Fear and Loathing at Rolling Stone (67 page)

Alcohol, Hashish, Prussic Acid, Strychnine are weak dilutions. The surest poison is time.

—Emerson,
Society and Solitude

The libel lawyers have never understood what Oscar had in mind—and, at the time, I didn’t understand it myself—one of the darker skills involved in the kind of journalism I normally get involved with has to do with the ability to write the Truth about “criminals” without getting them busted—and, in the eyes of the law,
any
person committing a crime is a criminal: whether it’s a Hells Angel laying an oil slick on a freeway exit to send a pursuing motorcycle cop crashing over the high side, a presidential candidate smoking a joint in his hotel room, or a good friend who happens to be a lawyer, an arsonist, and a serious drug abuser.

The line between writing truth and providing evidence is very, very thin—but for a journalist working constantly among highly paranoid criminals, it is also the line between trust and suspicion. And that is the difference between having free access to the truth and being treated like a spy. There is no such thing as “forgiveness” on that level; one fuckup will send you straight back to sportswriting—if you’re lucky.

In Oscar’s case, my only reason for describing him in the book as a three-hundred-pound Samoan instead of a two-hundred-fifty-pound Chicano lawyer was to protect him from the wrath of the L.A. cops and the whole California legal establishment he was constantly at war with. It would not serve either one of our interests, I felt, for Oscar to get busted or disbarred because of something I wrote about him. I had my reputation to protect.

The libel lawyers understood that much; what worried them was that I hadn’t protected “my attorney” well enough to protect also the book publisher from a libel suit—just in case my attorney was as crazy as he appeared to be in the manuscript they’d just vetoed . . . or maybe
he was crazy like a fox, they hinted; he was, after all, an
attorney
—who’d presumably worked just as hard and for just as many long years as
they
had—to earn his license to steal—and it was inconceivable to them that one of their own kind, as it were, would give all that up on what appeared to be a whim. No, they said, it
must
be a trap; not even a “Brown Power”
lawyer
could afford to laugh at the risk of almost certain disbarment.

Indeed. And they were at least half right—which is not a bad average for lawyers—because Oscar Z. Acosta, Chicano lawyer, very definitely could
not
afford the shitrain of suicidal publicity that he was doing everything possible to bring down on himself. There are a lot of
nice
ways to behave like a criminal—but hiring a camera to have yourself photographed doing it in the road is not one of them. It would have taken a reputation as formidable as Melvin Belli’s to survive the kind of grossly illegal behavior that Oscar was effectively admitting by signing that libel release. He might as well have burned his lawyer’s license on the steps of the Superior Court building in downtown L.A.

That is what the Ivy League libel lawyers in New York could not accept. They
knew
what that license was worth—at least to them; it averaged out to about $150 an hour—even for a borderline psychotic, as long as he had the credentials.

And Oscar had them—not because his father and grandfather had gone to Yale or Harvard Law; he’d paid his dues at night school, the only Chicano in his class, and his record in the courtroom was better than that of most of the colleagues who called him a disgrace to their venal profession.

Which may have been true, for whatever it’s worth . . . but what none of us knew at the time of the Great Madness that came so close to making
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
incurably unfit for publication was that we were no longer dealing with O. Z. Acosta, attorney-at-law—but with Zeta, the King of Brown Buffalos.

In retrospect it is hard to know exactly when Oscar decided to quit the Law just as finally as he’d once quit being a Baptist missionary—but it was obviously a lot earlier than even his few close friends realized, until long after he’d already made the move in his mind, to a new and higher place. The crazy attorney whose “suicidal behavior” so baffled the N.Y. libel lawyers was only the locustlike shell of a thirty-six-year-old
neoprophet who was already long overdue for his gig at the top of the Mountain.

There was no more time to be wasted in the company of lepers and lawyers. The hour had finally struck for the fat spic from Riverbank to start acting like that one man in every century “chosen to speak for his people.”

None of this terminal madness was easy to see at the time—not even for me, and I knew him as well as anyone . . . But not well enough, apparently, to understand the almost desperate sense of failure and loss that he felt when he was suddenly confronted with the stark possibility that he had never
really
been chosen to speak for anybody, except maybe himself—and even that was beginning to look like a halfway impossible task, in the short time he felt he had left.

I had never taken his burning bush trip very seriously—and I still have moments of doubt about how seriously he took it himself . . . They are very
long
moments, sometimes; and as a matter of fact, I think I feel one coming on right now . . . We should have castrated that brain-damaged thief! That shyster! That blasphemous freak! He was ugly and greasy, and he still owes me thousands of dollars!

The truth was not in him, goddamn it! He was put on this earth for no reason at all except to shit in every nest he could con his way into—but only after robbing them first, and selling the babies to sand-niggers. If that treacherous fist-fucker ever comes back to life, he’ll wish we’d had the good sense to nail him up on a frozen telephone pole for his thirty-third birthday present.

DO NOT COME BACK, Oscar! Wherever you are—stay there! There’s no room for you here anymore. Not after all this maudlin gibberish I’ve written about you . . . And besides, we have Werner Erhard now. So BURROW DEEP, you bastard, and take all that poison fat with you!

Cazart! And how’s that for a left-handed whipsong?

Never mind. There is no more time for questions—or answers either, for that matter. And I was never much good at this kind of thing anyway.

The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers.

—William Shakespeare,
King Henry VI

Well . . . so much for whipsongs. Nobody laughed when Big Bill sat down to play. He was not into filigree when it came to dealing with lawyers.

And neither am I, at this point. That last outburst was probably unnecessary, but what the hell? Let them drink Drano if they can’t take a joke. I’m tired of wallowing around in this goddamn thing.

What began as a quick and stylish epitaph for my allegedly erstwhile three-hundred-pound Samoan attorney has long since gone out of control. Not even Oscar would have wanted an obituary with no end, at least not until he was legally dead, and that will take four more years.

Until then—and probably for many years afterward—the Weird Grapevine will not wither for lack of bulletins, warnings, and other twisted rumors of the latest Brown Buffalo sightings. He will be seen at least once in Calcutta, buying nine-year-old girls out of cages on the White Slave Market . . . and also in Houston, tending bar at a roadhouse on South Main that was once the Blue Fox . . . or perhaps once again on the midnight run to Bimini; standing tall on his own hind legs in the cockpit of a fifty-foot black cigarette boat with a silver Uzi in one hand and a magnum of smack in the other, always running ninety miles an hour with no lights and howling Old Testament gibberish at the top of his bleeding lungs . . .

It might even come to pass that he will suddenly appear on my porch in Woody Creek on some moonless night when the peacocks are screeching with lust . . . Maybe so, and that is one ghost who will always be welcome in this house, even with a head full of acid and a chain of bull-maggots around his neck.

Oscar was one of God’s own prototypes—a high-powered mutant of some kind who was never even considered for mass production. He was too weird to live and too rare to die—and as far as I’m concerned, that’s just about all that needs to be said about him right now. Nobody really needed Oscar Zeta Acosta. Or
Rolling Stone
. Or Jimmy Carter or the Hindenburg . . . or even the Sloat diamond.

Jesus! Is there no respect in this world for the perfectly useless dead?

Apparently not . . . and Oscar
was
a lawyer, however reluctant he might have been at the end to admit it. He had a lawyer’s cynical view of the Truth—which he felt was not nearly as important to other people as
it was to him; and he was never more savage and dangerous than when he felt he was being lied to. He was never much interested in the
concept
of truth; he had no time for what he called “dumb Anglo abstracts.”

Condemn’d to drudge, the meanest of the mean and furbish falsehoods for a magazine.

—Lord Byron

The truth, to Oscar, was a tool and even a weapon that he was convinced he could not do without—if only because anybody who had more of it than he did would sooner or later try to beat on him with it. Truth was Power—as tangible to Oscar as a fistful of $100 bills or an ounce of pure LSD-25. His formula for survival in a world full of rich gabacho fascists was a kind of circle that began at the top with the idea that truth would bring him power, which would buy freedom—to crank his head full of acid so he could properly walk with the King, which would naturally put him even closer to more and finer truths . . . indeed, the full circle.

Oscar believed it, and that was what finally croaked him.

I tried to warn the greedy bastard, but he was too paranoid to pay any attention . . . Because he was actually a stupid, vicious quack with no morals at all and the soul of a hammerhead shark.

We are better off without him. Sooner or later he would have had to be put to sleep anyway . . . So the world is a better place now that he’s at least out of sight, if not certifiably dead.

He will not be missed—except perhaps in Fat City, where every light in the town went dim when we heard that he’d finally cashed his check.

One owes respect to the living; To the Dead one owes only the truth.

—Voltaire

__ __ __ __

Hunter, an avid boxing fan, had a particular admiration for his fellow Louisville native Muhammad Ali, and what was conceived of as a fairly quick and straightforward story soon turned into another twenty-thousand-word epic—equal parts biography, explication, theorizing, and interview. While Ali was normally skeptical, suspicious, and stand-offish toward interviewers, he and Hunter did seem to find a particular rapport. Before any of this happened, though, they had to meet. Ali’s promoter—a fiercely old-school bon vivant, Harold Conrad—described Hunter’s entrance to Ali’s hotel in Manhattan in his 1982 memoir,
Dear Muffo
:

He walks in late followed by the chauffeur with his luggage. I tell him Ali is waiting. He insists on checking in first.

Now he is at the desk, reaching into his jacket for his credit card. Suddenly he is frantically going through all his pockets.

“Holy shit, my wallet! Who the fuck took my wallet?” He screams for a bellboy to bring his luggage over, and he dumps it in the center of the lobby. One piece looks like a bedroll. Another is a strange looking satchel. There is also a tape recorder, an attaché case, and a large brown paper bag, and it’s all spread out on this beautiful marble floor, right in the center of traffic.

Thompson attacks the attaché case and turns it upside down. No wallet. Now he attacks the satchel, and his hands keep flipping things up in the air like a juggler tossing Indian clubs. First a bottle of Heineken. It caroms gently off the bag and rolls across the lobby. Then a bottle of Wild Turkey, a shoe, and another bottle of Heineken.

By now the doctor reaches the bowels of the satchel and comes up with a shaving kit. He opens it. Eureka! There is the wallet. He had put it in his shaving kit. Doesn’t everybody?

At last he checks in, and with much trepidation I take him up to Muhammad’s suite.

I don’t know how the doctor did it, but he came through. The interview with Muhammad was one of the best I’ve ever seen, and I thought that overall “Last Tango in Vegas” was brilliant, even though he did call me a pig fucker.

May 4 and May 18, 1978

When I’m gone, boxing will be nothing again. The fans with the cigars and the hats turned down’ll be there, but no more housewives and little men in the street and foreign presidents. It’s goin’ to be back to the fighter who comes to town, smells a flower, visits a hospital, blows a horn, and says he’s in shape. Old hat. I was the onliest boxer in history people asked questions like a senator.