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A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream
Great Red Shark
hell of a name of a carchevy caprice convertible 1973
The sporting editors had also given me $300 in cash, most of which was already spent on extremely dangerous drugs.
“We’re your friends,” said my attorney. “We’re not like the others.”
“Where can we get hold of a Vincent Black Shadow?”
My blood is too thick for California: I have never been able to properly explain myself in this climate.
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.”
The only way to prepare for a trip like this, I felt, was to dress up like human peacocks and get crazy, then screech off across the desert and cover the story.
For a loser, Vegas is the meanest town on earth.
preach.
“Where’s the ether?” said my attorney. “This mescaline isn’t working.”
if I had a nickel...
Ah, devil ether—a total body drug. The mind recoils in horror, unable to communicate with the spinal column.
The Circus-Circus is what the whole hep world would be doing on Saturday night if the Nazis had won the war.
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.”
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.
when I left the Fillmore half-crazy and, instead of going home, aimed the big 650 Lightning across the Bay Bridge at a hundred miles an hour wearing L. L. Bean shorts and a Butte sheepherder’s jacket
To hell with this panic. Get a grip. Maintain. For the next twenty-four hours this matter of personal control will be critical.
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.
“This telegram just came for you,” he said. “But actually it isn’t for you. It’s for somebody named Thompson, but it says ‘care of Raoul Duke’; does that make sense?”
It was dangerous lunacy, but it was also the kind of thing a real connoisseur of edge-work could make an argument for.
No sympathy for the devil; keep that in mind.
My guilt was so gross and overwhelming that explanations were useless.
sounds familiar
This is how the world works. All energy flows according to the whims of the Great Magnet. What a fool I was to defy him.
You better watch yourself, I thought. There are limits to what the human body can endure. You don’t want to break down and start bleeding from the ears right here in the terminal. Not in this town. In Las Vegas they kill the weak and deranged.
“Do I look like a goddamn Nazi?” I said. “I’ll have a natural American car, or nothing at all!”
My beard was about three days old, bordering on standard wino trim, and my eyes were totally hidden by Sandy Bull’s Saigon-mirror shades.
I gave my bag to the boy who scurried up, and told him to bring a quart of Wild Turkey and two fifths of Bacardi Anejo with a night’s worth of ice.
"As is noted on the rear of the bottle this is not a Puerto Rican rum. It was actually distilled a the first distillery Bacardi opened outside of Cuba way back in 1929. Destileria de Galarza in Mexico. The Spanish writing on the label suggests is was produced primarily for the Spanish speaking market."
Huge shoulders on the woman, and a chin like Oscar Bonavena.
http://www.boxing.com/wild_life_of_oscar_bonavena.html
The sun was going down behind the scrub hills northwest of the city. A good Kristofferson tune was croaking out of the radio. We cruised back to town through the warm dusk, relaxed on the red leather seats of our electric white Coupe de Ville.
I 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.…
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
Their sound system looked like something Ulysses S. Grant might have triggered up to address his troops during the Seige of Vicksburg.
If You Don’t Know, Come to Learn … If You Know, Come to Teach
A week in Vegas is like stumbling into a Time Warp, a regression to the late fifties.
oh, if only. 50's in Vegas might have been an interesting time
Att’y: 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.…
so, the "American Dream" was kind of a joke then, too
