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

“It won’t last long,” he said. “The first rush is the worst. ride the bastard out. If I put you in the pool right now, sink like a goddamn stone.”

I was sure of it. Not even my lungs seemed to be functioning. I needed artificial respiration, but I couldn’t open my mouth to say so. I was going to die. Just sitting there on the bed, unable to move ...well at least there’s no pain.

Probably, I’ll black out in a few seconds, and after that it won’t matter.

My attorney had gone back to watching television. The news was on again. Nixon’s face filled the screen, but his speech was hopelessly garbled. The only word I could make out was “sacrifice.” Over and over again: “Sacrifice ...sacrifice ...sacrificeI could hear myself breathing heavily. My attorney seemed to notice. “Just stay relaxed,” he said over his shoulder, with out looking at me. “Don’t try to fight it, or you’ll start getting brain bubbles ...strokes, aneurisms ...you’ll just wither up and die.” His hand snaked out to change channels.

It was after midnight when I finally was able to talk and move around ...but I was still not free of the drug; the voltage had merely been cranked down from 220 to 110. I was a babbling nervous wreck, flapping around the room like a wild animal, pouring sweat and unable to concentrate on any one thought for more than two or three seconds at a time.

My attorney put down the phone after making several calls. “There’s only one place where we can get fresh salmon,” he said, “and it’s closed on Sunday.”

“Of course,” I snapped. “These goddamn Jesus freaks! They’re multiplying like rats!”

He eyed me curiously.

“What about the Process?” I said. “Don’t they have a place here? Maybe a delicatessen or something? With a few tables in back? They have a fantastic menu in London. I ate there once; incredible food…”

“Get a grip on yourself,” he said. “You don’t want to even mention the Process in this town.”

“You’re right,” I said. “Call Inspector Bloor. He knows about food. I think he has a list. ”

“Better to call room service,” he said. “We can get the crab looey and a quart of Christian Brothers muscatel for about twenty bucks.

“No!” I said. “We must get out of this place. I need air. Let’s drive up to Reno and get a big tuna fish salad ... hell, it won’t take long. Only about four hundred miles; no traffic out there on the desert ...”

“Forget it,” he said. “That’s Army territory. Bomb tests, nerve gas—we’d never make it.”

We wound up at a place called The Big Flip about halfway downtown. I had a “New York steak” for $1.88. My attorney ordered the “Coyote Bush Basket” for $2.09 ... and after that we drank off a pot of watery “Golden West” coffee and watched four boozed-up cowboy types kick a faggot half to death between the pinball machines.

“The action never stops in this town,” said my attorney as we shuffled out to the car. “A man with the right contacts could probably pick up all the fresh adrenochrome he wanted, if he hung around here for a while.”

I agreed, but I wasn’t quite up to it, right then. I hadn’t slept for something like eighty hours, and that fearful ordeal with the drug had left me completely exhausted ...tomorrow we would have to get serious. The drug conference was scheduled to kick off at noon ... and we were still not sure how to handle it. So we drove back to the hotel and watched a British horror film on the late show.

“On behalf of the prosecuting attorneys of this county, I welcome you.”

We sat in the rear fringe of a crowd of about 1500 in the main ballroom of the Dunes Hotel. Far up in front of the room, barely visible from the rear, the executive director of the National District Attorneys’ Association—a middle-aged, well-groomed, successful GOP businessman type named Pat rick Healy-was opening their Third National Institute on Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs. His remarks reached us by way of a big, low-fidelity speaker mounted on a steel pole in our corner. Perhaps a dozen others were spotted around the room, all facing the rear and looming over the crowd ... so hat no matter where you sat or even tried to hide, you were ways looking down the muzzle of a big speaker.

This produced an odd effect. People in each section of the Lroom tended to stare at the nearest voice-box, instead of watching the distant figure of whoever was actually talking up front, on the podium. This 1935 style of speaker placement totally depersonalized the room. There was something is and authoritarian about it.

Whoever set up that system was probably some kind of Sheriff’s auxiliary technician on leave from a drive-in theater in Muskogee, where the management couldn’t afford individual car speakers and relied on ten huge horns, mounted ontelephone poles in the parking area.

A year earlier I had been to the Sky River Rock Festival in rural Washington, where a dozen stone-broke freaks from the Seattle Liberation Front had assembled a sound sys tem that carried every small note of an acoustic guitar—even a cough or the sound of a boot dropping on the stage—to half-deaf acid victims huddled under bushes a half mile away.

But the best technicians available to the National DAs’ convention in Vegas apparently couldn’t handle it. Their sound system looked like something Ulysses S. Grant might have triggered up to address his troops during the Seige of Vicksburg. The voices from up front crackled with a fuzzy, high-pitched urgency, and the delay was just enough to keep the words disconcertingly out of phase with the speaker’s ges tures.

“We must come to terms with the Drug Culture in this country! ... country ...country . . .” These echoes drifted back to the rear in confused waves. “The reefer butt is called a ‘roach’ because it resembles a cockroach . . .cockroach ... cockroach ...”

“What the fuck are these people talking about?” my attorney whispered. “You’d have to be crazy on acid to think a joint looked like a goddamn cockroach!”

I shrugged. It was clear that we’d stumbled into a prehis toric gathering. The voice of a “drug expert” named Bloomquist crackled out of the nearby speakers: “... about these flashbacks, the patient never knows; he thinks it’s all over and he gets himself straightened out for six months ... and then, darn it, the whole trip comes back on him.”

Gosh darn that fiendish LSD! Dr. E. R. Bloomquist, MD, was the keynote speaker, one of the big stars of the conference. He is the author of a paperback book titled Marijuana, which—according to the cover—“tells it like it is.” (He is also the inventor of the roach/cockroach thoery ... )

According to the book jacket, he is an “Associate Clinical Professor of Surgery (Anesthesiology) at the University of Southern Cllfcruia School of Medicine” ... and also “a well known authority on the abuse of dangerous drugs.: Dr. Bllomquist “has also appeared on national network television panles, has served as a consultant for government agencies, was a member of the Committee on Narcotics Addiction and Alcoholism of the Council on Mental Health of the American Medical Association.” His wisdom is massively reprinted and distributed, says the publisher. He is clearly one of the heavies on that circuit of second-rate academic hustlers who get paid anywhere from $500 to $1000 a hit for lecturing to cop crowds.

Dr. Bloomquist’s book is a compendium of state bullshit. On page 49 he explains, the “four states of being” in the cannabis society: “Cool, Groovy, Hip & Square”—in that descending order. “The square is seldom if ever cool,” says Bloomquist. “He is ‘not with it,’ that is, he doesn’t know ‘what’s happening.’ But if he manages to figure it out, he moves up a notch to ‘hip.’ And if he can bring himself to approve of what’s happening, he becomes ‘groovy.’ And after that, with much luck and perseverence, he can rise to the rank of ‘cool.’ ”