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

look casual while I cased the area for black boxes. None were visible. I to take the chance-just zip through the gate with a big smile on my face, mumbling distractedly about “a bad slump in the hardware market. ..

Just another failed salesman checking out. Blame it all on that bastard Nixon. Indeed. I decided it might look more natural if I found somebody to chat with-a routine line of small talk, between passengers:

“Hy’re yew, fella! I huess you’re probably wonderin’ what make sme sweat like this? Yeah! Well, god damn, man! Have you read the newspapers today? ...You’d never believe what those dirty bastards have doen this time!”

I figured that would cover it ...But I could’nt find anybody who looked safe enough to talk to. The whole airport was full of people who looked like they might go for my float ing rib if I made a false move. I felt very paranoid ...like some kind of criminal skullsucker on the lam from Scotland Yard.

Everywhere I looked I saw Pigs ... because on that morn ing the Las Vegas airport was full of cops: the mass exodus after the climax of the District Attorneys’ Conference. When I finally put this together I felt much better about the health of my own brain

EVERYTHING

seems to be ready.

Are you Ready?

Ready?

Well, why not? This is a heavy day in Vegas. A thousand cops are checking out of town, scurrying through the airport in groups of three and six. They are heading back home. The drug conference is finished. The Airport Lounge is humming with mean talk and bodies. Short beers and Bloody Marys, here and there a victim of chest rash rubbing Mexsana under the armpit straps of a thick shoulder holster. No point hiding this business any longer. Let it all hang out ... or at least get some air to it.

Yes, thank you kindly. . I think I busted a button on my trousers. I hope they don’t fall down. You don’t want my trousers to fall down now, do you?

Fuck no. Not today. N ot right here in the middle of the Las Vegas airport, on this sweaty-hard morning at the tail end of this mass meeting on the Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs.

“When the train ...come in the station ...I looked her in the eye...“

Grim music in the airport.

“Yes, it’s hard to tell it’’s hard to tell, when all your love’s in Vain...”

Every now and then you run up on one of those days when everythings in vain ...a stone bummer from start to finish; if you know what’s good for you, on days like these you sortof hunker down in a safe corner and watch. Maybe think a bit. Lay back on a cheap wooden chair, screened off from traffic, and shrewdly rip the poptops out of five or eight Budweisers ...smoke off a pack of King Marlboros, eat a nut-butter sandwich, and finally toward evening gobble a wad of good mescaline . .. then drive out, later on, to the beach. Get out in the surf, in the fog, and slosh along on numb-frozen feet about ten yards out from the tideline...stomping through tribes of wild sandpeckers ...riderunners, whorehoppers, stupid little birds and crabs and saltsuckershere and there a big pervert or woolly reject gimp off in the distance, wandering alone by themselves behind dunes and driftwood. ...

These are the ones you will never be properly introduced to—at least not if your luck holds. But the beach is less complicated than a boiling fast morning in the Las Vegas airport.

I felt very obvious. Amphetamine psychosis? Paranoid dementia?—What is it? My Argentine luggage? This crippled, walk that once made me a reject from the Naval ROTC?”

Indeed. This man will never be able to walk straight, Captain! Because one leg is longer than the other.... Not much. Three eighths of an inch or so, which counted out to about two eights more than the Captain could tolerate.

So we parted company. He accepted a command in the South China Sea, and I became a Doctor of Gonzo Journalism ...andmany years later, killing time in the Las Vegas airport this terrible morning, I picked up a newspaper and saw where teh Captain had fucked up very badly:

Ship Commander Butchered by Natives After “Accidental” Assault on Guam.

(AOP)-Aboard the USS. Crazy Horse: Somewhere in the Pactfic (Sept. 25)-The entire 3485-man crew of this newest American aircraft carrier is in violent mourning today, after five crewmen including the Captain were diced uplike pineapple meat in a brawl with the Heroin Police at the neutral port of Hong See. Dr. Bboor, the ship’s chaplain, presided over tense funeral services at dawn on the flight deck. The 4th Fleet Service Choir sang “Tom Thumb’s Blues” ... and then, while the ship’s bells tolled frantically, the remains of the five were set afire in a gourd and hurled into the Pacific by a hooded officer known only as “The Commander.” Shortly after the services ended, the crewmen fell to fighting among themselves and all communications with the ship were severed for an indefinite period. Official spokesmen at 4th Fleet Headquarters on Guam said the Navy had “no comment” on the situation, pending the re sults of a top-level investigation by a team of civilian specialists headed by former New Orleans district attor ney James Garrison.

... Why bother with newspapers, if this is all they offer? Agnew was right. The press is a gang of cruel faggots. Journalism is not a profession or a trade. It is a cheap catch-all for fuckoffs and misfits—a false doorway to the backside of life, a filthy piss-ridden little hole nailed off by the building inspector, but just deep enough for a wine to curl up from the sidewalk and masturbate like a chimp in a zoo-cage.

14. Farewell to Vegas ...“God’s Mercy on You Swine!”

I skulked around the airport, I realized that I was still wearing my police ,identification badge. It was a flat orange rectangle, sealed in clear plastic, that said: “Raoul Duke, Spe cial Investigator, Los Angeles.” I saw it in the mirror above urinal.

Get rid of this thing, I thought. Tear it off. The gig is finished.. . and it proved nothing. At least not to me. And certainly not to my attorney-who also had a badge-but he was back in Malibu, nursing his paranoid sores.

It been a waste of time, a lame fuckaround that was only—in clear retrospect—a cheap excuse for a thousand cops to spend a few days in Las Vegas and lay the bill on the taxpayers. Nobody had learned anything— or at least nothing except new. Except maybe me .. . and all I learned was that the District Attorneys’ Association is about ten years behind the grim truth and harsh kinetic realities of what they just recently learned to call “the Drug Culture” in tyhe Year of Our lord, 1971.

They are still burning the taxpayers for thousands of dollars to make films about “the dangers of LSD,” at a time when acid is widely known—to everybody but cops-to be the Studenbaker of the drug market, the popularity of psychedelics has fallen off so drastically drastically that most voluime dealers no longer even handle qualioty acid or mescaline except as a favor to special customers: Mainly jaded, over thirty drug dilettantes—like me, and my attorney.

The big market, these days, is in Downers. Reds and smack—Seconal and heroin—and a hellbroth of bad domestic grass sprayed with everything from arsenic to horse tranquillizers. What sells, today, is whateverFucks You Up-whatever short-circuits your brain and grounds it out for the longest possible time. The ghetto market has mushroomed into subur bia. The Miltown man has turned, with a vengeance, to skin-popping and even mainlining...and for every ex-speed freak who drifted, for relief, into smack, there are 200 kids who went straight to the needle off Seconal. They never even bothered to try speed.

Uppers are no longer stylish. Methedrine is almost as rare, on the 1971 market, as pure acid or DMT. “Consciousness Ex pansion” went out with LBJ . . and it is worth noting, historically, that downers came in with