Fear and loathing in Las Vegas, and other American stories (6 page)

Ether is the perfect drug for Las Vegas. In this town they love a drunk. Fresh meat. So they put us through the turnstiles and turned us loose inside.

The Circus-Circus is what the whole hep world would be doing on Saturday night if the Nazis had won the war. This is the Sixth Reich. The ground floor is full of gambling tables, like all the other casinos . . . but the place is about four stories high, in the style of a circus tent, and all manner of strange County-Fair/Polish Carnival madness is going on up in this space. Right above the gambling tables the Forty Flying Carazito Brothers are doing a high-wire trapeze act, along with four muzzled Wolverines and the Six Nymphet Sisters from San Diego . . . so you’re down on the main floor playing blackjack, and the stakes are getting high when suddenly you chance to look up, and there, right smack above your head is a half-naked fourteen-year-old girl being chased through the air by a snarling wolverine, which is suddenly locked in a death battle with two silver-painted Polacks who come swinging down from opposite balconies and meet in mid-air on the wolverine’s neck . . . both Polacks seize the animal as they fall straight down towards the crap tables—but they bounce off the net; they separate and spring back up towards the roof in three different directions, and just as they’re about to fall again they are grabbed out of the air by three Korean Kittens and trapezed off to one of the balconies.

This madness goes on and on, but nobody seems to notice. The gambling action runs twenty-four hours a day on the main floor, and the circus never ends. Meanwhile, on all the upstairs balconies, the customers are being hustled by every conceivable kind of bizarre shuck. All kinds of funhouse-type booths. Shoot the pasties off the nipples of a ten-foot bull-dyke and win a cotton-candy goat. Stand in front of this fantastic machine, my friend, and for just 99¢ your likeness will appear, two hundred feet tall, on a screen above downtown Las Vegas. Ninety-nine cents more for a voice message. “Say whatever you want, fella. They’ll hear you, don’t worry about that. Remember you’ll be two hundred feet tall.”

Jesus Christ. I could see myself lying in bed in the Mint Hotel, half-asleep and staring idly out the window, when suddenly a vicious nazi drunkard appears two hundred feet tall in the midnight sky, screaming gibberish at the world:
“Woodstock Über Alles!”

We will close the drapes tonight. A thing like that could send a drug person careening around the room like a ping-pong ball. Hallucinations are bad enough. But after a while you learn to cope with things like seeing your dead grandmother crawling up your leg with a knife in her teeth. Most acid fanciers can handle this sort of thing.

But
nobody
can handle that other trip—the possibility that any freak with $1.98 can walk into the Circus-Circus and suddenly appear in the sky over downtown Las Vegas twelve times the size of God, howling anything that comes into his head. No, this is not a good town for psychedelic drugs. Reality itself is too twisted.

Good mescaline comes on slow. The first hour is all waiting, then about halfway through the second hour you start cursing the creep who burned you, because nothing is happening . . . and then ZANG! Fiendish intensity, strange glow and vibrations . . . a very heavy gig in a place like the Circus-Circus.

“I hate to say this,” said my attorney as we sat down at the Merry-Go-Round Bar on the second balcony, “but this place is getting
to
me. I think I’m getting the Fear.”

“Nonsense,” I said. “We came out here to find the American Dream, and now that we’re right in the vortex you want to quit.” I grabbed his bicep and squeezed. “You must
realize,
” I said, “that we’ve found the main nerve.”

“I know,” he said. “That’s what gives me the Fear.”

The ether was wearing off, the acid was long gone, but the mescaline was running strong. We were sitting at a small round gold formica table, moving in orbit around the bartender.

“Look over there,” I said. “Two women fucking a polar bear.”

“Please,” he said. “Don’t
tell
me those things. Not now.” He signaled the waitress for two more Wild Turkeys. “This is my last drink,” he said. “How much money can you lend me?”

“Not much,” I said. “Why?”

“I have to go,” he said.

“Go?”

“Yes. Leave the country. Tonight.”

“Calm down,” I said. “You’ll be straight in a few hours.”

“No,” he said. “This is serious.”

“George Metesky was serious,” I said. “And you see what they did to him.”

“Don’t fuck around!” he shouted. “One more hour in this town and I’ll kill somebody!”

I could see he was on the edge. That fearful intensity that comes at the peak of a mescaline seizure. “OK,” I said. “I’ll lend you some money. Let’s go outside and see how much we have left.”

“Can we make it?” he said.

“Well . . . that depends on how many people we fuck with between here and the door. You want to leave quietly?”

“I want to leave
fast,”
he said.

“OK. Let’s pay this bill and get up very slowly. We’re both out of our heads. This is going to be a long walk.” I shouted at the waitress for a bill. She came over, looking bored, and my attorney stood up.

“Do they
pay
you to screw that bear?” he asked her.

“What?”

“He’s just kidding,” I said, stepping between them. “Come on, Doc—let’s go downstairs and gamble.” I got him as far as the edge of the bar, the rim of the merry-go-round, but he refused to get off until it stopped turning.

“It won’t stop,” I said. “It’s not
ever
going to stop.” I stepped off and turned around to wait for him, but he wouldn’t move . . . and before I could reach out and pull him off, he was carried away. “Don’t move,” I shouted. “You’ll come around!” His eyes were staring blindly ahead, squinting with fear and confusion. But he didn’t move a muscle until he’d made the whole circle.

I waited until he was almost in front of me, then I reached out to grab him—but he jumped back and went around the circle again. This made me very nervous. I felt on the verge of a freakout. The bartender seemed to be watching us.

Carson City, I thought. Twenty years.

I stepped on the merry-go-round and hurried around the bar, approaching my attorney on his blind side—and when we came to the right spot I pushed him off. He staggered into the aisle and uttered a hellish scream as he lost his balance and went down, thrashing into the crowd . . . rolling like a log, then up again in a flash, fists clenched, looking for somebody to hit.

I approached him with my hands in the air, trying to smile. “You fell,” I said. “Let’s go.”

By this time people
were
watching us. But the fool wouldn’t move, and I knew what would happen if I grabbed him. “OK,” I said. “You stay here and go to jail. I’m leaving.” I started walking fast towards the stairs, ignoring him.

This moved him.

“Did you see that?” he said as he caught up with me. “Some sonofabitch kicked me in the back!”

“Probably the bartender,” I said. “He wanted to stomp you for what you said to the waitress.”

“Good
god!
Let’s get out of here. Where’s the elevator?”

“Don’t go
near
that elevator,” I said. “That’s just what they
want
us to do . . . trap us in a steel box and take us down to the basement.” I looked over my shoulder, but nobody was following.

“Don’t run,” I said. “They’d like an excuse to shoot us.” He nodded, seeming to understand. We walked fast along the big indoor midway—shooting galleries, tattoo parlors, moneychangers and cotton-candy booths—then out through a bank of glass doors and across the grass downhill to a parking lot where the Red Shark waited.

“You drive,” he said. “I think there’s something wrong with me.”

When we got to the Mint I parked on the street in front of the casino, around a corner from the parking lot. No point risking a scene in the lobby, I thought. Neither one of us could pass for drunk. We were both hyper-tense. Extremely menacing vibrations all around us. We hurried through the casino and up the rear escalator.

We made it to the room without meeting anybody—but the key wouldn’t open the door. My attorney was struggling desperately with it. “Those bastards have changed the lock on us,” he groaned. “They probably searched the room. Jesus, we’re finished.”

Suddenly the door swung open. We hesitated, then hurried inside. No sign of trouble. “Bolt everything,” said my attorney. “Use all chains.” He was staring at two Mint Hotel Room keys in his hand. “Where did
this
one come from?” he said, holding up a key with number 1221 on it.

“That’s Lacerda’s room,” I said.

He smiled. “Yeah, that’s right. I thought we might need it.”

“What for?”

“Let’s go up there and blast him out of bed with the fire hose,” he said.

“No,” I said. “We should leave the poor bastard alone, I get the feeling he’s avoiding us for some reason.”

“Don’t kid yourself,” he said. “That Portuguese son of bitch is
dangerous.
He’s watching us like a hawk.” He squinted at me. “Have you made a deal with him?”

“I talked with him on the phone,” I said, “while you were out getting the car washed. He said he was turning in early, so he can get out there to the starting line at dawn.”

My attorney was not listening. He uttered an anguished cry and smacked the wall with both hands. “That dirty bastard!” he shouted. “I
knew
it! He got hold of my woman!”

I laughed. “That little blonde groupie with the film crew? You think he sodomized her?”

“That’s right—
laugh
about it!” he yelled. “You goddamn honkies are all the same.” By this time he’d opened a new bottle of tequila and was quaffing it down. Then he grabbed a grapefruit and sliced it in half with a Gerber Mini-Magnum—a stainless-steel hunting knife with a blade like a fresh-honed straight razor.

“Where’d you get that knife?” I asked.

“Room service sent it up,” he said. “I wanted something to cut the limes.”

“What limes?”

“They didn’t have any,” he said. “They don’t grow out here in the desert.” He sliced the grapefruit into quarters . . . then into eighths . . . then sixteenths . . . then he began slashing aimlessly at the residue. “That dirty toad bastard,” he groaned. “I
knew
I should have taken him out when I had the chance. Now he
has
her.”

I remembered the girl. We’d had a problem with her on the elevator a few hours earlier: my attorney had made a fool of himself.

“You must be a rider,” she’d said. “What class are you in?”

“Class?” he snapped. “What the fuck do you mean?”

“What do you
ride?”
she asked with a quick smile. “We’re filming the race for a TV series—maybe we can use you.”

“
Use
me?”

Mother of God, I thought. Here it comes. The elevator was crowded with race people: it was taking a long time to get from floor to floor. By the time we’d stopped at Three, he was trembling badly. Five more to go. . . .

“I ride the
big ones!”
he shouted suddenly. “The really
big
fuckers!”

I laughed, trying to de-fuse the scene. “The Vincent Black Shadow,” I said. “We’re with the factory team.”

This brought a murmur of rude dissent from the crowd. “Bullshit,” somebody behind me muttered.

“Wait a minute!” my attorney shouted . . . and then to the girl: “Pardon me, lady, but I think there’s some kind of ignorant chicken-sucker in this car who needs his face cut open.” He plunged his hand into the pocket of his black plastic jacket and turned to face the people crowded into the rear of the elevator. “You cheap honky faggots,” he snarled. “Which one of you wants to get cut?”

I was watching the overhead floor-indicator. The door opened at Seven, but nobody moved. Dead silence. The door closed. Up to Eight . . . then open again. Still no sound or movement in the crowded car. Just as the door began to close I stepped off and grabbed his arm, jerking him out just in time. The doors slid shut and the elevator light dinged Nine.