Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas   ::   Thompson Hunter S.

The engines were all roaring; we could barely hear each other.“The sporting press,” I yelled. “We’re friendlies - hired geeks.”

Dim smiles.

“If you want a good chase,” I shouted, “you should get after that skunk from CBS News up ahead in the big black jeep. He’s the man responsible for The Selling Of The Pentagon.”

“Hot damn!” two of them screamed at once. “A black jeep, you say?”

They roared off, and so did we. Bouncing across the rocks scrub oak/cactus like iron tumbleweeds. The beer in my hand flew up and hit the top, then fell in my lap and soaked my crotch with warm foam.

“You’re fired,” I said to the driver. “Take me back to the pits.”

It was time, I felt, to get grounded - to ponder this rotten assignment and figure out how to cope with it. Lacerda insisted on Total Coverage. He wanted to goback out in the dust storm and keep trying for some rare combination of film and lense that might penetrate the aweful stuff.

“Joe,” our driver, was willing. His name was not really “Joe,” but that’s what we’d been instructed to call him. I had talked to the FOMOCO boss the night before, and when we mentioned the driver he was assigning to us he said, “His real name is Steve, but you should just call him Joe.”

“Why not?” I said, We’ll call him anything he wants. How about “Zoom”?”

“No dice,” the FOrd man said, “It has to be “Joe”.

Lacerda agreed, and sometime around noon he went out on the desert again, in the company of our driver Joe. I went back to the blockhouse bar/casino that was actually the Mint Gun Club - where I began to drink heavily, think heavily, and make many heavy notes…



6. A Night on the Town… Confrontation at the Desert Inn… Drug Frenzy at the Circus Circus…

Saturday midnight… Memories of this night are extremely hazy. All I have, for guide - pegs, is a pocketful of keno cards and cocktail napkins, all covered with scribbled notes. Here is one: “Get the Ford man, demand a Bronco for race - observation purposes… photos?… Lacerda/call… why not a helicopter?… Get on the phone, lean on the fuckers… heavy yelling.”

Another says: “Sign on Paradise Boulevard - ’Stopless and Topless’… bush - league sex compared to L.A.; pasties here - total naked public humping in L.A… Las Vegas is a society of armed masturbators/gambling is the kicker here/sex is extra/weird trip for high rollers… house - whores for winners, hand jobs for the bad luck crowd.”

A long time ago when I lived in Big Sur down the road from Lionel Olay I had a friend who liked to go to Reno for the crap - shooting. He owned a sporting - goods store in Carmel. And one month he drove his Mercedes highway - cruiser to Reno on three consecutive weekends - winning heavilyinch time. After three trips he was something like $15,000 ahead, so he decided to skip the fourth weekend and take friends to dinner at Nepenthe. “Always quit winners,” explained. “And besides, it’s a long drive.”

On Monday morning he got a phone call from Reno - from the general manager of the casino he’d been working out on. “We missed you this weekend,” said the GM. “The pit - men were bored.”

“Shucks,” said my friend.

So the next weekend he flew up to Reno in a private plane, with a friend and two girls - all “special guests” of the GM. Nothing too good for high rollers…

And on Monday morning the same plane - the casino’s plane - flew him back to the Monterey airport. The pilot lent him a dime to call a friend for a ride to Carmel. He was $30,000 in debt, and two months later he was looking down the barrel of one of the world’s heaviest collection agendes.

So he sold his store, but that didn’t make the nut. They could wait for the rest, he said - but then he got stomped, which convinced him that maybe he’d be better off borrowing enough money to pay the whole wad.

Mainline gambling is a very heavy business - and Las Vegas makes Reno seem like your friendly neighborhood grocery store. For a loser, Vegas is the meanest town on earth. Until about a year ago, there was a giant billboard on the outskirts of Las Vegas, saying:

DON’T GAMBLE WITH MARIJUANA!

IN NEVADA: POSSESSION - 20 YEARS SALE - LIFE!

So I was not entirely at ease drifting around the casinos on this Saturday night with a car full of marijuana and head full of acid. We had several narrow escapes: at one point I tried to drive the Great Red Shark into the laundry room of the Landmark Hotel - but the door was too narrow, and the people inside seemed dangerously excited.

We drove over to the Desert Inn, to catch the Debbie Reynolds/Harry James show. “I don’t know about you,” I told my attorney, “but in my line of business it’s important to be Hep.”

“Mine too,” he said. “But as your attorney I advise you to drive over to the Tropicana and pick up on Guy Lombardo. He’s in the Blue Room with his Royal Canadians.”

“Why?” I asked.

“Why what?”

“Why should I pay out my hard - earned dollars to watch a fucking corpse?”

“Look,” he said. “Why are we out here? To entertain ourselves, or to do the job?”

“The job, of course,” I replied. We were driving around in circles, weaving through the parking lot of a place I thought was the Dunes, but it turned out to be the Thunderbird or maybe it was the Hacienda

My attorney was scanning The Vegas Visitor, looking for hints of action. “How about “‘Nickel Nick’s Slot Arcade?’” he said. “‘Hot Slots,’ that sounds heavy… Twenty - nine cent hotdogs..

Suddenly people were screaming at us. We were in trouble. Two thugs wearing red - gold military overcoats were looming over the hood: “What the hell are you doing?” one screamed. “You can’t park here! ’

“Why not?” I said. It seemed like a reasonable place to park, plenty of space. I’d been looking for a parking spot for what seemed like a very long time. Too long. I was about ready to abandon the car and call a taxi… but then, yes, we found this space.

Which turned out to be the sidewalk in front of the main entrance to the Desert Inn. I had run over so many curbs by this time, that I hadn’t even noticed this last one. But now we ourselves in a position that was hard to explain… the entrance, thugs yelling at us, bad confusion… attorney was out of the car in a flash, waving a five - dollar bill.

“We want this car parked! I’m an old friend of Debbie’s. I used to romp with her.”

For a moment I thought he had blown it… then one of the doormen reached out for the bill, saying: “OK, OK.