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“He who makes a beast of himself gets rid of the pain of being a man.” —DR. JOHNSON
“Turn up the fucking music!” he screamed. “My heart feels like an alligator!
“KILL THE BODY AND THE HEAD WILL DIE”
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.”
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.
No, this is not a good town for psychedelic drugs. Reality itself is too twisted.
I got him as far as the edge of the bar, the rim of the merry-go-round, but he refused to get off until it stopped turning.
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.
white noise at maximum decibels, a fine sound for sleeping, a powerful continuous hiss to drown out everything strange.
I meant no harm; I just liked the explosions.
How many more nights and weird mornings can this terrible shit go on? How long can the body and the brain tolerate this doom-struck craziness? This grinding of teeth, this pouring of sweat, this pounding of blood in the temples … small blue veins gone amok in front of the ears, sixty and seventy hours with no sleep.…
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.
‘Teeth Like Baseballs, Eyes Like Jellied Fire’
Even a goddamn werewolf is entitled to legal counsel
suddenly, they found themselves next to a white Cadillac convertible all covered with vomit and a 300-pound Samoan in a yellow fishnet T-shirt yelling at them: “Hey there! You folks want to buy some heroin?”
It’s not often that a man gets a chance to run terminal experiments on a virgin Cadillac and four brand-new $80 tires.
“Fuck newspapers,” said my attorney. “What we need right now is coffee.”
Every now and then you run up on one of those days when everything’s in vain … a stone bummer from start to finish; and if you know what’s good for you, on days like these you sort of hunker down in a safe corner and watch. Maybe think a bit. Lay back on a cheap wooden chair, screened off from the traffic, and shrewdly rip the poptops out of five or eight Budweisers … smoke off a pack of King Marlboros, eat a peanut-butter sandwich, and finally toward evening gobble up a wad of good mescaline … then drive out, later on, to the beach. Get out in the surf, in the fog, and slosh along on
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These are the ones you will never be properly introduced to—at least not if your luck holds. But the beach is less complicated than a boiling fast morning in the Las Vegas airport.
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.
“I never go anywhere without grapefruit,”
