Get rid of this thing, I thought. Tear it off. The gig is finished… and it proved nothing. At least not to me. And certainly not to my attorney-who also had a badge-but he was back in Malibu, nursing his paranoid sores.
It 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 except new. Except maybe me… and all I learned was that the District Attorneys' Association is about ten years behind the grim truth and harsh kinetic realities of what they just recently learned to call "the Drug Culture" in tyhe 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 Studenbaker of the drug market, the popularity of psychedelics has fallen off so drastically drastically that most voluime dealers no longer even handle qualioty acid or mescaline except as a favor to special customers: Mainly jaded, over thirty drug dilettantes - likeme, and my attorney.
The big market, these days, is in Downers. Reds and smack -Seconal and heroin-and a hellbroth of bad domestic grass sprayed with everything from arsenic to horse tranquillizers. What sells, today, is whateverFucks You Up-whatever short-circuits your brain and grounds it out for the longest possible time. The ghetto market has mushroomed into subur bia. The Miltown man has turned, with a vengeance, to skin- popping and even mainlining… and for every ex-speed freak who drifted, for relief, into smack, there are 200 kids who went straight to the needle off Seconal. They never even bothered to try speed.
Uppers are no longer stylish. Methedrine is almost as rare, on the 1971 market, as pure acid or DMT. "Consciousness Ex pansion" went out with LBJ.. and it is worth noting, historically, that downers came in with Nixon.
I limped onto the plane with no problem except a wave of ugly vibrations from the other passengers… but my head was so burned out, by then, that I wouldn't have cared if I'd had to climb aboard stark naked and covered with oozing chancres. It would have taken extreme physical force to keep me off that plane. I was so far beyond simple fatigue that I was beginning to feel nicely adjusted to the idea of perma nent hysteria. I felt like the slightest misunderstanding with the stewardess would cause me to either cry or go mad… and the woman seemed to sense this, because she treated me very gently.
When I wanted more Ice Cubes for my Bloody Mary, she brought them quickly
.. and when I ran out of cigarettes, she gave me a pack from her own purse. The only time she seemed nervous was when I pulled a grapefruita grapefruit out of my satchel and began slicing it up with a hunting knife. I noticed her watching me closely, so I tried to smile. “I never go anywhere without grapefruit,’ “It’s hard to get a really good one - unless you’re rich.”
She nodded.
I flashed her the grimace/smile again, but it was hard to know what she was thinking. It was entirely possible, I knew, that sge’d already decided to have me taken off the plane iin a cage when we got to Denver. I stared fixedly into her eyes for a time, but she kept herself under control.
I was asleep when our plane hit the runway, but the jolt brought me instantly awake. I looked out the window and saw the Rocky Mountains. What the fuck was I doing here?I wondered. I t made so sense at all. I decided to call my attorney as soon as possible. Have him iwre me some money to buy a huge albino Doberman. Denver is a national clearinghouse for stolen Dobermans; they come from all parts of the country.
Since i was already here, I though I might as well pick up a vicious do. But first, something for my nerves. Immediately after the plane landed I rushed up the corridor to the airport drugstore adn asked the clerk for a box of amyls.
She began to fidget and shake her head. “Oh, no,” she said finally. “I can’t sell you those things except by precription.”
“I know,” I said. “But you see, I’m a doctor. I don’t need a precription.”
She was still fidgeting. “Well… you’ll have to show me some I.D.,” she moaned.
“Of course.” I jerked out my wallet and let her see the police basge while I flipped through the deck until I located my Ecclesiastical Discount Card - which identifies me as a Doctor of Divinity, a certified Minister of the Church of the New Truth.
She inspected it carefully, then handed it back. I sensed a new respect in her manner. Her eyes grew warm. She seemed to want to touch me. “I hope you’ll forgive me, Doctor.” she said with a fine smile. “But I had to ask. We get some real freaks in this place. All kinds of dangerous addicts. You’d never believe it.”
“Don’t worry,” I said. “I understand perfectly. but I have a bad heart, and I hope - “
"Certainly!" she exclaimed-and within seconds she was back with a dosen amyls. I paid without quibbling about the ecclesiastical discount. Then I opened the box and cracked one under my nose immediately, while she watched.
"Just be thankful your heart is young and strong," I said. "If I were you I would never… ah… holy shit!… what? Yes, you'll have to excuse me now; I feel it coming on." I turned away and reeled off in the general direction of the bar.
"God's mercy on you swine!" I shouted at two Marines com ing out of the men's room.
PAN id=title>
To Bob Geiger,
for reasons that need
not be explained here
– and to Bob Dylan,
for Mister Tambourine Man
“ He who makes a beast of himself gets rid of the pain of being a man.”
– Dr. Johnson
Part One
We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold. I remember saying something like “I feel a bit lightheaded; maybe you should drive…” And suddenly there was a terrible roar all around us and the sky was full of what looked like huge bats, all swooping and screeching and diving around the car, which was going about a hundred miles an hour with the top down to Las Vegas. And a voice was screaming: “Holy Jesus! What are these goddamn animals?”
Then it was quiet again. My attorney had taken his shirt off and was pouring beer on his chest, to facilitate the tanning process. “What the hell are you yelling about?” he muttered, staring up at the sun with his eyes closed and covered with wraparound Spanish sunglasses. “Never mind,” I said. “It’s your turn to drive.
” I hit the brakes and aimed the Great Red Shark toward the shoulder of the highway. No point mentioning those bats, I thought. The poor bastard will see them soon enough.
It was almost noon, and we still had more than a hundred miles to go. They would be tough miles. Very soon, I knew, we would both be completely twisted. But there was no going back, and no time to rest. We would have to ride it out. Press registration for the fabulous Mint 400 was already underway, and we had to get there by four to claim our sound - proof suite. A fashionable sporting magazine in New York had taken care of the reservations, along with this huge red Chevy convertible we’d just rented off a lot on the Sunset Strip… and I was, after all, a professional journalist; so I had an obligation to cover the story, for good or ill.
The sporting editors had also given me $300 in cash, most of which was already spent on extremely dangerous drugs. The trunk of the car looked like a mobile police narcotics lab. 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.All this had been rounded up the night before, in a frenzy of high - speed driving all over Los Angeles County - from Topanga to Watts, we picked up everything we could get our hands on. Not that we needed all that for the trip, but once you get locked into a serious drug collection, the tendency is to push it as far as you can.
The only thing that really worried me was the ether. There is nothing in the world more helpless and irresponsible and depraved than a man in the depths of an ether binge. And I knew we’d get into that rotten stuff pretty soon. Probably at the next gas station. We had sampled almost everything else, and now - yes, it was time for a long snort of ether. And then do the next hundred miles in a horrible, slobbering sort of spastic stupor. The only way to keep alert on ether is to do up a lot of amyls - not all at once, but steadily, just enough to maintain the focus at ninety miles an hour through Barstow.
“Man, this is the way to travel,” said my attorney. He leaned over to turn the volume up on the radio, humming along withthe rhythm section and kind of moaning the words: “One toke over the line, Sweet Jesus… One toke over the line… ”
One toke? You poor fool! Wait till you see those goddamn bats. I could barely hear the radio… slumped over on the far side of the seat, grappling with a tape recorder turned all the way up on “Sympathy for the Devil.” That was the only tape we had, so we played it constantly, over and over, as a’kind of demented counterpoint to the radio. And also to maintain our rhythm on the road. A constant speed is good for gas mileage - and for some reason that seemed important at the time. Indeed. On a trip like this one must be careful about gas consumption. Avoid those quick bursts of acceleration that drag blood to the back of the brain.
My attorney saw the hitchhiker long before I did. “Let’s give this boy a lift,” he said, and before I could mount any argument he was stopped and this poor Okie kid was running up to the car with a big grin on his face, saying, “Hot damn! I never rode in a convertible before!”
“Is that right?” I said. “Well, I guess you’re about ready, eh?”
The kid nodded eagerly as we roared off.
“We’re your friends,” said my attorney. “We’re not like the others.”
“0 Christ, I thought, he’s gone around the bend. “No more of that talk,” I said sharply. “Or I’ll put the leeches on you.” He grinned, seeming to understand. Luckily, the noise in the car was so awful - between the wind and the radio and the tape machine - that the kid in the back seat couldn’t hear a word we were saying. Or could he?
How long can we maintain? I wondered. How long before one of us starts raving and jabbering at this boy? What will he think then? This same lonely desert was the last known home of the Manson family. Will he make that grim connection when my attorney starts screaming about bats and huge manta rays coming down on the car? If so - well, we’ll just have to cut his head off and bury him somewhere. Because it goes without saying that we can’t turn him loose. He’ll report us at once to some kind of outback nazi law enforcement agency, and they’ll run us down like dogs.
Jesus! Did I say that? Or just think it? Was I talking? Did they hear me? I glanced over at my attorney, but he seemed oblivious - watching the road, driving our Great Red Shark along at a hundred and ten or so. There was no sound from the back seat.Maybe I’d better have a chat with this boy, I thought. Perhape if I explain things, he’ll rest easy.
Of course. I leaned around in the seat and gave him a fine big smile… admiring the shape of his skull.“By the way,” I said. “There’s one thing you should probably understand.”
He stared at me, not blinking. Was he gritting his teeth?
“Can you hear me?” I yelled.
He nodded.
“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.” I smiled. “That’s why we rented this car. It was the only way to do it. Can you grasp that?”
He nodded again, but his eyes were nervous.
“I want you to have all the background,” I said. “Because this is a very ominous assignment - with overtones of extreme personal danger… Hell, I forgot all about this beer; you want one?”
He shook his head.
“How about some ether?” I said.
“What?”
“Never mind. Let’s get right to the heart of this thing. You see, about twenty - four hours ago we were sitting in the Polo Lounge of the Beverly Hills Hotel - in the patio section, of course - and we were just sitting there under a palm tree when this uniformed dwarf came up to me with a pink telephone and said, ‘This must be the call you’ve been waiting for all this time, sir.’”
I laughed and ripped open a beer can that foamed all over the back seat while I kept talking. “And you know? He was right! I’d been expecting that call, but I didn’t know who it would come from. Do you follow me?”
The boy’s face was a mask of pure fear and bewilderment. I blundered on: “I want you to understand that this man at the wheel is my attorney! He’s not just some dingbat I found on the Strip.