Fear and loathing in Las Vegas, and other American stories (23 page)

The sun was coming up when I got to the airport. I left the Whale in the VIP parking lot. A kid about fifteen years old checked it in, but I refused to answer his questions. He was very excited about the overall condition of the vehicle. “Holy God!” he kept shouting. “How did
this
happen?” He kept moving around the car, pointing at various dents, rips and crushed places.

“I know,” I said. “They beat the shit out of it. This is a terrible goddamn town for driving around in convertibles. The worst time was right out on the Boulevard in front of the Sahara. You know that corner where all the junkies hang out? Jesus, I couldn’t believe it when they all went crazy
at once.”

The kid was none too bright. His face had gone blank early on, and now he seemed in a state of mute fear.

“Don’t worry,” I said. “I’m insured.” I showed him the contract, pointing to the small-print clause where it said I was insured against
all damages,
for only two dollars a day.

The kid was still nodding when I fled. I felt a bit guilty about leaving him to deal with the car. There was no way to explain the massive damage. It was finished, a wreck, totaled out. Under normal circumstances I would have been seized and arrested when I tried to turn it in . . . but not at this hour of the morning, with only this kid to deal with. I was, after all, a “VIP.” Otherwise, they would never have chartered the car to me in the first place. . . .

Let the chickens come home to roost, I thought as I hurried into the airport. It was still too early to act normal, so I hunkered down in the coffee shop behind the L.A.
Times.
Somewhere down the corridor a jukebox was playing “One Toke Over the Line.” I listened for a moment, but my nerve ends were no longer receptive. The only song I might have been able to relate to, at that point, was “Mister Tambourine Man.” Or maybe “Memphis Blues Again. . . .”

“Awww, mama . . . can this really . . . be the end . . . ?”

My plane left at eight, which meant I had two hours to kill. Feeling desperately visible. There was no doubt in my mind that they were looking for me; the net was closing down . . . it was only a matter of time before they ran me down like some kind of rabid animal.

I checked all my luggage through the chute. All but the leather satchel, which was full of drugs. And the .357. Did they have the goddamn metal detector system in this airport? I strolled around to the boarding gate and tried to look casual while I cased the area for black boxes. None were visible. I decided 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 guess you’re probably wonderin’ what makes me sweat like this? Yeah! Well, god
damn,
man! Have you read the newspapers today? . . . You’d never believe what those dirty bastards have done
this
time!”

I figured that would cover it . . . but I couldn’t find anybody who looked safe enough to talk to. The whole airport was full of people who looked like they might go for my floating 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 morning 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 . . .

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. Not right here in the middle of the Las Vegas airport, on this sweaty-hard morning at the tail end of this mass meeting on Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs.

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

Grim music in this 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
everything’s
in vain . . . a stone bummer from start to finish; and if you know what’s good for you, on days like these you sort of hunker down in a safe corner and
watch.
Maybe think a bit. Lay back on a cheap wooden chair, screened off from the traffic, and shrewdly rip the poptops out of five or eight Budweisers . . . smoke off a pack of King Marlboros, eat a peanut-butter sandwich, and finally toward evening gobble up 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 saltsuckers, with here and there a big pervert or woolly reject gimping off in the distance, wandering alone by themselves behind the 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, loping 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-eighths 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 . . . and many years later, killing time in the Las Vegas airport this terrible morning, I picked up a newspaper and saw where the Captain had fucked up very badly:

. . . 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 wino to curl up from the sidewalk and masturbate like a chimp in a zoo-cage.

As 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, Special Investigator, Los Angeles.” I saw it in the mirror above the 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 now he was back in Malibu, nursing his paranoid sores.

It had 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 new. Except maybe me . . . and all I learned was that the National District Attorneys’ Association is about ten years behind the grim truth and harsh kinetic realities of what they have only just recently learned to call “the Drug Culture” in this foul 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 Studebaker of the drug market; the popularity of psychedelics has fallen off so drastically that most volume dealers no longer even handle quality 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 whatever Fucks You Up—whatever short-circuits your brain and grounds it out for the longest possible time. The ghetto market has mushroomed into suburbia. 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 Expansion” went out with LBJ . . . and it is worth noting, historically, that downers came in with Nixon.

I limped onto the plane with no problem except a wave of ugly vibrations from the other passengers . . . but my head was so burned out, by then, that I wouldn’t have cared if I’d had to climb aboard stark naked and covered with oozing chancres. It would have taken extreme physical force to keep me off that plane. I was so far beyond simple fatigue that I was beginning to feel nicely adjusted to the idea of permanent hysteria. I felt like the slightest misunderstanding with the stewardess would cause me to either cry or go mad . . . and the woman seemed to sense this, because she treated me very gently.

When I wanted more ice cubes for my Bloody Mary, she brought them quickly . . . and when I ran out of cigarettes, she gave me a pack from her own purse. The only time she seemed nervous was when I pulled a grapefruit out of my satchel and began slicing it up with a hunting knife. I noticed her watching me closely, so I tried to smile. “I never go anywhere without grapefruit,” I said. “It’s hard to get a really good one—unless you’re rich.”

She nodded.

I flashed her the grimace/smile again, but it was hard to know what she was thinking. It was entirely possible, I knew, that she’d already decided to have me taken off the plane in a cage when we got to Denver. I stared fixedly into her eyes for a time, but she kept herself under control.

I was asleep when our plane hit the runway, but the jolt brought me instantly awake. I looked out the window and saw the Rocky Mountains. What the fuck was I doing
here?
I wondered. It made no sense at all. I decided to call my attorney as soon as possible. Have him wire me some money to buy a huge albino Doberman. Denver is a national clearing house for stolen Dobermans; they come from all parts of the country.

Since I was already here, I thought I might as well pick up a vicious dog. But first, something for my nerves. Immediately after the plane landed I rushed up the corridor to the airport drugstore and asked the clerk for a box of amyls.

She began to fidget and shake her head. “Oh, no,” she said finally. “I can’t sell
those
things except by prescription.”

“I know,” I said. “But you see, I’m a
doctor.
I don’t need a prescription.”

She was still fidgeting. “Well . . . you’ll have to show me some I.D.,” she moaned.

“Of course.” I jerked out my wallet and let her see the police badge while I flipped through the deck until I located my Ecclesiastical Discount Card—which identifies me as a Doctor of Divinity, a certified Minister of the Church of the New Truth.