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“He who makes a beast of himself gets rid of the pain of being a man.”
We had two bags of grass, seventy-five pellets of mescaline, five sheets of high-powered blotter acid, a salt shaker half full of cocaine, and a whole galaxy of multi-colored uppers, downers, screamers, laughers … and also a quart of tequila, a quart of rum, a case of Budweiser, a pint of raw ether and two dozen amyls.
once you get locked into a serious drug collection, the tendency is to push it as far as you can.
There is nothing in the world more helpless and irresponsible and depraved than a man in the depths of an ether binge.
A constant speed is good for gas mileage—and for some reason that seemed important at the time.
“If a thing like this is worth doing at all, it’s worth doing right.
My blood is too thick for California:
“You have no faith in the essential decency of the white man’s culture.
Every now and then when your life gets complicated and the weasels start closing in, the only real cure is to load up on heinous chemicals and then drive like a bastard from Hollywood to Las Vegas.
Old elephants limp off to the hills to die; old Americans go out to the highway and drive themselves to death with huge cars.
But our trip was different. It was a classic affirmation of everything right and true and decent in the national character. It was a gross, physical salute to the fantastic possibilities of life in this country—but only for those with true grit. And we were chock full of that.
nobody even notices an acid freak.
“As your attorney, I advise you not to worry about me.”
Las Vegas is not the kind of town where you want to drive down Main Street aiming a black bazooka-looking instrument at people.
I could see that his brain had gone off to that campground beyond the sun.
“What’s the trouble here?” he croaked. “This man is my client. Are you prepared to go to court?”
Our tempers were ugly
All I could think was, ‘O Jesus, here we go again: Who’s divorced me this time?’”
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.”
Ether is the perfect drug for Las Vegas.
Hallucinations are bad enough. But after a while you learn to cope with things like seeing your dead grandmother crawling up your leg with a knife in her teeth. Most acid fanciers can handle this sort of thing.
No, this is not a good town for psychedelic drugs. Reality itself is too twisted.
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.
But no. Just another two bucks down the tube. You bastards!
live in a quiet place, where any sound
Ignore that nightmare in the bathroom. Just another ugly refugee from the Love Generation, some doom-struck gimp who couldn’t handle the pressure.
that you can get a lot higher without drugs than with them.
That was no old lady out there in that garden; it was the good doctor himself— and his humming was a frantic attempt to block me out of his higher consciousness.
Maybe it meant something. Maybe not, in the long run … but no explanation, no mix of words or music or memories can touch that sense of knowing that you were there and alive in that corner of time and the world. Whatever it meant.…
History is hard to know, because of all the hired bullshit, but even without being sure of “history” it seems entirely reasonable to think that every now and then the energy of a whole generation comes to a head in a long fine flash, for reasons that nobody really understands at the time—and which never explain, in retrospect, what actually happened.
In a closed society where everybody’s guilty, the only crime is getting caught. In a world of thieves, the only final sin is stupidity.
Against that heinous background, my crimes were pale and meaningless. I was a relatively respectable citizen—a multiple felon, perhaps, but certainly not dangerous. And when the Great Scorer came to write against my name, that would surely make a difference.
in those circles, that everything they told me went into the wastebasket or at least the dead-end file because the lead paragraphs I wrote for that article didn’t satisfy some editor three thousand miles away—some nervous drone behind a grey formica desk in the bowels of a journalistic bureaucracy that no con in Nevada will ever understand
To infiltrate the infiltrators would be to accept the fate of all spies: “As always, if you or any member of your organization is apprehended by the enemy, the Secretary will deny any Knowledge, etc.…”
There is only one road to L.A.—US Interstate 15, a straight run with no backroads or alternate routes, just a flat-out high-speed burn through Baker and Barstow and Berdoo and then on the Hollywood Freeway straight into frantic oblivion: safety, obscurity, just another freak in the Freak Kingdom.
This culture has beaten me down.
My primitive Christian instincts have made me a criminal.
This is wrong. It arouses contempt in the cop-heart. The thing to do—when you’re running along about a hundred or so and you suddenly find a red-flashing CHP-tracker on your trail—what you want to do then is accelerate. Never pull over with the first siren-howl. Mash it down and make the bastard chase you at speeds up to 120 all the way to the next exit. He will follow. But he won’t know what to make of your blinker-signal that says you’re about to turn right.
This worried me at first, but when I went to a doctor and described my normal daily intake of booze, drugs and poison he told me to come back when the sweating stopped.
But the Big Computer hadn’t nixed me yet, so I was still a fat gold credit risk.
This is one of the hallmarks of Vegas hospitality. The only bedrock rule is Don’t Burn the Locals. Beyond that, nobody cares.
“As your attorney, I advise you to tell me where you put the goddamn mescaline.”
I
Jesus, I thought. What a terrible thing to lay on somebody with a head full of acid.
“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!”
These poor bastards didn’t know mescaline from macaroni.
North Vegas is where you go if you’re a hooker turning forty and the syndicate men on the Strip decide you’re no longer much good for business out there with the high rollers … or if you’re a pimp with bad credit at the Sands … or what they still call, in Vegas, “a hophead.” This can mean almost anything from a mean drunk to a junkie, but in terms of commercial acceptability, it means you’re finished in all the right places.
] Att’y: As your attorney I advise you to get the chiliburger. It’s a hamburger with chili on it.
A little bit of this town goes a very long way. After five days in Vegas you feel like you’ve been here for five years.
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.
