Fear and Loathing at Rolling Stone (66 page)

When he came booming into a bar called the Daisy Duck in Aspen and announced that he was the trouble we’d all been waiting for, he was definitely into the politics of confrontation—and on all fronts: in the bars or the courts or even the streets, if necessary.

Oscar was not into serious street fighting, but he was hell on wheels in a bar brawl. Any combination of a two-hundred-fifty-pound Mexican and LSD-25 is a potentially terminal menace for anything it can reach—but when the alleged Mexican is in fact a profoundly angry Chicano lawyer with no fear at all of anything that walks on less than three legs
and a de facto suicidal conviction that he
will
die at the age of thirty-three—just like Jesus Christ—you have a serious piece of work on your hands. Especially if the bastard is
already
thirty-three and a half years old with a head full of Sandoz acid, a loaded .357 Magnum in his belt, a hatchet-wielding Chicano bodyguard at his elbow at all times, and a disconcerting habit of projectile-vomiting geysers of pure red blood off the front porch every thirty or forty minutes, or whenever his malignant ulcer can’t handle any more raw tequila.

This was the Brown Buffalo in the full crazed flower of his prime—a man, indeed, for all seasons. And it was somewhere in the middle of his thirty-third year, in fact, when he came out to Colorado—with his faithful bodyguard, Frank—to rest for a while after his grueling campaign for sheriff of Los Angeles County, which he lost by a million or so votes. But in defeat, Oscar had managed to create an instant political base for himself in the vast Chicano barrio of East Los Angeles—where even the most conservative of the old-line “Mexican-Americans” were suddenly calling themselves “Chicanos” and getting their first taste of tear gas at “La Raza” demonstrations, which Oscar was quickly learning to use as a fire-and-brimstone forum to feature himself as the main spokesman for a mushrooming “Brown Power” movement that the LAPD called more dangerous than the Black Panthers.

Which was probably true, at the time—but in retrospect it sounds a bit different than it did back in 1969 when the sheriff was sending out fifteen or twenty helicopter sorties a night to scan the rooftops and backyards of the barrio with huge sweeping searchlights that drove Oscar and his people into fits of blind rage every time they got nailed in a pool of blazing white light with a joint in one hand and a machete in the other.

But that is another and very long story—and since I’ve already written it once (“Strange Rumblings in Aztlan,”
RS
81) and came close to getting my throat slit in the process, I think we’ll just ease off and pass on it for right now.

The sad tale of Oscar’s fall from grace in the barrio is still rife with bad blood and ugly paranoia. He was too stunned to fight back in the time-honored style of a professional politician. He was also broke, divorced, depressed, and so deep in public disgrace in the wake of his “high-speed drug bust” that not even junkies would have him for an attorney.

In a word, he and his dream of “one million brown buffalos” were
finished
in East L.A . . . and everywhere else where it counted, for that matter, so Oscar “took off” once again, and once again with a head full of acid.

But . . .

Well . . . it is not an easy thing to sit here and keep a straight face while even considering the notion that there is any connection at all between Oscar’s sorry fate and his lifelong devotion to defending the truth at all costs. There are a lot of people still wandering around, especially in places like San Francisco and East L.A., who would like nothing better than to dash out Oscar’s teeth with a ball-peen hammer for all the weird and costly lies he laid on them at one point or another
in his frenzied assaults
on the way to his place in the sun. He never denied he was a lying pig who would use any means to justify his better end. Even his friends felt the sting. Yet there were times when he took himself as seriously as any other bush-league Mao or Moses, and in moments like these he was capable of rare insights and a naive sort of grace in his dealings with people that often touched on nobility. At its best, the Brown Buffalo shuffle was a match for Muhammad Ali’s.

After I’d known him for only three days, he made me a solemn gift of a crude wooden idol that I am still not sure he didn’t occasionally worship in secret when not in the presence of the dreaded “white-ass gabachos.” In a paragraph near the end of his autobiography, he describes that strangely touching transfer far better than I can.

I opened my beat-up suitcase and took out my wooden idol. I had him wrapped in a bright red and yellow cloth. A San Blas Indian had given him to me when I left Panama. I called him Ebb Tide. He was made of hard mahogany. An eighteen-inch god without eyes, without a mouth, and without a sexual organ. Perhaps the sculptor had the same hang-up about drawing the body from the waist down as I’d had in Miss Rollins’ fourth-grade class. Ebb Tide was my oldest possession. A string of small, yellowed wild pig’s fangs hung from its neck.

Ebb Tide still hangs on a nail just above my living room window. I can see him from where I sit now, scrawling these goddamn final desperate
lines before my head can explode like a ball of magnesium tossed into a bucket of water. I have never been sure exactly what kind of luck Ebb Tide was bringing down on me, over the years—but I’ve never taken the little bastard down or even thought about it, so he must be paying his way. He is perched just in front of the peacock perch outside, and right now there are two high-blue reptilian heads peering over his narrow wooden shoulders.

Does anybody out there believe that?

No?

Well . . . peacocks can’t live at this altitude anyway, like Doberman pinschers, sea snakes, and gun-toting Chicano missionaries with bad-acid breath.

Why does a hearse horse snicker, hauling a lawyer away?

—Carl Sandburg

Things were not going well in San Francisco or L.A. at that grim point in Oscar’s time, either. To him, it must have seemed like open season on every Brown Buffalo west of the Continental Divide.

The only place he felt safe was down south on the warm foreign soil of the old country. But when he fled back to Mazatlán this time, it was not just to rest but to brood—and to plot what would be his final crazed leap for the great skyhook.

It would also turn out to be an act of such monumental perversity that not even that gentle presence of Ebb Tide could change my sudden and savage decision that the treacherous bastard should have his nuts ripped off with a plastic fork—and then fed like big meat grapes to my peacocks.

The move he made this time was straight out of Jekyll and Hyde—the Brown Buffalo suddenly transmogrified into the form of a rabid hyena. And the bastard compounded his madness by hiding out in the low-rent bowels of Mazatlán like some half-mad leper gone over the brink after yet another debilitating attack of string warts and herpes simplex lesions . . .

This ugly moment came just as my second book,
Fear and Loathing
in Las Vegas
, was only a week or so away from going to press. We were in the countdown stage, and there is no way for anybody who hasn’t been there to understand the tension of having a new book
almost
on the presses, but not quite there. The only thing that stood between me and publication was a last-minute assault on the very essence of the story by the publisher’s libel lawyers. The book was malignant from start to finish, they said, with grievous libels that were totally indefensible. No publisher in his right mind would risk the nightmare of doomed litigation that a book like this was certain to drag us all into.

Which was true, on one level, but on another it seemed like a harmless joke—because almost every one of the most devastating libels they cited involved my old buddy, O. Z. Acosta; a fellow author, prominent Los Angeles attorney, and an officer of many courts. Specifically they advised:

We have read the above manuscript as requested. Our principal legal objection is to the description of the author’s attorney as using and offering for sale dangerous drugs as well as indulging in other criminal acts while under the influence of such drugs. Although this attorney is not named, he is identified with some detail. Consequently, this material should be deleted as libelous.

In addition, we have the following specific comments:

Page 3
: The author’s attorney’s attempt to break and enter and threats (
sic
) to bomb a salesman’s residence is libelous and should be deleted.
Page 4
: This page suggests that the author’s attorney was driving at an excessive speed while drunk, all of which is libelous and should be deleted.

Page 6
: The incident in which the author’s attorney advised the author to drive at top speed is libelous and should be deleted. The same applies to the attorney’s being party to a fraud at the hotel.
Page 31
: The statement that the author’s attorney will be disbarred is libelous and should be deleted.
Page 40
: The incident in which the author and his attorney impersonated police officers is libelous and should be deleted.

Page 41
: The reference to the attorney’s ______
^*
being a “junkie” and shooting people is libelous and should be deleted unless it may be proven true.
Page 48
: The incident in which the author’s attorney offers heroin for sale is libelous and should be deleted. We do not advise ______ to allow any material in this manuscript noted above as libelous to remain based upon expectancy of proving that it is true by the author’s testimony. Inasmuch as the author admits being under the influence of illegal drugs at most if not all times, proof of truth would be extremely difficult through him.

“Balls,” I told them. “We’ll just have Oscar sign a release. He’s no more concerned about this ‘libel’ bullshit than I am.

“And besides, truth is an absolute defense against libel, anyway . . . Jesus, you don’t understand what kind of a monster we’re dealing with. You should read the parts I left out . . .”

But the libel wizards were not impressed—especially since we were heaping all this libelous abuse on a fellow attorney. Unless we got a signed release from Oscar, the book would not go to press.

Okay, I said. But let’s do it quick. He’s down in Mazatlán now. Send the goddamn thing by air express, and he’ll sign it and ship it right back.

I think we are in Rats Alley
where the dead men lost their bones.

—T. S. Eliot,
The Waste Land

Indeed. So they sent the release off at once . . . and Oscar refused to sign it—but not for any reason a New York libel lawyer could possibly understand. He was, as I’d said, not concerned at all by the libels. Of course they were all true, he said when I finally reached him by telephone at his room in the Hotel Sinaloa.

The only thing that bothered him—bothered him very badly—was the fact that I’d repeatedly described him as a three-hundred-pound Samoan.

“What kind of journalist are you?” he screamed at me. “Don’t you have any respect for the truth? I can sink that whole publishing house for
defaming me
, trying to pass me off as one of those waterhead South Sea mongrels.”

The libel lawyers were stunned into paranoid silence. Was it either some kind of arcane legal trick, they wondered, or was this dope-addled freak really crazy enough to insist on having himself formally identified for all time with one of the most depraved and degenerate figures in American literature?

Should his angry threats and demands conceivably be taken seriously? Was it possible that a well-known practicing attorney might not only freely admit to all these heinous crimes, but insist that every foul detail be documented as the absolute truth?

“Why not?” Oscar answered. And the only way he’d sign the release, he added, was in exchange for a firm guarantee from the lawyers that both his name and a suitable photograph of himself be prominently displayed on the book’s dust cover.

They had never had to cope with a thing like this—a presumably sane attorney who flatly refused to release any other version of his clearly criminal behavior, except the abysmal naked truth. The concession he was willing to make had to do with his identity throughout the entire book as a “three-hundred-pound Samoan.” But he could grit his teeth and tolerate that, he said, only because he understood that there was no way to make that many changes at that stage of the deadline without tearing up half the book. In exchange, however, he wanted a formal letter guaranteeing that he would be properly identified on the book jacket.

The lawyers would have no part of it. There was no precedent anywhere in the law for a bizarre situation like this . . . but as the deadline pressures mounted and Oscar refused to bend, it became more and more obvious that the only choice except compromise was to scuttle the book entirely . . . and if
that
happened, I warned them, I had enough plastic forks to mutilate every libel lawyer in New York.

That seemed to settle the issue in favor of a last-minute compromise,
and
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
was finally sent to the printer with Oscar clearly identified on the back as the certified living model for the monstrous “three-hundred-pound Samoan attorney” who would soon be a far more public figure than any of us would have guessed at the time.