Fear and Loathing at Rolling Stone (91 page)

I tried to stay quiet and let the water calm down. For a moment I
thought I heard another person coming into the pool, but I couldn’t be sure. A ripple of terror caused me to drop deeper in the water and assume a karate position. There are only two or three things in the world more terrifying than the sudden realization that you are naked and alone and something large and aggressive is coming close to you in dark water.

It is moments like this that make you want to believe in hallucinations—because if three large men in trench coats actually
were
waiting for me in the shadows behind that door and something else was slithering toward me in the darkness, I was doomed.

Alone? No, I was
not
alone. I understood that. I had already seen three men and a huge black cat, and now I thought I could make out the shape of another person approaching me. She was lower in the water than I was, but I could definitely see it was a woman.

Of course, I thought. It must be my sweetheart, sneaking up to give me a nice surprise in the pool. Yessir, this is just like that twisted little bitch. She is a hopeless romantic and she knows this pool well. We once swam here every night and played in the water like otters.

Jesus Christ! I thought, what a paranoid fool I’ve been. I must have been going crazy. A surge of love went through me as I stood up and moved quickly to embrace her. I could already feel her naked body in my arms . . . Yes, I thought, love does conquer all.

But not for long. No, it took me a minute or two of thrashing around in the water before I understood that I was, in fact, completely alone in the pool. She was not here, and neither were those freaks in the corner. And there was no cat. I was a fool and a dupe. My brain was seizing up, and I felt so weak that I could barely climb out of the pool.

Fuck this, I thought, I can’t handle this place anymore. It’s destroying my life with its weirdness. Get away and never come back. It had mocked my love and shattered my sense of romance. This horrible experience would get me nominated for Rube of the Year in any high school class.

Dawn was coming up as I drove back down the road. On my way past the graveyard, I slowed down and tossed a quarter over the fence
like I always do. There were no comets colliding, no tracks in the snow except mine, and no sounds for ten miles in any direction except Lyle Lovett on my radio and the howl of a few coyotes. I drove with my knees while I lit up a glass pipe full of hashish.

When I got home I loaded my S&W .45 auto and fired a few bursts at a beer keg in the yard, then I went back inside and started scrawling feverishly in a notebook . . . What the hell? I thought. Everybody writes love letters on Sunday morning. It is a natural form of worship, a very high art. And on some days I am very good at it.

Today, I felt, was definitely one of those days. You bet. Do it
now
. Just then my phone rang and I jerked it off the hook, but there was nobody on the line. I sagged against the fireplace and moaned, and then it rang again. I grabbed it, but again there was no voice. Oh God! I thought. Somebody is fucking with me . . . I needed music, I needed rhythm. I was determined to be calm, so I cranked up the speakers and played “Spirit in the Sky,” by Norman Greenbaum.

I played it over and over for the next three or four hours while I hammered out my letter. My heart was racing and the music was making the peacocks scream. It was Sunday, and I was worshipping in my own way. Nobody needs to be crazy on the Lord’s Day.

My grandmother was never crazy when we went to visit her on Sundays. She always had cookies and tea, and her face was always smiling. That was down in the West End of Louisville, near the Ohio River locks. I remember a narrow concrete driveway and a big gray car in a garage behind the house. The driveway was two concrete strips with clumps of grass growing between them. It led back through the vicious wild rose bushes to what looked like an abandoned shed. Which was true. It was abandoned. Nobody walked in that yard, and nobody drove that big gray car. It never moved. There were no tracks in the grass.

It was a LaSalle sedan, as I recall, a slick-looking brute with a powerful straight-eight engine and a floor-mounted gearshift, maybe a 1939 model. We never got it started, because the battery was dead and gasoline was scarce. There was a war on. You had to have special coupons to buy five gallons of gas, and the coupons were tightly rationed. People hoarded and coveted them, but nobody complained, because we were
fighting the Nazis and our tanks needed all the gasoline for when they hit the beaches of Normandy.

Looking back on it now, I see clearly that the reason we drove down to the West End to visit my grandmother on the Lord’s Day was to con her out of her gas coupons for the LaSalle. She was an old lady, and she didn’t need any gasoline. But her car was still registered, and she still got her coupons every month. That was why we went to her house on Sundays.

So what—I would do the same thing myself if my mother had gasoline and I didn’t. We
all
would. It is the Law of Supply and Demand—and this is, after all, the final messy year of the American century and people are getting nervous. Hoarders are coming out of the closet, muttering darkly about Y2K and buying cases of Dinty Moore beef stew. Dried figs are popular, along with rice and canned hams. I, personally, am hoarding bullets, many thousands of them. Bullets will always be valuable, especially when your lights go out and your phone goes dead and your neighbors start running out of food. That is when you will find out who your friends are. Even close family members will turn on you. After the year 2000, the only people who’ll be safe to have as friends will be dead people.

I used to respect William Burroughs because he was the first white man to be busted for marijuana in my time. William was the Man. He was the victim of an illegal police raid at his home at 500 Wagner Street in Old Algiers, a low-rent suburb across the river from New Orleans, where he was settling in for a while to do some shooting and smoke marijuana.

William didn’t fuck around. He was serious about everything. When the Deal went down William was There, with a gun. Whacko!
Boom!
Stand back. I
am
the Law. He was my hero a long time before I ever heard of him.

But he was not the first white man to be busted for weed in my time. No. That was Robert Mitchum, the actor, who was arrested three months earlier in Malibu at the front door of a hideaway beach house for possession of marijuana and suspicion of molesting a teenage girl on
August 31, 1948. I remember the photos: Mitchum wearing an undershirt and snarling at the cops with the sea rolling up and the palm trees blowing.

Yessir, that was my boy. Between Mitchum and Burroughs and James Dean and Jack Kerouac, I got myself a serious running start before I was twenty years old, and there was no turning back. Buy the ticket, take the ride.

So welcome to
Thunder Road
, bubba. It was one of those movies that got a grip on me when I was too young to resist. It convinced me that the only way to drive was at top speed with a car full of whiskey, and I have been driving that way ever since, for good or ill.

The girl in the photos with Mitchum looked about fifteen years old, and she was also wearing an undershirt, with an elegant little nipple jutting out. The cops were trying to cover her chest with a raincoat as they rushed through the door. Mitchum was also charged with Sodomy and Contributing to the Delinquency of a Minor.

I was having my own troubles with police in those years. In the fifth grade I was officially apprehended by the FBI for turning over a U.S. mailbox in front of a bus. Soon after that, I became a frequent detainee in various jails around the South on booze, theft, and violence charges. People called me a criminal, and about half the time they were right. I was a full-bore Juvenile Delinquent, and I had a lot of friends.

We stole cars and drank gin and did a lot of fast driving at night to places like Nashville and Atlanta and Chicago. We needed music on those nights, and it usually came on the radio—on the fifty-thousand-watt clear-channel stations like WWL in New Orleans and WLAC in Nashville.

That is where I went wrong, I guess—listening to WLAC and driving all night across Tennessee in a stolen car that wouldn’t be reported for three days. That is how I got introduced to the Howlin’ Wolf. We didn’t know him, but we liked him and we knew what he was talking about. “I Smell a Rat” is a pure rock & roll monument to the axiom that says, “There is no such thing as paranoia.” The Wolf could kick out the jams, but he had a melancholy side to him. He could tear your heart out like the worst kind of honky-tonk. If history judges a man by
his heroes, like they say, then let the record show that Howlin’ Wolf is one of mine. He was a monster.