Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: The captivating memoir of countercultural journalism and social commentary (Harper Perennial Modern Classics)

by Hunter S. Thompson

The sporting editors had also given me $300 in cash, most of which was already spent on extremely dangerous drugs.

“That’s good,” I said. “Because I want you to know that we’re on our way to Las Vegas to find the American Dream.”

My blood is too thick for California: I have never been able to properly explain myself in this climate. Not with the soaking sweats … wild red eyeballs and trembling

Beverly Hills where another total stranger gives me $300 raw cash for no reason at all … I tell you, my man, this is the American Dream in action! We’d be fools not to ride this strange torpedo all the way out to the end.”

But we were delayed en route when a Stingray in front of us killed a pedestrian on Sunset Boulevard. The

through the blue desert ground-haze: The Sahara, the landmark, the Americana and the ominous Thunderbird—a cluster of grey rectangles in the distance, rising out of the cactus.

glanced over at my attorney, but he was staring up at the sky, and I could see that his brain had gone off to that campground beyond the sun. Thank

Ether

Shoot the pasties off the nipples of a ten-foot bull-dyke and win a cotton-candy goat.

“Say whatever you want, fella. They’ll hear you, don’t worry about that. Remember you’ll be two hundred feet tall.”

head. No, this is not a good town for psychedelic drugs. Reality itself is too twisted.

“Nonsense,” I said. “We came out here to find the American Dream, and now that we’re right in the vortex you want to quit.” I grabbed his bicep and squeezed. “You must realize,” I said, “that we’ve found the main nerve.” “I know,” he said. “That’s what gives me the Fear.”

Extremely menacing vibrations all around us.

Then he grabbed a grapefruit and sliced it in half with a Gerber Mini-Magnum—a stainless-steel hunting knife with a blade like a fresh-honed straight razor.

One of the things you learn, after years of dealing with drug people, is that everything is serious.

You can turn your back on a person, but never turn your back on a drug—especially when it’s waving a razor-sharp hunting knife in your eyes.

Was I just roaming around these Mint Hotel escalators in a drug frenzy of some kind, or had I really come out here to Las Vegas to work on a story?

Who are these people? These faces! Where do they come from? They look like caricatures of used-car dealers from Dallas. But they’re real. And, sweet Jesus, there are a hell of a lot of them—still screaming around these desert-city crap tables at four-thirty on a Sunday morning. Still humping the American Dream, that vision of the Big Winner somehow emerging from the last-minute pre-dawn chaos of a stale Vegas casino.

Indeed: “LAS VEGAS AT DAWN—The racers are still asleep, the dust is still on the desert, $50,000 in prize money slumbers darkly in the office safe at Del Webb’s fabulous Mint Hotel in the bright heart of Casino Center. Extreme tension.

dig my own graves,” he said. “Green water and the White Rabbit … put it on; don’t make me use this.” His arm lashed out of the water, the hunting knife gripped in his fist.

“Of course,” he said. “I’m your attorney. I’ll give you all the time you need, at my normal rates: $45 an hour—but you’ll

be wanting a cushion, so why don’t you just lay one of those $100 bills down there beside the radio, and fuck off?”

But sometimes … it’s hard to adjust to a city gig where the night is full of sounds, all of them comfortably routine. Cars, horns, footsteps … no way to relax; so drown it all out with the fine white drone of a cross-eyed TV set.

Just another ugly refugee from the Love Generation, some doom-struck gimp who couldn’t handle the pressure.

My attorney has never been able to accept the notion—often espoused by reformed drug abusers and especially popular among those on probation—that you can get a lot higher without drugs than with them.

Aaawww, Mama, Can This Really Be the End? … Down and Out in Vegas, with Amphetamine Psychosis Again?

didn’t even know who’d won the race. Maybe nobody. For all I knew, the whole spectacle had been aborted by a terrible riot—an orgy of senseless violence, kicked off by drunken hoodlums who refused to abide by the rules.

All I did was take your gibberish seriously … and you see where it got me? My primitive Christian instincts have made me a criminal.

a giddy, quavering sort of high that means the crash is coming.

No sympathy for the devil; keep that in mind. Buy the ticket, take the ride … and if it occasionally gets a little heavier than what you had in mind, well … maybe chalk it off to forced consciousness expansion: Tune in, freak out, get beaten. It’s all in Kesey’s Bible. … The Far Side of Reality.

felt like Othello. Here I’d only been in town a few hours, and we’d already laid the groundwork for a classic tragedy. The hero was doomed; he had already sown the seed of his own downfall. …

“You’d have to be crazy on acid to think a joint looked like a goddamn cockroach!”