Fear and Loathing at Rolling Stone (19 page)

On the other hand, it’s also true that
I
will blow a fact here and there. A month ago I wrote that a registered independent in Colorado could vote in either the GOP or Democratic primary—which was true last year, but the law was recently changed. Somebody wrote to curse me for that one, and all I can do is apologize. In 1970 I knew every clause, twist, sub-section & constitutional precedent that had anything to do with voter-eligibility laws in Colorado. (When you run for office on the Freak Power ticket, the first thing you do is learn
all
the laws.) But when I moved to Washington and got into the Presidential Campaign I stopped keeping track of things like that.

Voter-eligibility laws are changing so fast all over the country this year that in many cases not even the city/county clerks and official registrars in charge of dealing with new voters really know who is eligible. Just because somebody tells you that you’re not eligible to vote doesn’t mean you aren’t. During the Freak Power election in Aspen the county clerk formally and officially disqualified 88 out of 450 new voters. We took them all to court and won 87 out of 88 cases in six hours.

The only other serious error that I feel any need to explain or deal with at this time has to do with a statement about Nixon. What I wrote was: “There is still no doubt in my mind that he could never pass for human . . .”

But somebody cut the word “never.” El Ropo denies it, but our relationship has never been the same. He says the printer did it. Which is understandable, I guess; it’s a fairly heavy statement either way.

Is Nixon “human”? Probably so, in the technical sense. He is not a fish or a fowl. There is no real argument about that. Most juries would accept, prima facie, the idea that the President of the United States is a
mammal
.

He is surely not an Insect; and not of the lizard family. But “human” is something else. A mammal is not necessarily human. Rodents are mammals. An extremely intelligent Bayou Rat called “Honeyrunner” was once elected to the city council in DeFuniak Springs, Florida. Nobody called him “human,” but they say he did okay on the job.

It would take a really sick and traitorous mind to compare the President of the United States to a Bayou Rat, regardless of intelligence. So maybe El Ropo was right. By almost any standard of responsible journalism the President must be referred to as “human.” It is one of those ugly realities—like the Amnesty Question—that we will all have to face & accept.

About five years ago Tom Wicker wrote a column in the
New York Times
that focused—for reasons I no longer remember—on a whole wasps’ nest of ominous flaws that he (Wicker) had only recently discovered in the character of Richard Milhous Nixon.

Wicker was shocked. He called up the memory of Conrad’s “Lord Jim,” and said that he’d always thought Richard Nixon was “one of us.”

This is an impossible concept to explain to anybody who hasn’t brooded over the Meaning & Truth of “Lord Jim.” But to anyone who has, the idea that one of the most eminent journalistic gurus in the nation could ever have thought that “Richard Nixon was one of us” is genuinely unsettling.

Conrad’s “one of us” idea was a sort of primitive version of today’s far-flung belief that a very few people in this world radiate an almost unnaturally “good kaharma” (sp?) [
sic
]—and that
only the ones who can radiate on this special level are capable of recognizing it in others. A sort of Aristocracy of Instinct . . .

Did Tom Wicker once see this special inner glow in Richard Nixon? He has come a long way since he wrote that thing, five years ago, but . . . well, what can you say? Wicker appears to be one of those fast-learning types. He is one of the few big-league journalists in America who still sees his job as a means of furthering his education. Which keeps him interesting . . . but it makes me a little nervous to know that Wicker might still be nursing some secret flash about Nixon being one of the world’s special laid-back fireball truthseekers . . . while I still can’t decide if the bugger is even
human
.

Which is neither here nor there, for now. Probably we’ll never know anyway. And all I started out to do here was explain away a few of my worst mistakes.

The only other thing I had in mind was to say—to all the people who keep writing me those vicious goddamn letters—is that I get a really fine high boot out of reading them. I read them all, screening the best ones for good lines to steal. About a week ago I got one from somebody in Chicago, calling me a “Cryptofaggot Bulldog-nazi Honky-fascist Pig.”

I can really get behind a letter like that. But most of the stuff is lame. I’m not running a goddamn “Dear Abbey” [
sic
] service here. Anybody with problems should write to David Felton, Bleeding Heart Editor, at the San Francisco office. He’s
paid
to get down in the ditch with lunatics. And he
likes
it.

But I have more important things to do.

Politics.

Human Problems are secondary.

—30—

Letter from HST to JSW

Sept 17 ’72

Dear Jann:

I think we should offer McGovern a full page,
free
, in every issue between now and the election. As far as I’m concerned he has a pretty weak goddamn case, but I think we should give him a chance to make it—especially in
RS
, because everything he’s done since Miami has been subject to criticism by various
RS
writers, including me, and I suppose it’s possible we’ve all been wrong.

So why don’t we just give him a “house ad” in every issue from now until Nov 7? Let him do whatever he wants with it: solicit funds, denounce drugs, praise Muskie, etc. . . . whatever he wants.

Needless to say, we’ll reserve all rights to comment, whenever necessary, on the content of the ads . . . Or at least I will.

OK for now. I have no plans to come to California anytime soon—unless McGov follows thru on his rumored plan to campaign out there with Humphrey. If that happens, I’ll definitely make the trip. A horror like that would just about wrap the thing up for me, I think.

Hunter

Letter from HST to JSW

12/3

Jann/

—I will definitely need speed to get the campaign book done properly & on time—nevermind the fucking wisdom of it; just gather all you can & send it ASAP—with a bill, of course.

H

January 6, 1972

Outside my new front door the street is full of leaves. My lawn slopes down to the sidewalk; the grass is still green, but the life is going out of it. Red berries wither on the tree beside my white colonial stoop. In the driveway my Volvo with blue leather seats and Colorado plates sits facing the brick garage. And right next to the car is a cord of new firewood: pine, elm, and cherry. I burn a vicious amount of firewood these days—even more than the Alsop brothers.

When a man gives up drugs he wants big fires in his life—all night long, every night, huge flames in the fireplace & the volume turned all the way up. I have ordered more speakers to go with my new McIntosh amp—and also a fifty-watt “boombox” for the FM car radio.

You want good strong seatbelts with the boombox, they say, because otherwise the bass riffs will bounce you around inside like a goddamn pingpong ball . . . a very bad act in traffic; especially along these elegant boulevards of Our Nation’s Capital.

One of the best and most beneficial things about coming East now and then is that it tends to provoke a powerful understanding of the “Westward Movement” in U.S. history. After a few years on the Coast or even Colorado you tend to forget just exactly what it was that put you on the road, going west, in the first place. You live in L.A. a while and before long you start cursing traffic jams on the freeways in the warm Pacific dusk . . . and you tend to forget that in New York City you can’t even
park
; forget about driving.

Even in Washington, which is still a relatively loose and open city
in terms of traffic, it costs me about $1.50 an hour every time I park downtown . . . which is nasty: but the shock is not so much the money-cost as the rude understanding that it is no longer considered either sane or natural to
park
on the city streets. If you happen to find a spot beside an open parking meter you don’t dare use it, because the odds are better than even that somebody will come along and either steal your car or reduce it to twisted rubble because you haven’t left the keys in it.

There is nothing unusual, they tell me, about coming back to your car and finding the radio aerial torn off, the windshield wipers bent up in the air like spaghetti and all the windows smashed . . . for no particular reason except to make sure you know just exactly where it’s at these days.

Where indeed?

“It’s a Goddamn Jungle!”

Washington Post
columnist Nicholas von Hoffman recently pointed out that the Nixon-Mitchell administration—seemingly obsessed with restoring Law and Order in the land, at almost any cost—seems totally unconcerned that Washington, D.C., has become the “Rape Capital of the World.”

One of the most dangerous areas in town is the once-fashionable district known as Capitol Hill. This is the section immediately surrounding the Senate/Congress office buildings, a very convenient place to live for the thousands of young clerks, aides and secretaries who work up there at the pinnacle. The peaceful, tree-shaded streets on Capitol Hill look anything but menacing: brick colonial townhouses with cut glass doors and tall windows looking out on the Library of Congress and the Washington Monument . . . When I came here to look for a house or apartment, about a month ago, I checked around town and figured Capitol Hill was the logical place to locate.

“Good
God
, man!” said my friend from the liberal
New York Post
. “You can’t live
there
! It’s a goddamn jungle!”

Crime figures for “The District” are so heinous that they embarrass even J. Edgar Hoover. Rape is up 80 percent this year over 1970, and a recent rash of murders (averaging about one every day) has mashed the
morale of the local police to a new low. Of the 250 murders this year, only 36 have been solved . . . and the
Washington Post
says the cops are about to give up.

Meanwhile, things like burglaries, street muggings, and random assaults are so common that they are no longer considered news. The
Washington Evening Star
, one of the city’s three dailies, is located in the Southeast District—a few blocks from the Capitol—in a windowless building that looks like the vault at Fort Knox. Getting into the
Star
to see somebody is almost as difficult as getting into the White House. Visitors are scrutinized by hired cops and ordered to fill out forms that double as “hall passes.” So many
Star
reporters have been mugged, raped, and menaced that they come & go in fast taxis, like people running the gauntlet—fearful, with good reason, of every sudden footfall between the street and the bright-lit safety of the newsroom guard station.

This kind of attitude is hard for a stranger to cope with. For the past few years I have lived in a place where I never even bothered to take the keys out of my car, much less try to lock up the house. Locks were more a symbol than a reality, and if things ever got serious there was always the .44 Magnum. But in Washington you get the impression—if you believe what you hear from even the most “liberal” insiders—that just about everybody you see on the street is holding at least a .38 Special, and maybe worse.

Not that it matters a hell of a lot at ten feet . . . but it makes you a trifle nervous to hear that nobody in his or her right mind would dare to walk alone from the Capitol Building to a car in the parking lot without fear of later on having to crawl, naked and bleeding, to the nearest police station.

There is no way to avoid “racist undertones” here. The simple heavy truth is that Washington is mainly a Black City, and that most of the violent crime is therefore committed by blacks—not always against whites, but often enough to make the relatively wealthy white population very nervous about random social contacts with their black fellow citizens. After only ten days in this town I have noticed the Fear/Syndrome clouding even my own mind: I find myself ignoring black hitchhikers, and every time I do it I wonder, Why the fuck did you do
that? And I tell myself, Well, I’ll pick up the next one I see. And sometimes I do, but not always . . .

My arrival in town was not mentioned by any of the society columnists. It was shortly after dawn, as I recall, when I straggled into Washington just ahead of the rush-hour, government-worker carpool traffic boiling up from the Maryland suburbs . . . humping along in the slow lane on U.S. Interstate 70S like a crippled steel pissant; dragging a massive orange U-Haul trailer full of books and “important” papers . . . feeling painfully slow & helpless because the Volvo was never made for this kind of work.