help.
The only hope now, I felt, was the possibility that we’d gone to such excess, with our gig, that nobody in a position to bring the hammer down on us could possibly believe it. Particularily not since we’d signed in with the Police Conference. When you bring an act into this town, you want to bring it in heavy. Don’t waste any time with cheap shucks and misde minors. Go straight for the jugular. Get right into felonies.
The mentality of Las Vegas is so grossly atavistic that a really massive crime often slips by unrecognized. One of my neighbors recently spent a week in the Vegas jail for “vagrancy.” He’s about twenty years old: Long hair, Levi jacket, napsack - an out-front drifter, a straight Road Person. Totally harmless; he just wanders around the country looking whatever it was that we all thought we’d nailed down in in the Sixties-sort of an early Bob Zimmerman trip.
On a trip from Chicago to L.A., he got curious about Vegas and decided to have a look at it. Just passing through, strolling and digging the sights on the Strip… no hurry, why rush? He was standing on a street-corner near the Circus Circus, watching the multi-colored fountain, when the cop-cruiser pulled up.
Wham. Straight to jail. No phone call, no lawyer, no charge. “They put me in the car and took me down to the station.” he said. “They took me into a big room full of people to take off all my clothes before they booked me. I was standing in front of a big desk, about six feet tall, with a cop sitting behind it and looking down at me like some kind of medieval judge.
“The room was full of people. Maybe a dozen prisoners; twice that many cops, and about ten policewomen. You had to walk out in the middle of the room, then take everything out of your pockets and put it up on the desk and then strip naked-with everybody watching you.
“I only had about twenty bucks, and the fine for vagrancy was twenty-five, so they put me over on a bench with the peo ple who were going to jail. Nobody hassled me. It was like an assembly line.
“The two guys right behind me were longhairs. Acid people. They’d been picked up for vagrancy, too. But when they started emptying their pockets, the whole room freaked. Between them, they had $130,000, mostly in big bills. The cops couldn’t believe it. These guys just kept pulling out wads of money and dumping it up there on the desk-both of them naked and kind of hunched over, not saying anything.
“The cops went crazy when they saw all that money. They started whispering to each other; shit, there was no way they could hold these guys for ‘vagrancy.’ ” He laughed. “So they charged them with ‘suspicion of evasion of income taxes.’ ”
“They took us all to jail, and these two guys were just about nuts. They were dealers, of course, and they had their stash back in their hotel room-so they had to get out before the cops found out where they were staying.
“They offered one of the guards a hundred bucks to go out and get the best lawyer in town… and about twenty minutes later there he was, yelling about habeas corpus and that kind of shit… hell, I tried to talk to him myself, but this guy had a one-track mind. I told him I could make bail and even pay him something if they’d let me call my father in Chicago, but he was too busy hustling for these other guys.
“About two hours later he came back with a guard and said ‘Let’s go.’ They were out. One of the guys had 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 3urls- diction 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.”
