Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas

by Hunter S. Thompson

The idea of entering a coffee shop without a newspaper in my hands made me nervous. There was always the Sports Section; get wired on the baseball scores and pro-football rumors: “Bart Starr Beaten by Thugs in Chicago Tavern; Packers Seek Trade” … “Namath Quits Jets to be Governor of Alabama” … and a speculative piece on page 46 about a rookie sensation named Harrison Fire, out of Grambling: runs the hundred in nine flat, 344 pounds and still growing.

Att’y: I want tacos … Duke: Five for a buck, that’s like … five hamburgers for a buck. Att’y: No … don’t judge a taco by its price.

Let me explain it to you, let me run it down just briefly if I can. We’re looking for the American Dream, and we were told it was somewhere in this area.… Well, we’re here looking for it, ‘cause they sent us out here all the way from San Francisco to look for it. That’s why they gave us this white Cadillac, they figure that we could catch up with it in that …

When you bring an act into this town, you want to bring it in heavy. Don’t waste any time with cheap shucks and misdemeanors. Go straight for the jugular. Get right into felonies.

This was the fatal flaw in Tim Leary’s trip. He crashed around America selling “consciousness expansion” without ever giving a thought to the grim meat-hook realities that were lying in wait for all the people who took him too seriously. After West Point and the Priesthood, LSD must have seemed entirely logical to him … but there is not much satisfaction in knowing that he blew it very badly for himself, because he took too many others down with him. Not that they didn’t deserve it: No doubt they all Got What Was Coming To Them. All those pathetically eager acid freaks who thought they could buy Peace and Understanding for three bucks a hit. But their loss and failure is ours, too. What Leary took down with him was the central illusion of a whole life-style that he helped to create … a generation of permanent cripples, failed seekers, who never understood the essential old-mystic fallacy of the Acid Culture: the desperate assumption that somebody—or at least some force—is tending that Light at the end of the tunnel.

One of the crucial moments of the Sixties came on that day when the Beatles cast their lot with the Maharishi. It was like Dylan going to the Vatican to kiss the Pope’s ring.

Sonny Barger never quite got the hang of it, but he’ll never know how close he was to a king-hell breakthrough. The Angels blew it in 1965, at the Oakland-Berkeley line, when they acted on Barger’s hardhat, con-boss instincts and attacked the front ranks of an anti-war march. This proved to be an historic schism in the then Rising Tide of the Youth Movement of the Sixties. It was the first open break between the Greasers and the Longhairs, and the importance of that break can be read in the history of SDS, which eventually destroyed itself in the doomed effort to reconcile the interests of the lower/working class biker/dropout types and the upper/middle, Berkeley/student activists.

Nobody involved in that scene, at the time, could possibly have foreseen the Implications of the Ginsberg/Kesey failure to persuade the Hell’s Angels to join forces with the radical Left from Berkeley. The final split came at Altamont, four years later, but by that time it had long been clear to everybody except a handful of rock industry dopers and the national press. The orgy of violence at Altamont merely dramatized the problem. The realities were already fixed; the illness was understood to be terminal, and the energies of The Movement were long since aggressively dissipated by the rush to self-preservation.

In a scene where nobody with any ambition is really what he appears to be, there’s not much risk in acting like a king-hell freak. The overseers will nod wisely at each other and mutter about “these goddamn no-class put-ons.”

The other side of that coin is the “Goddamn! Who’s that?” syndrome. This comes from people like doormen and floorwalkers who assume that anybody who acts crazy, but still tips big, must be important—which means he should be humored, or at least treated gently.

Vegas is so full of natural freaks—people who are genuinely twisted—that drugs aren’t really a problem, except for cops and the scag syndicate. Psychedelics are almost irrelevant in a town where you can wander into a casino any time of the day or night and witness the crucifixion of a gorilla—on a flaming neon cross that suddenly turns into a pinwheel, spinning the beast around in wild circles above the crowded gambling action.

It was strange to sit there in Vegas and hear Bruce singing powerful stuff like “Chicago” and “Country Song.” If the management had bothered to hear the lyrics, the whole band would have been tarred and feathered.

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. Some people say they like it—but then some people like Nixon, too.

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.

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.