even sane.

Indeed. But what is sane? Especially here in “our own country”—in this doomstruck era of Nixon. We are all wired into a survival trip now. No more of the speed that fueled the Sixties. Uppers are going out of style. This was the fatal flaw in Tim Leary’s trip. He crashed around America selling “con sciousness expansion” without ever giving a thought to the grim meat-hook realities that were lying in wait for all the people who took him too seriously. After West Point and the Priesthood, LSD must have seemed entirely logical to him ... but there is not much satisfaction in knowing that he blew it very badiy for himself, because he took too many oth ers down with him.

Not that they didn’t deserve it: No doubt they all Got What Was Coming To Them. All those pathetically eager acid freaks who thought they could buy Peace and Understanding fot three bucks a hit. But their failure is ours, too.

What Leary took down with him was the central illusion of a whole life-style that he helped to create ...a generation of permanent cripples, failed seekers, who never understood the essential old-mystic fallacy of the Acid Culture: the desperate assumption that somebody-or at least some force-is tending that Light at the end of the tunnel.

This is the same cruel and paradoxically benevolent bullshit has kept the Catholic

Church going for so many centuries. It is also the military ethic ...a blind faith in

some higher and wiser “authority.” The Pope, The General, The Prime Minister ...all the

way up to “God.”

One of the crucial moments of the Sixties came on that day when the Beatles cast their lot with the Maharishi. It was like Dylan going to the Vatican to kiss the Pope’s ring.

First “gurus.” Then, when that didn’t work, back to Jesus. And now, following Manson’s primitive/instinct lead, a whole new wave of clan-type commune Gods like Mel Lyman, ruler Avatar, and What’s His Name who runs “Spirit and Flesh.”

Barger never quite got the hang of it, but he’ll never iw how close he was to a king-hell breakthrough. The Angels blew it in 1965, at the Oakland-Berkeley line, when they acted on Barger’s hardhat, con-boss instincts and attacked the front ranks of an anti-war march. This proved to be an historic schism in the then Rising Tide of the Youth Movement of the Sixties. It was the first open break between the Greasers and the Longhairs, and the importance of that break can be read in the history of SDS, which eventually destroyed in the doomed effort to reconcile the interests of the 'working class biker/dropout types and the upper/mid Berkeley/student activists.

Nobody involved in that scene, at the time, could possibly have foreseen the Implications of the Ginsberg/Kesey failure to pursuade the Hell’s Angels to join forces with the radical Left from Berkeley. The final split came at Altamont, four years later, but by that time it had long been clear to everybody except a handful of rock industry dopers and the national press. The orgy of violence at Altamont merey dramatized the problem. The realities were already fixed; the illness was understood to be terminal, and the energies of The Movement were long since aggressively dissipated by the rush to self- preservation.

Ah; this terrible gibberish. Grim memories and bad flash backs, looming up through the time/fog of Stanyan Street ... no solace for refugees, no point in looking back. The question, as always, is now . . .?

I was slumped on my bed in the Flamingo, feeling dangerously out of phase with my surroundings. Something ugly was about to happen. I was sure of it. The room looked like the site of some disastrous zoological experiment involving whiskey and gorillas. The ten-foot mirror was shattered, but still hanging together—bad evidence of that afternoon when my attorney ran amok with the coconut hammer, smashing mirror and all the lightbulbs.

We’d replaced the lights with a package of red and blue Christmas tree lights from Safeway, but there was no hope of saving the mirror. My attorney’s bed looked like a burned-rat’s nest. Fire had consumed the top half, and the rest a mass of wire and charred stuffing. Luckily, the maids had’nt come near the room since that awful confrontation on Tuesday.

I been asleep when the maid came in that morning. We’d forgotten to hang out the “Do Not Disturb” sign ...so she wandered into the room and startled my attorney, who kneeling, stark naked, in the closet, vomiting into