The Great Shark Hunt

The Great Shark Hunt

You better run little cottontail run

I hope you both live long enough

To see the setting sun

--Marshall Tucker Band

September 6th, 1974

The headline in today's Washington Post says Richard Nixon is "lonely and depressed" down there in his exile hideout in San Clemente. He sucks eggs for breakfast and wanders back and forth on the beach, spitting frequently into the surf and brooding about some vicious Polack whose name he can't remember. . . Some low-life friend of John Connally from Houston; the same white-haired little bugger who caused all the trouble with the Supreme Court, and now he has a runaway Grand Jury full of uppity niggers who --in Nixon's own words --"want to pick the carcass."

Indeed... What the hell is a carcass good for anyway, except to pick at? Gnaw the skull, suck the bones, then soak the bastard with gasoline and toss a match on it.

Jesus! How much more of this cheapjack bullshit can we be expected to take from that stupid little gunsel? Who gives a fuck if he's lonely and depressed out there in San Clemente? If there were any such thing as true justice in this world, his rancid carcass would be somewhere down around Easter Island right now, in the belly of a hammerhead shark.

But, no --he is sitting out there in the imitation-leather-lined study of his oceanside estate, still guarded constantly by a detail of Secret Service agents and still communicating with the outside world through an otherwise unemployable $40,000-a-year mouthpiece named Ron Ziegler... and still tantalizing the national press with the same kind of shrewdly programmed leaks that served him so well in the last months of his doomed presidency...

"He's terribly depressed, with much to be depressed about," says a friend. "Anyone would be depressed in his situation. I don't mean he's going off the deep end. I just mean that everything happened to him, seemingly all at once, and he doesn't know what to do about it."

Well, … shucks. I'd be tempted to put my mind to the task of helping the poor bastard figure out "what to do about" this cruel nutcracker that he somehow stumbled into… but I have a powerful suspicion that probably that gang of mean niggers in Washington has already solved Nixon's problem for him. They are going to indict the bastard and try to put him on trial.

Nixon knows this. He is not the kind of lawyer you'd want to hire for anything serious, but the reality of his situation vis-à-vis the Watergate grand jury is so bleak that even he has to grasp it. . . and this is the reason, I think, for the more or less daily front-page comments on his half-mad and pathetically crippled mental condition. He has devised another one of his famous fourth-down game breakers --the same kind of three-fisted brainstorm that climaxed with his decision to defuse the whole impeachment process by releasing his own version of "the tapes," or the time he figured out how to put a quick lid on the Watergate burglary investigation by blaming the whole thing on John Dean.

According to one Washington topsider, widely respected as an unimpeachable source and a shrewd judge of presidential character: "Dick Nixon is in a league all by himself when you're talking about style and grace under pressure. His instincts when the crunch comes are absolutely amazing."

Nobody will argue with that --although his strategy since leaving the White House has been marked by an unnatural focus on subtlety. The savage warrior of old now confronts us in the guise of a pitiful, frightened old pol --a whipped and broken man, totally at the mercy of his enemies and baffled by the firestorm of disasters that drove him out of the White House.

Which may even be partially true: He will probably go to his grave believing he was not really guilty of anything except underestimating the power of his enemies. .. But the fact remains that Jaworski will very likely break the news of Nixon's formal indictment before this article appears on the newsstands, and when that happens there will be only one man in the country with the power to arbitrarily short-circuit the legal machinery that in theory could land Richard Nixon in the same cellblock with John Dean.

That man is Gerald Ford, but he will have a hard time justifying a blanket presidential pardon for an admitted felon without at least the appearance of a ground swell of public sympathy to back him up.

So we may as well get braced for a daily dose of extremely grim news out of San Clemente, once Nixon is formally indicted. We will hear reports that the ex-president frequently bursts into tears for no reason at all, that he utters heartrending screams every night in his sleep, and the Los Angeles Herald-Examiner will quote an unnamed "prominent Beverly Hills psychiatrist" who will describe Nixon as a "pitiful basket case" and "a chronic bedwetter." And if Ford still seems reluctant to let Nixon go free, we will start seeing front-page "exclusive photos" of Nixon alone on the beach, staring soulfully at the sunset with tears drooling out of his eyes.

It will be a carefully orchestrated public relations campaign in the classic Nixon tradition. Ziegler will hold daily press briefings and read finely crafted descriptions of the former president's pitiful condition from the typewriter of Ray Price, Nixon's former chief speechwriter at the White House. Both Price and Pat Buchanan, the left and right forks of Nixon's tongue ever since he decided to make his move on the White House back in 1965, showed up at the San Clemente fortress in early September, both insisting they had just come out to say hello and "check up on the old man." As it happened, however, they both appeared about the same time rumors began surfacing in New York about a $2-million advance that Nixon had been offered for his memoirs.

Neither Price nor Buchanan claimed to know anything definite about the book offer, but in New York Spiro Agnew's literary agent was telling everybody who asked that the Nixon deal could be closed momentarily for at least $2 million and maybe more.

That is a hell of a lot of money for anybody's memoirs --even people who might reasonably be expected to tell the truth. But even a ridiculously fraudulent version of his five and a half wretched years in the White House and his own twisted view of the scandal that finished him off would be an automatic best seller if the book-buying public could be conned somehow into believing Richard Nixon was actually the author.

Meanwhile, with either Price or Buchanan or both standing ready to write his memoirs for him, Nixon was pondering an offer from Reader's Digest to sign on as a "consulting editor" at a salary of $100,000 a year. .. And Thursday of that week, President Ford made headlines by urging the Congress to appropriate $850,000 to cover Nixon's pension, living expenses and other costs of the painful transition from the White House to San Clemente. When the $850,000 runs out, he will have to scrimp until July 1st of next year, when he will pick up another $400,000 that will have to last him until July 1st, 1976. For as long as he lives, Richard Nixon will be on the federal dole forever at $400,000 a year --$60,000 pension, $96,000 to cover his personal staff salaries, $40,000 for travel, $21,000 to cover his telephone bills and $100,000 for "miscellaneous."

On top of his $300,000 annual expense account, Nixon's 24-hour-a-day Secret Service protection will cost the taxpayers between $500 and $1000 a day for as long as he lives --a conservative figure, considering the daily cost of things like helicopters, patrol boats, walkie-talkies and car telephones, along with salaries and living expenses for ten or 12 full-time agents. There is also the $40,000 a year Ron Ziegler still commands, as a ranking public servant. Add another $30,000 to $50,000 each for personal aides like Stephen Bull and Rose Mary Woods, plus all their living and travel expenses --and the cost of maintaining Richard Nixon in exile adds up to something like $750,000 a year. . . and these are merely the expenses. His personal income will presumably derive from things like the $2 million advance on his memoirs, his $100,000 a year stipend from Reader's Digest, and the $5000 a crack he can average, with no effort at all, on the year-round lecture circuit.

So. . . what we are looking at here is a millionaire ex-president and admitted felon; a congenital thief and pathological liar who spent 28 years on the public sugar tit and then quit just in time to avoid the axe. If he had fought to the bitter end, as he'd promised Julie he would "as long as even one senator believes in me," he risked losing about 95% of the $400,000 annual allowance he became qualified for under the "Former Presidents' Act" by resigning. . . But a president who gets impeached, convicted and dragged out of the White House by U.S. marshals is not covered by the "Former Presidents' Act." If Nixon had fought to the end and lost--which had become absolutely inevitable by the tune he resigned--he would have forfeited all but about $15,000 a year from the federal dole. . . So, in retrospect, the reason he quit is as easy to see as the numbers on his personal balance sheet The difference between resignation and being kicked out of office was about $385,000 a year for the rest of his life.

Most of this annual largesse will come, one way or another, out of the pockets of the taxpayers. All of the taxpayers. Even George and Eleanor McGovern will contribute a slice of their income to Richard Nixon's retirement fund. .. And so will I, unless Jaworski can nail the bastard on enough felony counts to strip him not only of his right to vote, like Agnew, but also his key to the back door of the Federal Treasury --which is not very likely now that Ford has done everything but announce the date for when he will grant the pardon.

The White House announced yesterday a negotiated agreement with Richard M. Nixon under which the former president and the U.S. government will have joint custody of White House tapes and presidential documents but with Mr. Nixon determining who shall have access to them.

In the letter of agreement making him the "sole legal owner of the papers and tapes until their future donation to the government," Mr. Nixon specifically asserted his legal title to "all literary rights" accompanying possession of the materials. Mr. Nixon has reportedly been told that a book of memoirs would be worth at least $2 million.

The Washington Post, September 9th, 1974

President Ford virtually made up his mind five days ago to grant a pardon to former-President Richard M. Nixon.

On Wednesday, presidential counsel Philip Buchen met with Herbert Miller, Nixon's attorney, at the White House and disclosed that Ford was considering executive clemency.

Would Nixon accept a pardon? Buchen asked.

Miller responded that he did not know, according to Buchen. But after checking with Nixon by telephone --the ex-president was at his home in San Clemente, California --Miller reported that a pardon was acceptable.

With that, the pardon was set, though Ford was unable to announce the pardon publicly until yesterday morning because it took several days to complete the arrangements.

The Washington Star-News, September 9th, 1974

Only ten days ago, in the first formal press conference of his administration, Mr. Ford had said that it would be "unwise and untimely" of him to make any commitment to a pardon until legal action was taken.

But the president was aware that political reaction was building in favor of prosecution of Mr. Nixon, a point dramatically confirmed by a Gallup Poll last week which showed that 56% of the American people thought that Mr. Nixon should be tried while only 37% opposed such action.

The Washington Post, September 9th, 1974

Powerful Men Brought Weeping to Their Knees... The Stinking Realities of Richard

Nixon's Place in History... The Mushwit Son-In-Law and the Last Tape

the Ex-Presidents Gifts

To the Editor:

The letter of Sylvia Wallace (August 23rd), warning that "we may yet see a Nixon renascent," caused me such grave concern that I immediately consulted the ineffable wisdom of the I Ching for some clue to the future of Mr. Nixon. I was unerringly directed to the Po Hexagram and the learned commentaries thereon. The book confirmed my worst fears: "Its strong subject, notwithstanding the attempts against him, survives and acquires fresh vigor. The people again cherish their sovereign and the plotters have wrought to their own overthrow."

The "legal steps" that your correspondent suggests to prevent Nixon's rebirth could prove woefully ineffective. I suggest that, after hanging, the body be drawn, quartered and burned and the ashes buried in an unmarked grave in a distant field guarded by an elite corps, lest his hardcore followers come and steal the remains and proclaim: He is risen!

Please! If Mr. Nixon regains popular favor, it will not be through any "revisionism" or reworking of the facts supporting the charges of guilt. It will probably be that coming events will force a careful re-evaluation of his contributions to the nation and crystallize an awareness of the misfortune suffered by the nation in the loss of his special gifts in these critical times. We may come to feel like the shepherd who had no sooner been conned by some pointy-eared gentleman into getting rid of his mean, tough sheep dog because of its fleas than the wolves reappeared on the scene.

Theodore P. Daly

Somers, New York

Letters to the Editor

The New York Times

September 4th, 1974

A prominent San Clemente supporter of Mr. Nixon since he went to Congress in 1946, who asked not to be identified, said he had heard that the Lincoln Club of Orange County, made up largely of wealthy industrialists who contributed millions of dollars to Republican campaign coffers, including Mr. Nixon's, had invited the former president to become a member of the select and influential group.

"You won't find Mr. Nixon living the life of a recluse," the Republican informant said. "Now that he is clear of any criminal prosecution, don't be surprised if he comes back into California politics. I think he should. I'd like to see him run for Senator John V. Tunney's seat in 1976."

The New York Times, September 9th, 1974

We are still too mired in it now to fit all the pieces together and understand what really happened in these last two frenzied years. . . or to grasp that the Real Meaning of what our new president calls the "national nightmare" and what historians will forever refer to as "Watergate" will probably emerge not so much from the day-to-day events of The Crisis, or even from its traumatic resolution --but more from what the survivors will eventually understand was prevented from happening.

I was out there on the crowded concrete floor of the Miami Beach Convention Center in August of 1972 when that howling mob of Republican delegates confirmed Richard Nkon's lust for another term in the White House with their constant, thunderous chant of "four more Years! four more Years! four more Years!"

It was bad enough, just listening to that demagogic swill --but I doubt if there were more than a dozen people in Miami that week who really understood what that cheap, demented little fascist punk had in mind for his Four More Years. It involved the systematic destruction of everything this country claims to stand for, except the rights of the rich to put saddles on the backs of the poor and use public funds to build jails for anybody who complained about it.

The tip of the iceberg began emerging about six months after Nixon took his second oath of office, when Senator Sam Ervin took his initially harmless-looking "Watergate Committee" act on national T.V. It didn't catch on, at first; the networks were deluged with letters from angry housewives, cursing Ervin for depriving them of their daily soap operas --but after two or three weeks the Senate Watergate hearings were the hottest thing on television.

Here, by god, was a real soap opera; tragedy, treachery, weird humor and the constant suspense of never knowing who was lying and who was telling the truth. . . Which hardly mattered to the vast audience of political innocents who soon found themselves as hooked on the all-day hearings as they'd previously been on the soaps and the quiz shows. Even Hollywood scriptwriters and apolitical actors were fascinated by the dramatic pace and structure of the hearings.

The massive complexities of the evidence, the raw drama of the daily confrontations and the deceptively elfin humor of "Senator Sam" came together in the multileveled plot that offered something to almost everybody --from bleeding hearts and Perry Mason fans to S&M freaks and the millions of closet Hell's Angels whose sole interest in watching the hearings was the spectacle of seeing once-powerful men brought weeping to their knees.

Consider John Mitchell, for instance --a millionaire Wall Street lawyer and close friend of the president, an arrogant, triple-chinned Roman who was Nixon's campaign manager in '68 and attorney general of the United States for four years until his old buddy put him in charge of the Committee to Re-elect the President in 1972. . . Here was a 61-year-old man with more money than he could count and so much power that he saw nothing unusual in treating the F.B.I, the Secret Service and every federal judge in the country like serfs in his private police force. . . who could summon limousines, helicopters or even Air Force One to take him anywhere he wanted to go by merely touching a buzzer on his desk. . .

And suddenly, at the very pinnacle of his power, he casually puts his initials on a memo proposing one of at least a dozen or so routine election-year bits of "undercover work" --and several months later while having breakfast in the Polo Lounge of the Beverly Hills Hotel, he gets a phone call from some yo-yo named Liddy, whom he barely knows, saying that four Cubans he's never even met have just been caught in the act of burglarizing the office of the Democratic National Committee located in an office building about 200 yards across the plaza below his own balcony in the Watergate apartments.

Which seems like a bad joke, at first, but when he gets back to Washington and drops by the White House to see his old buddy, he senses that something is wrong. Both Haldeman and Ehrlichman are in the Oval Office with Nixon; the president greets him with a nervous smile but the other two say nothing. The air reeks of tension. What the hell is going on here? Mitchell starts to sit down on the couch and call for a drink but Nixon cuts him off: "We're working on something, John. I'll call you at home later on, from a pay phone."

Mitchell stares at him, then picks up his briefcase and quickly says goodbye. Jesus Christ! What is this? On the way out to the limousine in the White House driveway, he sees Steve Bull's secretary reading a late edition of The Washington Star-News and idly snatches it out of her hands as he walks by. . . Moments later, as the big Cadillac rolls out into traffic on Pennsylvania Avenue, he glances at the front page and is startled by a large photo of his wife; she is packing a suitcase in the bedroom of their Watergate apartment. And next to the photo is a headline saying something like "Martha on the Rampage Again, Denounces 'Dirty Business' at White House."

"Good God!" he mutters. The Secret Service man in the front seat glances back at him for a moment, then looks away. Mitchell scans the story on Martha: She has freaked out again. Where does she keep getting that goddamn speed? he wonders; her eyes in the photo are the size of marbles. According to the story, she called U.P.I reporter Helen Thomas at four in the morning, cursing incoherently about "Mister President" and saying she has to get out of Washington at once, go back to the apartment in New York for a few days of rest.

Wonderful, Mitchell thinks. The last thing I need right now is to have her screaming around the apartment all night with a head full of booze and speed. Mitchell hates speed. In the good old days, Martha would just drink herself into a stupor and pass out. . . But when they moved down to Washington she began gobbling a pill here and there, just to stay awake at parties, and that's when the trouble started.

Then his eyes shift up to the lead story and he suddenly feels his balls contract violently, crawling straight up into his belly. Watergate Burglary Connected to White House," says the headline, and in the first graph of the story he sees the name of E. Howard Hunt, which he recognizes instantly --and a few graphs lower, goddamnit, is Gordon Liddy's name.

No need to read any further. Suddenly it all makes sense. He hears himself moan and sees the agent glance back at him again, saying nothing. He pulls the paper up in front of his face, but he is no longer reading. His finely tuned lawyer's mind is already racing, flashing back over all the connections: phone calls to Hunt, arguments with Liddy, secret meetings in Key Biscayne, Larry O'Brien, Cuban burglars with C.I.A connections, Howard Hughes.

He is fucked. It has taken less than 30 seconds for his brain to connect all the details. . . And yes, of course, that's what Nixon was talking about with those bastards, Haldeman and Ehrlichman. They knew. The president knew. Hunt and Liddy knew. . . Who else? Dean, Magruder? LaRue? How many others?

The limousine slows down, making the turn off Virginia Avenue and into the Watergate driveway. Instinctively, he glances up at the fifth floor of the office building and sees that all the lights are still on in O'Brien's office. That was where it had happened, right here in his own goddamn fortress...

His mind is still racing when the agent opens the door. "Here we are, sir. Your luggage is in the trunk; we'll bring it right up."

John Mitchell crawls out of the bright black Cadillac limousine and walks like a zombie through the lobby and into the elevator. Dick will be calling soon, he thinks. We'll have to act fast on this goddamn thing, isolate those dumb bastards and make sure they stay isolated.

The elevator stops and they walk down the soft, red-carpeted hall to his door. The agent goes in first to check all the rooms. Mitchell glances down the hall and sees another Secret Service man by the door to the fire exit. He smiles hello and the agent nods his head. Jesus Christ! What the hell am I worried about? We'll have this thing wrapped up and buried by ten o'clock tomorrow morning. They can't touch me, goddamnit. They wouldn't dare!

The agent inside the apartment is giving him the all-clear sign. "I put your briefcase on the coffee table, sir, and your luggage is on the way up. We'll be outside by the elevator if you need anything."

"Thanks," Mitchell says. "I'll be fine." The agent leaves, closing the door softly behind him. John Mitchell walks over to the T.V console and flips on the evening news, then pours himself a tall glass of scotch on the rocks and stretches out on the sofa, watching the tube, and waits for Nixon to call --from a pay phone. He knows what that means and it has nothing to do with dimes.

That was John Mitchell's last peaceful night in Washington. We will probably never know exactly what he and Nixon talked about on the telephone, because he was careful to make the call from one of the White House phones that was not wired into the tape-recording system. . . Mitchell had not been told, officially, about the president's new tape toy; the only people who knew about it, officially, were Nixon, Haldeman, Larry Higby, Steve Bull, Alex Butterfield and the three Secret Service agents responsible for keeping it in order. .. But unofficially almost everybody with personal access to the Oval Office had either been told on the sly or knew Richard Nixon well enough so they didn't need to be told. .. In any case, there is enough testimony in the files of the Senate Watergate committee to suggest that most of them had their own recording systems and taped most of what they said to each other, anyway.

Neither John Ehrlichman nor Charles Colson, for instance, were "officially" aware of the stunningly sophisticated network of hidden bugs that the Technical Security Division of the Secret Service had constructed for President Nixon. According to Alex Butterfield's testimony in closed hearings before the House Judiciary Committee, Nixon told Chief S.S agent Wong to have his electronics experts wire every room, desk, lamp, phone and mantelpiece inside the White House grounds where The President was likely ever to utter a word of more than one syllable on any subject

I've been using tape recorders in all kinds of journalistic situations for almost ten years, all kinds of equipment, ranging from ten-inch studio reels to raisin-sized mini-bugs --but I have never even seen anything like the system Wong's Secret Service experts rigged up for Nixon in the White House. In addition to dozens of wireless, voice-activated mikes about the size of a pencil eraser that he had built into the woodwork, there were also custom-built sensors, delay mechanisms and "standby" switches wired into telephones that either Bull or Butterfield could activate.

In the Cabinet Room, for instance, Nixon had microphones built into the bases of the wall lamps that he could turn on or off with harmless-looking buzzers labeled "Haldeman" and "Butterfield" on the rug underneath the cabinet table in front of his chair. The tapes and recording equipment were installed in a locked closet in the basement of the West Wing, but Nixon could start the reels rolling by simply pressing on the floor buzzer marked "Butterfield" with the toe of his shoe --and to stop the reels, putting the machinery back on standby, he could step on the "Haldeman" button.

Any serious description of Nixon's awesome tape-recording system would take thousands of words and boggle the minds of most laymen, but even this quick capsule is enough to suggest two fairly obvious but rarely mentioned conclusions: Anybody with this kind of a tape system, installed and maintained 24 hours a day by Secret Service electronics experts, is going to consistently produce extremely high quality voice reproductions. And since the White House personnel office can hire the best transcribing typists available, and provide them with the best tape-transcribing machinery on the market, there is only one conceivable reason for those thousands of maddening, strategically spotted "unintelligibles" in the Nixon version of the White House Tapes. Any Kelly Girl agency in the country would have given Nixon his money back if their secretaries had done that kind of damage to his transcripts. Sloppiness of that magnitude can only be deliberate, and Nixon is known to have personally edited most of those tape transcripts before they were typed for the printer. . . Which doesn't mean much, now that Nixon's version of the transcripts is no longer potential evidence but sloppy artifacts that are no longer even interesting to read except as an almost criminally inept contrast to the vastly more detailed and coherent transcripts that House Judiciary Committee transcribers produced from the same tapes. The only people with any reason to worry about either the implications of those butchered transcripts or the ham-fisted criminal who did the final editing jobs are the editors at whichever publishing house decides to pay Richard Nixon $2 million for his presidential memoirs, which will be heavily dependent on that vast haul of Oval Office tapes that Gerald Ford has just decreed are the personal property of Richard Nixon. He will have the final edit on those transcripts, too --just before he sends the final draft of his memoirs to the printer. The finished book will probably sell for $15; and a lot of people will be stupid enough to buy it.

The second and more meaningful aspect vis-à-vis Nixon's tape system has to do with the way he used it. Most tape freaks see their toys as a means to bug other people, but Nixon had the S.S technicians install almost every concealed bug in his system with a keen eye for its proximity to Richard Nixon.

According to Butterfield, Nixon was so obsessed with recording every move and moment of his presidency for the history books that he often seemed to be thinking of nothing else. When he walked from the White House to his office in the E.O.B, for instance, he would carry a small tape recorder in front of his mouth and maintain a steady conversation with it as he moved in his stiff-legged way across the lawn. . . And although we will never hear those tapes, the mere fact that he was constantly making them, for reasons of his own, confirms Alex Butterfield's observation that Richard Nixon was so bewitched with the fact that he really was The President that his only sense of himself in that job came from the moments he could somehow record and squirrel away in some safe place, for tomorrow night or the ages.

There is a bleeding kind of irony in this unnatural obsession of Nixon's with his place in history when you realize what must have happened to his mind when he finally realized, probably sometime in those last few days of his doomed presidency, just exactly what kind of place in history was even then being carved out for him.

In the way it is usually offered, the sleazy little argument that "Nixon has been punished enough" is an ignorant, hack politician cliche. .. But that image of him walking awkward and alone across the White House lawn at night, oblivious to everything in front or on either side of him except that little black and silver tape recorder that he is holding up to his lips, talking softly and constantly to "history," with the brittle intensity of a madman: When you think on that image for a while, remember that the name Nixon will seem to give off a strange odor every time it is mentioned for the next 300 years, and in every history book written from now on, "Nixon" will be synonymous with shame, corruption and failure.

No other president in American history has been driven out of the White House in a cloud of disgrace. No other president has been forced to preside over the degrading collapse of his own administration or been forced to stand aside and watch helplessly --and also guiltily --while some of his close friends and ranking assistants are led off to jail. And finally, no president of the United States has ever been so vulnerable to criminal prosecution, so menaced by the threat of indictment and trial, crouched in the dock of a federal courtroom and so obviously headed for prison that only the sudden grant of presidential pardon from the man he appointed to succeed him could prevent his final humiliation.

These are the stinking realities that will determine Richard Nixon's place in American history. . . And in this ugly context, the argument that "Richard Nixon has been punished enough" takes on a different meaning. He will spend many nights by himself in his study out there in San Clemente, listening over and over to those tapes he made for the ages and half-remembering the feel of thick grass on the Rose Garden lawn adding a strange new spring to his walk, even making him talk a bit louder as he makes his own knotty, plastic kind of love to his sweet little Japanese bride, telling it over and over again that he really is The President, The Most Powerful Man in the World --and goddamnit, you better never forget that!

Richard Nixon is free now. He bargained wisely and well. His arrangement with Ford has worked nicely, despite that week or so of bad feeling when he had to get a little rough with Gerry about the pardon, threatening to call in the L.A. Times man and play that quick little tape of their conversation in the Oval Office --the one where he offered to make Gerry the vice-president, in exchange for a presidential pardon whenever he asked for it --and he had known, by then, that he would probably need it a lot sooner than Gerry realized. Once their arrangement was made (and taped), Nixon just rode for as long as he could, then got off in time to sign up for his lifetime dole as a former president.

He will rest for a while now, then come back to haunt us again. His mushwit son-in-law, David Eisenhower, is urging him to run for the U.S. Senate from California in 1976, and Richard Nixon is shameless enough to do it. Or if not in the Senate, he will turn up somewhere else. The only thing we can be absolutely sure of, at this point in time, is that we are going to have Richard Milhous Nixon to kick around for at least a little while longer.

Part 3

Rolling Stone #111, October 10, 1974

Traveler Hears Mountain Music Where It's Sung

Renfro Valley, Ky.--The Bluegrass country is cold and brown in the winter. Night comes early and the horses are taken inside to sleep in heated barns. The farmers sit around pot bellied stoves and pass the time with a banjo and a jug and sometimes a bit of talk. Not many visitors in the winter. Not much to do, either.

Here in Rock Castle county the biggest event of the week is the Saturday night show in a little spot on the map called Renfro Valley, a big barn and a recording studio on U. S. highway 25, about 50 miles south of Lexington.

Ten years ago they flocked to this place like pilgrims to the shrine--not just from the nearby Bluegrass towns, but from all over the nation. They came for the country music and the All-Day Sings and to get a look at the Old Kentucky Barn Dance they'd heard so often on their radios at home. It got so big that 15,000 people showed up one summer Saturday night, and a national magazine sent down a team of cameras to record the scene for posterity.

Now perhaps 150 will show up. They come down from Berea and Crab Orchard, and Preachersville, and from places like Egypt and Shoulderblade across the mountains. Not many from out of state. Not even enough to justify using the barn, which is closed until spring, when the crowds will pick up again.

Only the locals show up in the winter. They come with guitars and bass fiddles and old songbooks, and they gather in the studio to do a radio show that you can still hear in some cities, but not in so many as you could a few years back. The show starts around 7 and winds up at 9:30 --just about the time the hillbilly singers and the Bluegrass banjo champs are warming up at Gerde's in New York's Greenwich Village.

Folks around here don't have much time for strangers. You ask what goes on at Renfro Valley and they shrug and say, "Not much." You want to find a restaurant after 8 p.m. and --if you can find anybody to ask --they'll direct you to Lexington, an hour's drive.

You have a thirst and they tell you, "This here's a dry county." Pause. "Yep, dry county." Another pause. "Maybe if you go up the road a piece to where you find a sort of restaurant, maybe somebody there can fix you up."

So if you want entertainment in these parts, you go to Renfro Valley and you go early. The studio is warm and the music is every bit as real as the people who sing it.

"Well, now, for all you folks out there in radioland, I want to say that we got a little gal visitin' with us this evenin'. Little Brenda Wallen, from up in Winchester, I believe..."

And little Brenda sings: "Beeyooeteful lies, beeyooeteful lies. .. each one a heartbreak. .. in perfect disguise. ."

Then the Hibbard Brothers quartet, lean mountain faces and huge hands poking out of gabardine sleeves --"O, what a time we will have up in heaven. ."

A murmur of approval from the audience. A flashbulb pops near the back of the room. Things are picking up. The Farmer Sisters take their turn at the mike, with a rippling version of "You're the Reason."

A few cheers from the crowd, a quick burst of fiddle music from a man beside the piano, then somebody holds up a hand for silence. Time for the commercial.

"This here's a long one," says the announcer, glancing at a yellow script in his hand, "so let's do it all at once and get it over with." Snickers from the audience. Everybody grins as the commercial is read very earnestly into the mike that will carry it out to the Good Lord only knows where.

The announcer finishes and heaves a sigh of relief, also into the mike. Everybody laughs and the show goes on. Meanwhile, the Greenbriar Boys are tuning their instruments at Gerde's; in a few hours there will be a long, button down line outside the hungry i in San Francisco, waiting to hear the latest hillbilly sensation.

It's 9:30 in Rock Castle county and the Old Kentucky Barn dance is over until next week. Only a few people remain in the studio. One of them is John Lair, a local boy and a onetime Chicago disk jockey who came back home to put Renfro Valley on the map. Red Foley got his start here. So did the Coon Creek Sisters, from a place back in the hills called Pinch 'Em Tight Holler.

Lair seems genuinely puzzled by the term, "Bluegrass music." He thinks it's a misnomer.

"It's plain old mountain music," he insists. "Same stuff they've been singing for more than a hundred years." He chuckles and shakes his head. "You go up to Lexington and call it Bluegrass music and you'll have a fight on your hands."

Lair says goodnight and leaves to go home. Outside, the parking lot is almost empty. A visitor has two choices --drive up to Lexington for something to eat and maybe a good fight, or hurry to the nearest motel.

A few miles up the road is a town called Nicholasville, where motel owners won't even answer the door after what they consider a decent hour. When I stopped a man on the street and asked him why this was, he said he was the chief of police and offered to rent me a bed in his house.

I went back to one of the motels, went into the office, turned on the light, picked a key off the desk and located a cabin by myself. The next morning it took me 20 minutes to find somebody to pay --and then I was told I wouldn't be welcome there in the future because my car had a license plate from Louisville. They don't care much for city boys, specially when they're roamin' around late at night.

If you drive thru Kentucky and plan to spend the night, get your room early. And if you like a toddy before bedding down, remember that 86 of the 120 counties are bone dry until you make friends. Grog shops are few and far between, and a man without foresight will usually go to bed thirsty.

Winter mornings are bleak. Almost always you wake up to a gray sky and a good country breakfast: fried sausage or ham, fried eggs, fried potatoes, and a plate of biscuits with butter and apple jelly. Then, after a pot of coffee, you move on.

No matter which way you go you'll drive thru a lot of cold, barren country to get there. North, thru the heart of the Bluegrass, west toward Louisville, east into the mountains, or south to Tennessee.

Not much speed on those narrow highways, plenty of time to look off across the white fences and wonder how the cows find anything to eat in the frozen fields. Time to listen to the sermons on the radio or the lonely thump of a shotgun somewhere back from the road.

Not much to hurry about in the Bluegrass, specially in the winter when the trees are bare and the barns are white with frost and most folks are inside by the stove.

The Chicago Tribune, February 18, 1962

A Footloose American in a Smugglers' Den

In Puerto Estrella, Colombia, there is little to do but talk. It is difficult to say just what the villagers are talking about, however, because they speak their own language --a tongue called Guajiro, a bit like Arabic, which doesn't ring well in a white man's ear.

Usually they are talking about smuggling, because this tiny village with thatched roof huts and a total population of about 100 South American Indians is a very important port of entry. Not for humans, but for items like whisky and tobacco and jewelry. It is not possible for a man to get there by licensed carrier, because there are no immigration officials and no customs. There is no law at all, in fact, which is precisely why Puerto Estrella is such an important port.

It is far out at the northern tip of a dry and rocky peninsula called La Guajira, on which there are no roads and a great deal of overland truck traffic. The trucks carry contraband, hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of it, bound for the interiors of Colombia and Venezuela. Most of it comes from Aruba, brought over at night on fast trawlers and put ashore at Puerto Estrella for distribution down the peninsula on the trucks.

I arrived at dusk on a fishing sloop from Aruba. And since there is no harbor I was put ashore in a tiny rowboat. Above us, on a sharp cliff, stood the entire population of the village, staring grimly and without much obvious hospitality at Puerto Estrella's first tourist in history.

In Aruba, the Guajiro Indians are described as "fierce and crazy and drunk all day on coconut whisky." Also in Aruba you will hear that the men wear "nothing but neckties, knotted just below the navel." That sort of information can make a man uneasy, and as I climbed the steep path, staggering under the weight of my luggage, I decided that at the first sign of unpleasantness I would begin handing out neckties like Santa Claus --three fine paisleys to the most menacing of the bunch, then start ripping up shirts.

As I came over the brink of the cliff, a few children laughed, an old hag began screeching, and the men just stared. Here was a white man with 12 Yankee dollars in his pocket and more than $500 worth of camera gear slung over his shoulders, hauling a typewriter, grinning, sweating, no hope of speaking the language, no place to stay --and somehow they were going to have to deal with me.

There was a conference, and then a small man stepped forward and made motions indicating that I should put my gear on an ancient truck which started with a crank. I was taken to an abandoned hospital, where I was given a sort of cell with a filthy mattress and broken windows to let in the air.

There is not much for the tourist in Puerto Estrella, no hotels, restaurants, or souvenirs. Nor is the food palatable. Three times a day I faced it --leaves, maize, and severely salted goat meat, served up with muddy water.

The drinking was a problem too, but in a different way. At the crack of dawn on the day after my arrival I was awakened and taken before a jury of village bigwigs. Its purpose was to determine the meaning of my presence. These gentlemen had gathered in the only concrete-block house in town, and before them on the table was a cellophane-wrapped bottle of Scotch whisky.

After an hour or so of gestures, a few words of Spanish, and nervous demonstrations of my camera equipment, they seemed to feel a drinking bout was in order. The Scotch was opened, five jiggers were filled, and the ceremony began.

It continued all that day and all the next. They tossed it off straight in jiggers, solemnly at first and then with mounting abandon. Now and then one of them would fall asleep in a hammock, only to return a few hours later with new thirst and vigor. At the end of one bottle they would proudly produce another, each one beautifully wrapped in cellophane.

As it turned out, three things made my visit a success. One was my size and drinking capacity (it was fear --a man traveling alone among reportedly savage Indians dares not get drunk); another was the fact that I never turned down a request for a family portrait (fear, again); and the third was my "lifelong acquaintance" with Jacqueline Kennedy, whom they regard as some sort of goddess.

With the exception of a few sophisticateds and local bigwigs, most of the men wore the necktie --a Guajiro version of the time-honored loin-cloth. The women, again with a few exceptions, wore dull and shapeless long black gowns.

A good many of the men also wore two and three hundred dollar wrist watches, a phenomenon explained by the strategic location of Puerto Estrella and the peculiar nature of its economy. It would not be fair to say that the Indians arbitrarily take a healthy cut of all the contraband that passes through their village, but neither would it be wise to arrive and start asking pointed questions, especially since anyone arriving on his own is wholly dependent on the good will of the Indians to get him out again.

Trying to leave can turn a man's hair white. You are simply stuck until one of the Indians has to run some contraband down the peninsula to Maicao.

There is nothing to do but drink, and after 50 hours of it I began to lose hope. The end seemed to be nowhere in sight; and it is bad enough to drink Scotch all day in any climate, but to come to the tropics and start belting it down for three hours each morning before breakfast can bring on a general failure of health. In the mornings we had Scotch and arm wrestling; in the afternoons, Scotch and dominoes.

The break came at dusk on the third day, when the owner of a truck called the Power Wagon rose abruptly from the drinking table and said we would leave immediately. We had a last round, shook hands all around, and shoved off. The truck was fully loaded, and I rode in back with my gear and a young Indian girl.

The drive from Puerto Estrella to Maicao is 10 to 12 hours, depending on which rut you take, but it seems like 40 days on the rack. On top of the heinous discomfort, there is the distinct possibility of being attacked and shot up by either bandits or the law. As far as the Contrabandista is concerned, one is as bad as the other.

The smugglers travel armed but they put their faith in speed, punishing both truck and passengers unmercifully as they roar through dry river beds and across long veldt-like plains oh a dirt track which no conventional car could ever navigate.

We rumbled into Maicao at three in the afternoon. They dropped me at the airport, where my luggage was thoroughly searched by a savage-looking gendarme before I was allowed on the plane. for Barranquilla. An hour later, there was another search at the Barranquilla airport. When I asked why, they replied I was coming from an area called Guajira, known to be populated by killers and thieves and men given over to lives of crime and violence.

I had a feeling that nobody really believed I had been there. When I tried to talk about Guajira, people would smile sympathetically and change the subject. And then we would have another beer, because Scotch is so expensive in Barranquilla that only the rich can afford it.

National Observer, August 6, 1962

Why Anti-Gringo Winds Often Blow South of the Border

One of my most vivid memories of South America is that of a man with a golf club --a five-iron, if memory serves --driving golf balls off a penthouse terrace in Cali, Colombia. He was a tall Britisher, and had what the British call "a stylish pot" instead of a waitsline. Beside him on a small patio table was a long gin-and-tonic, which he refilled from time to time at the nearby bar.

He had a good swing, and each of his shots carried low and long out over the city. Where they fell, neither he nor I nor anyone else on the terrace that day had the vaguest idea. The penthouse, however, was in a residential section on the edge of the Rio Cali, which runs through the middle of town. Somewhere below us, in the narrow streets that are lined by the white adobe blockhouses of the urban peasantry, a strange hail was rattling on the roofs --golf balls, "old practice duds," so the Britisher told me, that were "hardly worth driving away."

In the weeks that followed, when I became more aware of the attitude a good many Colombians have towards that nation's Anglo-Saxon population, I was glad nobody had traced the source of those well-hit mashies. Colombians, along with their Venezulean neighbors, may well be the most violent people on the continent, and a mixture of insult and injury does not rank high as a national dish.

It is doubtful that the same man would drive golf balls off a rooftop apartment in the middle of London. But is not really surprising to see it done in South America. There, where the distance between the rich and the poor is so very great, and where Anglo-Saxons are automatically among the elite, the concept of noblesse oblige is subject to odd interpretations.

The attitude, however, does not go unnoticed; the natives consider it bad form indeed for a foreigner to stand on a rooftop and drive golf balls into their midst. Perhaps they lack sporting blood, or maybe a sense of humor, but the fact is that they resent it, and it is easy to see why they might go to the polls at the next opportunity and vote for the man who promises to rid the nation of "arrogant gringo imperialists."

Whether the candidate in question is a fool, a thief, a Communist, or even all three does not matter much when emotions run high --and few elections south of the Rio Grande are won on the basis of anything but blatant appeals to popular emotion.

The North American presence in South America is one of the most emotional political questions on the continent. In most countries, especially Argentina and Chile, there is a considerable European presence as well. But with recent history as it is, when the winds of anti-gringo opinion begin to blow, they blow due north, toward the United States, which to the Latin American is more easily identifiable with capitalism and imperialism than any other country in the world.

With this in mind, a traveler in South America gets one shock after another at the stance generally taken by his fellow gringos --and sometimes a worse shock at the stance he takes himself.

One young American put it this way: "I came down here a real gung-ho liberal, I wanted to get close to these people and help them --but in six months I turned into a hardnose conservative. These people don't know what I'm talking about, they won't help themselves, and all they want is my money. All I want to do now is get out."

It is a sad fact that living for any length of time in a Latin American country has a tendency to do this to many Americans. To avoid it takes tremendous adaptability, idealism, and faith in the common future.

Take the example of a young man named John, a representative in a Latin American country for an international relief organization. His work consists mainly in distributing surplus food to the poor. He works hard, often going out on field trips, for three or four days of rough driving, bad food, primitive living, and dysentery.

But the people he has to work with bother him. He can't understand why the principal of a back-country school would steal food earmarked for the pupils and sell it to speculators. He can't understand why his warehouse --lying in the middle of a district where food is distributed regularly --is constantly being looted by the very people who were standing in line the week before to get their regular share.

He broods on these things and wonders if he is really accomplishing anything, or just being taken for a sucker. Then, one day when he is in a particularly bad mood over some new evidence of callousness or corruption, he hears below his window the shouting of a mob. A man is standing on the steps of a fountain, shouting hoarsely about "the rights of the people" and what should be done to secure them. And the crowd happily roars an answer --"down with the capitalist swine!"

Our man, standing at his window, suddenly loses his temper and shakes his fist. Abajo del pueblos! he yells. Meaning, "Down with the people." Then he quickly ducks back inside.

But the Latin family next door, standing at their window, hears the gringo abusing the crowd. Word gets around, and several days later our man is insulted as he walks to the corner cantina for a pack of cigarillos. He speaks good Spanish, and curses back, not understanding why his neighbors are no longer friendly. But it makes him even more bitter, and once the tide starts running in that direction, it is hard to reverse.

One day a new American appears in town, a trainee for one of the United States banks that have branches in South America. Our man John meets him at the Anglo-American Club and, in the course of conversation, tells him what to expect from the nationals --"a bunch of rotten ingrates, stupid and corrupt to the last man."

The newcomer hears other gringos say the same kind of thing. At night, in his new and unfamiliar apartment, he begins to think the neighbors are making noise on purpose, to wear on his nerves. Soon he is as bitter as most of the others.

When the inevitable bank strike comes along --as it does at regular intervals in most Latin American countries --our newcomer takes the advice of an older gringo employee and shows up at work with a pistol, which he puts on his desk like a paperweight to show the employees he means business.

The reaction of the nationals hardly needs to be cataloged. Our trainee is chalked up as one more bit of two-legged evidence that gringos are vicious fools. The net result --as far as both John and the young banker are concerned --is a grievous setback for the hope that North and South America will come to understand each other, and thus avoid a split-up that would wreck the Western Hemisphere.

The young American in a Latin American country faces other hazards. For one thing, he has to contend with the American colony that blooms in every city of any size.

Americans living in Latin American countries are often more snobbish than the Latin themselves. The typical American has quite a bit of money by Latin American standards, and he rarely sees a countryman who doesn't. An American businessman who would think nothing of being seen in a sport shirt on the streets of his home town will be shocked and offended at a suggestion that he appear in Rio de Janeiro, for instance, in anything but a coat and tie. The same man --often no more than 30 years old --might have been living in a prefabricated tract house in the States, but in Rio he will live on Copacabana beach with two maids, servants' quarters, and a balcony overlooking the sea.

Some people say that the American is fouling his own image in South America --that instead of being a showpiece for "democracy," he not only tends to ape the wealthy, antidemocratic Latins, but sometimes beats them at their own game. Suddenly finding himself among the elite, the nervous American is determined to hold his own --and, unlike the genuine aristocrat who never doubts his own worth, the newcomer to status seeks to prove it at every turn.

Others, though, repeat the old, familiar, "When in Rome, do as the Romans do." In South America, so the thinking goes, the lower classes have no grasp of equality and take informality for weakness. So the only alternative is to make them respect you. "I know it's silly to shout at the maid every time she makes a mistake," said one American housewife in Brazil. "But she's lazy and I want her to know I'm watching her. With these people, it's either discipline or anarchy."

Another problem that plagues the gringo is drink. Because he never really feels at home in a foreign language; because his income is usually embarrassingly large by local standards; because he worries continually about being cheated whenever he buys anything; because he never gets over the feeling that most upper-class Latins consider him a boob from a country where even the boobs are rich; and because he can never understand why people don't seem to like him for what he is --just a good guy who feels a bit out of place among these strange surroundings and customs --because of all these tensions and many more of the same kind, he tends to drink far more than he does at home.

"To relax" is the usual excuse, but sometimes there is almost no choice. In Rio, for instance, the evening traffic jams are so bad that getting from the business district out to Copacabana --where "everybody" lives --is almost impossible between the hours of 5 and 8. One of the first things a new arrival is told is: "If you can't get out of town by five, forget about it and settle down to serious drinking until eight." This hiatus in the day is termed "the drinking hour."

With many people, the "drinking hour" soon becomes a necessary habit. Sometimes it leads to disaster. Often an American will arrive home broke and bleary-eyed at 3 or 4 in the morning, still lugging his briefcase and cursing the long-gone traffic.

Because of things like the drinking hour and other, purely local, situations, a man returning to the States after a stay in Latin America is often struck dumb by the question, "What can we do about that place?"

He has no idea, because he has never had time enough to relax and give it much thought. His concern has been survival. Objectivity is one of the first casualties of "culture shock" --a term for the malady that appears when a North American, with his heritage of Puritan pragmatism, suddenly finds himself in a world with different traditions and a different outlook on life.

It is an odd feeling to return from a year in South America and read a book by some expense-account politician who toured the continent in six weeks and spoke only with presidents, cabinet ministers, and other "leading figures" like himself. The problems and the issues suddenly become quite clear --as they never were when you were right there in the midst of them.

Now, looking back on that man with the golf club, it is easy to see him as a fool and a beast. But I recall quite well how normal it seemed at the time, and how surprised I would have been if any of the dozen people on the terrace had jumped up to protest.

Democracy Dies in Peru, but Few Seem to Mourn Its Passing

The "death of democracy" has not left much of a vacuum in Peru. It was more like the death of somebody's old uncle, whose name had been familiar in the household for many years, but who died, where he had always lived, in some far-off town the family never quite got around to visiting --although they had always meant to, or at least that's what they said.

If there is one profound reality in Peruvian politics it is the fact that this country has absolutely no democratic tradition, and any attempt to introduce one is going to meet violent opposition. The people who need democracy don't even know what the word means; the people who know what it means don't need it and they don't mind saying so. If the Alliance for Progress requires that democracy in Peru become a fact instead of just a pleasant word, then the Alliance is in for rough sledding too.

This is the basis of the current "misunderstanding" between Washington and Lima. If the Peruvian people were as concerned about democracy as is President Kennedy, this country would right now be in the throes of a violent civil war. What happened in Lima on July 18 was more than enough to touch off armed conflict in many countries of the world, but democracy has never been a reality in Peru, and for that reason it goes largely unmourned; especially in Lima, which voted heavily for the return of an ex-dictator.

On July 24, the un-elected government of Peru issued a Decree-Law, assuming all executive and legislative powers, and the third largest country in South America passed officially into the hands of the military. The second largest, Argentina, had provided an easy-to-follow example some five months before. Next on the list, according to current speculation in Washington and other Hemisphere capitals, will be Venezuela --and what might be precipitated by Brazil's congressional elections in October is anybody's guess.

It requires little guesswork, however, to see what this trend means for the Alliance for Progress, and also for the future of democracy in South America. The outlook is dreary at best, and as the pressure from Washington mounts the reaction will mount just as fast. Peru was a good example.

Even so, after all these months of tension, all this talk and campaigning, all the space devoted in newspapers to the Peruvian elections, a visitor to Lima arrives with a feeling that there is bound to be some evidence that the whole thing was a bust --that it was all a put-up job, because the Armed Forces did exactly what they said they were going to do all along.

When the American Popular Revolutionary Alliance (apra) won the recent elections, the military called it a "fraud," took over the government, annulled what was undeniably the most honest and least fraudulent election in Peru's history, and installed a four-man junta that is a military dictatorship no matter which way you look at it.

Yet life goes on in Lima as if nothing had happened. The evening streets are full of pretty girls and slick-haired men in business suits, the opulent shops that flank the trolleys on Avenida Peirola are full of silver and alpaca and the soft rustle of money changing hands, and the all night cantinas still sound as if their frenzied pisco-swilling patrons had abandoned all hope of ever seeing another dawn.

This is Lima, democracy or no democracy, dictators or no dictators. The city is full of people, in fact, who say that what happened is precisely nothing at all. They point out that the people in power now are those who have always been in power and that those faces on the outside, looking in, are the same faces that have been there for as long as anyone in Peru can remember. It is foolish, they say, to talk about the Junta "seizing the reins," because the Junta is nothing more than a dress-uniform version of the same power bloc that has held the reins for centuries.

It is only in times of crisis that it puts on the jackboots and goes into the street with truncheons. In times of peace it wears mufti and busies itself with other, less militant pursuits --primarily that of maintaining itself in the style to which it has long been accustomed. It is as old as the Incas and every bit as ruthless with opposition. Its counterpart in the U.S. has been labelled The Power Elite. In Peru it is called the Forty Families, an all-powerful aristocracy that makes its North American cousin look weak and tame by comparison.

"That's what Kennedy doesn't understand," explained one Lima-based American businessman. "You just can't have democracy down here. The people don't understand it. Loeb was the same way: he went out to the futbol game and sat down in the grandstand with the common people --I saw him myself, with his feet propped up on the rail and the top of his hose showing --why, they thought he was crazy. It was absolutely incomprehensible, even to the people he was trying to make friends with. If you want to get anywhere down here, you have to make people respect you."

However sad a commentary that may be on a lot of things --American businessmen included --it is sadder still because there is a lot of truth in it. From the beginning of their history the Peruvian people have been conditioned to understand that these are only two kinds of human beings in this world --the Ins and the Outs, and a vast gulf in between. In a book called The Ancient Civilizations of Peru you read that "The Inca state insured the people against hunger, exploitation, undue hardship and all kinds of want, but regimented them rigorously and left them no choice, independence or initiative. .. There was a large class of nobles and priests, supported by the masses. Heavy tribute in the form of labor was demanded of the peasants, who profited very little from it."

That was in 1438, and little has changed since then except that the peasants are no longer insured against hunger, exploitation, undue hardship and all kinds of want. There is ample evidence of all those conditions even in Lima, which differs from the rest of Peru much like Manhattan differs from the mountains of eastern Kentucky.

The strange assumption in Lima's business community --Americans and Peruvians alike --is that President Kennedy would join them in their endorsement of The System in Peru "if he could only understand it, and stop paying so much attention to Loeb."

U.S. Ambassador James Isaac Loeb is undoubtedly the most second-guessed man in recent Peruvian history. There is not a man at the Bankers' Club, among other places, who cannot tell you where he went wrong and exactly what he should have done instead. The most common criticism is that he tried to force-feed democracy to a people who had not the faintest idea what he was talking about.

The nominal chief of the Junta, General Manuel Perez Godoy, has flatly called Loeb "an Aprista," which is tantamount now to being called an enemy of the state. He is sure to be declared "persona non grata" if he returns to Lima, and in business circles it is Loeb who draws most of the blame for the U.S. refusal to recognize the Junta. The general sentiment is that Kennedy has been "misled." Gen. Perez is of the same mind; in a recent statement on the U.S. stand, he called the whole thing "a misunderstanding."

Gen. Perez has impressed foreign journalists in Lima with his unique feeling for words and their fundamental meanings. He is no mean orator, and in his first statement after the takeover he explained it this way: "We have seen a fraudulent electoral process in which not even the most basic and elementary rights of the citizens have been respected. The Armed Forces have seen with pain, with anxiety, with tight lips and dry eyes, this sacrifice of our people, of our country, of our future."

The fact that the Armed Forces had been able to dig up only 70 fraudulent ballots out of a total of some 2 million did not deter Gen. Perez from going on T.V to amplify and reiterate his feelings.

'To the humble, to the forgotten worker, to the voter who has been deprived in many cases of the elementary social, economic and cultural benefits, it is now being attempted to take from him also his only hope --that of gaining the progress and social justice he deserves, to wipe out his liberty to vote with fraud.

"We will not consent to it. A military imperative forces on us the hard obligation of assuming the functions of government that normally should be in civilian hands, in order to establish peace, order and respect for the laws that rule the republic."

"We are stirred by a great ambition to save democracy."

Earlier in the same speech Gen. Perez had talked of "the great electoral fraud," said "the people have been grossly cheated," accused the National Elections Board of an attempt "to cover up this conduct," and explained that ex-President Prado --then languishing on a prison ship --had showed a "lack of objectivity" for not having annulled the elections himself.

This was a little hard for some people to take, notably those 600,000 or so humbled and forgotten voters who had cast their ballots for apra and Dr. Victor Raul Haya de la Torre. Gen. Perez drew praise, however, from those quarters where it had not been previously understood that democracy is best preserved by installing a military dictatorship. He was also admired for his eloquent attack on those who would tamper with the people's right to express themselves by means of the ballot.

What is more than obvious in Lima is that the biggest fraud in the whole affair was the military's attempt to explain and justify the coup. It is hard to find anyone who seriously believes they took over because of "a great electoral fraud." The National Elections Board, a group of respected jurists with no ties to apra, investigated the charges and found that, although there had been isolated cases of false registration and multiple voting, the sum of the infractions was far too small to have any effect on the outcome. President Prado agreed --and was exiled to Paris for his efforts when the military decided to back its charges with a Sherman tank and a U.S.-trained ranger battalion.

The Junta has scheduled new elections for June 9, 1963, but the only people in Lima who seem to believe it are taxi drivers, hotel clerks and a varied assortment of small jobholders who voted for Gen. Manuel Odria, dictator from 1948 to 1956. In the circle most heartily in agreement with the takeover --namely, the business and finance community --the betting is against elections next year. "These boys are in to stay," said the president of a U.S. businessmen's society. "Once they get the taste of sugar on their tongues they're not going to give it up."

Nor was he much alarmed by the prospect. "These people are like children," he explained. "They'll complain all day about discipline, but deep down they like it. They need it.

"Let's be smart about it," he added. "The rich people are running this country. They're running the country back home. Why not face facts and be thankful for what stability we have? These people are anti-Communist. Let's recognize the Junta, keep the aid flowing, and get on with it." He smiled indulgently. "We think young Kennedy up there just flew off the handle. Now he's out on a limb and he doesn't know how to get back."

Nearly everybody who wears a tie in Lima feels the same way. Business is good in Peru --it is the only South American country without a balance of payments deficit --and the vested interests want to keep it that way. Even the taxi driver, who is making a good living because there are enough people on the streets with money in their pockets, does not particularly care who sits in the Presidential Palace as long as they don't upset the apple cart.

This is what almost happened. apra is more than just another political party; it is a genuine threat to a way of life that was 500 years old when the U.S. was born. To say that the takeover came simply because of the military's longstanding feud with apra is to gloss over the fact that the entire ruling class in Peru regards apra as more dangerous than communism. apra has an ally in the Alliance for Progress and therefore an ally in the U.S. Communism has never been more than a minor threat in Peru and is more a convenient whipping boy than anything else.

If anyone has carried the battle to the Communists, it is Haya de la Torre. One of his most popular campaign slogans was "apra, si! Communismo, no!" Fernando Belaunde Terry, who finished second in the presidential race, was not noted for any savage tirades against the Red Menace. Nor was Gen. Odria. Local Communists, however, have given the Junta their full-fledged support, although the party is still illegal and will undoubtedly remain that way.

apra, primarily because of its appeal to the millions of voteless, illiterate Indians, is by long odds the main threat to Peru's status quo. At the moment, the party is still reeling from the jolt of having its hard-fought election victory annulled. When the soldiers pulled out of the Casa del Pueblos (House of the People) which is apra's headquarters, the place was a total wreck. On August 7, after two weeks of occupation, it was returned to the party, and a vast, silent crowd was on hand to view the remains. There were bullet holes in the walls and ceiling, doors and windows had been smashed and party records destroyed, and the entire building --nearly a city block of offices and facilities --was a shambles of glass, broken furniture and water-soaked paper. Among the smashed or stolen items were: the only dentist drill, all medicine from the clinic and drugs from the pharmacy, typewriters, a radio transmitter, all phonograph records, sculpture in the art workshop, instruments for the children's band, food and plates from the dining hall, records from the credit union, and just about everything else that human beings could put to any use at all.

Those who passed through the Casa del Pueblos that night, in what seemed like a huge funeral procession, could not be numbered in that alleged "vast majority" of Peruvians who "fully support the Junta." The air was heavy with bitterness and defeat. They were anxious to know what the U.S. was going to do about the takeover, and the only American there could only shake his head and say that it was too early to tell, although it seemed inevitable that the hue and cry for recognition would sooner or later have its effect.

This is the other side of the "misunderstanding." apra represents some 600,000 of Peru's 2,000,000 voters, plus a vast majority of the 53 percent of the population which neither reads, writes nor votes. Haya de la Torre got 14,000 more votes than any other candidate, and in a democratic country a man who did that well could expect to have at least some say in the government.

In Peru, however, the figures don't necessarily add up to the score. The will of the people is subject to the veto of that class for which armies have been the strong right arm ever since armies were invented. To these people, democracy means chaos. It will loosen their grip on the national purse strings, shatter the foundations of society, and send the rabble pouring into the vaults. A whole way of life would collapse if democracy became a reality in Peru. The military takeover was no accidental trodding on Washington's toes. It was a step taken with full deliberation and plenty of warning beforehand. The military --and the oligarchy which supports the military --were, and still are, bound and determined not to let apra get its hands on the throttle.

It follows then, that if the U.S. reaction to the takeover is a misunderstanding, the whole Alliance for Progress is a misunderstanding, because the Alliance is based rather firmly on the assumption that Progress will not come at the expense of democracy. Mr. Kennedy has said this over and over again, but it is a concept that has not gained wide acceptance in Peru. Not among the people who count, anyway.

National Observer, August 27, 1962

The Inca of the Andes: He Haunts the Ruins of His Once-Great Empire

When the cold Andean dusk comes down on Cuzco, the waiters hurry to shut the Venetian blinds in the lounge of the big hotel in the middle of town. They do it because the Indians come up on the stone porch and stare at the people inside. It tends to make tourists uncomfortable, so the blinds are pulled. The tall, oak-paneled room immediately seems more cheerful.

The Indians press their faces between the iron bars that protect the windows. They tap on the glass, hiss, hold up strange gimcracks for sale, plead for "monies," and generally ruin the tourist's appetite for his inevitable Pisco Sour.

It wasn't always this way. Until 1532 this city of crisp air and cold nights in the Andes Mountains served as the gold-rich capital of the Inca empire, the Indian society that South American expert Harold Osborne has called "the only civilization which has succeeded in making the Andes genuinely habitable to man." Many of Cuzco's buildings still rest on Inca foundations --massive walls of stone that have lasted through 400 years of wars, looting, erosion, earthquakes, and general neglect.

Today, the Indian is as sad and hopeless a specimen as ever walked in misery. Sick, dirty, barefoot, wrapped in rags, and chewing narcotic coca leaves to dull the pain of reality, he limps through the narrow cobblestone streets of the city that once was the capital of his civilization.

His culture has been reduced to a pile of stones. Archeologists point out it's an interesting pile, but the Indian doesn't have much stomach for poking around in his own ruins. In fact, there's something pathetic about an Indian child leading you across a field to see what he calls ruinas. For this service he wants "monies," and then he'll be quiet unless you aim a camera at him, which will cost you about 10 cents a shot.

Probably one Indian in a thousand has any idea why people come to Cuzco to look at ruinas. The rest have other things to think about, like getting enough to eat, and this has made Cuzco one of the continent's liveliest hotbeds of Communist agitation.

Communist-inspired "peasant uprisings" are old-hat in Cuzco, dating back to the early 1940s. Indeed, they're familiar all over Peru. At one point during World War 2, Communists took over Cuzco and built a giant hammer and sickle out of whitewashed stones on a hill overlooking the city.

The pattern hasn't changed too much since then. Last winter peasant leader Hugo Blanco organized an Indian militia in the Convencion Valley near here and carried out a series of hit-and-run harassments. At about the same time, there were strikes and fighting at the United States-owned Cerro de Pasco mines.

But the phenomenon is restricted neither to the cities nor to Peru alone. It's also seen in the countryside and in the other two Andean countries, Ecuador and Bolivia. Of the three nations, only Bolivia has made any attempt to bring the Indians into the national life. Peru has taken some nervous and tentative steps, and Ecuador has done almost nothing.

Yet the combined populations of the three countries total some 18,500,000, of which about 10 percent are white. About 40 per cent are pure Indian, and the rest are mixed-blood cholos, or mestizos. If the Indians and cholos join and develop their full power, the shape of northern South America may never be the same.

Communism, though, isn't the only persuasion that can rouse the normally placid Indians to violence. Another is the powerful chicha beer, the Andes' answer to home brew, which they drink in heavy amounts. In 1953 an anthropological field survey in Bolivia reported 979 bottles were consumed in one province for every adult man and woman, an average of 21 over 2 bottles a day.

Another agitating influence is extreme conservatism. One example: Last fall in Ecuador, a sanitation unit from the U.N.-sponsored Andean Indian Mission was attacked by Indians who'd been told the men were "Communist agents." A doctor and his assistant were killed, and the doctor's body was burned. The Ecuadorian press, pointing out the Communists certainly didn't tell the Indians the U.N. officials were "Communist agents," called the incident "a tragic consequence of the rivalry between the extreme left and the extreme right to win Indian support."

This incident and many others like it were blamed on conservative elements opposed to land reform or any other change in the status quo. The example of Bolivia has shown that once the Indian begins voting, he has little common cause with large landowning or industrial interests. Thus the best hope for the status quo is to keep the Indian ignorant, sick, poverty-stricken, and politically impotent.

And the Indians, living mainly on a barren plateau that ranges from 10,000 feet above sea level in Ecuador to 15,000 in Bolivia (Denver, by contrast, is 5,280 feet above), are curiously receptive to this conservatism. Ever since the Spaniards' destruction of his empire in the mid-Sixteenth Century, the Indian has viewed all change as for the worse --except, sometimes, the changes advocated by his Communist-inspired "peasant leaders." The word "government," for him, has been synonymous with "exploitation."

A fine old Indian tradition, now on the wane, was to greet all strangers with a hail of stones, because they invariably meant trouble. Until very recently any man arriving on "official business" might have meant an entire village was being sent into the mines to labor for the rest of their lives.

Even when convinced somebody is trying to help him, the Indian is loath to change his ways. Arnaldo Sanjines, a Bolivian working for the Inter-American Agricultural Service in La Paz, tells of stopping at a tiny farm to demonstrate a steel plow to an Indian using the same primitive plow his ancestors used 500 years ago. The old man tried the new plow and was obviously convinced of its superiority, but finally handed it back.

"Ah, senor," he said, "this is a wonderful plow, but I like my old wooden one and I think I will die with it."

Mr. Sanjines shakes his head sadly as he talks of the 12 years he has spent with the service, trying to convince the Indians to give up their ancient methods of farming. One of the main stumbling blocks, he says, is that the Indian lives almost entirely outside the money economy; he exists, as he always has, on a system of barter. One Indian, after walking for miles to a village market, returned home to say he'd been cheated out of all his produce because all he got for it was money.

There is a sharp distinction, however, between "city Indians" and those who stay in the mountains. From Bogota south, the Andean cities are overrun with Indian beggars, who have no qualms about lying on a downtown sidewalk and grabbing at the legs of any passers-by who look prosperous.

One of the most effective groups now working with the Indians in Bolivia is the Maryknoll Fathers, a Catholic order based in La Paz. Says one priest: "Bolivia hasn't got a chance unless the Indians join the country. We're making some progress here --more than the others, anyway. In Peru and Ecuador all they do is make the necessary concessions."

In 1957, Father Ryan, one of the Maryknoll veterans, started Radio Penas, which broadcasts lessons in Spanish to the millions of Indians who speak only Quechua or Aymara. With 3,000 fixed-frequency receivers, donated by Bloomingdale's in New York, the Maryknollers have taught about 7,000 Indians in the past five years to speak the language of the country. There is one class a day, but it is difficult to get the Indians to tune in at the right hour, because they tell time by the sun.

The focus of the "Indian problem" is Peru --the golden magnet that brought the Spaniards to South America in the Sixteenth Century. (In the first six months of the conquest, Francisco Pizarro and his men looted Inca temples of over $200,000,000 in gold ornaments, which they melted and sent back to Spain.) Peru was the scene of most of the conquest's bloody battles. In Peru, Pizarro chose to build Lima, his "City of Kings" from which the Spanish Viceroys ruled the Andes until they were driven out in 1821.

Today the "wealth of the Andes" is no longer gold, but the political power lying dormant in the Indian population. This explains the long and bitter struggle for Indian support between Peru's Communists and the American Popular Revolutionary Alliance (apra), the country's broadest-based political party.

Bolivia's 1952 revolution against dictatorial interests took the Indian pressure off that country; it gave the Indian land, a vote, and at least the beginnings of a say in the government. Nor does Ecuador seem immediately menacing; the boiling point there probably is still several years away.

But in Peru the pressure is on as it never has been before, and the main pressure point is here in Cuzco. And whoever consolidates Indian support in this nation will not only rule Peru but will influence events in Bolivia and Ecuador.

Today in Cuzco, though, tourists still wander about town and pay ragged Indians to pose for photos. They still take the little train to Machu Picchu to look at the fabled ruinas. They still sit in the comfortable old hotel and drink Pisco Sours while the waiters pull the blinds. But the Indians are still outside the windows, and if recent events are any indication, they are getting tired of having the blinds pulled on them.

Brazilshooting

National Observer, June 10, 1963

Rio De Janeiro.

Brazilian police have a reputation for extreme leniency, and the Brazilian army is said to be the most stable and democratically inclined in all of Latin America, but in recent weeks the administration of "justice" has taken on a new look in Brazil, and many people are beginning to wonder just what the army and the police exist for.

On a recent night, with the temperature at its normal 95 and air conditioners humming all over the city, an American journalist was awakened by a telephone call at 4:30 in the morning. It was a friend, calling from the nightclub district of Copacabana.

"Get down here as fast as you can!" the voice shouted. "Bring your camera! The Army is all over the streets with machine guns! They've blown the Domino all to pieces and they're killing people right outside the bar where I'm sitting --we've locked the door, but they may break it down!"

Ten minutes later the half-dressed journalist jumped out of a cab a block away from the action. He walked quickly, but very casually, toward the Domino Club, with his camera and flashgun cradled in one arm like a football. In a Latin American country nervous with talk of revolution, no man with good sense runs headlong into a shooting party, because he is likely to get stitched across the chest with Czech machine gun slugs.

But at 4:45 the Domino Club was quiet. It is --or was --a well-known clip joint, catering mainly to American tourists and wealthy Brazilians. The lure was girls --some young and pretty, others slightly piggy and painted after long years of service.

Now the Domino is a shell, a dark room full of broken glass and bullet holes. The doorman is dead; he was cut down by gunfire as he fled toward a nearby corner. The bartender is in the hospital with a bullet-crease down the side of his skull, and several patrons are wounded. Most observers say another man is dead, but the bodies were taken away so quickly that nobody can be sure.

What happened? The Correio de Manhã, one of Rio's best papers, explained it this way: In an editorial entitled, "Battlefield Copacabana," the paper said: "Copacabana was the scene of a military operation on Friday. A detachment of paratroopers under the command of two lieutenants sealed off a street in order to assault a nightclub with machine guns, hand grenades and tear gas. ."

Correio went on to say: "These arms have been acquired by the nation with the money of taxpayers and put at the disposal of the armed forces for the defense of the country, protection of the constitutional powers, and maintenance of the legal order. . . in the Copacabana case, they were not used for these purposes. ."

That was not all of it. The attack on the Domino, carried out by uniformed paratroopers wearing black greasepaint on their faces, was a case of pure and simple vengeance. Several weeks ago an Army sergeant was beaten to death as a result of a dispute over the size of his bill in the Domino. A few days later an Army captain stopped in the club to say that the Army intended to even the score. He was severely beaten by the doorman and several others. About ten days passed without incident, then the Army evened the score.

When the journalist arrived, the street was cordoned off at both ends by soldiers with fixed bayonets and machine guns. Several bodies --some dead, others still alive --were being put into trucks. There was a large crowd around the entrance to the Domino. The journalist took a few photos, then slipped through the cordon --only to be nailed immediately by a captain, who escorted him out.

"But the Brazilian press is in there," the American protested.

"Maybe so," the Captain replied, "but you're not Brazilian."

The journalist went around the block and slipped in from the other end, but by this time it was all over. The sky was getting light, and several blocks away a few early risers were out on Copacabana beach. In the middle of Rua Carvalho de Mendonca, where the body of the doorman had lain, was a large smear of blood and trampled flowers. Several cars were riddled with bullet holes. Near one corner, the cracks in the mosaic sidewalk were filled with blood, and there was a long smear across the sidewalk where a body had been dragged to a truck in the street. A drugstore had bullet holes in its windows, merchandise and glass counters inside. Concrete and marble walls on both sides of the street were pocked with bullet chips. On the sidewalk in front of the Domino lay a hand grenade that had failed to explode.

Had the grenade gone off inside the club, it could hardly have helped but kill at least one American --the Domino was always full of them --and the resulting furor would have been hard for Brazil to handle.

Even without the grenade, it is a wonder more people weren't killed in the attack. The soldiers burst through the door, ordered everybody to lie down on the floor, and sprayed the entire room with machine gun fire. The owner of the Domino, who was the main target of the raid, escaped into another nightclub. One patron grabbed a soldier's weapon and shot him with it. Another patron fled, they pulled a pistol and wounded one of the pursuing soldiers. Several witnesses say this man was the other dead body hauled off with that of the luckless doorman. But nobody knows for sure --except the Army, and the flow of information from that quarter has all but ceased.

The Rio police were not in on the Domino attack. They have problems of their own. In recent weeks the newspapers have reported a half-dozen cases of police killing vagrants and beggars, then dumping the bodies into nearby rivers that flow into Guanabara Bay. So far two policemen have been arrested. One confessed, and officials assured the press that both would be dismissed from the force.

A columnist on the Brazil Herald, Rio's English-language daily, observed that, "The method adopted by several members of the police to tackle the social problem and do away with misery by dumping beggars into a river... is not meeting with general approval, despite undeniable efficacy."

The Jornal do Brasil called for an immediate investigation, saying that policemen are suspected of "summarily applying the death penalty to individuals considered bad elements..." And, "The people [of Rio] imagine the terror used in some police departments to be normal treatment not only for dangerous criminals, but mere suspects and possibly even personal enemies of policemen."

One man voiced the opinion that "Dismissal from the force cannot in any way be considered cruel or unusual punishment for policemen who kill beggars and vagrants who bother them and get in their way while they are trying to do their job --which mainly consists of making the rounds to collect payoffs."

It was also pointed out that policemen dismissed from the force often go to work as doormen or bouncers for clubs like the Domino. Brazilian nightclubs, in fact, are not known for an excess of patience or generosity. A "ballerina" named Maria, recently fired from a club in a small town near Rio, made a complaint to the police, accusing the owner of the place of "transforming the backyard of his joint into a cemetery." The girl reported that "Customers who cannot pay the bill, or protest the amount, are invited to have a talk with him in the backyard, where they are shot and buried." The police promised to investigate.

Meanwhile, there is a lot of talk in Rio over the Domino incident. It was not the first time that the Army has taken commando-style vengeance on an unfriendly nightclub, but this was the first time anyone was machine-gunned. The question in most people's minds is, "What next?"

Said one Copacabana club-owner: "What am I supposed to do the next time a solider causes trouble in here? I have to treat him with kid gloves or they'll come in here and shoot me like an animal."

An American wondered what the reaction would be if soldiers from Fort Knox, Kentucky, shot up a bar in Louisville where a soldier had been cheated, beaten or even killed some weeks before. "I can't even conceive of it," he said, "but if it ever happened I bet they'd all hang."

Another American said, "Hell, when I was a lieutenant [in the U.S. Army] I could probably have requisitioned two trucks from the motor pool if I wanted to get back at some clip-joint, but I know damn well I could never have got two platoons of armed men to follow me."

There is the nut of the problem, and one of the biggest differences between the United States and not only Brazil, but all Latin American countries. Where civil authority is weak and corrupt, the Army is king by default. Even the words "Justice" and "Authority" take on different meanings. After the Domino attack, the Jornal do Brazil ran a follow-up story, headlined: "Army Sees No Crime in Its Action."

Or, as George Orwell observed, "In the kingdom of the blind, the one-eyed man is king."

National Observer, February 11, 1963

Chatty Letters During a Journey from Aruba to Rio

During the past seven months, journalist Hunter S. Thompson has been roaming through South America. His informative dispatches on social, economic, and political conditions there have been appearing in The National Observer.

But there's another side to reporting that seldom shows up in formal dispatches --the personal experiences of the digging, inquisitive newsman. These often give fascinating insights on the land and people. Witness these excerpts from Mr. Thompson's personal letters to his editor in Washington.

I am leaving by smuggling boat for Colombia in a few hours and am rushing to get this off before I go. [Article on Aruba, The National Observer, July 16.] It is probably too late and too long for you, but I hope not, because I think it is a good and valid look at island politics, personalities, etcetera

In about three days I plan to be in Barranquilla, Colombia. After Barran, I plan to go up the Magdalena River to Bogota, thence to Peru in time for the June 10 elections. But this is tentative.

Bogota, Columbia.

Here is a sort of offbeat travel piece that might interest you [Article on Guajira, The National Observer, August 6]. In Aruba, they are probably announcing the election results right about now and I imagine there are a lot of people digging holes in the bleak Aruba landscape.

If you can think of anything else you might want, let me know. By the time I get to Ecuador I will have seen most of Colombia at close range. If nothing else, I will have a lot of photos and, hopefully, an immunity to dysentery, which is now on me in full force.

The Valencia piece [Article on Colombia, The National Observer, June 24] will be in the mail tomorrow if they will stop ringing these bells --a mad clanging every five or ten minutes. Sometimes it goes on for 20, and bounces me around the hotel room the whole while. Between the dysentery, the bells, and the unceasing loudspeakers in the street I am half mad. (Ah, here go the bells again.) Ten minutes of it now; a lunatic in the belfry and worms in the stomach. What a town!

Cali, Columbia.

My figures sent earlier on the price of Colombian coffee on the world market are correct, but not nearly as dramatic as the following: Ninety cents a pound in 1954, 39 cents a pound in 1962. As I said, Colombia depends on coffee for 77 percent of its export earnings.

Incidentally, Colombia gets another 15 percent of its export earnings from petroleum. That leaves 8 percent as a base to begin "diversifying" with. Not much, eh? Some good minds are just about at the end of their tether with the problem.

While I'm talking here, the Alliance for Progress thing is a toughie, because most of the hard-nose opposition to it is sulky and silent. In a lot of cases, the Alliance faces a problem not unlike that of trying to convince Jay Gould that he is not acting in the best interests of his country.

Incidentally, Rojas Pinilla is without doubt the only dictator whose name is in the phone book in the capital city over which he once held sway. He lives in the best section of Bogota.

Cali, Columbia.

There is an alarming tendency (in Colombia, anyway) to view the problems of the local economies as essentially a thing for the Alliance to deal with. Almost like, "Thank God, Big Brother has finally come to the rescue --let him handle it." This is, of course, a generalization, but there is a lot of truth in it.

Another ominous note is the attitude of a lot of American businessmen I have talked to --"Sure, we'd like to help, but business is business, you know..." And everything they say makes sense on at least one level: Fears of arbitrary government price controls, expropriation, mounting labor difficulties, and the risks of long-term investments versus the near-certainty of the short.

Keeto, Ekwador.

The sun is shining to Quito, the mountains are green and sparkling around the town, and my mind is running to high gear.

Most everything I have to say, however, revolves in one way or another around questions of money. There seems to be a universal impression that I am on some sort of Divine Dole, and the theory that I often require money in order to make money has not gained wide acceptance. I trust you have sufficient background in Personal Economics to grasp the full meaning of this.

I could toss in a few hair-raising stories about what happens to poor Yanquis who eat cheap food, or the fact that I caught a bad cold to Bogota because my hotel didn't have hot water, but that would only depress us both. As it is, I am traveling at least half on gall. But in the course of these travels I have discovered that gall is not always the best currency, and there are times when I would be far better off with the other kind.

I am throwing this thing in your lap though I don't expect anyone to agree --at a distance of several thousand miles --with my certain knowledge that I am a paragon of wisdom, courage, decency, and visionary talent. On the other hand, I am working on my fourth case of dysentery, my stomach feels like a tree is growing in it, and I am medically forbidden to touch so much as a single beer.

Well, this is the longest letter I've written since I was in the Air Force and was sending love letters to a girl in Tallahassee. I don't expect you to be altogether happy with this one, but then the girl wasn't always happy with hers, either, and we both survived.

Ah, it is noon now, check-out time, and I can hear the clang of the cash register across the patio as they rack up another $7 to Senor Thompson, the gringo with the messy room.

Guayaquil, Ecuador.

Things are not going well here, my man. I limped in Saturday night after a spine-cracking train ride, and on Sunday discovered to my horror that the president and all the Guayaquil money men are leaving Wednesday for Washington. For this reason I am having a time seeing anyone --or at least the right people.

Aside from that problem, I am beset by other forms of plague. One, I have not had any word from my New York secretary in two weeks so I have no idea how I stand at the bank. Thus I am afraid to cash a check. The first time I bounce one down here I might as well give up and go back to the States.

The moneyed community on this continent, which is what you have to deal with when you want to cash checks, is like Melville's circle of Genius --which "all over the world stands hand to hand, and one shock of recognition runs the whole circle round." Which means, in my case, that if I bounce a check in Cali my reputation as a crook will precede me to Buenos Aires. So I have to be careful.

Optimism is a rare commodity here, and the daily harassments of life in Guayaquil are just about as much as a man should have to bear.

Guayaquil, Ecuador.

This is to confirm my not particularly pointed observations during yesterday's phone call, which I appreciated a whale of a lot and all the more because I suspect you did it primarily to keep me from feeding myself to the giant turtles.

Now I feel better in the head, if not in the stomach. On Monday I will fly to Lima. I could go before that but Saturday and Sunday are holidays and we just finished a five-day lull having to do with Ecuadorian history. These holidays are maddening; every time you turn around they are rolling down the store fronts and locking the offices. That, in addition to a noon to 4 p.m. lunch hour, makes work just about impossible.

I understand that while I was in Quito my secretary told you I was to Talara, Peru. I think the New York summer has affected her reason. Just for the record, I have never been near Talara and will do everything in my power to avoid it in the future.

I have a good peg on Peru. It may seem like heresy in Washington, but it is a fact that democracy is just about as popular here as eating live goldfish. I tell you now so you'll have time to ponder. (Some Sone half&?& has been throwing rocks at my window all night and if I hadn't sold my pistol I'd whip up the blinds and crank off a few rounds at his feet. As it is, all I can do is gripe to the desk.) The street outside is full of thugs, all drunk on pisco. In my weakened condition I am not about to go out there and tackle them like Joe Palooka.

It is all I can do to swing out of bed in the mornings and stumble to the shower, which has come to be my only pleasure. I am beginning to look like the portrait of Dorian Gray; pretty soon I am going to have to have the mirrors taken out.

Leema, Peru.

First, I want to assure you that I exist. There is at present 171 pounds of me --down from 189 in Aruba --and just about the same weight in luggage spread out around this room. I am barred once again from touching even a single beer, any fried foods, spices, pepper, and just about everything else except broiled meat and mineral water.

(Now this hotel doesn't have any more mineral water --How long, O Lord, how long?)

La Paz, Bolivya.

I blew in yesterday in unholy shape. This awful spate of pain and sickness puts the fear of God in a man. The latest was the sting of a poison insect in Cuzco, paralyzing my leg as if I'd been hit by a 50-pound sting-ray. Anyway, after two visits to the clinic, much cortisone, many infrared lamps, and the inevitable drink-prohibiting antibiotics I was at least able to walk with a cane fashioned out of one of the legs of my camera tripod. That is the state I am in now. I hobble around La Paz like a vet from the Indian wars, averaging about 100 yards an hour on the flats and more like a turtle on the hills.

At the end of this week there will be no electricity in La Paz. Now it is rationed to the point where the United States Embassy, for one, has elevator service only every other day. This means I have to go up five flights of stairs on one leg, so I have been impressed with the gravity of the situation.

They work it so that every section of the city gets a turn at having electricity. So on some days you have hot water, elevators, lights, etcetera, and on some days you don't. If the electricity goes off completely, however, I may have to flee. It is bad enough having to walk up the stairs on the cane, without having no lights or hot water when I get here. Or heat, I might add, and La Paz is cold at Christmas.

Rio De Janeiro, Brazil.

I've been trying to get off a letter for about a week now, but have been hopping across jungle and Matto Grosso, touring oil camps, and spending all my money on antibiotics.

I figure, though, that every week I've spent in these countries is a week I won't have to spend the next time I go back. An investment, as it were, and now that I've survived this much of the thing I think I'd be kicking myself right now if I'd just skimmed through.

I definitely mean to base here --for a while, anyway. It is about time I lived like a human being for a change.

National Observer, December 31, 1962 Ketchum, Idaho

"That poor old man. He used to walk out there on the road in the evenings. He was so frail and thin and old-looking that it was embarrassing to see him. I was always afraid a car would hit him, and that would have been an awful way for him to go. I was tempted to go out and tell him to be careful, and I would have if it had been anyone else. But with Hemingway it was different."

The neighbor shrugged and glanced at Ernest Hemingway's empty house, a comfortable looking chalet with a big pair of elk horns over the front door. It is built on a hillside looking down on the Big Wood River, and out across the valley at the Sawtooth Mountains.

A mile or so away, in a small graveyard at the north end of town, is Hemingway's simple grave, lying in the afternoon shadow of Baldy Mountain and the Sun Valley ski runs.

Beyond Baldy are the high pastures of the Wood River National Forest, where thousands of sheep graze in the summer, tended by Basque sheepherders from the Pyrenees. All winter long the grave is covered with deep snow, but in the summer tourists come out and take pictures of each other standing beside it. Last summer there was a problem with people taking chunks of earth for souvenirs.

When news of his death made headlines in 1961 there must have been other people besides myself who were not as surprised by the suicide as by the fact that the story was date-lined Ketchum, Idaho. What was he doing living there? When had he left Cuba, where most people assumed he was working, against what he knew was his last deadline, on the long-promised Big Novel?

The newspapers never answered those questions --not for me, at any rate --so it was with a feeling of long-restless curiosity that I came, last week, up the long bleak road to Ketchum, over the drainage divide between the Magic and the Wood River valleys, through Shoshone and Bellevue and Hailey --Ezra Pound's hometown --past Jack's Rock Shop on U.S. 93, and into Ketchum itself, population 783.

Anybody who considers himself a writer or even a serious reader cannot help but wonder just what it was about this outback little Idaho village that struck such a responsive chord in America's most famous writer. He had been coming here off and on since 1938, until finally, in 1960, he bought a home just outside of town, and, not incidentally a 10-minute drive from Sun Valley, which is so much a part of Ketchum that they are really one and the same.

The answers might be instructive --not only as a key to Hemingway, but to a question he often pondered, even in print. "We do not have great writers," he explains to the Austrian in Green Hills of Africa. "Something happens to our good writers at a certain age... You see we make our writers into something very strange... We destroy them in many ways." But Hemingway himself never seemed to discover in what way he was being "destroyed," and so he never understood how to avoid it.

Even so, he knew something had gone wrong with both himself and his writing, and after a few days in Ketchum you get a feeling that he came here for exactly that reason. Because it was here, in the years just before and after World War 2, that he came to hunt and ski and raise hell in the local pubs with Gary Cooper and Robert Taylor and all the other celebrities who came to Sun Valley when it still loomed large on cafe society's map of diversions.

Those were "the good years," and Hemingway never got over the fact that they couldn't last. He was here with his third wife in 1947, but then he settled in Cuba and 12 years went by before he came again --a different man this time, with yet another wife, Mary, and a different view of the world he had once been able "to see clear and as a whole."

Ketchum was perhaps the only place in his world that had not changed radically since the good years. Europe had been completely transformed, Africa was in the process of drastic upheaval, and finally even Cuba blew up around him like a volcano. Castro's educators taught the people that "Mr. Way" had been exploiting them, and he was in no mood in his old age to live with any more hostility than was necessary.

Only Ketchum seemed unchanged, and it was here that he decided to dig in. But there were changes here too; Sun Valley was no longer a glittering, celebrity-filled winter retreat for the rich and famous, but just another good ski resort in a tough league. "People were used to him here," says Chuck Atkinson, owner of a Ketchum motel. "They didn't bother him and he was grateful for it. His favorite time was the fall. We would go down to Shoshone for the pheasant shooting, or over on the river for some ducks. He was a fine shot, even toward the end, when he was sick."

Hemingway didn't have many friends in Ketchum. Chuck Atkinson was one of them, and when I saw him one morning in his house on a peak overlooking the town, he had just received a copy of A Moveable Feast. "Mary sent it from New York," he explained. "I read part of it after breakfast; it's good, it sounds more like him than some of the other stuff."

Another friend was Taylor "Beartracks" Williams, a veteran guide who died last year and was buried near the man who gave him the original manuscript of For Whom the Bell Tolls. It was "Beartracks" who took Hemingway into the mountains after elk, bear, antelope, and sheep in the days when "Papa" was still a meat-hunter.

Not surprisingly, Hemingway has acquired quite a few friends since his death. "You're writing a story on Ketcbum?" asked a bartender. "Why don't you do one on all the people who knew Hemingway? Sometimes I get the feeling I'm the only person in town who didn't."

Charley Mason, a wandering pianist, is one of the few people who spent much time with him, mainly listening, because "When Ernie had a few drinks he could carry on for hours with all kinds of stories. It was better than reading his books."

I met Mason in the Sawtooth Club on Main Street, when he came in to order coffee over the bar. He is off the booze these days and people who know him say he looks 10 years younger. As he talked, I had an odd feeling that he was somehow a creation of Hemingway's, that he had escaped from one of the earlier short stories.

"He was a hell of a drinker," Mason said with a chuckle. "I remember one time over at the Tram [a local pub] just a few years ago; he was with two Cubans --one was a great big Negro, a gun-runner he knew from the Spanish Civil War, and the other was a delicate little guy, a neurosurgeon from Havana with fine hands like a musician. That was a three-day session. They were blasted on wine the whole time and jabbering in Spanish like revolutionaries. One afternoon when I was there, Hemingway jerked the checkered cloth off the table and he and the other big guy took turns making the little doctor play the bull. They'd whirl and jerk the cloth around --it was a hell of a sight."

On another evening, out at Sun Valley, Mason took a break on the stand and sat down for a while at Hemingway's table. In the course of the conversation Mason asked him what it took "to break in on the literary life, or anything else creative, for that matter."

"Well," said Hemingway, "there's only one thing I live by --that's having the power of conviction and knowing what to leave out." He had said the same thing before, but whether he still believed it in the winter of his years is another matter. There is good evidence that he was not always sure what to leave out, and very little evidence to show that his power of conviction survived the war.

That power of conviction is a hard thing for any writer to sustain, and especially so once he becomes conscious of it. Fitzgerald fell apart when the world no longer danced to his music; Faulkner's conviction faltered when he had to confront Twentieth Century Negroes instead of the black symbols in his books; and when Dos Passos tried to change his convictions he lost all his power.

Today we have Mailer, Jones, and Styron, three potentially great writers bogged down in what seems to be a crisis of convictions brought on, like Hemingway's, by the mean nature of a world that will not stand still long enough for them to see it clear as a whole.

It is not just a writer's crisis, but they are the most obvious victims because the function of art is supposedly to bring order out of chaos, a tall order even when the chaos is static, and a superhuman task in a time when chaos is multiplying.

Hemingway was not a political man. He did not care for movements, but dealt in his fiction with the stresses and strains on individuals in a world that seemed far less complex, prior to World War 2, than it has since. Rightly or wrongly, his taste ran to large and simple (but not easy) concepts --to blacks and whites, as it were, and he was not comfortable with the multitude of gray shadings that seem to be the wave of the future.

It was not Hemingway's wave, and in the end he came back to Ketchum, never ceasing to wonder, says Mason, why he hadn't been killed years earlier in the midst of violent action on some other part of the globe. Here, at least, he had mountains and a good river below his house; he could live among rugged, non-political people and visit, when he chose to, with a few of his famous friends who still came up to Sun Valley. He could sit in the Tram or the Alpine or the Sawtooth Club and talk with men who felt the same way he did about life, even if they were not so articulate. In this congenial atmosphere he felt he could get away from the pressures of a world gone mad, and "write truly" about life as he had in the past.

Ketchum was Hemingway's Big Two Hearted River, and he wrote his own epitaph in the story of the same name, just as Scott Fitzgerald had written his epitaph in a book called The Great Gatsby. Neither man understood the vibrations of a world that had shaken them off their thrones, but of the two, Fitzgerald showed more resilience. His half-finished Last Tycoon was a sincere effort to catch up and come to grips with reality, no matter how distasteful it might have seemed to him.

Hemingway never made such an effort. The strength of his youth became rigidity as he grew older, and his last book was about Paris in the Twenties.

Standing on a corner in the middle of Ketchum it is easy to see the connection Hemingway must have made between this place and those he had known in the good years. Aside from the brute beauty of the mountains, he must have recognized an atavistic distinctness in the people that piqued his sense of dramatic possibilities. It is a raw and peaceful little village, especially in the off season with neither winter skiers nor summer fishermen to dilute the image. Only the main street is paved; most of the others are no more than dirt and gravel tracks that seem at times to run right through front yards.

From such a vantage point a man tends to feel it is not so difficult, after all, to see the world clear and as a whole. Like many another writer, Hemingway did his best work when he felt he was standing on something solid --like an Idaho mountainside, or a sense of conviction.

Perhaps he found what he came here for, but the odds are huge that he didn't. He was an old, sick, and very troubled man, and the illusion of peace and contentment was not enough for him --not even when his friends came up from Cuba and played bullfight with him in the Tram. So finally, and for what he must have thought the best of reasons, he ended it with a shotgun.

National Observer, May 25, 1964 Peer, S.D.

I had met the tramp digger the night before. And because he was broke and I wasn't, I bought him a hotel room so he wouldn't have to sleep in the grass beside the road to Spokane. But instead of traveling the next day, he took what was left of his cash and sat by himself on a stool at the Thunderbird Bar in downtown Missoula, sullenly nursing his drinks as he had the night before, and putting his change in the juke box, which can be a very expensive machine for those who need steady noise to keep from thinking.

It was four in the morning when he knocked on the door of my hotel room. "Sorry to bother you, pard," he said. "I heard your typewriter going, but I just got lonely, you know --I had to talk to somebody."

"Well," I said, not really surprised to find him still in town, "I guess we could both use some coffee. Let's go to the Oxford, it's open all night." We went down the stairs of the silent hotel and through the lobby where a sleepy desk clerk looked up and wondered, with that bailiff's leer that desk clerks have been cultivating since the beginning of time, just what sort of a journalist I was if it was necessary to have vagrants calling on me at this rude hour on a chill Montana morning.

Which may be a valid question. But then somebody else might ask what sort of a journalist would spend six weeks traveling around the West and not write about Bobby Cleary, the tramp digger with no home and a downhill run to a guaranteed early grave; Bob Barnes, the half-deaf wildcat trucker who never understood that his life was a desperate game of musical chairs; or the lean, stuttering redhead from Pennsylvania who said his name was Ray and had hitchhiked West to find a place "where a man can still make an honest living."

You will find them along the highways, in the all-night diners, and in the old brass-rail bars that still serve 10-cent beer --a motley, varied, and always talkative legion of men who fit no pattern except that they all seem like holdovers from the days of the Great Depression. You will not find them any place where men wear suits and ties or work at steady jobs. These are the boomers, the drifters, the hard travelers, and the tramp diggers who roam the long highways of the West as regularly and as stoically as other men ride the subways of New York City. Their work is where they find it, their luggage is rarely more than one small suitcase or a paper sack, and their view of the future is every bit as grim as it is limited.

These are the people who never got the message that rugged individualism has made some drastic adjustments in these hyper-organized times. They are still living in the era of Horace Greeley, Horatio Alger and in some cases, Eugene Debs. They want no part of "city living," but they have neither the education nor the interest to understand why it is ever more difficult for them to make a living "out here in the open." The demise of the easy-living, independent West has made them bitter and sometimes desperate. In the old days a man with abnormal variety of skills could roll into any Western hamlet or junction and find an odd job or two that would pay his way and usually provide a little margin to spend with the local sports.

Today it takes a union card before you can talk turkey with most construction foremen, and many of the big companies have a hard core of regulars who move from one project to another. You see them on the highways in Wyoming, Colorado, and the Dakotas, caravans of pickups pulling house trailers, flat-beds hauling bulldozers, and hard-faced men from California and Texas with their families in the cab and their automobiles riding high in the beds of big dump trucks en route from an interstate highway job in Montana, for instance, to a dam-building project in Colorado.

This is the well-paid elite of the tran-zee-unt construction industry that is getting fat on Federal projects that more and more Western states are coming to view as economic necessities.

Some people accuse Western governors, senators, and representatives of dipping into the "pork barrel," but others say these projects are no more than prudent allocations of the taxpayers' money for necessary construction that Western states either cannot or will not afford. At any rate it is a big industry in the West, a money tree for a lot of people including the foremen and the skilled heavy-equipment operators who make up the construction elite --and a massive source of both hope and frustration to the boomers, drifters, and other free-lance laborers who go high on the hog when they get hired, and live like hobos when they don't.

"Bud," the broad-shouldered, pot-bellied cat driver, was not unhappy with life when I met him in a big dance hall in Jackson, Wyo. He was wearing an expensive gray Stetson and a pair of fancy cowboy boots that had not made much of a dent in his $200-a-week salary on the road-building job outside of town. In the course of an hour he asked about 30 girls to dance, got turned down by at least 25, and spent the rest of his time posing regally at the bar, dispensing wisdom and humor in every direction. At one point he let his gaze flash over the crowd and pronounced in the manner of a man long-skilled in the squandering of vast sums: "These damn silly tourists think they're big spenders! Ha! We'll see." At that, he swept his change off the bar and disappeared.

The tramp digger in Missoula had not been so lucky. He wore a cheap, frayed windbreaker that was all but useless in the bitter nights of a late Rocky Mountain spring. He was tall, with the thick neck and sloping shoulders of a man who works with his back, but his eyes were dull in a slack face, and he walked with a weary shuffle that made him seem like an old man at 26.

As we walked along the deserted sidewalks of Higgins Avenue I asked him what plans he had. "I don't know, pard," he said with a shrug and a half smile, "maybe California, maybe Utah, it's all the same. I'll just hit the road when it gets light. There's always work for a good hard-rock digger."

Bobby Cleary was a specialist of sorts; as a tramp digger he is a body for hire in any kind of dangerous, underground work. He had come over from Butte where he said he was black-listed in the mines because he had quit too often. There was no work in Missoula, he was stone broke, and his prospects for the immediate future were not real bright. Now he looked up at the sky that was already getting gray, took the butt of an old cigaret from behind his ear, lit it, and recited what seemed to be his motto:

"That's the way it goes --first your money, then your clothes."

He had said it several times the night before, when we had struck up a conversation in the Thunderbird after he had frightened everybody else at the bar with a loud diatribe on "justice for the working man, by Jesus. My old man fought for the union and one of these days I'm gonna write it all down like Jack London. By Jesus he cared. He knew what it was like, and how about another whisky here, fella, for a no-count tramp digger!"

In the Oxford Cafe --or "The Ox," as it is called by its generally unemployed and often homeless habitues --I ordered coffee, and Cleary asked for "a bowl of beans." He looked at me and grinned: "I figure you're buyin', pard. Otherwise I'd have ordered a glass of water and crackers," he nodded. "Starch and water, it fills the belly."

I reached in the pocket of my leather sheepherder's jacket, pulled out a black, passport-sized wallet, and put two dollars on the counter. In the dreary dawn of a hobo's breakfast at the Oxford Cafe, that wallet seemed as out of place as a diplomatic pouch or a pair of cashmere Levi's.

It was a week or so later when the wallet embarrassed me again. I had picked up an elderly hitchhiker named Bob Barnes on Interstate 90 near the cattle town of Miles City, Mont. We stopped for gas at the North Dakota line, and I left the wallet on the dashboard while I wired up a defective muffler. When I got back in the car he said very quietly: "That's a real nice wallet; where did you get it?"

"Buenos Aires," I said, then immediately added, "Things are cheap down there." But I had not been quick enough and it showed in his face; here was a young punk with a fat black wallet, idly pulling rank on an old man who felt himself going down and out, for some reason that was either senseless or cruel, or both.

Bob Barnes was an ex-truck driver, who looked like an aging school-teacher. He was too old now for any chance of a job with the big hauling companies, but still able to work as a "wildcatter," which is like saying a pitcher cut loose by the Yankees might still catch on with the Mets. He had borrowed some money to come out from Minneapolis to Great Falls, Mont., where he had an old friend who owned a small trucking firm and would give him a job. But the friend had moved to California and nothing else was available --at least not before his money ran out, and when that happened he began riding his thumb back to Minneapolis with not even a toothbrush or a pack of cigarettes for luggage, and not a dime in his pocket.

When I picked him up around noon on Saturday, he had not eaten since Friday morning. "Every time I walked past one of those highway restaurants I thought about going in and asking if I could wash dishes for a meal," he said, "but I just couldn't do it. I'm not a bum and I don't know how to act like one."

We were together all afternoon, a long hot drive across the plains and the badlands to Bismark, but it was late in the day before he finally got around to admitting that his trip was not a lark of some kind.

When he finally began talking about himself, I wished he hadn't. His wife had been killed two years earlier in an automobile accident. Since then he had been a drifter, but it was a hard dollar for a man in his 50s, and this wild stab at a job in Montana was his last real idea what to do with himself. When he got back to Minneapolis he thought he could "arrange a loan until things get better."

Unlike the other boomers I met, Bob Barnes has gone the whole route and found it pretty barren in the homestretch. He has pushed big timber trucks through blizzards in northern Minnesota and driven straight through from Florida to Chicago with a load of tomatoes that would spoil if he stopped to sleep. He has driven every kind of rig on every major highway in the nation. He knows the names of waitresses in truck stops in Virginia and Texas and Oregon. And he can tell you how to get from New York to Los Angeles with a heavyweight load by taking back roads and avoiding the truck scales; there is only one route left, and only a few veteran wildcatters know it.

I dropped him at the Salvation Army in Bismarck, where he could get a bowl of soup and a cot for the night before striking out again in the morning for Minneapolis. We shook hands and wished each other good luck. I felt like a pious hypocrite and drove off rapidly, without looking back.

Several days later, on the flat black ribbon that runs from Bismarck down the prairie to Pierre, I picked up a young, happy-go-lucky type from Pennsylvania. He had just quit a hay-hauling job in North Dakota and was on his way to Los Angeles, where he felt sure of getting a job.

Maybe so, I thought, but I hope I don't have to pick you up in 10 years when they've really tightened the screws, because the day of the boomer is rapidly coming to an end. In the age of automation and job security, a touch of the wanderlust is the kiss of death. In any count of the chronically unemployed the boomers will be very prominent; they have never sought security, but only work; they have never saved, but only earned and spent --participating, as it were, in an increasingly technological economy that has less and less room for their sort with every passing year.

When we got to Pierre I dropped the young optimist and his blue plastic suitcase on the south side of town. He got out in the middle of a small dust storm and pointed his thumb toward Los Angeles.

I returned to the Holiday Inn --where they have a swimming pool and air-conditioned rooms --to consider the paradox of a nation that has given so much to those who preach the glories of rugged individualism from the security of countless corporate sinecures, and so little to that diminishing band of yesterday's refugees who still practice it, day by day, in a tough, rootless and sometimes witless style that most of us have long since been weaned away from.

National Observer, July 13, 1964

Marlon Brando and the Indian Fish-In

Olympia, Wash.

"As an actor, he's not much of a field general." That was the consensus here last week after Marlon Brando's well-publicized but few-tul and disorganized attempt to help local Indians "regain" fishing rights granted them more than 100 years ago under treaties with the U.S. Government.

The old Governor Hotel, just down the street from the State Capitol, was almost taken over by Indians who came from every corner of the nation to protest "encroachment" on their historic treaty rights. The show was billed as the turning point for the American Indian in this century. Said one of the leaders: "Up to now we've always been on the defensive, but now we've reached a point where it's life or death for the Indian culture, and we've decided to take the offensive."

Early rumors had it that not only Mr. Brando, but Paul Newman, James Baldwin, and Eugene Burdick would be on hand to offer moral support and draw publicity. But of the four only Mr. Brando showed up, along with writers Kay Boyle and Paul Jacobs from San Francisco, and the Rev. John J. Yaryan, canon precenter of San Francisco Grace Cathedral. The canon arrived with a white bucket marked "bait," and the blessing of his bishop, James A. Pike. The idea was to stage a "fish-in" for the Indian cause.

More than 50 tribes were represented by some 500 Indians at the gathering, and one of the leaders said happily that it was the first time Indians had demonstrated any unity since the battle of Little Big Horn.

This time, though, things didn't go so well for the red man. Mr. Brando led the Indians in three separate assaults against "the forces of injustice," and they lost all three. By week's end, the show had fizzled out and Mr. Brando was off in the wilderness of the northwest Olympic Peninsula, trying to get himself arrested again and prove some point that had long since been lost in the chaos that characterized the affair from beginning to end.

Even so, the thing was a qualified success almost in spite of itself. Among the important results were:

--A new feeling of unity among Indians, where previously there had been none.

--Plenty of publicity for the Indian cause, thanks largely to Mr. Brando's presence.

--The emergence of a new, dynamic leadership in the form of the National Indian Youth Council.

--Emergence of the fact that the Indian wants no part of the Negro civil-rights cause and will make every effort to detach himself from it.

--The inescapable conclusion that the Indians still have a long way to go before they can speak with one voice, or even make themselves heard effectively without the help of people like Mr. Brando.

The aim of the whole affair was to protest the state of Washington's forbidding the Indians to fish with nets on certain areas outside their tiny reservations.

The Indians point out that the Treaty of Medicine Creek, signed in 1854 by representatives of Washington state Indians and the U.S. Government, deprived them of their reservations but permitted them to fish in "usual and accustomed places." So, they claim, did other treaties of similar vintage.

The most "usual" place for these Indians --mostly members of the Nisqually and Puyalhip tribes --has been the Nisqually River, fed by a Mount Rainier glacier and cutting 60 miles to enter Puget Sound a few miles south of Tacoma.

In recent years they have used nylon gill nets and other increasingly effective gear of the white man --to the discomfiture of sportsmen restricted to rod and reel, commercial fishermen banned from the river entirely, and fisheries officials who fear complete loss of salmon and steelhead trout runs.

So last month the State Supreme Court ruled that the state can restrict off-reservation Indian net-fishing in areas it deems the more necessary to protect salmon and steelhead runs. The state did so, and the Indians promptly claimed this action violated the Treaty of Medicine Creek.

Says Janet McCloud, Tulalip Indian whose husband fishes the Nisqually: "They [the original treaty-makers] promised us we could fish for eternity --as long as the mountain stands, the grass grows green, and the sun shines. ." The State Game Department, she said, thinks the steelhead belongs to the white man. "They must think the steelhead swam over behind the Mayflower."

Since the state restricted their fishing, the Indians have been organizing in protest. The state, by way of defense of its action, points to the majority decision of the Supreme Court, which said, "None of the signatories to the original treaty contemplated fishing with a 600-foot nylon gill net, which could prevent the escapement of any fish up the river for spawning purposes."

The Indians deny this. They say such factors as pollution and dam-building are contributing heavily to depletion of Washington's fish, and add that only 30 per cent of fish caught in Washington are caught by Indians --the rest going to sportsmen and white commercial fishermen.

That was the background to last week's developments. For the Indians, the week began well and became progressively worse. On Monday Mr. Brando and Canon Yaryan got themselves arrested for using a drift net to catch two steelheads in the Puyallup River near Tacoma, where a recently issued injunction forbids net-fishing by Indians or anyone else. They also got a lot of half-serious publicity, but to Mr. Brando's chagrin the charges were quickly dropped. Said Pierce County Prosecutor John McCutcheon: "Brando is no fisherman. He was here to make a point. There's no use prolonging this thing."

And so, reluctantly, the rest of the day was taken up with a series of strategy meetings dominated by Mr. Brando and a bevy of lawyers, one of whom gave a nearly superhuman performance by managing to appear in almost as many news photographs as did Mr. Brando.

So the "fish-in" proved nothing except that a Hollywood actor and an Episcopal minister can fish illegally in Washington and get away with it. The Indians were no better off, and the only one who took the risk of fishing with Mr. Brando and the canon now faces a contempt-of-court charge for defying an injunction.

Nor did a mass demonstration at the State Capitol on Tuesday help the cause. Governor Albert D. Rosellini, along with about 1,500 others, listened to several fiery speeches and a "proclamation of protest" concerning "harassment" of Indians, then gave a flat "no" to proposals that Indians be given greater freedom to fish in "the usual and accustomed places." To do so, said the governor, would be to condone a "hazard" to state fish resources.

Mr. Brando called the governor's stand "unsatisfactory" and said he would step up his efforts on behalf of the Indians. "We're prepared to go all the way to the wall with this thing," he told reporters. "I'll keep on fishing, and if it means going to jail, I'll go to jail."

All of which made good copy for the local press, but nobody seemed to know what good would come of it. At one point, a lynx-eyed young lady in a very tight dress asked the actor if it was true that some of the Indians resented his new role as "the Indian spokesman."

Her question was merely the public echo of a feeling that quite a few people had expressed in private. There was no doubt that Mr. Brando's presence at the affair drew a lot of public attention, but much of it was irrelevant and led to speculation --some in print --that he was "doing the whole thing for personal publicity."

He wasn't, but he so completely dominated the scene that many of the Indians felt lucky when anyone noticed them at all. The issue came to a head when a television network scheduled an interview with several leaders of the youth council. It was a chance for the Indians to present their point of view to a nationwide audience that is largely ignorant of their problems. But Mr. Brando vetoed the interview because he had plans for another "fish-in" on the same day, and wanted all the Indians with him.

Unfortunately, he couldn't convince the press to drive four hours through a rainstorm to cover an event that seemed to have no news value. Contrary to his expectations, the publicity effort was a flop.

In all, the whole affair suffered badly from lack of organization. Mr. Brando was undoubtedly sincere in his effort; he talked persuasively and at great length about Indian problems, but he seemed to have no strategy except to get himself arrested.

Only three or four people among the several hundred involved seemed to have any idea what was happening from one hour to the next. An air of mystery and intrigue pervaded the whole affair. Mr. Brando explained it as being necessary to keep the authorities in the dark, but the authorities were several jumps ahead of him at every turn, and the only people really in the dark were the reporters, who were generally sympathetic at first; the Indians, many of whom had taken time off from their jobs to come to Olympia and accomplish something; and the lawyers, whose laboriously contrived strategy proved ineffective at every showdown.

Aside from lack of organization, another root problem was the Indians' fear of getting their "cause" identified in the public mind with the Negro civil-rights movement. "We're happy to have Marlon on our side," said one Indian leader. "But he's one of our big problems, too, because he keeps making statements comparing Indians and Negroes; the two movements are entirely different. The Negroes don't have the law on their side yet and they have a lot of popular prejudice against them, while the Indians' problem is the Federal bureaucracy; we already have the law on our side in the form of treaties, and all we ask the white man to do is live up to those treaties."

A press statement explaining why a proclamation of protest was being presented to the governor was very explicit on this subject: "The presentation shall be conducted in such a manner as to ensure that the great pride and dignity of the Indian people will be upheld." Many Indians are very touchy about their pride, and regard the Negro effort as crude and undignified.

Here in Washington state, in fact, a "splinter group" of Indians has caused a schism in Indian ranks by retaining Jack Tanner, president of the Tacoma Branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (N.A.A.C.P), to represent them. Mr. Tanner, a Negro, called the Olympia protest "ridiculous," and on Wednesday had five clients stage a separate "fish-in" of their own, for which they were immediately arrested.

As the Indians press their fight, the youth council probably will do much of the fighting, and its emergence here was a major event. Up to now the relation between these "young Turks" and the Indians' traditional tribal councils has been roughly the same as once existed between young Negroes and the N.A.A.C.P --the youths often felt they were "on the outside." But last week they were clearly running the Indian show.

"Sure, we made a lot of mistakes," says Clyde Warrior, one of the most aggressive of the young Turks, "so now we know what not to do next time. This was just a beginning. Wait until we get rolling."

Which will take a bit of time. The youth council operates on a financial shoestring, and its members hold down full-time jobs to support themselves. Most are college graduates, more articulate than their elders, and much more willing to "offend a few people," as Mr. Warrior says, in order to get things done.

The significant thing about last week's events here, in fact, was just that: The Indians, young and old, were willing "to offend a few people." Throughout the country, Indians are doing battle with Federal and state governments over a variety of causes. And even though last week's "fish-in" and assorted protests here resulted only in a stand-off, the attitudes they represented could have wide-ranging repercussions.

National Observer, March 9, 1964

The "Hashbury" Is the Capital of the Hippies

San Francisco.

In 1965 Berkeley was the axis of what was just beginning to be called the "New Left." Its leaders were radical, but they were also deeply committed to the society they wanted to change. A prestigious faculty committee said the Berkeley activists were the vanguard of "a moral revolution among the young," and many professors approved.

Now, in 1967, there is not much doubt that Berkeley has gone through a revolution of some kind, but the end result is not exactly what the original leaders had in mind. Many one-time activists have forsaken politics entirely and turned to drugs. Others have even forsaken Berkeley. During 1966, the hot center of revolutionary action on the Coast began moving across the bay to San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury district, a run down Victorian neighborhood of about 40 square blocks between the Negro/Fillmore district and Golden Gate Park.

The "Hashbury" is the new capital of what is rapidly becoming a drug culture. Its denizens are not called radicals or beatniks, but "hippies" --and perhaps as many as half are refugees from Berkeley and the old North Beach scene, the cradle and the casket of the so-called Beat Generation.

The other half of the hippy population is too young to identify with Jack Kerouac, or even with Mario Savio. Their average age is about 20, and most are native Californians. The North Beach types of the late nineteen-fifties were not nearly as provincial as the Haight-Ashbury types are today. The majority of beatniks who flocked into San Francisco 10 years ago were transients from the East and Midwest. The literary-artistic nucleus --Kerouac, Ginsberg, et al --was a package deal from New York. San Francisco was only a stop on the big circuit: Tangier, Paris, Greenwich Village, Tokyo and India. The senior beats had a pretty good idea what was going on in the world; they read newspapers, traveled constantly and had friends all over the globe.

The world "hip" translates roughly as "wise" or "tuned-in." A hippy is somebody who "knows" what's really happening, and who adjusts or grooves with it. Hippies despise phoniness; they want to be open, honest, loving and free. They reject the plastic pretense of 20th-century America, preferring to go back to the "natural life," like Adam and Eve. They reject any kinship with the Beat Generation on the ground that "those cats were negative, but our thing is positive." They also reject politics, which is "just another game." They don't like money, either, or any kind of aggressiveness.

A serious problem in writing about the Haight-Ashbury is that most of the people you have to talk to are involved, one way or another, in the drug traffic. They have good reason to be leery of strangers who ask questions. A 22-year-old student was recently sentenced to two years in prison for telling an undercover narcotics agent where to buy some marijuana. "Love" is the password in the Haight-Ashbury, but paranoia is the style. Nobody wants to go to jail.

At the same time, marijuana is everywhere. People smoke it on the sidewalks, in doughnut shops, sitting in parked cars or lounging on the grass in Golden Gate Park. Nearly everyone on the streets between 20 and 30 is a "head," a user, either of marijuana, L.S.D, or both. To refuse a proffered "joint" is to risk being labeled a "nark" --narcotics agent --a threat and a menace to almost everybody.

With a few loud exceptions, it is only the younger hippies who see themselves as a new breed. "A completely new thing in this world, man." The ex-beatniks among them, many of whom are now making money off the new scene, incline to the view that hippies are, in fact, second-generation beatniks and that everything genuine in the Haight-Ashbury is about to be swallowed --like North Beach and the Village --in a wave of publicity and commercialism.

Haight Street, the Great White Way of what the local papers call "Hippieland," is already dotted with stores catering mainly to the tourist trade. Few hippies can afford a pair of $20 sandals or a "mod outfit" for $67.50. Nor can they afford the $3.50 door charge at the Fillmore Auditorium and the Avalon Ballroom, the twin wombs of the "psychedelic, San Francisco, acid-rock sound." Both the Fillmore and the Avalon are jammed every weekend with borderline hippies who don't mind paying for the music and the light shows. There is always a sprinkling of genuine, barefoot, freaked-out types on the dance floor, but few of them pay to get in. They arrive with the musicians or have other good connections.

Neither of the dance palaces is within walking distance of the Hashbury, especially if you're stoned, and since only a few of the hippies have contacts in the psychedelic power structure, most of them spend their weekend nights either drifting around on Haight Street or loading up on acid --L.S.D --in somebody's pad. Some of the rock bands play free concerts in Golden Gate Park for the benefit of those brethren who can't afford the dances. But beyond an occasional Happening in the park, the Haight-Ashbury scene is almost devoid of anything "to do" --at least by conventional standards. An at-home entertainment is nude parties at which celebrants paint designs on each other.

There are no hippy bars, for instance, and only one restaurant above the level of a diner or a lunch counter. This is a reflection of the drug culture, which has no use for booze and regards food as a necessity to be acquired at the least possible expense. A "family" of hippies will work for hours over an exotic stew or curry in a communal kitchen, but the idea of paying $3 for a meal in a restaurant is out of the question.

Some hippies work, others live on money from home and many are full-time beggars. The Post Office is a major source of hippy income. Jobs like sorting mail don't require much thought or effort. A hippy named Admiral Love of the Psychedelic Rangers delivers special-delivery letters at night. The admiral is in his mid-20's and makes enough money to support an apartmentful of younger hippies who depend on him for their daily bread.

There is also a hippy-run employment agency on Haight Street and anyone needing part-time labor or some kind of specialized work can call and order as many freaks as he needs; they might look a bit weird, but many are far more capable than most "temporary help," and vastly more interesting to have around.

Those hippies who don't work can easily pick up a few dollars a day panhandling along Haight Street. The fresh influx of curiosity-seekers has proved a great boon to the legion of psychedelic beggars. During several days of roaming around the area, I was touched so often that I began to keep a supply of quarters in my pocket so I wouldn't have to haggle over change. The panhandlers are usually barefoot, always young and never apologetic. They'll share what they collect anyway, so it seems entirely reasonable that strangers should share with them.

The best show on Haight Street is usually on the sidewalk in front of the Drag Store, a new coffee bar at the Corner of Masonic Street. The Drog Store features an all-hippy revue that runs day and night. The acts change sporadically, but nobody cares. There will always be at least one man with long hair and sunglasses playing a wooden pipe of some kind. He will be wearing either a Dracula cape, a long Buddhist robe, or a Sioux Indian costume. There will also be a hairy blond fellow wearing a Black Bart cowboy hat and a spangled jacket that originally belonged to a drum major in the 1949 Rose Bowl parade. He will be playing the bongo drums. Next to the drummer will be a dazed-looking girl wearing a blouse (but no bra) and a plastic mini-skirt, slapping her thighs to the rhythm of it all.

These three will be the nucleus of the show. Backing them up will be an all-star cast of freaks, every one of them stoned. They will be stretched out on the sidewalk, twitching and babbling in time to the music. Now and then somebody will fall out of the audience and join the revue; perhaps a Hell's Angel or some grubby, chain-draped impostor who never owned a motorcycle in his life. Or maybe a girl wrapped in gauze or a thin man with wild eyes who took an overdose of acid nine days ago and changed himself into a raven. For those on a quick tour of the Hashbury, the Drog Store revue is a must.

Most of the local action is beyond the reach of anyone without access to drugs. There are four or five bars a nervous square might relax in, but one is a Lesbian place, another is a hangout for brutal-looking leather fetishists and the others are old neighborhood taverns full of brooding middle-aged drunks. Prior to the hippy era there were three good Negro-run jazz bars on Haight Street, but they soon went out of style. Who needs jazz, or even beer, when you can sit down on a public curbstone, drop a pill in your mouth, and hear fantastic music for hours at a time in your own head? A cap of good acid costs $5, and for that you can hear the Universal Symphony, with God singing solo and the Holy Ghost on drums.

Drugs have made formal entertainment obsolete in the Hashbury, but only until somebody comes up with something appropriate to the new style of the neighborhood. This summer will see the opening of the new Straight Theater, formerly the Haight Theater, featuring homosexual movies for the trade, meetings, concerts, dances. "It's going to be a kind of hippy community center," said Brent Dangerfield, a young radio engineer from Salt Lake City who stopped off in San Francisco on his way to a job in Hawaii and now is a partner in the Straight. When I asked Dangerfield how old he was he had to think for a minute. "I'm 22," he said finally, "but I used to be much older."

Another new divertissement, maybe, will be a hippy bus line running up and down Haight Street, housed in a 1930 Fagol bus --a huge, lumbering vehicle that might have been the world's first house trailer. I rode in it one afternoon with the driver, a young hippy named Tim Thibeau who proudly displayed a bathtub under one of the rear seats. The bus was a spectacle even on Haight Street: people stopped, stared and cheered as we rumbled by, going nowhere at all. Thibeau honked the horn and waved. He was from Chicago, he said, but when he got out of the Army he stopped in San Francisco and decided to stay. He was living, for the moment, on unemployment insurance, and his plans for the future were hazy. "I'm in no hurry," he said. "Right now I'm just taking it easy, just floating along." He smiled and reached for a beer can in the Fagol's icebox.

Dangerfield and Thibeau reflect the blind optimism of the younger hippy element. They see themselves as the vanguard of a new way of life in America --the psychedelic way --where love abounds and work is fun and people help each other. The young hippies are confident that things are going their way.

The older hippies are not so sure. They've been waiting a long time for the world to go their way, and those most involved in the hip scene are hedging their bets this time. "That back to nature scene is okay when you're 20," said one. "But when you're looking at 35 you want to know something's happening to you."

Ed Denson, at 27, is an ex-beatnik, ex-Goldwaterite, ex-Berkeley radical and currently the manager of a successful rock band called Country Joe and the Fish. His home and headquarters is a complex of rooms above a liquor store in Berkeley. One room is an art studio, another is an office; there is also a kitchen, a bedroom and several sparsely furnished areas without definition.

Denson is deeply involved in the hippy music scene, but insists he's not a hippy. "I'm very pessimistic about where this thing is going," he said. "Right now it's good for a lot of people. It's still very open. But I have to look back at the Berkeley scene. There was a tremendous optimism there, too, but look where all that went. The Beat Generation? Where are they now? What about hula-hoops? Maybe this hippy thing is more than a fad; maybe the whole world is turning on but I'm not optimistic. Most of the hippies I know don't really understand what kind of a world they're living in. I get tired of hearing about what beautiful people we all are. If the hippies were more realistic they'd stand a better chance of surviving."

Most hippies take the question of survival for granted, but it's becoming increasingly obvious as the neighborhood fills with penniless heads, that there is simply not enough food and lodging to go around. A partial solution may come from a group called the "Diggers," who have been called the "worker-priests" of the hippy movement and the "invisible government" of the Hashbury. The Diggers are young and aggressively pragmatic; they have set up free lodging centers, free soup kitchens and free clothing distribution centers. They comb the neighborhood soliciting donations of everything from money to stale bread to camping equipment. Diggers' signs are posted in local stores, asking for donations of hammers, saws, shovels, shoes and anything else that vagrant hippies might use to make themselves at least partially self-supporting.

The name and spirit derive from small groups of 17th-century English rural revolutionaries, called both Diggers and True Levelers, who had a number of Socialist ideas. Money should be abolished, communal farms could support all those willing to work them, and individual ownership of land would be outlawed. The Diggers were severely harassed and the movement eventually caved in under the weight of public opprobrium.

The Hashbury Diggers have fared a bit better, but the demand for food and lodging is beginning to exceed the supply. For a while, the Diggers were able to serve three meals, however meager, each afternoon in Golden Gate Park. But as the word got around, more and more hippies showed up to eat, and the Diggers were forced to roam far afield to get food. Occasionally there were problems, as when Digger chieftain Emmett Grogan, 23, called a local butcher a "Fascist pig and a coward" when he refused to donate meat scraps. The butcher whacked Grogan with the flat side of his meat cleaver.

The Digger ethic of mass sharing goes along with the American Indian motif that is basic to the Hashbury scene. The cult of "tribalism" is regarded by many of the older hippies as the key to survival. Poet Gary Snyder, a hippy guru, sees a "back to the land" movement as the answer to the food and lodging problem. He urges hippies to move out of the cities, form tribes, purchase land and live communally in remote areas. He cites a hippy "clan" calling itself the Maha-Lila as a model (though the clan still dwells in the Hashbury):

"Well, now," Snydar says, "like, you are asking how it's going to work. Well, the Maha-Lila is a group of about three different families who have sort of pooled their resources, which are not very great. But they have decided to pay together and to work together and to take care of each other and that means all of them have ways of getting a small amount of bread, which they share. And other people contribute a little money when it comes in. And then they work together on creative projects, like they're working together on a light-show right now for a poetry reading that we're going to give. And they consider themselves a kind of extended family or clan."

"That's the model. They relate it to a larger sense of the tribe, which is loose, but for the time being everybody has to be able --from time to time --to do some little job. The thing that makes it different is that you don't have a very tight monogamous family unit, but a slightly larger unit where the sharing is greater."

The tribal concept makes a lot better sense than simply depending on the Diggers. There are indications, however, that the youthful provincialism of the Haight-Ashbury is due for a forced consciousness-expansion. For the past few months, the scene has been filled up with would-be hippies from other parts of the country, primarily Los Angeles and New York. The real influx is expected this summer. The city is rife with rumors, reliable and otherwise, that anywhere from 50,000 to 200,000 "indigent young people" will descend on San Francisco as soon as the school year ends.

The Diggers are appalled at the prospect. "Where are they going to stay?" says one. "What are they going to do?" A girl who works in one of the Digger kitchens shrugs and says: "The Diggers will continue to receive the casualties of the love generation." Local officials, from the Mayor down, are beginning to panic. Civic leaders in the Haight-Ashbury have suggested that sleeping facilities be provided in Golden Gate Park or in nearby Kezar Stadium but Police Chief Tom Cahill said no.

"Law and order will prevail," he insisted. "There will be no sleeping in the park. There are no sanitation facilities and if we let them camp there we would have a tremendous health problem. Hippies are no asset to the community. These people do not have the courage to face the reality of life. They are trying to escape. Nobody should let their young children take part in this hippy thing."

In March, the city's Health Director, Dr. Ellis Sox, sent a task force of inspectors on a door-to-door sweep of the Haight-Ashbury. Reports of as many as 200 people living in one house or 50 in one apartment had stirred rumors of impending epidemics in the neighborhood. In a two-day blitz, eight teams of inspectors checked roughly 1,400 buildings and issued a total of 65 deadline notices to repair sanitation faults. But only 16 of the 65 notices, according to The San Francisco Chronicle, were issued to occupants "whose bizarre dress and communal living habits could class them as hippies."

Dr. Sox had no choice but to back off. "The situation is not as bad as we thought," he said. "There has been a deterioration [of sanitation] in the Haight-Ashbury, but the hippies did not contribute much more to it than other members of the neighborhood." Dr. Sox went on to deny that his mass inspection was part of a general campaign against weirdos, but nobody seemed to believe him.

The Haight-Ashbury Neighborhood Council, a nonhippy group of permanent residents, denounced Dr. Sox for his "gratuitous criticism of our community." The council accused city officials of "creating an artificial problem" and harassing the hippies out of "personal and official" prejudice.

As recently as 1962, the Haight-Ashbury was a drab, working-class district, slowly filling with Negroes and so plagued by crime and violence that residents formed vigilante patrols. Housewives were mugged on the way to the grocery store, teenagers were slashed and stomped in gang rumbles, and every drunk on Haight Street was fair game for local jack-rollers.

Now, with the coming of the drug culture, even the squarest of the neighborhood old-timers say the streets are safer than they have been for years. Burglaries are still a problem but violence is increasingly rare. It is hard to find anyone outside the hippy community who will say that psychedelic drugs have made the neighborhood a better place to live. But it's even harder to find a person who wouldn't rather step over a giggling freak on the sidewalk than worry about hoodlums with switch-blades. The fact that the hippies and the squares have worked out such a peaceful coexistence seems to baffle the powers at City Hall.

A lot of cheap labels describe what is happening in the Hashbury, but none make much sense: the Love Generation, the Happening Generation, the Combine Generation and even the L.S.D Generation. The last is the best of the lot, but in the interest of accuracy it should probably be amended to the Head Generation.

A "head," in the language of hip, is a user of psychedelic drugs: L.S.D, marijuana ("grass"), mescaline, peyote, methedrine, benzedrine, and a half-dozen others that are classified in the trade as mind-stimulating, consciousness-expanding, or "head" drugs. At the other end of the spectrum are "body" drugs: opium, heroin, barbiturates and even alcohol. These are basically depressants, while head drugs are stimulants. But neither type comes with a manufacturer's guarantee, and the Hashbury is full of people whose minds have been jerked around savagely by drugs that were supposed to induce peaceful euphoria.

Another hazard is the widespread tendency to mix two or three drugs at one time. Acid and alcohol can be a lethal combination, causing fits of violence, suicidal depression and a general freakout that ends in jail or a hospital.

There is widespread concern, at least in San Francisco, about the dangers of so many people using so much L.S.D. A doctor at San Francisco General Hospital says there are at least 10,000 hippies in the Haight-Ashbury, and that about four of them a day wind up in a psychiatric ward on bad trips. He estimates that acidheads make up only 11 over 2 per cent of the city's population, but that the figure for the Haight-Ashbury is more like 100 per cent.

The estimate is absurd; if every hippy in the Hashbury took acid every day, the percentage of users in the neighborhood would still be less than 50 per cent. Many of the local squares try grass from time to time, but few have worked up an appetite for L.S.D; the difference in potency is roughly the same as the difference between beer and grain alcohol. Even among hippies, anything more than one dose of acid a week is considered excessive.

Most heads are relatively careful about their drug diets, but in recent months the area has attracted so many young, inexperienced hippies that public freak-outs are a fairly routine thing. Neighborhood cops complain that acidheads throw themselves in front of moving cars, strip naked in grocery stores and run through plate-glass windows. On weekdays, the action is about on a par with Macdougal Street in Greenwich Village, but weekend hippies and nervous voyeurs from the suburbs make Saturdays and Sundays a nightmarish traffic jam. The sidewalks are so crowded that even a mild freak-out is likely to cause a riot.

Municipal buses no longer use Haight Street on weekends; they were rerouted after mobs of hippies staged sit-down strikes in the street, called mill-ins, which brought all traffic to a standstill. The only buses still running regularly along Haight Street are those from the Gray Line, which recently added "Hippieland" to its daytime sightseeing tour of San Francisco. It was billed as "the only foreign tour within the continental limits of the United States" and was an immediate hit with tourists who thought the Haight-Ashbury was a human zoo. The only sour note on the tour was struck by the occasional hippy who would run alongside the bus, holding up a mirror.

Last year in Berkeley, hard-core political radicals who had always viewed hippies as spiritual allies began to worry about the long-range implications of the Haight-Ashbury scene. Students who once were angry activists were content to live back in their pads and smile at the world through a fog of marijuana smoke --or, worse, to dress like clowns or American Indians and stay zonked for days at a time on L.S.D.

Even in Berkeley, political rallies during 1966 had overtones of music, madness and absurdity. Instead of picket signs and revolutionary slogans, more and more demonstrators carried flowers, balloons and colorful posters featuring slogans from Dr. Timothy Leary, the high priest of acid. The drug culture was spreading faster than political activists realized. Unlike the dedicated radicals who emerged from the Free Speech Movement, the hippies were more interested in dropping out of society than they were in changing it. They were generally younger than the political types, and the press dismissed them as the "pot left," a frivolous gang of druggies and sex kooks who were only along for the ride.

Then Ronald Reagan was elected Governor by almost a million-vote plurality. Shortly afterward, Clark Kerr was fired as president of the University of California --a direct result of Reagan's victory. In that same November, the G.O.P. gained 50 seats in Congress and served a clear warning on the Johnson Administration that despite all the headlines about Berkeley and the New Left, most of the electorate was a lot more hawkish, hard-nosed and conservative than the White House antennae had indicated.

The lesson was not lost on the hippies, many of whom still considered themselves at least part-time political activists. One of the most obvious casualities of the 1966 elections was the New Left's illusion of its own leverage. The radical-hippy alliance had been counting on the voters to repudiate the "right-wing, warmonger" elements in Congress, but instead it was the "liberal" Democrats who got stomped.

So it is no coincidence that the Haight-Ashbury scene developed very suddenly in the winter of 1966 to 1967 from the quiet, neo-Bohemian enclave that it had been for four or five years to the crowded, defiant dope fortress that it is today. The hippies, who had never really believed they were the wave of the future anyway, saw the election returns as brutal confirmation of the futility of fighting the establishment on its own terms.

There had to be a whole new scene, they said, and the only way to do it was to make the big move --either figuratively or literally --from Berkeley to the Haight-Ashbury, from pragmatism to mysticism, from politics to dope, from the hangups of protest to the peaceful disengagement of love, nature and spontaneity.

The credo of the Haight-Ashbury was expressed, about as well as it can be, by Joyce Francisco, 23-year-old advertising manager of the new hippy newspaper, The San Francisco Oracle. She was talking a few months ago to a columnist from the establishment press, trying to explain what the hippy phenomenon meant: "I love the whole world," she said. "I am the divine mother, part of Buddha, part of God, part of everything."

"How do you live?" the columnist asked.

"From meal to meal. I have no money, no possessions. Money is beautiful only when it's flowing; when it piles up it's a hang-up. We take care of each other. There's always something to buy beans and rice for the group, and someone always sees that I get grass or acid. I was in a mental hospital once because I tried to conform and play the game. But now I'm free and happy."

Next question: "Do you use drugs often?"

"Fairly. When I find myself becoming confused I drop out and take a dose of acid. It's a short cut to reality; it throws you right into it. Everyone should take it, even children. Why shouldn't they be enlightened early, instead of waiting till they're old? Human beings need total freedom. That's where God is at. We need to shed hypocrisy, dishonesty, phoniness and go back to the purity of our childhood values."

The columnist then asked if Miss Francisco ever prayed.

"Oh, yes," she said. "I pray in the morning sun. It nourishes me with its energy so I can spread my love and beauty and nourish others. I never pray for anything; I don't need anything. Whatever turns me on is a sacrament: L.S.D, sex, my bells, my colors. .. that is the holy communion, you dig?"

The columnist wasn't sure if she did or not, but she passed on the interview for the benefit of those readers who might. Many did. Anyone who thinks all the hippies in the Bay Area are living in the Hashbury might just as well leave his head in the sand.

In normal circumstances, the mushrooming popularity of psychedelics would be a main factor in any article on hippies. But the vicious excesses of our drug laws make it impossible, or at least inhuman, to document the larger story. A journalist dealing with heads is caught in a strange dilemma. The only way to write honestly about the scene is to be part of it. If there is one quick truism about psychedelic drugs, it is that anyone who tries to write about them without firsthand experience is a fool and a fraud.

Yet to write from experience is an admission of felonious guilt; it is also a potential betrayal of people whose only "crime" is the smoking of a weed that grows wild all over the world but the possession of which, in California, carries a minimum sentence of two years in prison for a second offense and a minimum of five years for a third. So, despite the fact that the whole journalism industry is full of unregenerate heads --just as many journalists were hard drinkers during Prohibition --it is not very likely that the frank, documented truth about the psychedelic underworld, for good or ill, will be illuminated at any time soon in the public prints.

If I were to write, for instance, that I recently spent 10 days in San Francisco and was stoned almost constantly. . . that in fact I was stoned for nine nights out of 10 and that nearly everyone I dealt with smoked marijuana as casually as they drank beer. . . and if I said many of the people I talked to were not freaks and dropouts, but competent professionals with bank accounts and spotless reputations. . . and that I was amazed to find psychedelic drugs in homes where I would never have mentioned them two years ago --if all this were true, I could write an ominous screed to the effect that the hippy phenomenon in the Haight-Ashbury is little more than a freak show and a soft-sell advertisement for what is happening all around them. . . that drugs, orgies and freak-outs are almost as common to a much larger and more discreet cross section of the Bay Area's respectable, upward-mobile society as they are to the colorful drop-outs of San Francisco's new Bohemia.

There is no shortage of documentation for the thesis that the current Haight-Ashbury scene is only the orgiastic tip of a great psychedelic iceberg that is already drifting in the sea lanes of the Great Society. Submerged and uncountable is the mass of intelligent, capable heads who want nothing so much as peaceful anonymity. In a nervous society where a man's image is frequently more important than his reality, the only people who can afford to advertise their drug menus are those with nothing to lose.

And these--for the moment, at least--are the young lotus-eaters, the barefoot mystics and hairy freaks of the Haight-Ashbury --all those primitive Christians, peaceful nay-sayers and half-deluded "flower children" who refuse to participate in a society which looks to them like a mean, calculated and soul-destroying hoax.

As recently as two years ago, many of the best and brightest of them were passionately involved in the realities of political, social and economic life in America. But the scene has changed since then and political activism is going out of style. The thrust is no longer for "change" or "progress" or "revolution," but merely to escape, to live on the far perimeter of a world that might have been --perhaps should have been --and strike a bargain for survival on purely personal terms.

The flourishing hippy scene is a matter of desperate concern to the political activists. They see a whole generation of rebels drifting off to a drugged limbo, ready to accept almost anything as long as it comes with enough "soma."

Steve DeCanio, an ex-Berkeley activist now doing graduate work at M.I.T., is a good example of a legion of young radicals who know they have lost their influence but have no clear idea how to get it back again. "This alliance between hippies and political radicals is bound to break up," he said in, a recent letter. "There's just too big a jump from the slogan of 'Flower Power' to the deadly realm of politics. Something has to give, and drugs are too ready-made as opiates of the people for the bastards (the police) to fail to take advantage of it."

Decanio spent three months in various Bay Area jails as a result of his civil rights activities and now he is lying low for a while, waiting for an opening. "I'm spending an amazing amount of time studying," he wrote. "It's mainly because I'm scared; three months on the bottom of humanity's trash heap got to me worse than it's healthy to admit. The country is going to hell, the left is going to pot, but not me. I still want to figure out a way to win."

Meanwhile, like most other disappointed radicals, he is grimly amused at the impact the hippies are having on the establishment. The panic among San Francisco officialdom at the prospect of 200,000 hippies flocking into the Hashbury this summer is one of the few things that ex-Berkeley radicals can still laugh at. Decanio's vision of the crisis was not written as prophecy, but considering the hidden reality of the situation, it may turn out that way: "I can see Mayor Shelley standing on the steps of the Civic Center and shouting into T.V microphones, 'The people cry bread! Bread! Let them turn on!'"

The New York Times Magazine, May 14, 1967

When the Beatniks Were Social Lions

San Francisco.

What ever happened to the Beat Generation? The question wouldn't mean much in Detroit or Salt Lake City, perhaps, but here it brings back a lot of memories. As recently as 1960, San Francisco was the capital of the Beat Generation, and the corner of Grant and Columbus in the section known as North Beach was the crossroads of the "beat" world.

It was a good time to be in San Francisco. Anybody with half a talent could wander around North Beach and pass himself off as a "comer" in the new era. I know, because I was doing it, and so was a fellow we'll have to call Willard, the hulking, bearded son of a New Jersey minister. It was a time for breaking loose from the old codes, for digging new sounds and new ideas, and for doing everything possible to unnerve the Establishment.

Since then, things have died down. The "beatnik" is no longer a social lion in San Francisco, but a social leper; as a matter of fact, it looked for a while as if they had all left. But the city was recently startled by a "rent strike" in North Beach and as it turned out, lo and behold, the strikers were "beatniks." The local papers, which once played Beat Generation stories as if the foundations of The System were crumbling before their very eyes, seized on the rent strike with strange affection --like a man encountering an old friend who owes him money, but whom he is glad to see anyway.

The rent strike lasted only about two days, but it got people talking again about the Beat Generation and its sudden demise from the American scene --or at least from the San Francisco scene, because it is still very extant in New York. But in New York it goes by a different name, and all the humor has gone out of it.

One of the most surprising things about the rent strike was the fact that so few people in San Francisco had any idea what the Beat Generation was. An interviewer from a radio station went into the streets seeking controversy on "the return of the beatniks," but drew a blank. People remembered the term, and not much more.

But the Beat Generation was very real in its day, and it has a definite place in our history. There is a mountain of material explaining the sociological aspects of the thing, but most of it is dated and irrelevant. What remains are the people who were involved; most of them are still around, looking back with humor and affection on the uproar they caused, and drifting by a variety of routes toward debt, parenthood, and middle age.

My involvement was tangential at best. But Willard was in there at the axis of things, and in retrospect he stands out as one of the great "beatniks" of his time. Certainly San Francisco has good cause to remember him; his one and only encounter with the forces of law and order provided one of the wildest Beat Generation stories of the era.

Before San Francisco he had been in Germany, teaching English and cultivating an oriental-type beard. On his way out to the coast he stopped in New York and picked up a mistress with a new Ford. It was de rigueur, in those days, to avoid marriage at all costs. He came to me through the recommendation of a friend then working in Europe for a British newspaper. "Willard is a great man," said the letter. "He is an artist and a man of taste."

As it turned out, he also was a prodigious drinker in the tradition of Brendan Behan, who was said to have had "a thirst so great it would throw a shadow." I was making my own beer at the time and Willard put a great strain on the aging process; I had to lock the stuff up to keep him from getting at it before the appointed moment.

Sadly enough, my beer and Willard's impact on San Francisco were firmly linked. The story is a classic, and if you travel in the right circles out here you will still hear it told, although not always accurately. The truth, however, goes like this:

Willard arrived shortly before I packed up and left for the East; we had a convivial few weeks, and, as a parting gesture, I left him a five-gallon jug of beer that I did not feel qualified to transport across the nation. It still had a week or so to go in the jug, then another few weeks of aging in quart bottles, after which it would have had a flavor to rival the nectar of the gods. Willard's only task was to bottle it and leave it alone until it was ready to drink.

Unfortunately, his thirst threw a heavy shadow on the schedule. He was living on a hill overlooking the southern section of the city, and among his neighbors were several others of the breed, mad drinkers and men of strange arts. Shortly after my departure he entertained one of these gentlemen, who, like my man Willard, was long on art and energy, but very short of funds.

The question of drink arose, as it will in the world of art, but the presence of poverty cast a bleak light on the scene. There was, however, this five-gallon jug of raw, unaged home brew in the kitchen. Of course, it was a crude drink and might produce beastly and undesired effects, but... well...

The rest is history. After drinking half the jug, the two artists laid hands on several gallons of blue paint and proceeded to refinish the front of the house Willard was living in. The landlord, who lived across the street, witnessed this horror and called the police. They arrived to find the front of the house looking like a Jackson Pollack canvas, and the sidewalk rapidly disappearing under a layer of sensual crimson. At this point, something of an argument ensued, but Willard is 6 feet 4, and 230 pounds, and he prevailed. For a while.

Some moments later the police came back with reinforcements, but by this time Willard and his helper had drunk off the rest of the jug and were eager for any kind of action, be it painting or friendly violence. The intrusion of the police had caused several mottos to be painted on the front of the house, and they were not without antisocial connotations. The landlord was weeping and gnashing his teeth, loud music emanated from the ulterior of the desecrated house, and the atmosphere in general was one of hypertension.

The scene that followed can only be likened to the rounding up of wild beasts escaped from a zoo. Willard says he attempted to flee, but floundered on a picket fence, which collapsed with his weight and that of a pursuing officer. His friend climbed to a roof and rained curses and shingles on the unfriendly world below. But the police worked methodically, and by the time the sun set over the Pacific the two artists were sealed in jail.

At this point the gentlemen of the press showed up for the usual photos. They tried to coax Willard up to the front of his cell to pose, but the other artist had undertaken to tip the toilet bowl out of the floor and smash it into small pieces. For the next hour, the press was held at bay with chunks of porcelain, hurled by the two men in the cell. "We used up the toilet," Willard recalls, "then we got the sink. I don't remember much of it, but I can't understand why the cops didn't shoot us. We were out of our heads."

The papers had a field day with the case. Nearly all the photos of the "animal men" were taken with what is known among press photographers as "the Frankenstein flash." This technique produces somewhat the same impression of the subject as a flashlight held under his chin, but instead of a flashlight, the photographer simply holds his flash unit low, so that sinister shadows appear on the face of a subject, and a huge shadow looms on the wall behind him. It is a technique that could make Casper Milquetoast look like the Phantom of the Opera, but the effect, with Willard, was nothing short of devastating; he looked like King Kong.

Despite all the violence, the story has a happy ending. Willard and his friends were sentenced to six months in jail, but were quickly released for good behavior, and neither lost any time in fleeing to New York. Willard now lives in Brooklyn, where he moves from one apartment to another as walls fill up with paintings. His artistic method is to affix tin cans to a wall with tenpenny nails, then cover the wall with lumpy plaster and paint. Some say he has a great talent, but so far he goes unrecognized --except by the long-suffering San Francisco police, who were called upon to judge what was perhaps his most majestic effort.

Willard was as hard to define then as he is now; probably it is most accurate to say he had artistic inclinations and a superabundance of excess energy. At one point in his life he got the message that others of his type were gathering in San Francisco, and he came all the way from Germany to join the party.

Since then, things have never been the same. Life is more peaceful in San Francisco, but infinitely duller. That was pretty obvious when the rent strike cropped up; for a day or so it looked like the action was back in town, but it was no dice.

One of the "strikers," an unemployed cartoonist with a wife and a child and a rundown apartment for which he refuses to pay rent, summed up the situation. His landlady had declined to make repairs on the apartment, and instead got an eviction order. In the old days, the fellow would have stayed in the place and gotten tough. But the cartoonist is taking the path of least resistance. "It takes a long time to get people evicted," he says with a shrug, "and we're thinking of splitting to New York on a freight train anyway."

That's the way it is these days in the erstwhile capital of the Beat Generation. The action has gone East, and the only people who really seem to mourn it are the reporters, who never lacked a good story, and a small handful of those who lived with it and had a few good laughs for a while. If Willard returned to San Francisco today, he probably would have to settle for a job as a house painter.

The Nonstudent Left

National Observer, April 20, 1964

Berkeley

At the height of the "Berkeley insurrection" press reports were loaded with mentions of outsiders, nonstudents and professional troublemakers. Terms like "Cal's shadow college" and "Berkeley's hidden community" became part of the journalistic lexicon. These people, it was said, were whipping the campus into a frenzy, goading the students to revolt, harassing the administration, and all the while working for their own fiendish ends. You could almost see them loping along the midnight streets with bags of seditious leaflets, strike orders, red banners of protest and cablegrams from Moscow, Peking or Havana. As in Mississippi and South Vietnam, outside agitators were said to be stirring up the locals, who wanted only to be left alone.

Something closer to the truth is beginning to emerge now, but down around the roots of the affair the fog is still pretty thick. The Sproul Hall sit-in trials ended in a series of unexpectedly harsh convictions, the Free Speech Movement has disbanded, four students have been expelled and sentenced to jail terms as a result of the "dirty word" controversy, and the principal leader, Mario Savio, has gone to England, where he'll study and wait for word on the appeal of his four-month jail term --a procedure which may take as long as eighteen months.

As the new semester begins --with a new and inscrutable chancellor --the mood on the Berkeley campus is one of watchful waiting. The basic issues of last year are still unresolved, and a big new one has been added: Vietnam. A massive nationwide sit-in, with Berkeley as a focal point, is scheduled for October 15 to 16, and if that doesn't open all the old wounds, then presumably nothing will.

For a time it looked as though Govemor Edmund Brown had side-tracked any legislative investigation of the university, but late in August Assembly Speaker Jesse Unruh, an anti-Brown Democrat, named himself and four colleagues to a joint legislative committee that will investigate higher education in California. Mr. Unruh told the press that "there will be no isolated investigation of student-faculty problems at Berkeley," but in the same period he stated before a national conference of more than 1,000 state legislators, meeting in Portland, that the academic community is "probably the greatest enemy" of a state legislature.

Mr. Unruh is a sign of the times. For a while last spring he appeared to be in conflict with the normally atavistic Board of Regents, which runs the university, but somewhere along the line a blue-chip compromise was reached, and whatever progressive ideas the Regents might have flirted with were lost in the summer lull. Governor Brown's role in these negotiations has not yet been made public.

One of the realities to come out of last semester's action is the new "anti-outsider law," designed to keep "nonstudents" off the campus in any hour of turmoil. It was sponsored by Assemblyman Don Mulford, a Republican from Oakland, who looks and talks quite a bit like the "old" Richard Nixon. Mr. Mulford is much concerned about "subversive infiltration" on the Berkeley campus, which lies in his district. He thinks he knows that the outburst last fall was caused by New York Communists, beatnik perverts and other godless elements beyond his ken. The students themselves, he tells himself, would never have caused such a ruckus. Others in Sacramento apparently shared this view: the bill passed the Assembly by a vote of 54 to 11 and the Senate by 27 to 8. Governor Brown signed it on June 2. The Mulford proposal got a good boost, while it was still pending, when J. Edgar Hoover testified in Washington that forty-three Reds of one stripe or another were involved in the Free Speech Movement.

On hearing of this, one student grinned and said: "Well I guess that means they'll send about 10,000 Marines out here this fall. Hell, they sent 20,000 after those fifty-eight Reds in Santo Domingo. Man, that Lyndon is nothing but hip!"

Where Mr. Hoover got his figure is a matter of speculation, but the guess in Berkeley is that it came from the San Francisco Examiner, a Hearst paper calling itself "The Monarch of the Dailies." The Examiner is particularly influential among those who fear King George 3 might still be alive in Argentina.

The significance of the Mulford law lies not in what it says but in the darkness it sheds on the whole situation in Berkeley, especially on the role of nonstudents and outsiders. Who are these thugs? What manner of man would lurk on a campus for no reason but to twist student minds? As anyone who lives or works around an urban campus knows, vast numbers of students are already more radical than any Red Mr. Hoover could name. Beyond that, the nonstudents and outsiders California has legislated against are in the main ex-students, graduates, would-be transfers, and other young activist types who differ from radical students only in that they don't carry university registration cards. On any urban campus the nonstudent is an old and dishonored tradition. Every big city school has its fringe element: Harvard, New York University, Chicago, the Sorbonne, Berkeley, the University of Caracas. A dynamic university in a modern population center simply can't be isolated from the realities, human or otherwise, that surround it. Mr. Mulford would make an island of the Berkeley campus but, alas, there are too many guerrillas.

In 1958, I drifted north from Kentucky and became a non-student at Columbia. I signed up for two courses and am still getting bills for the tuition. My home was a $12-a-week room in an off-campus building full of jazz musicians, shoplifters, mainliners, screaming poets and sex addicts of every description. It was a good life. I used the university facilities and at one point was hired to stand in a booth all day for two days, collecting registration fees. Twice I walked almost the length of the campus at night with a big wooden box containing nearly $15,000. It was a wild feeling and I'm still not sure why I took the money to the bursar.

Being a "non" or "nco" student on an urban campus is not only simple but natural for anyone who is young, bright and convinced that the major he's after is not on the list. Any list. A serious nonstudent is his own guidance counselor. The surprising thing is that so few people beyond the campus know this is going on.

The nonstudent tradition seems to date from the end of World War 2. Before that it was a more individual thing. A professor at Columbia told me that the late R.P. Blackmur, one of the most academic and scholarly of literary critics, got most of his education by sitting in on classes at Harvard.

In the age of Eisenhower and Kerouac, the nonstudent went about stealing his education as quietly as possible. It never occurred to him to jump into campus politics; that was part of the game he had already quit. But then the decade ended. Nixon went down, and the civil rights sturgle broke out. With this, a whole army of guilt-crippled Eisenhower deserters found the war they had almost given up hoping for. With Kennedy at the helm, politics became respectable for a change, and students who had sneered at the idea of voting found themselves joining the Peace Corps or standing on picket lines. Student radicals today may call Kennedy a phony liberal and a glamorous sellout, but only the very young will deny that it was Kennedy who got them excited enough to want to change the American reality, instead of just quitting it. Today's activist student or nonstudent talks about Kerouac as the hipsters of the '50s talked about Hemingway. He was a quitter, they say; he had good instincts and a good ear for the sadness of his time, but his talent soured instead of growing. The new campus radical has a cause, a multipronged attack on as many fronts as necessary: if not civil rights, then foreign policy or structural deprivation in domestic poverty pockets. Injustice is the demon, and the idea is to bust it.

What Mulford's law will do to change this situation is not clear. The language of the bill leaves no doubt that it shall henceforth be a misdemeanor for any nonstudent or nonemployee to remain on a state university or state college campus after he or she has been ordered to leave, if it "reasonably appears" to the chief administrative officer or the person designated by him to keep order on the campus "that such person is committing an act likely to interfere with the peaceful conduct of the campus."

In anything short of riot conditions, the real victims of Mulford's law will be the luckless flunkies appointed to enforce it. The mind of man could devise few tasks more hopeless than rushing around this 1,000-acre, 27,000-student campus in the midst of some crowded action, trying to apprehend and remove --on sight and before he can flee --any person who is not a Cal student and is not eligible for readmission. It would be a nightmare of lies, false seizures, double entries and certain provocation. Meanwhile, most of those responsible for the action would be going about their business in legal peace. If pure justice prevailed in this world, Don Mulford would be appointed to keep order and bag subversives at the next campus demonstrations.

There are those who seem surprised that a defective rattrap like the Mulford law could be endorsed by the legislature of a supposedly progressive, enlightened state. But these same people were surprised when Proposition 14, which reopened the door to racial discrimination in housing, was endorsed by the electorate last November by a margin of nearly 2 to 1.

Meanwhile, the nonstudent in Berkeley is part of the scene, a fact of life. The university estimates that about 3,000 non-students use the campus in various ways: working in the library with borrowed registration cards; attending lectures, concerts and student films; finding jobs and apartments via secondhand access to university listings; eating in the cafeteria, and monitoring classes. In appearance they are indistinguishable from students. Berkeley is full of wild-looking graduate students, bearded professors and long-haired English majors who look like Joan Baez.

Until recently there was no mention of nonstudents in campus politics, but at the beginning of the Free Speech rebellion President Kerr said "nonstudent elements were partly responsible for the demonstration." Since then, he has backed away from that stand, leaving it to the lawmakers. Even its goats and enemies now admit that the F.S.M revolt was the work of actual students. It has been a difficult fact for some people to accept, but a reliable poll of student attitudes at the time showed that roughly 18,000 of them supported the goals of the F.S.M, and about half that number supported its "illegal" tactics. More than 800 were willing to defy the administration, the Governor and the police, rather than back down. The faculty supported the F.S.M by close to 8 to 1. The nonstudents nearly all sided with the F.S.M. The percentage of radicals among them is much higher than among students. It is invariably the radicals, not the conservatives, who drop out of school and become activist non-students. But against this background, their attitude hardly matters.

"We don't play a big role politically," says one. "But philosophically we're a hell of a threat to the establishment. Just the fact that we exist proves that dropping out of school isn't the end of the world. Another important thing is that we're not looked down on by students. We're respectable. A lot of students I know are thinking of becoming nonstudents."

"As a nonstudent I have nothing to lose," said another. "I can work full time on whatever I want, study what interests me, and figure out what's really happening in the world. That student routine is a drag. Until I quit the grind I didn't realize how many groovy things there are to do around Berkeley: concerts, films, good speakers, parties, pot, politics, women --I can't think of a better way to live, can you?"

Not all nonstudents worry the lawmakers and administrators. Some are fraternity bums who flunked out of the university, but don't want to leave the parties and the good atmosphere. Others are quiet squares or technical types, earning money between enrollments and meanwhile living nearby. But there is no longer the sharp division that used to exist between the beatnik and the square: too many radicals wear ties and sport coats; too many engineering students wear boots and levis. Some of the most bohemian-looking girls around the campus are Left puritans, while some of the sweetest-looking sorority types are confirmed pot smokers and wear diaphragms on all occasions.

Nonstudents lump one another --and many students --into two very broad groups: "political radicals" and "social radicals." Again, the division is not sharp, but in general, and with a few bizarre exceptions, a political radical is a Left activist in one or more causes. His views are revolutionary in the sense that his idea of "democratic solutions" alarms even the liberals. He may be a Young Trotskyist, a De Bois Club organizer or merely an ex-Young Democrat, who despairs of President Johnson and is now looking for action with some friends in the Progressive Labor Party.

Social radicals tend to be "arty." Their gigs are poetry and folk music, rather than politics, although many are fervently committed to the civil rights movement. Their political bent is Left, but their real interests are writing, painting, good sex, good sounds and free marijuana. The realities of politics put them off, although they don't mind lending their talents to a demonstration here and there, or even getting arrested for a good cause. They have quit one system and they don't want to be organized into another; they feel they have more important things to do.

A report last spring by the faculty's Select Committee on Education tried to put it all in a nutshell: "A significant and growing minority of students is simply not propelled by what we have come to regard as conventional motivation. Rather than aiming to be successful men in an achievement-oriented society, they want to be moral men in a moral society. They want to lead lives less tied to financial return than to social awareness and responsibility."

The committee was severely critical of the whole university structure, saying: "The atmosphere of the campus now suggests too much an intricate system of compulsions, rewards and punishments; too much of our attention is given to score keeping." Among other failures, the university was accused of ignoring "the moral revolution of the young."

Talk like this strikes the radicals among "the young" as paternalistic jargon, but they appreciate the old folks' sympathy. To them, anyone who takes part in "the system" is a hypocrite. This is especially true among the Marxist, Mao-Castro element --the hipsters of the Left.

One of these is Steve DeCanio, a 22-year-old Berkeley radical and Cal graduate in math, now facing a two-month jail term as a result of the Sproul Hall sit-ins. He is doing graduate work, and therefore immune to the Mulford law. "I became a radical after the 1962 auto row (civil rights) demonstrations in San Francisco," he says. "That's when I saw the power structure and understood the hopelessness of trying to be a liberal. After I got arrested I dropped the pre-med course I'd started at San Francisco State. The worst of it, though, was being screwed time and again in the courts. I'm out on appeal now with four and a half months of jail hanging over me."

DeCanio is an editor of Spider, a wild-eyed new magazine with a circulation of about 2,000 on and around the Berkeley campus. Once banned, it thrived on the publicity and is now officially ignored by the protest-weary administration. The eight-man editorial board is comprised of four students and four nonstudents. The magazine is dedicated, they say, to "sex, politics, international communism, drugs, extremism and rock'n'roll." Hence, S-P-I-D-E-R.

DeCanio is about two-thirds political radical and one-third social. He is bright, small, with dark hair and glasses, cleanshaven, and casually but not sloppily dressed. He listens carefully to questions, uses his hands for emphasis when he talks, and quietly says things like: "What this country needs is a revolution; the society is so sick, so reactionary, that it just doesn't make sense to take part in it."

He lives, with three other nonstudents and two students, in a comfortable house on College Avenue, a few blocks from campus. The $120-a-month rent is split six ways. There are three bedrooms, a kitchen and a big living room with a fireplace. Papers litter the floor, the phone rings continually, and people stop by to borrow things: a pretty blonde wants a Soviet army chorus record, a Tony Perkins type from the Oakland Du Bois Club wants a film projector; Art Goldberg --the arch-activist who also lives here --comes storming in, shouting for help on the "Vietnam Days" teach-in arrangements.

It is all very friendly and collegiate. People wear plaid shirts and khaki pants, white socks and moccasins. There are books on the shelves, cans of beer and Cokes in the refrigerator, and a manually operated light bulb in the bathroom. In the midst of all this it is weird to hear people talking about "bringing the ruling class to their knees," or "finding acceptable synonyms for Marxist terms."

Political conversation in this house would drive Don Mulford right over the wall. There are riffs of absurdity and mad humor in it, but the base line remains a dead-serious alienation from the "Repugnant Society" of 20th-century America. You hear the same talk on the streets, in coffee bars, on the walk near Ludwig's Fountain in front of Sproul Hall, and in other houses where activists live. and gather. And why not? This is Berkeley, which DeCanio calls "the center of West Coast radicalism." It has a long history of erratic politics, both on and off the campus. From 1911 to 1913, its Mayor was a Socialist named Stitt Wilson. It has more psychiatrists and fewer bars than any other city of comparable size in California. And there are 249 churches for 120,300 people, of which 25 percent are Negroes --one of the highest percentages of any city outside the South.

Culturally, Berkeley is dominated by two factors: the campus and San Francisco across the Bay. The campus is so much a part of the community that the employment and housing markets have long since adjusted to student patterns. A $100-a-month apartment or cottage is no problem when four or five people split the rent, and there are plenty of ill-paid, minimum-strain jobs for those without money from home. Tutoring, typing, clerking, car washing, hash slinging and baby sitting are all easy ways to make a subsistence income; one of the favorites among nonstudents is computer programming, which pays well.

Therefore, Berkeley's nonstudents have no trouble getting by. The climate is easy, the people are congenial, and the action never dies. Jim Prickett, who quit the University of Oklahoma and flunked out of San Francisco State, is another of Spider's nonstudent editors. "State has no community," he says, "and the only nonstudent I know of at Oklahoma is now in jail." Prickett came to Berkeley because "things are happening here." At 23, he is about as far Left as a man can get in these times, but his revolutionary zeal is gimped by pessimism. "If we have a revolution in this country it will be a Fascist take-over," he says with a shrug. Meanwhile he earns $25 a week as Spider's star writer, smiting the establishment hip and thigh at every opportunity. Prickett looks as much like a Red menace as Will Rogers looked like a Bantu. He is tall, thin, blond, and shuffles. "Hell, I'll probably sell out," he says with a faint smile. "Be a history teacher or something. But not for a while."

Yet there is something about Prickett that suggests he won't sell out so easily. Unlike many nonstudent activists, he has no degree, and in the society that appalls him even a sellout needs credentials. That is one of the most tangible realities of the nonstudent; by quitting school he has taken a physical step outside the system --a move that more and more students seem to find admirable. It is not an easy thing to repudiate --not now, at any rate, while the tide is running that way. And "the system" cannot be rejoined without some painful self-realization. Many a man has whipped up a hell of a broth of reasons to justify his sellout, but few recommend the taste of it.

The problem is not like that of high school dropouts. They are supposedly inadequate, but the activist nonstudent is generally said to be superior. "A lot of these kids are top students," says Dr. David Powellson, chief of Cal's student psychiatric clinic, "but no university is set up to handle them."

How, then, are these bright mavericks to fit into the super-bureaucracies of government and big business? Cal takes its undergraduates from the top eighth of the state's high school graduates, and those accepted from out of state are no less "promising." The ones who migrate to Berkeley after quitting other schools are usually the same type. They are seekers --disturbed, perhaps, and perhaps for good reason. Many drift from one university to another, looking for the right program, the right professor, the right atmosphere, and right way to deal with the deplorable world they have suddenly grown into. It is like an army of Holden Caulfields, looking for a home and beginning to suspect they may never find one.

These are the outsiders, the nonstudents, and the potential --if not professional -- troublemakers. There is something primitive and tragic in California's effort to make a law against them. The law itself is relatively unimportant, but the thinking that conceived it is a strutting example of what the crisis is all about. A society that will legislate in ignorance against its unfulfilled children and its angry, half-desperate truth seekers is bound to be shaken as it goes about making a reality of mass education.

It is a race against time, complacency and vested interests. For the Left-activist nonstudent the race is very personal. Whether he is right, wrong, ignorant, vicious, super-intelligent or simply bored, once he has committed himself to the extent of dropping out of school, he has also committed himself to "making it" outside the framework of whatever he has quit. A social radical presumably has his talent, his private madness or some other insulated gimmick, but for the political radical the only true hope is somehow to bust the system that drove him into limbo. In this new era many believe they can do it, but most of those I talked to at Berkeley seemed a bit nervous. There was a singular vagueness as to the mechanics of the act, no real sense of the openings.

"What are you going to be doing ten years from now?" I asked a visiting radical in the house where Spider is put together. "What if there's no revolution by then, and no prospects of one?"

"Hell," he said. "I don't think about that: Too much is happening right now. If the revolution's coming, it had better come damn quick."

The Nation, volume 201, September 27, 1965

Those Daring Young Men in Their Flying Machines... Ain't What They Used to Be!

Myths and legends die hard in America. We love them for the extra dimension they provide, the illusion of near-infinite possibility to erase the narrow confines of most men's reality. Weird heroes and mold-breaking champions exist as living proof to those who need it that the tyranny of "the rat race" is not yet final. Look at Joe Namath, they say; he broke all the rules and still beat the system like a gong. Or Hugh Hefner, the Horatio Alger of our time. And Cassius Clay --Muhammad Ali --who flew so high, like the U.2, that he couldn't quite believe it when the drone bees shot him down.

Gary Powers, the U.2 pilot shot down over Russia, is now a test pilot for Lockheed Aircraft, testing newer, more "invincible" planes in the cool, bright skies above the Mojave Desert, in the Antelope Valley just north of Los Angeles. The valley is alive with aviation projects, particularly at Edwards Air Force Base, near Lancaster, where the Air Force tests its new planes and breeds a new, computerized version of the legendary, hell-for-leather test pilot. Air Force brass at Edwards is appalled at the persistence of the old "kick the tire, light the fire, and away we go" image. The key word in today's Air Force, they insist, is "professionalism."

This made my visit to the base a bit tricky. It was painfully obvious, even after an hour or so of casual talk, that the hard-nosed pros on the flight line resented the drift of my conversation --particularly when I asked about things like "dueling societies." The Air Force has never valued a sense of humor in its career men, and in high-risk fields like flight testing, a sense of the absurd will cripple a man's future just as surely as an L.S.D habit.

Test pilots are very straight people. They are totally dedicated to their work and not accustomed to dealing with slip-shod civilians who seem even faintly disorganized --especially writers. My image was further queered by a painfully cracked bone in my right hand, which forced me to use my left in all formal introductions.

At one point, while talking to two colonels, I lamely explained that I break my hand about once a year. "Last time," I said, "it was a motorcycle wreck on a rainy night; I missed a shift between second and third, doing about seventy on a bad curve."

Zang! That did it. They were horrified. "Why would anybody do a thing like that?" asked Lieutenant Colonel Ted Sturmthal, who had just come back from flying the huge X.B.70 across the country at the speed of sound. Lieutenant Colonel Dean Godwin, who is rated, along with Sturmthal, as one of the top test pilots in the Air Force, stared at me as if I'd just produced a Vietcong watch fob.

We were sitting in a sort of gray-plastic office near the flight line. Outside, on the cold, gray runway, sat a plane called the S.R.71, capable of flying 2000 m.p.h. --or about 3100 feet per second --in the thin air on the edge of the earth's atmosphere, nearly 20 miles up. The S.R.71 has already made the U.2 obsolete; the thrust of its two engines equals the power of 45 diesel locomotives and it cruises at an altitude just inside the realm of space flight. Yet neither Sturmthal nor Godwin would have balked for an instant at the prospect of climbing into the cockpit of the thing and pushing it as high and hard as it could possibly go.

The Air Force has been trying for 20 years to croak the image of the wild-eyed, full-force, "aim it at the ground and see if it crashes" kind of test pilot, and they have finally succeeded. The vintage-'69 test pilot is a supercautious, super-trained, superintelligent monument to the Computer Age. He is a perfect specimen, on paper, and so confident of his natural edge on other kinds of men that you begin to wonder --after spending a bit of time in the company of test pilots --if perhaps we might not all be better off if the White House could be moved, tomorrow morning, to this dreary wasteland called Edwards Air Force Base. If nothing else, my own visit to the base convinced me that Air Force test pilots see the rest of us, perhaps accurately, as either physical, mental, or moral rejects.

I came away from Edwards with a sense of having been to I.B.M's version of Olympus. Why had I ever left that perfect world? I had been in the Air Force once, and it had struck me then as being a clumsy experiment in mass lobotomy, using rules instead of scalpelts. Now, ten years later, the Air Force still benefits from the romantic pilot myth that its personnel managers have long since destroyed.

Back in the good old days, when men were Men and might was Right and the Devil took the hindmost, the peaceful desert highways in Antelope Valley were raceways for off-duty pilots on big motorcycles. Slow-moving travelers were frequently blown off the road by wildmen in leather jackets and white scarves, two-wheeled human torpedoes defying all speed limits and heedless of their own safety. Motorcycles were very popular toys with the pilots of that other, older era, and many an outraged citizen was jerked out of his bed at night by the awful roar of a huge four-cylinder Indian beneath his daughter's window. The image of the daredevil, speedball pilot is preserved in song and story, as it were, and in films like the Howard Hughes classic, Hell's Angels.

Prior to World War 2, pilots were seen as doomed, half-mythical figures, much admired for their daring, but not quite sane when judged by normal standards. While other men rode trains or chugged around the earth in Model-Ts, barnstorming pilots toured the nation with spectacular "aviation shows," dazzling the yokels at a million county fairs. When their stunts went wrong, they crashed and often died. The survivors pushed on, treating death like a churlish, harping creditor, toasting their own legend with beakers of gin and wild parties to ward off the chill. "Live fast, die young, and make a good-locJking corpse." That gag got a lot of laughs at debutante parties, but in aviation circles it seemed a bit raw, a little too close to the bone.

It was especially pertinent to test pilots, whose job it was to find out which planes would fly and which ones were natural death-traps. If the others took lunatic risks, at least they took them in proved planes. Test pilots, then and now, put the products of engineers' theories to the ultimate test. No experimental plane is "safe" to fly. Some work beautifully, others have fatal flaws. The Mojave Desert is pockmarked with the scars of failure. Only the new ones are visible; the older scars have been covered over by drifting sand and mesquite brush.

Each funeral means more donations, from friends and survivors, to the "window fund." The Test Pilots' Memorial Window in the chapel is a wall of colorful stained-glass mosaics, paid for with donations that otherwise might have gone into the purchase of short-lived flowers. The original idea was to have only one memorial window, but each year invariably brought more donations, so that now there are only a few plain windows left. All the others have been replaced by stained-glass memorials to the 100 names on the plaque in the chapel hallway.

Two or three new names are added each year, on the average, but some years are worse than others. There were no flight-test fatalities in either 1963 or 1964. Then, in 1965, there were eight. In 1966, the death count dropped to four, but two of these occurred on a single day, June 8th, in a mid-air crash between a single-seat fighter and one of the only two X.B.70 bombers ever built.

That was a very bad day on Edwards. Test pilots are very close: They live and work together like a professional football team; their wives are good friends, and their children are part of the same small world. So a double fatality shatters everybody. Today's test pilots and their families live nearly as close to death as the old-time pilots ever did --but the new breed fears it more. With rare exceptions, they are married, with at least two children, and in their off-duty hours they live as carefully and quietly as any physics professor. A few ride little Hondas, Suzuki, and other midget motorcycles, but strictly for transportation --or, as one of the pilots explained, "So Mama can use the family car." The flight-line parking lot, where working pilots leave their cars, looks no different from any supermarket lot in San Bernardino. Here again, with rare exceptions, the test pilot's earthbound vehicle is modest --probably a five-year-old Ford or Chevy, perhaps a Volkswagen, Datsun, or other low-priced import. At the other end of the flight line, in front of the test pilots' school, the mix is a bit livelier. Of the 46 cars I counted there one afternoon, there was one Jaguar X.K.E, one I.K.150, one old mur-say-dees with a V.8 Chevy engine, one Stingray; all the rest were clunkers. A cluster of motorcycles stood near the door, but the hottest one in the lot was a mild-mannered 250 Yamaha.

The midnight roads around Antelope Valley are quiet these days, except for an occasional teen-age drag race. Today's test pilots go to bed early, and they regard big motorcycles with the same analytical disdain they have for hippies, winos, and other failure symbols. They take their risks, on assignment, between dawn and 4:30 P.M. But when their time is their own, they prefer to hunker down in the wall-to-wall anonymity of their one-story, flat-roofed, Levittown-style homes between the base golf course and the officers' club, there to relax in front of the tube with a succulent T.V dinner. Their music is Mantovani, and their idea of an "artist" is Norman Rockwell. On Friday afternoons, from four-thirty to seven, they crowd into the officers' club bar for the weekly "happy hour," where most of the talk is about planes and current test projects. Then, just before seven, they go home to pick up their wives and dress for dinner, again at "the club." After dinner there will be a bit of dancing to the jukebox or maybe a small combo. Heavy drinking is out of the question; a drunken test pilot is viewed with genuine alarm by the others, who see any form of social excess --drink, wenching, late hours, any "unusual" behavior --as an indication of some deeper problem, an emotional cancer of some kind. Tonight's juicer is tomorrow's --or Monday's --hangover risk, a pair of slow-focusing eyes or an uncertain hand at the controls of a $100 million aircraft. The Air Force has trained three generations of elite-level pilots to abhor any hint of foreseeable human risk in the flight-test program. The planes, after all, are risky enough, they are the necessary unknown factor in the equation that every test project ideally boils down to. (Test pilots are very hip to equations; they can describe a plane and all its characteristics, using nothing but numbers.) And a cool waterhead knows that an equation with only one unknown factor is a hell of a lot simpler to cope with than an equation with two. The idea, then, is to minimize the chance of a second unknown factor --such as an unpredictable pilot --that might turn a simple flight-test equation into a scorched crater on the desert and another wave of donations to the "window fund."

Civilian test pilots, working on contract for companies like Boeing or Lockheed, are just as carefully screened as their soul brothers in the Air Force. The men who run the "military-industrial complex" are not about to entrust the fruits of their billion-dollar projects to the kind of pilot who might be tempted to zoom a new plane under the Golden Gate Bridge at rush hour. The whole philosophy of research testing is to minimize the risk. Test pilots are sent up with specific instructions. Their job is to perform a set of finely plotted maneuvers with the plane, to assess its performance in specific circumstances --stability at high speeds, rate of acceleration at certain climb angles, etcetera --and then to bring it down safely and write a detailed report for the engineers. There are plenty of fine pilots around, but only a handful can communicate in the language of superadvanced aerodynamics. The best pilot in the world --even if he could land a B.52 on the Number Eight green at Pebble Beach without taking a divot --would be useless on a test-flight project unless he could explain, in a written report, just how and why the landing could be made.

The Air Force is very keen on people who "go by the book," and there is, in fact, a book --called a technical order --on every piece of equipment in use, including planes. Test pilots can't go by "the book," however, because for all practical purposes, they are the people who write it. "We push a plane to its absolute limits," said a young major at Edwards. "We want to know exactly how it performs under every conceivable circumstance. And then we explain it, on paper, so other pilots will know what to expect of it."

He was standing on the flight line in a bright-orange flying suit, a baggy one-piece thing full of special pockets and zippers and flaps. These pilots are sporty-looking people, vaguely resembling a bunch of pro-football quarterbacks. The age bracket is early thirties to late forties, with a median around 37 or 38. The average age in the U.S.A.F. Aerospace Research Pilot School at Edwards is 30. Nobody over 32 is accepted; few pilots younger than 29 have logged enough air time to qualify. From a list of 600 to 1000 applicants each year, the school picks two classes of 16 men each. Washouts are rare; the screening process is so thorough that no candidate who appears to be even faintly questionable survives the final cut. Forty-one of the nation's 63 astronauts are graduates of the test pilots' school --a military version of Cal Tech and M.I.T. --the ultimate in aviation academics.

A sense of elitism is pervasive among test pilots. There are less than 100 of them on Edwards, with several hundred more spread out on testing projects from coast to coast. But Edwards is the capital of their world. "It's like the White House," says recently retired Colonel Joseph Cotton. "After Edwards, the only direction a test pilot can go is down; any other assignment is practically a demotion."

Colonel Cotton is the man who saved one of the $350 million experimental X.B.70's by short-circuiting a computer with a paper clip. The huge plane's landing gear had jammed, making it impossible to land. "You can't argue with a black box," said the colonel, "so we had to fool it." While the plane circled the base and engineers on the ground radioed careful instructions, Joe Cotton took a flashlight and a paper clip and crawled into the dark landing-gear bay to perform critical surgery in a maze of wires and relays.

Incredibly, it worked. He managed to short the faulty circuit out of the chain of command, as it were, and trick the computer into lowering the landing gear. The plane landed with locked brakes and flaming tires, but no serious damage --and "Joe Cotton's paper clip" was an instant legend.

I found Colonel Cotton at his new home in Lancaster, pacing around his living room while his wife tried to place a call to a fellow pilot whose teen-age son had been killed the day before in a motorcycle accident. The funeral was set for the next afternoon, and the whole Cotton family was going. (The flight line was empty the next day. The only pilot in the test-operations building was a visiting Britisher. All the others had gone to the funeral.)

Joe Cotton is 47, one of the last of the precomputer generation. By today's standards, he wouldn't even quality for test-pilot training. He is not a college graduate, much less a master of advanced calculus with an honors degree in math or science. But the young pilots at Edwards speak of Joe Cotton as if he were already a myth. He is not quite real, in their terms: a shade too complex, not entirely predictable. At a recent symposium for the Society of Experimental Test Pilots, Colonel Cotton showed up wearing a Mickey Mouse wristwatch. All the other pilots thought it was "great" --but none of them rushed out to buy one for themselves.

Joe Cotton is a very gentle, small-boned man with an obsessive interest in almost everything.

We talked for nearly five hours. In an age of stereotypes, he manages to sound like a patriotic hippie and a Christian anarchist all at once.

"The greatest quality you can build into a plane," he says, "is the quality of forgiveness." Or: "Having control of that airplane is like having control of your life; you don't want it wandering around up there, trying to get into a spin and crash...

"Flight testing is a beautiful racket. . . Being a test pilot on the Mojave Desert in America is the greatest expression of freedom I can think of. . ." And suddenly: "Retiring from the Air Force is like getting out of a cage. . ."

It is always a bit of a shock to meet an original, unfettered mind, and this was precisely the difference between Colonel Joe Cotton and the young pilots I met on the base. The Air Force computers have done their work well: They have screened out all but the near-perfect specimens. And the science of aviation will benefit, no doubt, from the ultimate perfection of the flight-test equation. Our planes will be safer and more efficient, and eventually we will breed all our pilots in test tubes.

Perhaps it will be for the best. Or maybe not. The last question I asked Joe Cotton was how he felt about the war in Vietnam, and particularly the antiwar protests. "Well," he said, "anytime you can get people emotionally disturbed about war, that's good. I've been an Air Force pilot most of my life, but I've never thought I was put on earth to kill people. The most important thing in life is concern for one another. When we've lost that, we've lost the right to live. If more people in Germany had been concerned about what Hitler was doing, well. ." He paused, half-aware --and only half-caring, it seemed --that he was no longer talking like a colonel just retired from the U.S. Air Force.

"You know," he said finally. "When I fly over Los Angeles at night, I look down at all those lights. . . six million people down there. . . and that's how many Hitler killed. ." He shook his head.

We walked outside, and when Joe Cotton said good night, he smiled and extended his left hand --remembering, somehow, after all that rambling talk, that I couldn't use my right.

The next afternoon, in the officer's club bar, I decided to broach the same question about the war in a friendly conversation with a young test pilot from Virginia, who had spent some time in Vietnam before his assignment to Edwards. "Well, I've changed my mind about the war," he said. "I used to be all for it, but now I don't give a damn. It's no fun anymore, now that we can't go up north. You could see your targets up there, you could see what you hit. But hell, down south all you do is fly a pattern and drop a bunch of bombs through the clouds. There's no sense of accomplishment." He shrugged and sipped his drink, dismissing the war as a sort of pointless equation, an irrelevant problem no longer deserving of his talents.

An hour or so later, driving back to Los Angeles, I picked up a newscast on the radio: Student riots at Duke, Wisconsin, and Berkeley; oil slick in the Santa Barbara Channel; Kennedy murder trials in New Orleans and Los Angeles. And suddenly Edwards Air Force Base and that young pilot from Virginia seemed a million miles away. Who would ever have thought, for instance, that the war in Vietnam could be solved by taking the fun out of bombing?

The Police Chief

The Professional Voice of Law Enforcement

Pageant, September 1969

Weapons are my business. You name it and I know it: guns, bombs, gas, fire, knives and everything else. Damn few people in the world know more about weaponry than I do. I'm an expert on demolition, ballistics, blades, motors, animals --anything capable of causing damage to man, beast or structure. This is my profession, my bag, my trade, my thing. .. my evil specialty. And for this reason the editors of Scanlan's have asked me to comment on a periodical called The Police Chief.

At first I refused... but various pressures soon caused me to change my mind. Money was not a factor in my decision. What finally spurred me to action was a sense of duty, even urgency, to make my voice heard. I am, as I said, a pro--and in this foul and desperate hour in our history I think even pros should speak up.

Frankly, I love this country. And also, quite frankly, I despise being put in this position --for a lot of reasons, which I don't mind listing:

1) For one thing, the press used to have a good rule about not talking about each other --no matter what they thought, or even what they knew. In the good old days a newspaperman would always protect his own kind. There was no way to get those bastards to testify against each other. It was worse than trying to make doctors testify in a malpractice suit, or making a beat cop squeal on his buddy in a "police brutality" case.

2) The reason I know about things like "malpractice" and "police brutality" is that I used to be a "cop" --a police chief, for that matter, in a small city just east of Los Angeles. And before that I was a boss detective in Nevada --and before that a beat cop in Oakland. So I know what I'm talking about when I say most "journalists" are lying shitheads. I never knew a reporter who could even say the word "corrupt" without pissing in his pants from pure guilt.

3) The third reason for the bad way I feel about this "article" is that I used to have tremendous faith in this magazine called The Police Chief. I read it cover-to-cover every month, like some people read the Bible, and the city paid for my subscription. Because they knew I was valuable to them, and The Police Chief was valuable to me. I loved that goddamn magazine. It taught me things. It kept me ahead of the game.

But no more. Things are different now --and not just for me either. As a respected law enforcement official for 20 years in the West, and now as a weapons consultant to a political candidate in Colorado, I can say from long and tremendous experience that The Police Chief has turned to cheap jelly. As a publication it no longer excites me, and as a phony Voice of the Brotherhood it makes me sick with rage. One night in Oakland, about a dozen years ago, I actually got my rocks off from reading the advertisements. . . I hate to admit such a thing, but it's true.

I remember one ad from Smith & Wesson when they first came out with their double-action 44 Magnum revolver: 240 grains of hot lead, exploding out of a big pipe in your hand at 1200 feet per second. . . and super-accurate, even on a running target.

Up until that time we'd all thought the 0.357 Magnum was just about the bee's nuts. F.B.I-filed tests had proved what the 0.357 could do: in one case, with F.B.I agents giving fire-pursuit to a carload of fleeing suspects, an agent in the pursuing car brought the whole chase to an end with a single shot from his 0.357 revolver. His slug penetrated the trunk of the fleeing car, then the back seat, then the upper torso of a back seat passenger, then the front seat, then the neck of the driver, then the dashboard, and finally imbedded itself in the engine block. Indeed, the 0.357 was such a terrifying weapon that for ten years only qualified marksmen were allowed to carry them.

So it just about drove me crazy when --just after I'd qualified to carry a 0.357 --I picked up a new issue of The Police Chief and saw an ad for the 0.44 Magnum, a brand-new revolver with twice the velocity and twice the striking power of the "old" 0.357.

One of the first real-life stories I heard about the 0.44 Magnum was from a Tennessee sheriff whom I met one spring at a law enforcement conference in St. Louis. "Most men can't handle the goddamn thing," he said. "It kicks worse than a goddamn bazooka, and it hits like a goddamn A-bomb. Last week I had to chase a nigger downtown, and when he got so far away that he couldn't even hear my warning yell, I just pulled down on the bastard with this 0.44 Magnum and blew the head clean off his body with one shot. All we found were some teeth and one eyeball. The rest was all mush and bone splinters."

Well. .. let's face it; that man was a bigot. We've learned a lot about racial problems since then. .. but even a nigger could read The Police Chief in 1970 and see that we haven't learned much about weapons. Today's beat cop in any large city is a sitting duck for snipers, rapers, dope addicts, bomb-throwers and communist fruits. These scum are well-armed --with U.S. Army weapons --and that's why I finally quit official police work.

As a weapons specialist I saw clearly --in the years between 1960 and 1969 --that the Army's weapons-testing program on the Indo-Chinese peninsula was making huge strides. In that active decade the basic military cartridge developed from the ancient 30.06 to the neuter 0.308 to a rapid-fire 0.223. That lame old chestnut about "sharpshooters" was finally muscled aside by the proven value of sustained-firescreens. The hand-thrown grenade was replaced, at long last, by the portable grenade launcher, the Claymore mine and the fiery missile-cluster. In the simplest of technical terms, the kill-potential of the individual soldier was increased from 1.6 per second to 26.4-per second --or nearly five K.P points higher than Pentagon figures indicate we would need to prevail in a land war with China.

So the reason for this nation's dismal failure on the Indo-Chinese peninsula lies not in our weapons technology, but in a failure of will. Yes. Our G.I.'s are doomed in Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Thailand, Burma, etcetera for the same insane reason that our law enforcement agents are doomed in Los Angeles, New York and Chicago. They have been shackled, for years, by cowardly faggots and spies. Not all were conscious traitors; some were morally weak, others were victims of drugs, and many were simply crazy...

Let's face it. The majority of people in this country are mentally ill... and this illness unfortunately extends into all walks of life, including law enforcement. The illness is manifest in our National Stance from Bangkok to Bangor, to coin a phrase, but to those of us still dying on our feet in the dry rot of middle America there is no worse pain --and no more hideous proof of the plague that afflicts us all --than the knowledge of what has happened to The Police Chief, a magazine we once loved because it was great.

But let's take a look at it now. The editor-in-chief is an F.B.I dropout by the name of Quinn Tamm, a middle-aged career cop who ruined his whole life one day by accidentally walking on the fighting side of J. Edgar Hoover's wiretap fetish. Tamm is legally sane --by "liberal" standards --but in grass-roots police circles he is primarily known as the model for Mitch Greenhill's famous song "Pig in the Stash." The real editor of the magazine is a woman named Pitcher. I knew her in the old days, but Tamm's son does most of the work, anyway.

One of the most frightening things about The Police Chief is that it calls itself "The Professional Voice of Law Enforcement." But all it really is, is a house-organ for a gang of high-salaried pansies who call themselves the "International Association of Chiefs of Police, Inc."

How about that? Here's a crowd of suck-asses putting out this magazine that says it's the voice of cops. Which is bullshit. All you have to do is look at the goddamn thing to see what it is. Look at the advertising; Fag tools! Breathalysers, "paralyzers," gas masks, sirens, funny little car radios with voice scramblers so the scum can't listen in. . . but no Attack Weapons!!! Not one! The last really functional weapon that got mentioned in The Police Chief was the "Nutcracker Flail," a combination club and pincers about three feet long that can cripple almost anybody. It works like a huge pair of pliers: the officer first flails the living shit out of anybody he can reach. . . and then, when a suspect falls, he swiftly applies the "nutcracker" action, gripping the victim's neck, extremities or genitals with the powerful pincers at the "reaching" end of the tool, then squeezing until all resistance ceases.

Believe me, our city streets would be a lot safer if every beat cop in the nation carried a Nutcracker Flail. . . So why is this fine weapon no longer advertised in P.C? I'll tell you why: for the same reason they no longer advertise the 0.44 Magnum or the fantastically efficient Stoner rifle that can shoot through brick walls and make hash of the rabble inside. Yes. . . and also for the same reason they won't advertise The Growler, a mobile sound unit that emits such unholy shrieks and roars that every human being within a radius of ten city blocks is paralyzed with unbearable pain: they collapse in their tracks and curl up like worms, losing all control of their bowels and bleeding from the ears.

Every P.D in the country should have a Growler, but the P.C won't advertise it because they're afraid of hurting their image. They want to be Loved. In this critical hour we don't need love, we need Weapons --the newest and best and most efficient weapons we can get our hands on. This is a time of extreme peril. The rising tide is almost on us. .. but you'd never know it from reading The Police Chief. Let's look at the June 1970 issue:

The first thing we get is a bunch of gibberish written by the police chief of Miami, Florida, saying "the law enforcement system [in the U.S.A.] is doomed to failure." Facing this is a full-page ad for the Smith & Wesson "Street Cleaner," described as a "Pepper Fog tear smoke generator. .. loaded with a new Super Strength Type C.S [gas] just developed by Gen. Ordnance." The "Street Cleaner" with Super C.S "not only sends the meanest troublemakers running. It convinces them not to come back. .. You can trigger anything from a 1-second puff to a 10 minute deluge. .. Do you have a Street Cleaner yet?"

In all fairness, the Pepper Fogger is not a bad tool, but it's hardly a weapon. It may convince trouble-makers not to come back in ten minutes, but wait a few hours and the scum will be back in your face like wild rats. The obvious solution to this problem is to abandon our obsession with tear gas and fill the Street Cleaner with a nerve agent. C.S only slaps at the problem: nerve gas solves it.

Yet the bulk of all advertising in the P.C is devoted to tear gas weapons: Federal Laboratories offers the 201.Z gun, along with the Fed 233 Emergency Kit, featuring "Speed-heat" grenades and gas projectiles guaranteed to "pierce barricades." The A.A.I Corporation offers a "multi-purpose grenade that can't be thrown back." And, from Lake Erie Chemical, we have a new kind of gas mask that "protects against C.S." (This difference is crucial; the ad explains that army surplus gas masks do well enough against the now-obsolete C.N gas, but they're virtually useless against C.S --"the powerful irritant agent that more and more departments are turning to and that's now 'standard' with the National Guard.")

Unfortunately, this is about as far as The Police Chief goes, in terms of weapons (or tools) information. One of the few interesting items in the non-weapons category is a "scrambler" for "police-band" car radios --so "the enemy" can't listen in. With the "scrambler," everything will sound like Donald Duck.

The only consistently useful function of the P.C is the old faithful "Positions Open" section. For instance: Charlotte, N.C., needs a "firearms identification expert" for the new city-county crime lab. Ellenville, N.Y. is looking for a new chief of police, salary "10,500 with liberal fringe benefits." Indeed. And the U.S. Department of Justice is "now recruiting Special Agents for the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs." The ad says they need "a sizeable number" of new agents, to start at $8098 per annum, "with opportunity for premium overtime pay to gross up to $10,000."

(In my opinion, only a lunatic or a dope addict would do narc-work for that kind of money. The hours are brutal and the risks are worse: I once had a friend who went to work as a drug agent for the feds and lost both of his legs. A girl he was trusting put L.S.D in his beer, then took him to a party where a gang of vicious freaks snapped his femurs with a meat-ax.)

Let's face it: we live in savage times. Not only are "cops" called pigs --they are treated like swine and eat worse than hogs. Yet the P.C still carries advertising for "P.I.G." tie-clasps! What kind of two-legged scumsucker would wear a thing like that?

why are we Groveling? This is the rootnut question! Why has the once great Police Chief turned on its rank and file?

Are we dupes? Do the Red Pansies want to destroy us? If not, why do they mock all we believe in?

So it should come as no surprise --to the self-proclaimed pigs who put out The Police Chief --that most of us no longer turn to that soggy-pink magazine when we're looking for serious information. Personally, I prefer the Shooting Times, or Guns & Ammo. Their editorials on "gun control" are pure balls of fire, and their classified ads offer every conceivable kind of beastly weapon from brass knuckles and blowguns to 20 millimeters. cannons.

Another fine source of weapons info --particularly for the private citizen --is a little known book titled, How to Defend Yourself, Your Family, and Your Home --a Complete Guide to Self-Protection. Now here is a book with real class! It explains, in 307 pages of fine detail, how to set booby traps in your home so that "midnight intruders" will destroy themselves upon entry; it tells which type of shotgun is best for rapid-fire work in narrow hallways (a sawed-off double-barreled 12-gauge; one barrel loaded with a huge tear gas slug, the other with Double-O buckshot). This book is invaluable to anyone who fears that his home might be invaded, at any moment, by rioters, rapers, looters, dope addicts, niggers, Reds or any other group. No detail has been spared: dogs, alarm wiring, screens, bars, poisons, knives, guns. . . ah yes, this is a wonderful book and highly recommended by the National Police Officers Association of America. This is a very different group from the police chiefs. Very different.

But why grapple now with a book of such massive stature? I need time to ponder it and to run tests on the many weapons and devices that appear in the text. No professional would attempt to deal lightly with this book. It is a rare combination of sociology and stone craziness, laced with weapons technology on a level that is rarely encountered.

You will want this book. But I want you to know it first. And for that, I need time... to deal smartly with the bugger on its own terms. No pro would settle for less.

--Raoul Duke (Master of Weaponry)

Part 4

Scanlan's Monthly, volume 1, no. 7, June 1970

The Great Shark Hunt

Four-thirty in Cozumel now; dawn is coming up on these gentle white beaches looking west at the Yucatan Channel. Thirty yards from my patio here at Cabañas del Caribe, the surf is rolling up, very softly, on the beach out there in the darkness beyond the palm trees.

Many vicious mosquitoes and sand fleas out here tonight. There are 60 units in this rambling beach-front hotel, but my room --number 129 --is the only one full of light and music and movement.

I have both my doors and all four windows propped open --a huge bright magnet for every bug on the island. . . But I am not being bitten. Every inch of my body --from the soles of my bleeding bandaged feet to the top of my sun-scorched head --is covered with 6 to 12 Insect Repellent, a cheap foul-smelling oil with no redeeming social or aesthetic characteristics except that it works.

These goddamn bugs are all around --settling on the notebook, my wrist, my arms, circling the rim of my tall glass of Bacardi Añejo and ice. .. but no bites. It has taken about six days to solve this hellish bug problem. .. which is excellent news on the one level, but, as always, the solution to one problem just peels back another layer and exposes some new and more sensitive area.

At this stage of the gig, things like mosquitoes and sand fleas are the least of our worries. . . because in about two hours and 22 minutes I have to get out of this hotel without paying an unnaturally massive bill, drive about three miles down the coast in a rented V.W Safari that can't be paid for, either, and which may not even make it into town, due to serious mechanical problems --and then get my technical advisor Yail Bloor out of the Mesón San Miguel without paying his bill, either, and then drive us both out to the airport in that goddamn junk Safari to catch the 7:50 Aeromexico flight to Mérida and Monterrey, where we'll change planes for San Antonio and Denver.

So we are looking at a very heavy day. . . 2000 miles between here and home, no cash at all, ten brutally expensive days in three hotels on the Striker Aluminum Yachts credit tab, which just got jerked out from under us when the local P.R team decided we were acting too weird to be what we claim to be --and so now we are down to about $44 extra between us --with my bill at the Cabañas hovering around $650 and Bloor's at the San Miguel not much less --plus 11 days for that wretched car from the local Avis dealer who already hit me for $40 cash for a broken windshield, and God only knows how much he'll demand when he sees what condition his car is in now. . . plus about $400 worth of black coral that we ordered up from China: doubled-thumbed fist, coke spoons, sharks' teeth, etcetera . . and that $120 18-kt.-gold chain at the market. . . also Sandy's black-coral necklace. We will need all available cash for the black-coral deal --so things like hotel bills and car rentals will have to be put off and paid by check, if anybody will take one. . . or charged to Striker Aluminum Yachts, which got me into this goddamn twisted scene in the first place. But the Striker people are no longer with us; extreme out-front hostility. Bruce, Joyce --even the bogus lecher Eduardo. How did we blow the image?

"Dear Mr. Thompson. . . Here's some background information on the Cozumel cruise and international fishing tournament. . . Regarding the cruise schedule, about 14 Strikers will leave Fort Lauderdale on April 23, arriving iin Key West that night, leaving Key West midday on the 25th, to assure skirting the Cuban coast in the daytime, and arriving in Cozumel midafternoon on the 27th or 28th. In addition to the proven sailfishing, there will be a Marlin Only Day on Saturday May sixth, in the initial attempt on any volume basis to determine how good the blue-marlin fishing is. . . Each night during the tournament, there are cocktail parties with over 250 people attending, mariachi and island music, etcetera . . We are happy you can make the trip. . . Flights leave Miami daily for Cozumel at 2 45 PM You will need a Mexican tourist card, which you can pick up at the Mexican Tourism Department, 100 Biscayne Boulevard, Room 612 Miami. There are no shots required.

Sincerely,

Terence J. Byrne

Public Relations Representative

Striker Aluminum Yachts

Fort Lauderdale, Florida

Indeed. .. no shots: just a tourist card, plenty of Coppertone, a new pair of Top-siders and a fine gringo smile for the customs officers. The letter called up visions of heavy sport on the high seas, mono a mono with giant sailfish and world-record marlin. .. Reeling the bastards in, fighting off sharks with big gaffs, strapped into a soft white-Naugahyde fighting chair in the cockpit of a big power cruiser. . . then back to the harbor at dusk for a brace of gin and tonics, tall drinks in the sunset, lounging around in cool deck chairs while the crew chops up bait and a strolling mariachi band roams on the pier, wailing mournful Olmec love songs. ...

Ah, yes, I was definitely ready for it. Sixteen months of straight politics had left me reeling around on the brink of a nervous breakdown. I needed a change, something totally different from my normal line of work. Covering politics is a vicious, health-ripping ordeal that often requires eight or nine shots at once --twice or three times a week in the peak season --so this unexpected assignment to "cover" a deep-sea-fishing tournament off the Yucatan coast of Mexico was a welcome relief from the horrors of the campaign trail in 1972.

Right. Things would be different now: hot sun, salt air, early to bed and early to rise. . . This one had all the signs of a high-style bag job: Fly off to the Caribbean as a guest of the idle rich, hang around on their boats for a week or so, then crank out a left-handed story to cover expenses and pay for a new motorcycle back in the Rockies. The story itself was a bit on the hazy side, but the editor at Playboy said not to worry. Almost everybody unfortunate enough to have had any dealings with me since the campaign ended seemed convinced that I was in serious need of a vacation --a cooling-out period, a chance to back off --and this fishing tournament in Cozumel looked just about perfect. It would pry my head out of politics, they said, and force me off in a new direction --out of the valley of death and back toward the land of the living.

There was, however, a kink: I had just come back from "vacation." It was the first one I'd ever attempted, or at least the first one I'd tried since I was fired from my last regular job on Christmas Day in 1958, when the production manager at Time magazine ripped up my punch card in a stuttering rage and told me to get the fuck out of the building. Since then I had been unemployed --in the formal sense of that word --and when you've been out of work for 14 years, it's almost impossible to relate to a word like vacation.

So I was extremely nervous when circumstances compelled me, in the late winter of '72, to fly to Cozumel with my wife, Sandy, in order to do nothing at all.

Three days later I ran out of air in a rip tide, 90 feet down on Palancar Reef, and I came so close to drowning that they said, later, I was lucky to get off with a serious case of the bends. The nearest decompression chamber was in Miami, so they chartered a plane and flew me there that same night.

I spent the next 19 days in a pressurized sphere somewhere in downtown Miami, and when I finally came out, the bill was $3000. My wife finally located my attorney in a drug commune on the outskirts of Mazatlan. He flew immediately to Florida and had the courts declare me a pauper so I was able to leave without legal problems.

I went back to Colorado with the idea of resting for at least six months. But three days after I got home, this assignment came in to cover the fishing tournament. It was a natural, they said, because I was already familiar with the island. And besides, I needed a change from politics.

Which was true, in a way --but I had my own reasons for wanting to go back to Cozumel. On the evening before my near-fatal scuba dive on Palancar Reef, I had stashed 50 units of pure M.D.A in the adobe wall of the shark pool at the local aquarium next to the Hotel Barracuda --and this stash had been much on my mind while I was recovering from the bends in the Miami hospital.

So when the Cozumel assignment came through, I drove immediately into town to consult with my old friend and drug crony Yail Bloor. I explained the circumstances in detail, then asked his advice.

"It's clear as a fucking bell," he snapped. "We'll have to go down there at once. You'll handle the fishermen while I get the drugs."

These were the circumstances that sent me back to Cozumel in late April. Neither the editor nor the high-powered sport-fishing crowd we'd be dealing with had any notion of my real reason for making the trip. Bloor knew, but he had a vested interest in maintaining the cover because I was passing him off, on the tab, as my "technical advisor." It made perfect sense, I felt: In order to cover a highly competitive situation, you need plenty of trustworthy help.

When I got to Cozumel, on Monday afternoon, everybody on the island with any clout in the tourism business was half-mad with excitement at the idea of having a genuwine, real-life "Playboy writer" in their midst for a week or ten days. When I slumped off the plane from Miami, I was greeted like Buffalo Bill on his first trip to Chicago --a whole gaggle of public-relations specialists met the plane, and at least three of them were waiting for me: What could they do for me? What did I want? How could they make my life pleasant?

Carry my bags?

Well... why not?

To where

Well. . . I paused, sensing an unexpected opening that could lead almost anywhere. . . "I think I'm supposed to go to the Cabañas," I said. "But --"

"No," said one of the handlers, "you have a press suite at Cozumeleno."

I shrugged. "Whatever's right," I muttered. "Let's roll."

I'd asked the travel agent in Colorado to get me one of those V.W Safari jeeps --the same kind I'd had on my last trip to Cozumel --but the P.R crowd at the airport insisted on taking me straight to the hotel. My jeep they said, would be delivered within the hour, and in the meantime, I was treated like some kind of high-style dignitary: A few people actually addressed me as "Mr. Playboy" and the others kept calling me "sir." I was hustled into a waiting car and whisked off along the two-lane blacktop highway through the palm jungle and out in the general direction of the American Strip, a cluster of beach-front hotels on the northeast end of the island.

Despite my lame protests, they took me to the newest, biggest and most expensive hotel on the island --a huge, stark-white concrete hulk that reminded me of the Oakland city jail. We were met at the desk by the manager, the owner and several hired heavies who explained that the terrible hammering noise I heard was merely the workmen putting the finishing touches on the third floor of what would eventually be a five-story colossus. "We have just ninety rooms now," the manager explained, "but by Christmas we will have three hundred."

"Jesus God!" I muttered.

"What?"

"Never mind," I said. "This is a hell of a thing you're building here: No doubt about that --it's extremely impressive in every way --but the odd fact is that I thought I had reservations down the beach at the Cabañas." I flashed a nice shrug and a smile, ignoring the awkward chill that was already settling on us.

The manager coughed up a brittle laugh. "The Cabañas? No, Señor Playboy. The Cozumeleno is very different from the Cabañas."

"Yeah," I said. "I can see that right off." The Mayan bellboy had already disappeared with my bags.

"We saved a Junior suite for you," said the manager. "I think you'll be satisfied." His English was very precise, his smile was unnaturally thick... and it was clear, from a glance at my high-powered welcoming committee, that I was going to be their guest for at least one night... And as soon as they forgot about me, I would flee this huge concrete morgue and sneak off to the comfortable run-down palm-shaded peace of the Cabañas, where I felt more at home.

On the drive out from the airport, the P.R man, who was wearing a blue baseball cap and a stylish blue-and-white T-shirt, both emblazoned with the lightning-flash Striker logo, had told me that the owner of this new, huge Cozumeleno hotel was a member of the island's ruling family. "They own about half of it," he said with a grin, "and what they don't own they control absolutely, with their fuel license."

"Fuel license?"

"Yeah," said the P.R man. "They control every gallon of fuel that's sold here --from the gasoline we're driving on right now in this jeep to the gas in every stove in all the hotel restaurants and even the goddamn jet fuel at the airport.

I didn't pay much attention to that talk, at the time. It seemed like the same kind of sleazy, power-worshipping bullshit you'd expect to hear from any P.R man, anywhere, on any subject in any situation....

My problem was clear from the start. I had come down to Cozumel --officially, at least --to cover not just a fishing tournament but a scene: I'd explained to the editor that big-time sport fishing attracts a certain kind of people and it was the behavior of these people --not the fishing --that interested me. On my first visit to Cozumel, I'd discovered the fishing harbor completely by accident one night when Sandy and I were driving around the island more or less naked, finely twisted on M.D.A, and the only reason we located the yacht basin was that I took a wrong turn around midnight and tried --without realizing where I was going --to run a roadblock manned by three Mexican soldiers with submachine guns at the entrance to the island's only airport.

It was a hard scene to cope with, as I recall, and now that I look back on it, I suspect that moldy white powder we'd eaten was probably some kind of animal tranquilizer instead of true M.D.A. There is a lot of P.C.P on the drug market these days; anybody who wants to put a horse into a coma can buy it pretty easily from... well... why blow that, eh?

In any case, we were bent --and after being driven away from the airport by armed guards, I took the next available open road and we would up in the yacht basin, where there was a party going on. I could hear it about a half mile off, so I homed in on the music and drove across the highway and about 200 yards down a steep grassy embankment to get to the dock. Sandy refused to get out of the jeep, saying that these weren't the kind of people she felt ready to mix with, under the circumstances... so I left her huddled under a blanket on the front seat and walked out onto the dock by myself. It was exactly the kind of scene I'd been looking for --about 35 stone-drunk rich honkies from places like Jacksonville and Pompano Beach, reeling around in this midnight Mexican port on their $200,000 power cruisers and cursing the natives for not providing enough teenage whores to go with the mariachi music. It was a scene of total decadence and I felt right at home in it. I began mixing with the crowd and trying to hire a boat for the next morning --which proved to be very difficult, because nobody could understand what I was saying.

What's wrong here? I wondered. Is there speed in this drug? Why can't these people understand me?

One of the people I was talking to was the owner of a 60-foot Chris-Craft from Milwaukee. He'd just arrived from Key West that afternoon, he said, and all he seemed to have any real interest in at the moment was the "Argentine maid" he was grappling with in the cockpit of his boat. She was about 15 years old, had dark-blonde hair and red eyes, but it was hard to get a good look at her, because "Cap'n Tom" --as he introduced himself --was bending her over a Styrofoam bait box full of dolphin heads and trying to suck on her collarbone while he talked to me.

Finally I gave up on him and found a local fishing merchant called Fernando Murphy, whose drunkenness was so crude and extreme that we were able to communicate perfectly, even though he spoke little English. "No fishing at night," he said. "Come to my shop downtown by the plaza tomorrow and I rent you a nice boat."

"Wonderful," I said. "How much?"

He laughed and fell against a pasty blonde woman from New Orleans who was too drunk to talk. "For you," he said, "a hundred and forty dollars a day --and I guarantee fish."

"Why not?" I said. "I'll be there at dawn. Have the boat ready."

"¡Chingado!" he screamed. He dropped his drink on the dock and began grappling with his own shoulder blades. I was taken aback at his outburst, not understanding for a moment. . . until I saw that a laughing 300-pound man wearing Levis and a red baseball hat in the cockpit of a nearby boat called Black Snapper had hooked the back of Murphy's shirt with a 30-pound marlin rod and was trying to reel him in.

Murphy staggered backward, screaming "¡Chingado!" once again as he fell sideways on the dock and ripped his shirt open. Well, I thought, no point trying to do business with this crowd tonight and, in fact, I never fished on that trip. But the general low tone of that party had stayed with me --a living caricature of white trash run amuck on foreign shores; an appalling kind of story, but not without a certain human-interest quotient.

On the first day of the tournament, I spent eight hours at sea aboard the eventual winner --a 54-foot Striker called Sun Dancer, owned by a wealthy middle-aged industrialist named Frank Oliver from Palatka, Florida.

Oliver ran a fleet of barges on the Inland Waterway out of Jacksonville, he said, and Sun Dancer was the only boat in the Cozumel Harbor flying a Confederate flag. He had "about three hundred and twenty-five thousand in it" --including a network of built-in vacuum-cleaner wall plugs for the deep-pile carpets --and although he said he spent "maybe five weeks out of the year" on the boat, he was a very serious angler and he meant to win this tournament.

To this end, he had hired one of the world's top fishing captains --a speedy little cracker named Cliff North --and turned Sun Dancer over to him on a year-round basis. North is a living legend in the sport-fishing world and the idea that Oliver would hire him as his personal captain was not entirely acceptable to the other anglers. One of them explained that it was like some rich weekend duffer hiring Arnold Palmer to shoot the final round of the Greater Cleveland Elks golf tourney for him. North lives on the boat, with his wife and two young "mates," who do all the menial work, and during the ten months of the year when Oliver's not around, he charters Sun Dancer out to anybody who can pay the rate. All Cuff has to do --in return for this sinecure --is make sure Oliver wins the three or four fishing tournaments he finds time to enter each year.

Thanks to North and his expert boat handling, Frank Oliver is now listed in the sport-fishing record books as one of the world's top anglers. Whether or not Oliver would win any tournaments without North and Sun Dancer is a subject of widespread disagreement and occasional rude opinion among sport-fishing pros. Not even the most egotistical anglers will deny that a good boat and a hot-rod captain to handle it are crucial factors in ocean fishing --but there is a definite division of opinion between anglers (who are mainly rich amateurs) and pros (the boat captain and the crews) about the relative value of skills.

Most of the pros I talked to in Cozumel were reluctant, at first, to speak on this subject --at least for the record --but after the third or fourth drink, they would invariably come around to suggesting that anglers were more of a hazard than a help and, as a general rule of thumb, you could catch more fish by just jamming the rod into a holder on the rear end of the boat and letting the fish do the work. After two or three days on the boats, the most generous consensus I could get from the pros was that even the best angler is worth about a ten percent advantage in a tournament, and that most are seen as handicaps.

"Jesus God Almighty," said a veteran captain from Fort Lauderdale one night in a local hotel bar, "you wouldn't believe the things I've seen these fools do!" He laughed, but the sound was nervous and his body seemed to shudder as the memories came back on him. "One of the people I work for," he said, "has a wife who's just flat-out crazy." He shook his head wearily. "I don't want you to get me wrong, now --I love her dearly, as a person --but when it comes to fishing, goddamn it, I'd like to chop her up and toss her out for the sharks." He took a long hit on his rum and Coke. "Yeah, I hate to say it, but that's all she's good for --shark bait and nothin' else. Jesus, the other day she almost killed herself! We hooked a big sailfish, and when that happens, you have to move pretty fast, you know --but all of a sudden, I heard her screaming like crazy, and when I looked down from the bridge, she had her hair all tangled up in the reel!" He laughed. "Goddamn! Can you believe that? She almost got scalped! I had to jump down, about fifteen feet onto a wet deck in a bad sea, we were wallowing all around --and cut the whole line loose with my knife. She came within about ten seconds of having all her hair pulled out!"

Few anglers --and especially winners like Frank Oliver --agree with the pros' 90 to 10 split. "It's basically a teamwork situation," says Oliver, "like a chain with no weak links. The angler, the captain, the mates, the boat --they're all critical, they work like gears with each other."

Well. . . maybe so. Oliver won the tournament with 28 sailfish in the three days that counted. But he was fishing alone on Sun Dancer --a boat so lavishly outfitted it could have passed for the nautical den in Nelson Rockefeller's Fifth Avenue apartment --and with the Arnold Palmer of sport fishing up on the bridge. Most of his competition was fishing in twos and threes on charter boats they were assigned to at random, with wild-tempered, contemptuous captains they'd never even met before yesterday morning.

"Fishing against Cliff North is bad enough," said Jerry Haugen, captain of a stripped-down hulk of a boat called Lucky Striker, "but when you have to go against North and only one angler, with everything set up exactly the way he wants it, that's just about impossible."

Which is neither here nor there, in the rules of big-time sport fishing. If Bebe Rebozo decided to borrow a half-million dollars from the Pentagon at no interest and enter the Cozumel tournament with the best boat he could buy and a crew of specially trained U.S. Marines, he would compete on the same basis with me, if I entered the thing with a 110 year-old Colorado Riverboat and a crew of drug-crazed politicos from the Meat Possum Athletic Club. According to the rules, we'd be equal. And while Bebe could fish alone on his boat, the tournament directors could assign me a nightmarish trio of anglers like Sam Brown, John Mitchell and Baby Huey.

Could we win? Never in hell. But nobody connected with that tournament would ever forget the experience. . . which is almost what happened anyway, for different reasons. By the third day of the tournament, or maybe it was the fourth, I had lost all control of my coverage. At one point, when Bloor ran amuck and disappeared for 30 hours, I was forced to jerk a dope addict out of the island's only night club and press him into service as a "special observer" for Playboy. He spent the final day of the tournament aboard Sun Dancer, snorting coke in the head and jabbering wildly at North while poor Oliver struggled desperately to maintain his one-fish lead over Haugen's manic crew on Lucky Striker.

Thursday night was definitely the turning point. Whatever rapport Bloor and I had developed with the Striker people was wearing very thin after three days of increasingly strange behavior and the antisocial attitude we apparently manifested at the big Striker cocktail party at the Punta Morena beach bar was clearly unacceptable. Almost everybody there was staggering drunk by nightfall and the ugliness threshold was low. Here were all these heavy anglers --prosperous Florida businessmen, for the most part --snarling and snapping at one another like East Harlem street fighters on the eve of a long-awaited rumble:

"You potbellied asshole! You couldn't catch a fish in a goddamn barrel!"

"Watch your stupid lip, fella: That's my wife you just stepped on!"

"Whose wife, fatface? Keep your fuckin' hands to yourself."

"Where's the goddamn waiter? Boy! Boy! Over here! Get me another drink, will ya?"

"Let me just put it to you this way, my friend. How 'bout a goddamn fish-off? Just you and me --for a thousand bucks, eh? Yeah, how 'bout it?"

People were lurching around in the sand with plates full of cold macaroni and shrimp sauce. Every now and then, somebody would jerk one of the giant turtles out of the tank on the patio and thrust it in the face of some bleary-eyed bystander, laughing wildly and struggling to hang on to the thing, big green flippers clawing frantically at the air and lashing a spray of stale turtle water on everybody within a radius of ten feet. . . "Here: I wantcha to meet my friend! She'll do a real job on yer pecker. How horny are ya?"

It was not a good scene to confront with a head full of acid. We drank heavily, trying to act natural, but the drug set us clearly apart. Bloor became obsessed with the notion that we'd stumbled into a gathering of drunken greedheads who were planning to turn Cozumel into "a Mexican Miami Beach" --which was true, to a certain extent, but he pursued it with a zeal that churned up angry resentment in every conversation he wandered into. At one point, I found him shouting at the manager of the hotel he was staying in: "You're just a bunch of goddamn moneygrubbing creeps! All this bullshit about tourism and development --what the hell do you want here, another Aspen?"

The hotel man was baffled. "What is Aspen?" he asked. "What are you talking about?"

"You know goddamn well what I'm talking about, you sleazy bastard!" Bloor shouted. "These dirty concrete hotels you're building all over the beach, these dirty little hot-dog stands and _ _."

I hurried across the patio and grabbed him by the shoulder. "Never mind Yail," I said, trying to focus at least one of my eyes on whoever he was talking to. "He's still not adjusted to this altitude." I tried to smile at them, but I could sense it wasn't working. .. a drugged grimace, wild eyes and very jerky movements. I could hear myself talking, but the words made no sense: "These goddamned iguanas all over the road. .. we did a one-eighty back there at the U turn. .. Yail grabbed the emergency brake when he saw all those lizards, jerked it right out by the root. .. Thank Christ we had those snow tires. We live at five thousand feet, you know, damn little air pressure up there, but down here at sea level you feel it squeezing your brain like a vise. .. No way to escape it, you can't even think straight. ."

Nobody smiled; I was babbling out of control and Bloor was still yelling about "land rapers." I left him and went to the bar. "We're leaving," I said, "but I want some ice for the road."

The bartender gave me a Pepsi-Cola cup full of melting shavings. "We'll need more than that," I said --so he filled up another cup. He spoke no English, but I could grasp what he was trying to tell me: There was no container available for the amount of ice I wanted and they were almost out of ice anyway.

My head was beginning to pulsate violently at this point I could barely keep a focus on his face. Rather than argue, I went out to the parking lot and drove the Safari through a screen of small beach trees and up onto the patio, parking it right in front of the bar and indicating to the stunned bartender that I wanted the back seat filled with ice.

The Striker crowd was appalled. "You crazy son of a bitch!" someone yelled. "You mashed about fifteen trees!" I nodded, but the words didn't register. All I could think about was ice --throwing one cupload after another into the back seat. The acid, by this time, had fucked up my vision to the point where I was seeing square out of one eye and round out of the other. It was impossible to focus on anything; I seemed to have four hands.

The bartender had not been lying: The Punta Moreña ice vat was virtually empty. I scraped a few more cuploads out of the bottom --hearing Bloor's angry cursing somewhere above and behind me --then I jumped over the counter and into the front seat of the jeep.

Nobody seemed to notice, so I gunned the engine violently and leaned on the horn as I crept very slowly in first gear through the mashed trees and shrubbery. Loud voices seemed to be looming down on me from the rear and suddenly Bloor was climbing over the back, yelling, "Get moving, goddamn it, get moving!" I stomped on the accelerator and we fish-tailed out of the deep-sand parking lot.

Thirty minutes later, after a top-speed, bug-spattered run all the way to the other side of the island, we rolled into the parking lot of what appeared to be a night club. Bloor had calmed down a bit, but he was still in a high, wild condition as we lurched to a stop about five feet from the front door. I could hear loud music inside.

"We need a few drinks," I muttered. "My tongue feels like an iguana's been chewing on it." Bloor stepped out, "Keep the engine running," he said. "I'll check the place out."

He disappeared inside and I leaned back on the seat to stare straight up at the star-crazed sky. It seemed about six feet above my eyes. Or maybe 60 feet, or 600. I couldn't be sure, and it didn't matter, anyway, because by that time I was convinced I was in the cockpit of a 727 coming into L.A. at midnight. Jesus, I thought, I am ripped right straight to the tits. Where am I? Are we going up or down? Somewhere in the back of my brain, I knew I was sitting in a jeep in the parking lot of a night club on an island off the Mexican coast --but how could I really be sure, with another part of my brain apparently convinced that I was looking down on the huge glittering bowl of Los Angeles from the cockpit of a 727? Was that the Milky Way? Or Sunset Boulevard? Orion, or the Beverly Hills Hotel?

Who gives a fuck? I thought. It's a fine thing to just lie back and stare up or down at. My eyeballs felt cool, my body felt rested...

Then Bloor was yelling at me again. "Wake up, goddamn it! Park the car and let's go inside. I've met some wonderful people."

The rest of that night is very hazy in my memory. The inside of the club was loud and almost empty --except for the people Bloor had met, who turned out to be two half-mad coke runners with a big silver can full of white powder. When I sat down at the table, one of them introduced himself as Frank and said, "Here, I think you need something for your nose."

"Why not?" I said, accepting the can he tossed into my lap, "and I also need some rum." I yelled at the waiter and then opened the can, despite a rustle of protests around the table.

I looked down at my lap, ignoring Frank's nervous behavior, and thought, Zang! This is definitely not Los Angeles. We must be somewhere else.

I was staring down at what looked like a whole ounce of pure, glittering white cocaine. My first instinct was to jerk a 100-peso note out of my pocket and quickly roll it up for snorting purposes, but by this time Frank had his hand on my arm. "For Christ's sake," he was whispering, "don't do that shit here. Take it into the bathroom."

Which I did. It was a difficult trip, through all those chairs and tables, but I finally managed to lock myself in the toilet stall and start lashing the stuff up my nose with no thought at all of the ominous noise I was making. It was like kneeling down on a beach and sticking a straw into the sand; after five minutes or so, both my nostrils were locked up like epoxy and I hadn't even made a visible depression in the dune right in front of my eyes.

Good God, I thought. This can't be true. I must be hallucinating!

By the time I staggered back to the table, the other had calmed down. It was obvious that Bloor had already been into the can, so I handed it back to Frank with a twisted smile. "Be careful with this stuff," I mumbled. "It'll turn your brain to jelly."

He smiled. "What are you people doing here?"

"You'd never believe it," I replied, accepting a tall glass of rum from the waiter. The band was taking a break now and two of the musicians had wandered over to our table. Frank was saying something about a party later on. I shrugged, still fighting to clear my nasal passages with quick sniffs of rum. I sensed that this latest development might have serious consequences for the future of my story, but I was no longer especially concerned about that.

From somewhere down deep in my memory, I heard a snatch of some half-remembered conversation between a construction worker and a bartender at a bar in Colorado. The construction man was explaining why he shouldn't have another drink: "You can't wallow with the pigs at night and then soar with the eagles in the morning," he said.

I thought briefly on this, then shrugged it off. My own situation was totally different, I felt. In about three hours, I was supposed to be down on the docks with my camera and tape recorder to spend another day on one of those goddamn boats.

No, I thought, that geek in Colorado had it all wrong. The real problem is how to wallow with the eagles at night and then soar with the pigs in the morning.

In any case, it made no difference. For a variety of good reasons, I missed my boat the next morning and spent the afternoon passed out in the sand on an empty beach about ten miles out of town.

By Friday night, it was clear that the story was not only a dry hole but maybe even a dry socket. Our most serious problem had to do with the rat-bastard tedium of spending eight hours a day out at sea in the boiling sun, being tossed around on the bridge of a high-powered motorboat and watching middle-aged businessmen reeling sailfish up to the side of the boat every once in a while. Both Bloor and I had spent a full day at sea --on the only boats in the tournament getting any real action, Sun Dancer and Lucky Striker --and by dusk on Friday, we had pretty well come to the conclusion that deep-sea fishing is not one of your king-hell spectator sports. I have watched a lot of bad acts in my time, from tag-team pro wrestling in Flomaton, Alabama, to the Roller Derby on Oakland T.V and intramural softball tournaments at Scott Air Force Base in Illinois --but I'm damned if I can remember anything as insanely fucking dull as that Third Annual International Cozumel Fishing Tournament. The only thing that comes close to it, in recent memory, is an afternoon I spent last March in a traffic jam on the San Diego freeway. .. but even that had a certain adrenaline factor; by the end of the second hour, I was so crazy with rage that I cracked the top half of the steering wheel off my rented Mustang, then exploded the water pump by racing the engine at top speed and finally abandoned the mess altogether in the outside lane about two miles north of the Newport Beach exit.

It was Saturday afternoon, I think, when the brain fog had cleared enough for a long, clean focus on our situation --which had been drastically altered, at that point, by three nights of no sleep and a handful of spastic confrontations with the Striker crowd. I had been thrown out of one hotel and moved to another and Bloor had been threatened with jail or deportation by the manager of his hotel on the midtown square.

I had managed another zombielike day at sea, with massive aid from Frank's can, but our relationship with the Striker people was apparently beyond redemption. Nobody connected with the tournament would have anything to do with us. We were treated like lepers. The only people we felt easy with, at that point, were a motley collection of local freaks, boozers, hustlers and black-coral divers who seemed to collect each afternoon on the porch of the Bal-Hai, the town's main bar.

They quickly befriended us --a sudden shift in old relationships with the island that caused me to begin signing all the tabs, splitting them about half and half between Striker and P Layboy . Nobody seemed to care, especially the ever-growing crowd of new friends who came to drink with us. These people understood and were vaguely amused at the idea that we'd fallen into serious disfavor with the Strikers and the local power structure. For the past three sleepless days, we'd been gathering at the Bal-Hai to brood publicly on the likelihood of massive retaliation by local jefes, incensed by our rotten behavior.

It was sometime around dusk on Saturday, hunkered down at a big round table on the Bal-Hai porch, that I noticed the pea-green Mustang making its second pass in less than ten minutes. There is only one pea-green Mustang on the island, and one of the divers had told me it belonged to the "mayor" --a heavy-set young pol and an appointed, not elected, official who looked like a beer-bellied lifeguard on some beach at Acapulco. We had seen him often in the past few days, usually in the late afternoon and always cruising up and down the seaside frontera.

"That son of a bitch is beginning to make me nervous," Bloor muttered.

"Don't worry," I said. "They won't shoot --not as long as we're here in a crowd."

"What?" A gray-haired woman from Miami sitting next to us had caught the word shoot.

"It's the Striker crowd," I explained. "We hear they've decided to get heavy with us."

"Jesus Christ!" said a retired airline pilot who'd been living off his boat and the Bal-Hai porch for the past few months. "You don't think they'll start shooting, do you? Not on a peaceful island like this!"

I shrugged. "Not here. They wouldn't shoot into a crowd. But we can't let them catch us alone."

The woman from Miami started to say something, but Bloor cut her off with an outburst that spun heads the length of the porch:

"They're in for the shock of their goddamn lives, tomorrow," he snarled. "Wait till they see what gets off that goddamn ferry from Playa del Carmen in the morning."

"What the hell are you talking about?" the ex-pilot asked.

Bloor said nothing, staring blankly out to sea. I hesitated a moment, then instinctively picked up the thread: "Heavies," I said. "We made some calls last night. Tomorrow morning they'll come off that boat like a pack of goddamn wolverines."

Our friends at the table were glancing nervously at one another. Violent crime is almost unheard of on Cozumel; the native oligarchy is into far more subtle varieties... and the idea that the Bal-Hai might be the scene of a Chicago-style shoot-out was a hard thing to grasp, even for me.

Bloor cut in again, still staring off toward the mainland. "You can hire just about anything you want in Mérida," he said. "We got these thugs for ten bucks a head, plus expenses. They'll crack every skull on the island if they have to --then burn every one of those goddamn red-neck boats right down to the waterline."

Nobody spoke for a moment, then the woman from Miami and the retired airline pilot got up to leave. "See you later," the man said stiffly. "We have to get back to the boat and check things out."

Moments later, the two divers who'd been sitting with us also left, saying they'd probably see us tomorrow at the Striker party.

"Don't count on it," Bloor muttered. They grinned nervously and sped off down the frontera on their tiny Hondas. We were left alone at the big round table, sipping margaritas and staring out at the sunset over the Yucatan Peninsula, 12 miles across the channel. After a few long moments of silence, Bloor reached into his pocket and came up with a hollowed-out glass eye he had bought from one of the street peddlers. There was a silver cap on the back and he flipped it up, then jammed the straw from his margarita into the hole and snorted heavily before handing it over to me. "Here," he said. "Try some of Frank's best."

The waiter was hovering over us, but I ignored him --until I realized I was having problems, then I looked up from the eyeball in my hand and asked for two more drinks and a dry straw. "¿Como no?" he hissed, moving quickly away from the table.

"This thing's all jammed up from the moisture," I said to Bloor, showing him the powder-packed straw. "We'll have to slice it open."

"Never mind," he said. "There's plenty more where that came from."

I nodded, accepting a fresh drink and about six dry straws from the waiter. "You notice how fast our friends left," I said, bearing down on the eyeball again. "I suspect they believed all that gibberish."

He sipped his own new drink and stared at the glass eye in my hand. "Why shouldn't they?" he mumbled. "I'm beginning to believe it myself."

I felt a great numbness in the back of my mouth and my throat as I snapped the cap shut and handed the eyeball back to him. "Don't worry," I said. "We're professionals --keep that in mind."

"I am," he said. "But I'm afraid they might figure that out."

It was late Saturday night, as I recall, when we learned that Frank Oliver had officially won the tournament --by one fish, ahead of the balls-out poor-boy crew on Lucky Striker. I wrote this down in my notebook as we roamed round the dock where the boats were tied up. Nobody urged us to come aboard for "a friendly drink" --as I heard some of the anglers put it to others on the dock --and, in fact, there were only a few people who spoke to us at all. Frank and his friend were sipping beers at the open-air bar nearby, but his kind of hospitality was not in tune with this scene. Jack Daniels and heavy petting on the foredeck is about as heavy as the Striker crowd gets. . . and after a week of mounting isolation from this scene I was supposed to be "covering," I was hung on the dark and ugly truth that "my story" was fucked. Not only did the boat people view me with gross disapproval but most of them no longer even believed I was working for P Layboy . All they knew, for sure, was that there was something very strange and off-center, to say the least, about me and all my "assistants."

Which was true, in a sense, and this feeling of alienation on both sides was compounded, on ours, by a galloping drug-induced paranoia that honed each small incident, with every passing day, to a grim and fearful edge. The paranoid sense of isolation was bad enough --along with trying to live in two entirely different worlds at the same time --but the worst problem of all was the fact that I'd spent a week on this goddamn wretched story and I still didn't have the flimsiest notion of what deepsea fishing felt like. I had no idea what it was like to actually catch a big fish. All I'd seen was a gang of frantic red-neck businessmen occasionally hauling dark shadows up to the side of various boats, just close enough to where some dollar-an-hour mate could cut the leader and score a point for "the angler." During the whole week, I'd never seen a fish out of the water --except on the rare occasions when a hooked sailfish had jumped for an instant, 100 or so yards from the boat, before going under again for the long reeling-in trip that usually took ten or fifteen minutes of silent struggle and always ended with the fish either slipping the hook or being dragged close enough to the boat to be "tagged" and then cut loose.

The anglers assured me it was all a great thrill, but on the evidence, I couldn't believe it. The whole idea of fishing, it seemed to me, was to hook a thrashing sea monster of some kind and actually boat the bastard. And then eat it.

All the rest seemed like dilettante bullshit --like hunting wild boar with a can of spray paint, from the safety of a pickup truck. .. and it was this half-crazed sense of frustration that led me finally to start wandering around the docks and trying to hire somebody to take me and Bloor out at night to fish for man-eating sharks. It seemed like the only way to get a real feel for this sport --to fish (or hunt) for something genuinely dangerous, a beast that would tear your leg off in an instant if you made the slightest mistake.

This concept was not widely understood on the dock in Cozumel. The businessmen-anglers saw no point in getting the cockpits of their expensive tubs messed up with real blood, and especially not theirs. .. but I finally found two takers: Jerry Haugen on Lucky Striker and a local Mayan captain who worked for Fernando Murphy.

Both of these efforts ended in disaster --for entirely different reasons and also at different times; but for the record, I feel a powerful obligation to record at least a brief observation about our shark-hunting expeditions off the coast of Cozumel: The first is that I saw more sharks by accident while scuba-diving during the daylight hours than I did during either of our elaborate, big-money nighttime "hunts" off the fishing boats; and the second is that anybody who buys anything more complex or expensive than a bottle of beer on the waterfront of Cozumel is opting for serious trouble.

Cerveza Superior, at 75 cents a bottle on the porch of the Bal-Hai, is a genuine bargain --if only because you know what you're getting --compared with the insanely and even fatally inept "deep-sea-fishing and scuba-diving tours" offered at dockside shacks like El Timon or Fernando Murphy's. These people rent boats to dumb gringos for $140 a day (or night) and then take you out to sea and dump you over the side with faulty diving gear in shark-filled waters during the day, or run you around in circles during the night --a Fernando Murphy specialty --while allegedly trolling for sharks about 500 yards offshore. There are plenty of bologna sandwiches while you wait for a strike, unable to communicate verbally with the guilt-stricken Mayan mate or the Mayan captain up top, who both understand what kind of a shuck they are running but who are only following Fernando Murphy's orders. Meanwhile Murphy is back in town playing maître d' at his Tijuana-style night club, La Piñata.

We found Murphy at his night club after spending six useless hours "at sea" on one of his boats, and came close to getting beaten and jailed when we noisily ruined the atmosphere of the place by accusing him of "outright thievery" on the grounds of what his hired fisherman had already admitted he'd done to us --and the only thing that kept us from getting stomped by Murphy's heavies was the timely popping-off of flashbulbs by an American photographer. There is nothing quite like the sudden white flash of a professional gringo camera to paralyze the brain of a Mexican punk long enough for the potential victims to make a quick, nonviolent exit.

We were counting on this, and it worked; a sorry end to the only attempt we ever made to hire local fishermen for a shark hunt. Murphy had his $140 cash in advance, we had our harsh object lesson in commercial dealings on the Cozumel dock --and with the photos in the can, we understood the wisdom of leaving the island at once.

Our other nighttime shark hunt --with Jerry Haugen on Lucky Striker --was a totally different kind of experience. It was at least an honest value. Haugen and his two-man crew were the "hippies" of the Striker fleet, and they took me and Bloor out one night for a serious shark hunt --a strange adventure that nearly sunk their boat when they hooked a reef in pitch-darkness about a mile out at sea and which ended with all of us up on the bridge while a four-foot nurse shark flopped crazily around in the cockpit, even after Haugen had shot it four times in the head with a 0.45 automatic.

Looking back on all that, my only feeling for deep-sea fishing is one of absolute and visceral aversion. Hemingway had the right idea when he decided that a 0.45-caliber submachine gun was the proper tool for shark fishing, but he was wrong about his targets. Why shoot innocent fish, when the guilty walk free along the docks, renting boats for $140 a day to drunken dupes who call themselves "sport fishermen"?

Our departure from the island was not placid. The rough skeleton of the plan --as I conceived it with a head full of M.D.A on the night before --was to wait until about an hour before the first early-morning flight to Mérida on Aeromexico, then jump both our hotel bills by checking out in a raving frenzy at dawn, at the end of the night clerk's shift --and signing "Playboy/Striker Aluminum Yachts" on both bills. I felt this bogus dual imprimatur would be heavy enough to confuse both desk clerks long enough for us to reach the airport and make the escape.

Our only other problem --except for connecting with the black-coral wizard who was expecting at least $300 cash for the work we'd assigned him --was dumping the Avis rental jeep at the airport no more than three minutes before boarding time. I knew that the local Avis people would have me under observation by the same shadowy observer who'd nailed me on the broken-windshield charge, but I also knew he'd been watching us long enough to know we were both late risers. He would set his psychic work clock, I felt, to coincide with our traditional noon-to-dawn working hours. I also knew that the hours he'd been keeping for the past week were so far off his normal wake-sleep schedule that by now he was probably a nervous, jabbering mess from trying to keep up with a gang of wild gringos fueled from an apparently bottomless satchel full of speed, acid, M.D.A and cocaine.

It boiled down to a question of armaments --or lack of them --and their long-term effects in the crunch. Looking back on my experience over the years, I was confident of being able to function at peak-performance level, at least briefly, after 80 or 90 hours without sleep. There were negative factors, of course: 80 or 90 hours of continuous boozing, along with sporadic energy/adrenaline sappers like frantic, rock-dodging swims in the high surf at night and sudden, potentially disastrous confrontations with hotel managers --but on balance, I felt, the drug factor gave us a clear-cut advantage. In any 24-hour period, a determined private eye can muster the energy to keep pace with veteran drug users. .. but after 48 straight hours, and especially after 72, fatigue symptoms begin manifesting drastically --hallucinations, hysteria, massive nerve failure. After 72 hours, both the body and the brain are so badly depleted that only sleep will make the nut. .. while your habitual drag user, long accustomed to this weird and frenzied pace, is still hoarding at least three hours of high-speed reserve.

There was no question in my mind --once the plane was finally airborne out of Cozumel --about what to do with the drugs. I had eaten three of the remaining five caps of M.D.A during the night and Bloor had given our hash and all but six of his purple pills to the black-coral wizard as a bonus for his all-night efforts. As we zoomed over the Yucatan Channel at 8000 feet, we took stock of what he had left:

Two hits of M.D.A, six tabs of acid, about a gram and a half of raw cocaine, four reds and a random handful of speed. That --plus $44 and a desperate hope that Sandy had made and paid for our reservations beyond Monterrey, Mexico --was all we had between Cozumel and our refuge/destination at Sam Brown's house in Denver. We were airborne out of Cozumel at 8:13 A.M., Mountain Daylight Time --and if everything went right, we would arrive at Denver's Stapleton International Airport before seven.

We'd been airborne for about eight minutes when I looked over at Bloor and told him what I'd been thinking: "We don't have enough drugs here to risk carrying them through Customs," I said. He nodded thoughtfully: "Well... we're pretty well fixed, for poor boys."

"Yeah," I replied. "But I have my professional reputation to uphold. And there's only two things I've never done with drugs: sell them or take them through Customs --especially when we can replace everything we're holding for about ninety-nine dollars just as soon as we get off the plane."

He hunkered down in his seat, saying nothing. Then he stared across at me. "What are you saying? That we should just throw all this shit away?"

I thought for a moment. "No. I think we should eat it."

"What?"

"Yeah, why not? They can't bust you for what's already dissolved in your belly --no matter how weird you're acting."

"Jesus Christ!" he muttered. "We'll go stark raving nuts if we eat all this shit!"

I shrugged. "Keep in mind where we'll be when we hit Customs," I said. "San Antonio, Texas. Are you ready to get busted in Texas?"

He stared down at his fingernails.

"Remember Tim Leary?" I said. "Ten years for three ounces of grass in his daughter's panties..."

He nodded. "Jesus... Texas! I'd forgotten about that."

"Not me," I said. "When Sandy went through Customs in San Antonio about three weeks ago, they tore everything she was carrying apart. It took her two hours to put it back together."

I could see him thinking. "Well. ." he said finally, "what if we eat this stuff and go crazy --and they nail us?"

"Nothing," I said. "We'll drink heavily. If we're seized, the stewardesses will testify we were drunk."

He thought for a moment, then laughed. "Yeah... just a couple of good ole boys O.D.'d on booze. Nasty drunks, staggering back into the country after a shameful vacation in Mexico --totally fucked up."

"Right," I said. "They can strip us down to the skin. It's no crime to enter the country helplessly drunk."

He laughed. "You're right. What do we start with? We shouldn't eat it all at once --that's too heavy."

I nodded, reaching into my pocket for the M.D.A and offering him one as I tossed the other into my mouth. "Let's eat some of the acid now, too," I said. "That way, we'll be adjusted to it by the time we have to eat the rest --and we can save the coke for emergencies."

"Along with the speed," he said. "How much do you have left?"

"Ten hits," I said. "Pure-white amphetamine powder. It'll straighten us right out, if things get tense."

"You should save that for the end," he said. "We can use this coke if we start getting messy."

I swallowed the purple pill, ignoring the Mexican stewardess with her tray of sangria.

"I'll have two," said Bloor, reaching across me.

"Same here," I said, lifting two more off the tray.

Bloor grinned at her. "Pay no attention. Were just tourists --down here making fools of ourselves."

Moments later we hit down on the runway at Mérida. But it was a quick and painless stop. By nine A.M., we were cruising over central Mexico at 20,000 feet, headed for Monterrey. The plane was half empty and we could have moved around if we'd wanted to --but I glanced across at Bloor, trying to use him as a mirror for my own condition, and decided that wandering around in the aisles would not be wise. Making yourself noticeable is one thing --but causing innocent passengers to shrink off with feelings of shock and repugnance is a different game entirely. One of the few things that can't be controlled about acid is the glitter it puts in the eyes. No amount of booze will cause the same kind of laughing, that fine predatory glows that comes with the first rush of acid up the spine.

But Bloor felt like moving. "Where's the goddman head?" he muttered.

"Never mind," I said. "We're almost to Monterrey. Don't attract attention. We have to check through Immigration there."

He straightened up in his seat. "Immigration?"

"Nothing serious," I said. "Just turn in our tourist cards and see about the tickets to Denver... But we'll have to act straight..."

"Why?" he asked.

I gave it some thought. Why, indeed? We were clean. Or almost clean, anyway. About an hour out of Mérida we'd eaten another round of acid --which left us with two more of those, plus four reds and the coke and the speed. The luck of the split had left me with the speed and the acid; Bloor had the coke and the reds. . . and by the time the Abrosh Su Sinturon Fasten Seat Belts sign flashed on above Monterrey, we'd agreed, more or less, that anything we hadn't eaten by the time we got to Texas would have to be flushed down the stainless-steel John in the plane's lavatory.

It had taken about 45 tortured minutes to reach this agreement, because by that time, neither one of us could speak clearly. I tried to whisper, through gritted teeth, but each time I succeeded in uttering a coherent sentence my voice seemed to echo around the cabin like I was mumbling into a bullhorn. At one point, I leaned over as close as possible to Bloor's ear and hissed: "Reds... how many?" But the sound of my own voice was such a shock that I recoiled in horror and tried to pretend I'd said nothing.

Was the stewardess staring? I couldn't be sure. Bloor had seemed not to notice --but suddenly he was thrashing around in his seat and clawing frantically underneath himself with both hands. "What the fuck?" he was screaming.

"Quiet!" I snapped. "What's wrong with you?"

He was jerking at his seat belt, still shouting. The stewardess ran down the aisle and unbuckled it for him. There was fear in her face as she backed off and watched him spring out of his seat. "Goddamn you clumsy bastard!" he yelled.

I stared straight ahead. Jesus, I thought, he's blowing it, he can't handle the acid, I should have abandoned this crazy bastard in Cozumel. I felt my teeth grinding as I tried to ignore his noise... then I glanced across and saw him groping between the seats and coming up with a smoldering cigarette butt. "Look at this!" he shouted at me. He was holding the butt in one hand and fondling the back of his thigh with the other...

"Burned a big hole in my pants," he was saying. "He just spit this dirty thing right down in my seat!"

"What?" I said, feeling in front of my mouth for the cigarette in my filter. .. but the filter was empty, and I suddenly understood. The fog in my brain suddenly cleared and I heard myself laughing. "I warned you about these goddamn Bonanzas!" I said. "They'll never stick in the filter!"

The stewardess was pushing him back down into his seat. "Fasten belts," she kept saying, "fasten belts."

I grabbed his arm and jerked downward, pulling him off balance and causing him to fall heavily onto the back of the seat. It gave way and collapsed on the legs of whoever was sitting behind us. The stewardess jerked it quickly back to the upright position, then reached down to fasten Bloor's seat belt. I saw his left arm snake out and settle affectionately around her shoulders.

Good God! I thought. This is it. I could see the headlines in tomorrow's News: Drug fray-kus on Airliner near Monterrey: Gringos Jailed on Arson, Assault Charges."

But the stewardess only smiled and backed off a few steps, dismissing Bloor's crude advance with a slap at his arm and an icy professional smile. I tried to return it, but my face was not working properly. Her eyes narrowed. She was clearly more insulted by the demented grin I was trying now to fix on her than she was by Bloor's attempt to push her head down into his lap.

He smiled happily as she stalked away. "That'll teach you," he said. "You're a goddamn nightmare to travel with."

The acid was leveling out now. I could tell by the tone of his voice that he was into the manic stage. No more of that jerky, paranoid whispering. He was feeling confident now; his face had settled into that glaze of brittle serenity you invariably see on the face of a veteran acid eater who knows that the first rush is past and now he can settle down for about six hours of real fun.

I was not quite there myself, but I knew it was coming --and we still had about seven more hours and two plane changes between now and Denver. I knew the Immigration scene at Monterrey was only a formality --just stand in line for a while with all the other gringos and not get hysterical when the cop at the gate asks for your tourist card.

We could ease through that one, I felt --on the strength of long experience. Anybody who's still on the street after seven or eight years of public acid eating has learned to trust his adrenaline gland for getting through routine confrontations with officialdom --traffic citations, bridge tolls, airline ticket counters...

And we had one of these coming up: getting our baggage off this plane and not losing it in the airport until we found out which flight would take us to San Antonio and Denver. Bloor was traveling light, with only two bags. But I had my normal heavy load: two huge leather suitcases, a canvas sea-bag and tape recorder with two portable speakers. If we were going to lose anything, I wanted to lose it north of the border.

The Monterrey airport is a cool, bright little building, so immaculately clean and efficient that we were almost immediately lulled into a condition of grinning euphoria. Everything seemed to be working perfectly. No lost baggage, no sudden outbursts of wild jabbering at the Immigration desk, no cause for panic or fits of despair at the ticket counter. . . Our first-class reservations had already been made and confirmed all the way to Denver. Bloor had been reluctant to blow 32 extra dollars "just to sit up front with the businessmen," but I felt it was necessary. "There's a lot more latitude for weird behavior in first class." I told him. "The stewardesses back in the tourist section don't have as much experience, so they're more likely to freak out if they think they have a dangerous nut on their hands."

He glared at me. "Do I look like a dangerous nut?"

I shrugged. It was hard to focus on his face. We were standing in a corridor outside the souvenir shop. "You look like a serious dope addict," I said, finally. "Your hair's all wild, your eyes are glittering, your nose is all red and --" I suddenly noticed white powder on the top edge of his mustache. "You swine! You've been into the coke!"

He grinned blankly. "Why not? Just a little pick-me-up."

I nodded. "Yeah. Just wait till you start explaining yourself to the Customs agent in San Antonio with white powder drooling out of your nose." I laughed. "Have you ever seen those big bullet-nosed flashlights they use for rectal searches?" He was rubbing his nostrils vigorously. "Where's the drugstore? I'll get some of that Dristan nasal spray." He reached into his back pocket and I saw his face turn gray. "Jesus," he hissed. "I've lost my wallet!" He kept fumbling in his pockets but no wallet turned up. "Good God!" he moaned. "It's still on the plane!" His eyes flashed wildly around the airport. "Where's the gate?" he snapped. "The wallet must be under the seat."

I shook my head. "No, it's too late."

"What?"

"The plane. I saw it take off while you were in the rest room, snorting up the coke."

He thought for a moment, then uttered a loud, wavering howl. "My passport! All my money! I have nothing! They'll never let me back into the country, with no I.D."

I smiled. "Ridiculous. I'll vouch for you."

"Shit!" he said. "You're crazy! You look crazy!"

"Let's go find the bar," I said. "We have forty-five minutes."

"What?"

"The drunker you get, the less it'll bother you," I said. "The best thing, right now, is for you to get weeping, falling-down drunk. I'll swear you staggered in front of a moving plane on the runway in Mérida and a jet engine sucked the coat right off your back and into its turbine." The whole thing seemed absurd. "Your wallet was in the coat, right? I was a witness. It was all I could do to keep your whole body from being sucked into the turbine."

I was laughing wildly now; the scene was very vivid. I could almost feel the terrible drag of the suction as we struggled to dig our heels into the hot asphalt runway. Somewhere in the distance, I could hear the wail of a mariachi band above the roar of the engines, sucking us ever closer to the whirling blades. I could hear the wild screech of a stewardess as she watched helplessly. A Mexican soldier with a machine gun was trying to help us, but suddenly he was sucked away like a leaf in the wind. . . wild screams all around us, then a sickening thump as he disappeared feetfirst into the black maw of the turbine. . . The engine seemed to stall momentarily, then spit a nasty shower of hamburger and bone splinters all over the runway. . . more screaming from behind us as Bloor's coat ripped away; I was holding him by one arm when another soldier with a machine gun began firing at the plane, first at the cockpit and then at the murderous engine. . . which suddenly exploded, like a bomb going off right in front of us; the blast hurled us 200 feet across the tarmac and through a wire-mesh fence. . .

Jesus! What a scene! A fantastic tale to lay on the Customs agent in San Antonio: "And then, officer, while we were lying there on the grass, too stunned to move, another engine exploded! And then another! Huge balls of fire! It was a miracle that we escaped with our lives. . . Yes, so you'll have to make some allowance for Mr. Bloor's unsteady condition right now. He was badly shaken, half-hysterical most of the afternoon. .. I want to get him back to Denver and put him under sedation. ."

I was so caught up in this terrible vision that I'd failed to notice Bloor down on his knees until I heard him shout. He'd spread the contents of his kit bag all over the floor of the corridor rummaging through the mess, and now he was smiling happily at the wallet in his hand.

"You found it." I said.

He nodded --clutching it with both hands, as if it might leap out of his grip with the strength of a half-captured lizard and disappear across the crowded lobby. I looked around and saw that people were stopping to watch us. My mind was still whirling from the fiery hallucination that had seized me, but I was able to kneel down and help Bloor stuff his belongings back into the kit bag. "We're attracting a crowd." I muttered. "Let's get to the bar, where it's safe."

Moments later we were sitting at a table overlooking the runway, sipping margaritas and watching the ground crew load the 727 that would take us to San Antonio. My plan was to stay hunkered down in the bar until the last moment, then dash for the plane. Our luck had been excellent, so far, but that scene in the lobby had triggered a wave of paranoia in my head. I felt very conspicuous. Bloor's mannerisms were becoming more and more psychotic. He took one sip of his drink, then whacked it down onto the table and stared at me. "What is this?" he snarled.

"A double margarita," I said, glancing over at the waitress to see if she had her eye on us.

She did, and Bloor waved at her.

"What do you want?" I whispered.

"Glaucoma," he said.

The waitress was on us before I could argue. Glaucoma is an extremely complicated mix of about nine unlikely ingredients that Bloor had learned from some randy old woman he met on the porch of the Bal-Hai. She'd taught the bartender there how to make it: very precise measurements of gin, tequila, Kahlua, crushed ice, fruit juices, lime rinds, spices --all mixed to perfection in a tall frosted glass.

It is not the kind of drink you want to order in an airport bar with a head full of acid and a noticeable speech impediment; especially when you can't speak the local language and you just spilled the first drink you ordered all over the table.

But Bloor persisted. When the waitress abandoned all hope, he walked over to speak with the bartender. I slumped in my chair, keeping an eye on the plane and hoping it was almost ready to go. But they hadn't even loaded the baggage yet: departure time was still 20 minutes away --plenty of time for some minor incident to mushroom into serious trouble. I watched Bloor talking to the bartender, pointing to various bottles behind the bar and occasionally using his fingers to indicate measurements. The bartender was nodding his head patiently.

Finally, Bloor came back to the table. "He's making it," he said. "I'll be back in a minute. I have business."

I ignored him. My mind was drifting again. Two days and nights without sleep plus a steady diet of mind-altering drugs and double margaritas were beginning to affect my alertness. I ordered another drink and stared out at the hot brown hills beyond the runway. The bar was comfortably air conditioned, but I could feel the warm sun through the window.

Why worry? I thought. We've survived the worst. All we have to do now is not miss that plane out there. Once we're across the border, the worst that can happen is a nightmarish fuck-around at Customs in San Antonio. Maybe even a night in jail, but what the hell? A few misdemeanor charges --public drunkenness, disturbing the peace, resisting arrest --but nothing serious, no felony. All the evidence for that would be eaten by the time we landed in Texas.

My only real worry was the chance that there might already be grand-larceny charges filed against us in Cozumel. We had, after all, jumped two hotel bills totaling about 15,000 pesos, in addition to leaving that half-destroyed Avis jeep in the airport parking lot --another 15,000 pesos --and we had spent the past four or five days in the constant company of a flagrant, big-volume drug runner whose every movement and contact, for all we knew, might have been watched or even photographed by Interpol agents.

Where was Frank now? Safe at home in California? Or jailed in Mexico City, swearing desperate ignorance about how all those cans of white powder got into his luggage? I could almost hear it: "You've got to believe me, Captain! I went down to Cozumel to check on a land investment. I was sitting in a bar one night, minding my own business, when all of a sudden these two drunken acid freaks sat down next to me and said they worked for Playboy. One of them had a handful of purple pills and I was stupid enough to eat one. The next thing I knew, they were using my hotel room as their headquarters. They never slept. I tried to keep an eye on them, but there were plenty of times while I was sleeping when they could have put almost anything in my luggage. . . What? Where are they now? Well. . . I can't say for sure, but I can give you the names of the hotels they were using."

Jesus! These terrible hallucinations! I tried to put them out of my mind as I finished my drink and called for another. A paranoid shudder jerked me out of my slump in the chair. I sat up and looked around. Where was that bastard Bloor? How long had he been gone? I glanced out at the plane and saw the fuel truck still parked under the wing. But they were loading the baggage now. Ten more minutes.

I relaxed again, shoving a handful of pesos at the waitress to pay for our drinks, trying to smile at her. . . when suddenly the whole airport seemed to echo with the sound of my name being shouted over a thousand loud-speakers. . . then I heard Bloor's name. . . a harsh, heavily accented voice, bellowing along the corridors like the scream of a banshee. . . "Passengers Hunter Thompson and Yail Bloor. Report Immediately to the Immigration Desk."

I was too stunned to move. "Mother of twelve bastards!" I whispered. "Did I actually hear that?" I gripped both arms of my chair and tried to concentrate. Was I hallucinating again? There was no way to be sure...

Then I heard the voice again, booming all over the airport: Will Passengers Hunter Thompson and Yail Bloor Report Immediately to the Immigration Desk..."

No! I thought. This is impossible! It had to be paranoid dementia. My fear of being nailed at the last moment had become so intense that I was hearing voices! The sun through the window had caused the acid to boil in my brain; a huge bubble of drugs had burst a weak vein in my frontal lobes.

Then I saw Bloor rushing into the bar. His eyes were wild, his hands were flapping crazily. "Did you hear that?" he shouted.

I stared at him. Well. . . I thought, we're fucked. He heard it, too. . . or even if he hadn't, even if we're both hallucinating, it means we've O.D.'d. . . totally out of control for the next six hours, crazed with fear and confusion, feeling our bodies disappear and our heads swell up like balloons, unable to even recognize each other. . .

"Wake up! Goddamn it!" he yelled. "We have to make a run for the plane!"

I shrugged. "It's no use. They'll grab us at the gate."

He was frantically trying to zip up his kit bag. "Are you sure those were our names they called? Are you positive?"

I nodded, still not moving. Somewhere in the middle of my half-numb brain, the truth was beginning to stir. I was not hallucinating; the nightmare was real. . . and I suddenly remembered the Striker P.R man's talk about that all-powerful jefe in Cozumel who had the fuel license.

Of course. A man with that kind of leverage would have connections all over Mexico: police, airlines, Immigration. It was madness to think we could cross him and get away with it. No doubt he controlled the Avis franchise, too. . . and he'd gone into action the minute his henchmen found that crippled jeep in the airport parking lot, with its windshield shattered and an 11-day bill unpaid. The phone lines had been humming 20,000 feet beneath us all the way to Monterrey. And now, with less than ten minutes to spare, they had ambushed us.

I stood up and slung the seabag over my shoulder just as the waitress brought Bloor's glaucoma. He looked at her, then lifted it off the tray and drank the whole thing in one gulp. "Gracias, gracias," he mumbled, handing her a 50-peso note. She started to make change, but he shook his head. "Nada, nada, keep the goddamn change." Then he pointed toward the kitchen. "Back door?" he said eagerly. " zeta Exito?" He nodded at the plane about 50 feet below us on the runway. I could see a few passengers beginning to board. "Big hurry!" Bloor told her. " zeta Importante!"

She looked puzzled, then pointed to the main entrance to the bar.

He stuttered helplessly for a moment, then began shouting:

"Where's the goddamn back door to this place? We have to catch that plane now!"

A long-delayed rush of adrenaline was beginning to clear my head. I grabbed his arm and lurched toward the main door. "Let's go," I said. "We'll run right past the bastards." My brain was still foggy, but the adrenaline had triggered a basic survival instinct. Our only hope was to run like doomed rats for the only available opening and hope for a miracle.

As we hurried down the corridor, I jerked one of the Press tags off my seabag and gave it to Bloor. "Start waving this at them when we hit the gate," I said, leaping sideways to avoid a covey of nuns in our way "¡Pardonnez!" I shouted. "¡Prensa! ¡Prensa! ¡Mucho importante!"

Bloor picked up the cry as we approached the gate, running at full speed and shouting incoherently in garbled Spanish. The Immigration booth was just beyond the glass doors leading out to the runway. The stairway up to the plane was still full of passengers, but the clock above the gate said exactly 11:20 --departure time. Our only hope was to burst past the cops at the desk and dash aboard the plane just as the stewardess pulled the big silver door closed.

We had to slow down as we approached the glass doors, waving our tickets at the cops and yelling "¡Prensa! ¡Prensa!" at everybody in front of us. I was pouring sweat by this time and we were both gasping for breath.

A small, muscular-looking cop in a white shirt and dark glasses moved out to head us off as we stumbled through the doors. "Señor Bloor? Señor Thompson?" he asked sharply.

The voice of doom.

I staggered to a halt and sagged against the desk, but Bloor's leather-soled Mod boots wouldn't hold on the marble floor and he skidded past me at full speed and crashed into a ten-foot potted palm, dropping his kit bag and mangling several branches that he grabbed to keep from falling.

"Señor Thompson? Señor Bloor?" Our accuser had a one-track mind. One of his assistants had run over to help Bloor keep his feet. Another cop picked his kit bag off the floor and handed it to him.

I was too exhausted to do anything but nod my head meekly. The cop who'd called our names took the ticket out of my hand and glanced at it --then quickly handed it back to me. "Ahha!" he said with a grin. "Señor Thompson!" Then he looked at Bloor. "You are Señor Bloor?"

"You're goddamn right I am!" Bloor snapped. "What the hell's going on here? This is a goddamn outrage --all this wax on these floors! I almost got killed!"

The little cop grinned again. Was there something sadistic in his smile? I couldn't be sure. But it didn't matter now. They had us on the gaff. I flashed on all the people I knew who'd been busted in Mexico; dopers who'd pushed their luck too far, gotten careless. No doubt we would find friends in prison; I could almost hear them hooting their cheerful greetings as we were led into the yard and turned loose.

This scene passed through my head in milliseconds. Bloor's wild yells were still floating in the air as the cop began pushing me out the door toward the plane. "Hurry! Hurry!" he was saying... and behind me I heard his assistant prodding Bloor. "We were afraid you would miss the plane," he was saying. "We called on the P.A. system." He was grinning broadly now. "You almost missed the plane."

We were almost to San Antonio before I got a grip on myself. The adrenaline was still pumping violently through my head; the acid and booze and fatigue had been totally neutralized by that scene at the gate. My nerves were so jangled as the plane took off that I had to beg the stewardess for two Scotch and waters, which I used to down two of our four reds.

Bloor ate the other two, with the help of two bloody marys. His hands were trembling badly, his eyes were filled with blood... but as he came back to life, he began cursing "those dirty bastards on the P.A. system" who had caused him to panic and get rid of all the coke.

"Jesus!" he said quietly, "you can imagine what a horror that was! I was standing there at the urinal, with my joint in one hand and a coke spoon in the other --jamming the stuff up my nose and trying to piss at the same time --when all of a fucking sudden it just exploded all around me! They have a speaker up there in the corner of that bathroom, and the whole place is tile!" He took a long hit on the drink. "Shit, I almost went crazy! It was like somebody had snuck up behind me and dropped a cherry bomb down the back of my shirt. All I could think of was getting rid of the coke. I threw it into one of the urinals and ran like a bastard for the bar." He laughed nervously. "Hell, I didn't even zip up my pants; I was running down the hall with my joint hanging out."

I smiled, remembering the sense of almost apocalyptic despair that seized me when I heard the first announcement.

"That's odd," I said. "It never even occurred to me to get rid of the drugs. I was thinking about all those hotel bills and that goddamn jeep. If they'd nailed us for that stuff, a few pills wouldn't make much difference."

He seemed to brood for a while. . . then he spoke, staring fixedly at the seat in front of him. "Well. . . I don't know about you. . . but I don't think I could stand another shock like that one. I had about 90 seconds of pure terror. I felt like my whole life had ended. Jesus! Standing at that urinal with a coke spoon up my nose and suddenly hearing my name on the speaker. . ." He moaned softly. "Now I know how Liddy must have felt when he saw those cops running into the Watergate. . . seeing his whole life fall apart, from a hot rod in the White House to a twenty-year jailbird in sixty seconds."

"Fuck Liddy," I said. "It couldn't have happened to a nicer guy." I laughed out loud. "Liddy was the bastard who ran Operation Intercept --remember that?"

Bloor nodded.

"What do you think would have happened if Gordon Liddy had been standing at the gate when we came crashing through?"

He smiled, sipping his drink.

"We'd be sitting in a Mexican jail right now," I said. "Just one of these pills" --I held up a purple acid tab --"would have been enough to drive Liddy into a hate frenzy. He'd have had us locked up on suspicion of everything from hijacking to dope smuggling."

He looked at the pill I was holding, then reached for it. "Let's finish these off," he said. "I can't stand this nervousness."

"You're right," I said, reaching into my pocket for the other one. "We're almost to San Antonio." I tossed the pill down my throat and called the stewardess for another drink.

"Is that it?" he asked. "Are we clean?"

I nodded. "Except for the speed."

"Get rid of it," he said. "We're almost there."

"Don't worry," I replied. "This acid will take hold just about the time we land. We should order more drinks." I unbuckled my seat belt and walked up the aisle to the lavatory, fully intending to flush the speed down the toilet. .. but when I got inside, with the door locked behind me, I stared down at the little buggers resting so peacefully there in my palm. .. ten caps of pure-white amphetamine powder. .. and I thought: No, we might need these, in case of another emergency. I remembered the dangerous lethargy that had gripped me in Monterrey. .. Then I looked down at my white-canvas basketball shoes and noticed how snugly the tongues fit under the laces. .. plenty of pressure down there, I thought, and plenty of room for ten pills. .. so I put all the speed in my shoes and went back to the seat. No point mentioning it to Bloor, I thought. He's clean, and therefore totally innocent. It would only inhibit his capacity for righteous anger, I felt, if I told him about the speed I was still carrying. .. until we were safely through Customs and reeling blindly around the San Antonio airport; then he would thank me for it.

San Antonio was a cakewalk; no trouble at all --despite the fact that we virtually fell off the plane, badly twisted again, and by the time we got our bags onto the conveyor belt leading up to the tall black Customs agent, we were both laughing like fools at the trail of orange amphetamine pills strung out behind us on the floor of the tin-roofed Customs shed. I was arguing with the agent about how much import tax I would have to pay on the two bottles of prima tequila I was carrying when I noticed Bloor was almost doubled over with laughter right beside me. He had just paid a tax of $5.88 on his own tequila, and now he was cracking up while the agent fussed over my tax.

"What's the hells's wrong with you?" I snapped, glancing back at him. . . Then I noticed he was looking down at my feet, fighting so hard to control his laughter that he was having trouble keeping his balance.

I looked down... and there, about six inches from my right shoe, was a bright-orange Spansule. Another one was sitting on the black-rubber floor mat about two feet behind me... and two feet farther back was another. They looked as big as footballs.

Insane, I thought. I've left a trail of speed all the way from the plane to this beetle-browed Customs agent --who was now handing me the official receipt for my liquor tax. I accepted it with a smile that was already disintegrating into hysteria as I took it out of his hand. He was staring grimly at Bloor, who was out of control now, still laughing at the floor. The Customs man couldn't see what Yail was laughing at because of the conveyor belt between us. . . but I could: It was another one of those goddamn orange balls, resting on the white-canvas toe of my shoe. I reached down as casually as I could and put the thing in my pocket. The Customs man watched us with a look of total disgust on his face and we hauled our bags through the swinging wooden doors and into the lobby of the San Antonio airport.

"Can you believe that?" Bloor said. "He never even looked inside these damn things! For all he knows, we just came across the border with two hundred pounds of pure scag!"

I stopped laughing. It was true. My big suitcase --the elephantskin Abercrombie & Fitch job with brass corners --was still securely locked. Not one of our bags had been opened for even the laziest inspection. We had listed the five quarts of tequila on our declaration forms --and that was all that seemed to interest him.

"Jesus Christ!" Bloor was saying. "If we'd only known."

I smiled, but I was still feeling nervous about it. There was something almost eerie about two laughing, staggering dopers checking through one of the heaviest drug check points on the Customs map without even opening their bags. It was almost insulting. The more I thought about it, the angrier I felt... because that cold-eyed nigger had been absolutely right. He had sized us up perfectly with one glance. I could almost hear him thinking: "Goddamn! Look at these two slobbering honkies. Anybody this fucked up can't be serious."

Which was true. The only thing we slipped past him was a single cap of speed, and even that was an accident. So, in truth, he had saved himself a lot of unnecessary work by ignoring our baggage. I would have preferred not to understand this embarrassment so keenly, because it plunged me into a fit of depression --despite the acid, or maybe because of it.

The rest of that trip was a nightmare of paranoid blunders and the kind of small humiliations that haunt you for many weeks afterward. About halfway between San Antonio and Denver, Bloor reached out into the aisle and grabbed a stewardess by the leg, causing her to drop a tray of 21 wineglasses, which crashed in a heap at her feet and ignited rumblings of bad discontent from the other first-class passengers who had ordered wine with their lunch.

"You stinking, dope-addict bastard!" I muttered, trying to ignore him in the burst of ugliness that surrounded us.

He grinned stupidly, ignoring the howls of the stewardess and fixing me with a dazed, uncomprehending stare that confirmed, forever, my convictions that nobody with even latent inclinations to use drugs should ever try to smuggle them. We were virtually shoveled off the plane in Denver, laughing and staggering in such a rotten condition that we were barely able to claim our luggage.

Months later, I received a letter from a friend in Cozumel, asking if I were still interesting in buying an interest in some beach acres on the Caribbean shores. It arrived just as I was preparing to leave for Washington to cover "The Impeachment of Richard Nixon," the final act in a drama that began, for me, almost exactly a year earlier when I had bought a News from a newsboy hustling the porch of the Bal-Hai in Cozumel and read John Dean's original outcry about refusing to be the "scapegoat"

Well... a lot of madness has flowed under our various bridges since then, and we have all presumably learned a lot of things. John Dean is in prison, Richard Nixon has quit and been pardoned by his hand-picked successor, and my feeling for national politics is about the same as my feeling for deep-sea fishing, buying land in Cozumel or anything else where the losers end up thrashing around in the water on a barbed hook.

Playboy Magazine, December 1974

Jimmy Carter and the Great Leap of Faith

Fear & Loathing on the Campaign Trail 76 Third-Rate Romance, Low-Rent Rendezvous

The View from Key West: Ninety Miles North of Havana and Nine Hundred Years on the Campaign Trail. .. Farewell to the Boys on the Bus: Or, Johnny, I Never Knew Ye. .. Another Rude and Wistful Tale from the Bowels of the American Dream, With Notes, Nightmares and Other Strange Memories from Manchester, Boston, Miami and Plains, Georgia. .. And 440 Volts from Castrato, the Demon Lover of Coconut Grove

A lot of people will tell you that horses get spooked because they're just naturally nervous and jittery, but that ain't right. What you have to remember is that a horse sees things maybe six or seven times bigger than we do.

Billy Herman, a harness-racing trainer at Pompano Park in Miami This news just came over the radio, followed by a song about "faster horses, younger women, older whiskey and more money..." and then came a news item about a Polish gentleman who was arrested earlier today for throwing "more than two dozen bowling balls into the sea off a pier in Fort Lauderdale" because, he told arresting officers, "he thought they were nigger eggs."

... We are living in very strange times, and they are likely to get a lot stranger before we bottom out. Which could happen a lot sooner than even Henry Kissinger thinks. . . Because this is, after all, another election year, and almost everybody I talk to seems to feel we are headed for strangeness. . . of one sort or another. And some people say we are already deep in the midst of it. Which may be true. The evidence points both ways. . . But from my perch in this plastic catbird seat out here on the southernmost rim of Key West, the barometer looks to be falling so fast on all fronts that it no longer matters. And now comes this filthy news in the latest Gallup Poll that Hubert Humphrey will be our next president. . . Or, failing that, he will foul the national air for the next six months and drive us all to smack with his poison gibberish.

Jesus, no wonder that poor bastard up in Fort Lauderdale ran amok and decided that all bowling balls were actually nigger eggs that would have to be hurled, at once, into shark-infested waters. He was probably a desperate political activist of some kind trying to send a message to Washington.

Last night, on this same radio station, I heard a warning about "a new outbreak of dog mutilations in Coconut Grove." The disc jockey reading the news sounded angry and agitated. "Three more mongrel dogs were found castrated and barely alive tonight," he said, "and investigating officers said there was no doubt that all three animals were victims of the same bloodthirsty psychotic --a stocky middle-aged Cuban known as 'Castrato' --who has terrorized dog owners in Coconut Grove for the past three months.

"Today's mutilations, police said, were executed with the same sadistic precision as all the others. According to the owner of one victim, a half-breed chow watchdog named Willie, the dog was 'minding his own business, just lying out there in the driveway, when all of a sudden I heard him start yelping and I looked out the front door just in time to see this dirty little spic shoot him again with one of those electric flashlight guns. Then the sonofabitch grabbed Willie by the hind legs and threw him into the back of an old red pickup. I yelled at him, but by the time I got hold of my shotgun and ran out on the porch, he was gone. It all happened so fast that I didn't even get the license number off the truck.' "

The voice on the radio paused for a long moment, then dipped a few octaves and went on with the story: 'Several hours later, police said, Willie and two other dogs --both mongrels --were found in a vacant lot near the Dinner Key yacht marina. All three had been expertly castrated. . ."

Another long pause, followed by a moaning sound as the radio voice seemed to crack and stutter momentarily. . . And then it continued, very slowly: "The nature of the wounds, police said, left no room for doubt that today's mutilations were the work of the same fiendish hand responsible for all but two of the 49 previous dog castrations in Coconut Grove this year.

"This is definitely the work of Castrato," said Senior Dog Warden Lionel Olay at a hastily called press conference late this afternoon. 'Look at the razor work on this mongrel chow,' Olay told reporters. 'These cuts are surgically perfect, and so is this cauterization. This man you call "Castrato" is no amateur, gentlemen. This is very artistic surgery --maybe 50 or 55 seconds from start to finish, assuming he works with a whip-steel straight razor and a 220-volt soldering iron.'

"Olay ended the press conference on a humorous note, urging reporters to 'work like dogs until this case is cracked. And if any of you people own mongrels,' he added, 'either keep them out of Coconut Grove or have them put to sleep."

"Meanwhile," said the newscaster, "South Miami police have warned all dog owners in the area to be on the lookout for a red pickup truck cruising slowly in residential neighborhoods. The driver, a small but muscular Cuban between 40 and 50 years old, is known to be armed with an extremely dangerous, high-voltage electric weapon called a 'Taser' and is also criminally insane.

Jesus Christ! I'm not sure I can handle this kind of news and frantic stimulus at four o'clock in the morning --especially with a head full of speed, booze and Percodan. It is extremely difficult to concentrate on the cheap realities of Campaign '76 under these circumstances. The idea of covering even the early stages of this cynical and increasingly retrograde campaign has already plunged me into a condition bordering on terminal despair, and if I thought I might have to stay with these people all the way to November I would change my name and seek work as a professional alligator poacher in the swamps around Lake Okeechobee. My frame of mind is not right for another long and maddening year of total involvement in a presidential campaign. . . and somewhere in the back of my brain lurks a growing suspicion that this campaign is not right either; but that is not the kind of judgment any journalist should make at this point. At least not in print.

So for the moment I will try to suspend both the despair and the final judgment. Both will be massively justified in the next few months, I think --and until then I can fall back on the firmly held but rarely quoted conviction of most big-time Washington polls that nobody can function at top form on a full-time basis in more than one presidential campaign. This rule of thumb has never been applied to journalists, to my knowledge, but there is ample evidence to suggest it should be. There is no reason to think that even the best and brightest of journalists, as it were, can repeatedly or even more than once crank themselves up to the level of genuinely fanatical energy, commitment and total concentration it takes to live in the speeding vortex of a presidential campaign from start to finish. There is not enough room on that hell-bound train for anybody who wants to relax and act human now and then. It is a gig for ambitious zealots and terminal action-junkies. . . and this is especially true of a campaign like this one, which so far lacks any central, overriding issue like the war in Vietnam that brought so many talented and totally dedicated nonpoliticians into the '68 and '72 campaigns.

The issues this time are too varied and far too complex for the instant polarization of a Which Side Are You On? crusade. There will not be many ideologues seriously involved in the '76 campaign; this one is a technicians' trip, run by and for politicians. . . Which is not really a hell of a lot different from any other campaign, except that this time it is going to be painfully obvious. This time, on the 200th anniversary of what used to be called "The American Dream," we are going to have our noses rubbed, day after day --on the tube and in the headlines --in this mess we have made for ourselves.

Today, wherever in this world I meet a man or woman who fought for Spanish liberty, I meet a kindred soul. In those years we lived our best, and what has come after and what there is to come can never carry us to those heights again.

--from The Education of a Correspondent by Herbert Matthews

My problem with this campaign began not quite two years ago, in May of 1974, when I flew down to Georgia with Teddy Kennedy and ran into Jimmy Carter. The meeting was not so much accidental as inevitable: I knew almost nothing about Carter at the time, and that was all I wanted to know. He was the lame duck governor of Georgia who had nominated "Scoop" Jackson at the 1972 Democratic Convention in Miami, and in the course of that year I had written some ugly things about him.

...Or at least that's what he told me when I showed up at the governor's mansion for breakfast at eight o'clock in the morning. I had been up all night, in the company of serious degenerates. ...ah, but let's not get into that, at least not quite yet. I just reread that Castrato business, and it strikes me that I am probably just one or two twisted tangents away from terminal fusing of the brain circuits.

Yes, the point: my feeling for Southern politicians is not especially warm, even now. Ever since the first cannonballs fell on Fort Sumter in 1861, Southern politics has been dominated by thieves, bigots, warmongers and buffoons. There were governors like Earl Long in Louisiana, "Kissin' Jim" Folsom in Alabama and Orval Faubus in Arkansas... and senators like Bilbo and Eastland from Mississippi. Smathers and Gurnev from Florida... and Lyndon Johnson from Texas.

Toward the end of the Civil Rights movement in the 1960s, the governor of Georgia was a white trash dingbat named Lester Maddox --who is still with us, in one crude form or another --and when the curtain finally falls on George Wallace, he will probably go down in history as the Greatest Thief of them all. Wallace was the first Southern politician to understand that there are just as many mean, stupid bigots above the Mason-Dixon Line as there are below it, and when he made the shrewd decision to "go national" in 1968, he created an Alabama-based industry that has since made very rich men of himself and a handful of cronies. For more than a decade, George Wallace has bamboozled the national press and terrified the ranking fixers in both major parties. In 1968, he took enough Democratic votes from Hubert Humphrey to elect Richard Nixon, and if he had bothered to understand the delegate selection process in 1972, he could have prevented McGovern's nomination and muscled himself into the number two spot on a Humphrey-Wallace ticket.

McGovern could not have survived a second-ballot short-fall in Miami that year, and anybody who thinks the Happy Warrior would not have made that trade with Wallace is a fool. Hubert Humphrey would have traded anything, with anybody, to get the Democratic nomination for himself in 1972. . . and he'll be ready to trade again, this year, if he sees the slightest chance.

And he does. He saw it on the morning after the New Hampshire primary, when five percent of the vote came in as "uncommitted." That rotten, truthless old freak was on national T.V at the crack of dawn, cackling like a hen full of amyls at the "wonderful news" from New Hampshire. After almost four years of relatively statesmanlike restraint and infrequent T.V appearances that showed his gray hair and haggard jowls --four long and frantic years that saw the fall of Richard Nixon, the end of the war in Vietnam and a neo-collapse of the U.S. economy --after all that time and all those sober denials that he would never run for president, all it took to jerk Hubert out of his closet was the news from New Hampshire that five percent of the Democratic voters, less than 4000 people, in that strange little state had cast their ballots for "uncommitted" delegates.

To Humphrey, who was not even entered in the New Hampshire primary, this meant five percent for him. Never mind that a completely unknown ex-governor of Georgia had won the New Hampshire with more than 30% of the vote; or that liberal Congressman Morris Udall had finished a solid but disappointing second with 24%; or that liberal Senator Birch Bayh ran third with 16%... None of that mattered to Hubert, because he was privy to various rumors and force-fed press reports that many of the "uncommitted" delegates in New Hampshire were secret Humphrey supporters. There was no way to be sure, of course --but no reason to doubt it, either; at least not in the mushy mind of the Happy Warrior.

His first T.V appearance of the '76 campaign was a nasty shock to me. I had been up all night, tapping the glass and nursing my bets along (I had bet the quinella, taking Carter and Reagan against Udall and Ford) and when the sun came up on Wednesday I was slumped in front of a T.V set in an ancient New England farmhouse on a hilltop near a hamlet called Contoocook. I had won early on Carter, but I had to wait for Hughes Rudd and the Morning News to learn that Ford had finally overtaken Reagan. The margin at dawn was less than one percent, but it was enough to blow my quinella and put Reagan back on Cheap Street, where he's been ever since. . . and I was brooding on this unexpected loss, sipping my coffee and tapping the glass once again, when all of a sudden I was smacked right straight in the eyes with the wild-eyed babbling spectacle of Hubert Horatio Humphrey. His hair was bright orange, his cheeks were rouged, his forehead was caked with Mantan, and his mouth was moving so fast that the words poured out in a high-pitched chattering whine. . . "O my goodness, my gracious. . . isn't it wonderful? Yes, yes indeed. . . O yes, it just goes to show. . . I just can't say enough. . ."

No! I thought. This can't be true. Not now! Not so soon! Here was this monster, this shameful electrified corpse --giggling and raving and flapping his hands at the camera like he'd just been elected president. He looked like three iguanas in a feeding frenzy. I stood up and backed off from the T.V set, but the view was no different from the other side of the room. I was seeing The Real Thing, and it stunned me. . . Because I knew, in my heart, that he was real: that even with a five percent shadow vote in the year's first primary, where his name was not on the ballot, and despite Jimmy Carter's surprising victory and four other nationally known candidates finishing higher than "uncommitted," that Hubert Humphrey had somehow emerged from the chaos of New Hampshire with yet another new life, and another serious shot at the presidency of the United States.

This was more than a visceral feeling, or some painful flash of dread instinct. It was, in fact, a thing I'd predicted myself at least six months earlier. . . It was a summer night in Washington and I was having dinner at an outdoor restaurant near the Capitol with what the Wall Street Journal later described as "a half-dozen top operatives from the 1972 McGovern campaign." And at that point there were already three certain candidates for '76 --Jimmy Carter, Mo Udall and Fred Harris. We had just come from a brief and feisty little session with Carter, and on the way to the restaurant we had run into Udall on the street, so the talk at the table was understandably "deep politics." Only one person in the group had even a tentative commitment to a candidate in '76, and after an hour or two of cruel judgments and bitter comment, Alan Baron --McGovern's press secretary and a prime mover in the "new politics" wing of the Democratic party --proposed a secret ballot to find out which candidate those of us at the table actually believed would be the party nominee in 1976. "Not who we want, or who we like," Baron stressed, "but who we really think is gonna get it."

I tore a page out of my notebook and sliced it up to make ballots. We each took one, wrote a name on it, then folded it up and passed the ballots to Baron, a Farouk-like personage with a carnivorous sense of humor and the build of a sumo wrestler.

(Alan and I have not always been friends. He was Muskie's campaign manager for Florida in '72, and he had never entirely recovered from his encounter with the Gin-Crazed Boohoo on Big Ed's "Sunshine Special"... and even now, after all this time, I will occasionally catch him staring at me with a feral glint in his eyes.)

Indeed, and so much for that --just another bucket of bad blood gone under the bridge, so to speak, and in presidential politics you learn to love the bridges and never look down.

Which gets us back to the vote count, and the leer on Baron's face when he unfolded the first ballot. "I knew it," he said. "That's two already, counting mine. . . yeah, here's another one." He looked up and laughed. "It's a landslide for Hubert."

And it was. The final count was Humphrey 4, Muskie 2 and one vote for Udall from Rick Stearns, who was already involved in the planning and organizing stages of Udall's campaign. Nobody else at the table was committed to anything except gloom, pessimism and a sort of aggressive neutrality.

So much for the idea of a sequel to Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72. Barring some totally unexpected development, I will leave the dreary task of chronicling this low-rent trip to Teddy White, who is already trapped in a place I don't want to be.

But there is no way to escape without wallowing deep in the first few primaries and getting a feel, more or less, for the evidence. . . And in order to properly depress and degrade myself for the ordeal to come, I decided in early January to resurrect the National Affairs Desk and set up, once again, in the place where I spent so much time in 1972 and then again in 1974. These were the boom-and-bust years of Richard Milhous Nixon, who was criminally insane and also president of the United States for five years.

Marching through Georgia with Ted Kennedy... Deep, Down and Dirty; on the Darkest Side of Shame... The Politics of Mystery and Blood on the Hands of Dean Rusk... Jimmy Carter's Law Day Speech, and Why It Was Shrouded in Secrecy by Persons Unknown... Derby Day in the Governor's Mansion and the Strangling of the Sloat Diamond

If any person shall carnally know in any manner any brute animal, or carnally know any male or female person by the anus or by and with the mouth, or voluntarily submit to such carnal knowledge, he or she shall be guilty of a felony and shall be confined in the penitentiary not less than one year nor more than three years.

--Commonwealth of Virginia Anti-Sodomy Statute, 1792

One of the most difficult problems for a journalist covering a presidential campaign is getting to know the candidates well enough to make confident judgments about them, because it is just about impossible for a journalist to establish a personal relationship with any candidate who has already made the big leap from "long shot" to "serious contender." The problem becomes more and more serious as the stakes get higher, and by the time a candidate has survived enough primaries to convince himself and his staff that they will all be eating their lunches in the White House Mess for the next four years, he is long past the point of having either the time or the inclination to treat any journalist who doesn't already know him personally as anything but just another face in the campaign "press corps."

There are many complex theories about the progressive stages of a presidential campaign, but for the moment let's say there are three: Stage One is the period between the decision to run for president and the morning after the New Hampshire primary when the field is still crowded, the staff organizations are still loose and relaxed, and most candidates are still hungry for all the help they can get --especially media exposure, so they can get their names in the Gallup Poll; Stage Two is the "winnowing out," the separating of the sheep from the goats, when the two or three survivors of the early primaries begin looking like long-distance runners with a realistic shot at the party nomination; and Stage Three begins whenever the national media, the public opinion polls and Mayor Daley of Chicago decide that a candidate has picked up enough irreversible momentum to begin looking like at least a probable nominee, and a possible next president.

This three-stage breakdown is not rooted in any special wisdom or scientific analysis, but it fits both the 1972 and 1976 Democratic campaigns well enough to make the point that any journalist who doesn't get a pretty firm personal fix on a candidate while he's still in Stage One might just as well go with his or her instincts all the way to Election Day in November, because once a candidate gets to Stage Two his whole lifestyle changes drastically.

At that point he becomes a public figure, a serious contender, and the demands on his time and energy begin escalating to the level of madness. He wakes up every morning to face a split-second, 18-hour-a-day schedule of meetings, airports, speeches, press conferences, motorcades and handshaking. Instead of rambling, off-the-cuff talks over a drink or two with reporters from small-town newspapers, he is suddenly flying all over the country in his own chartered jet full of syndicated columnists and network T.V stars. . . Cameras and microphones follow him everywhere he goes, and instead of pleading long and earnestly for the support of 15 amateur political activists gathered in some English professor's living room in Keene, New Hampshire, he is reading the same cliché-riddled speech --often three or four times in a single day --to vast auditoriums full of people who either laugh or applaud at all the wrong times and who may or may not be supporters. . . And all the fat cats, labor leaders and big-time polls who couldn't find the time to return his phone calls when he was desperately looking for help a few months ago are now ringing his phone off the hook within minutes after his arrival in whatever Boston, Miami or Milwaukee hotel his managers have booked him into that night. But they are not calling to offer their help and support, they just want to make sure he understands that they don't plan to help or support anybody else, until they get to know him a little better.

It is a very mean game that these high-rolling, coldhearted hustlers play. The president of the United States may no longer be "the most powerful man in the world," but he is still close enough to be sure that nobody else in the world is going to cross him by accident. And anybody who starts looking like he might get his hands on that kind of power had better get comfortable, right from the start, with the certain knowledge that he is going to have to lean on some very mean and merciless people just to get himself elected.

The power of the presidency is so vast that it is probably a good thing, in retrospect, that only a very few people in this country understood the gravity of Richard Nixon's mental condition during his last year in the White House. There were moments in that year when even his closest friends and advisers were convinced that the president of the United States was so crazy with rage and booze and suicidal despair that he was only two martinis away from losing his grip entirely and suddenly locking himself in his office long enough to make that single telephone call that would have launched enough missiles and bombers to blow the whole world off its axis or at least kill 100 million people.

The sudden, hellish reality of a nuclear war with either Russia or China or both was probably the only thing that could have salvaged Nixon's presidency after the Supreme Court ruled that he had to yield up the incriminating tapes that he knew would finish him off. Would the action-starved generals at the Strategic Air Command Headquarters have ignored an emergency order from their Commander-in-chief? And how long would it have taken Pat Buchanan or General Haig to realize that 'The Boss" had finally flipped? Nixon spent so much time alone that nobody else in the White House would have given his absence a second thought until he failed to show up for dinner, and by that time he could have made enough phone calls to start wars all over the world.

A four-star general commandant of the U.S. Marine Corps with three wars and 35 years of fanatical devotion to duty, honor and country in his system would hack off his own feet and eat them rather than refuse to obey a direct order from the president of the United States --even if he thought the president was crazy.

The key to all military thinking is a concept that nobody who ever wore a uniform with even one stripe on it will ever forget: "You don't salute the man, you salute the uniform." Once you've learned that, you're a soldier --and soldiers don't disobey orders from people they have to salute. If Nixon's tortured mind had bent far enough to let him think he could save himself by ordering a full-bore Marine/Airborne invasion in Cuba, he would not have given the Boom-Boom order to some closet-pacifist general who might be inclined to delay the invasion long enough to call Henry Kissinger for official reassurance that the president was not insane.

No West Pointer with four stars on his hat would take that kind of risk anyway. By the time word got back to the White House, or to Kissinger, that Nixon had given the order to invade Cuba, the whole Caribbean would be a sea of fire; Fidel Castro would be in a submarine on his way to Russia, and the sky above the Atlantic would be streaked from one horizon to the other with the vapor trails of a hundred panic-launched missiles.

Right. But it was mainly a matter of luck that Nixon's mental disintegration was so obvious and so crippling that by the time he came face to face with his final option, he was no longer able to even recognize it. When the going got tough, the politician who worshiped toughness above all else turned into a whimpering, gin-soaked vegetable. .. But it is still worth wondering how long it would have taken Haig and Kissinger to convince all those S.A.C generals out in Omaha to disregard a Doomsday phone call from the president of the United States because a handful of civilians in the White House said he was crazy.

Ah. . . but we are wandering off into wild speculation again, so let's chop it off right here. We were talking about the vast powers of the presidency and all the treacherous currents surrounding it. . . Not to mention all the riptides, ambushes, Judas goats, fools and ruthless, dehumanized thugs that will sooner or later have to be dealt with by any presidential candidate who still feels strong on his feet when he comes to that magic moment for the leap from Stage Two to Stage Three.

But there will be plenty of time for that later on. And plenty of other journalists to write out it. .. But not me. The most active and interesting phase of a presidential campaign is Stage One, which is as totally different from the Sturm und Drang of Stage Three as a guerrilla-style war among six or eight Gypsy nations is totally different from the bloody, hunkered down trench warfare that paralyzed and destroyed half of Europe during World War 1.

Athens, Ala. (A.P)--Iladean Tribble, who had said she would marry entertainer Elvis Presley on Saturday, confirmed Sunday that the ceremony did not take place. Mrs. Tribble, a 42-year-old widow with four children, was asked in a telephone interview why the wedding did not take place. She replied: "This is the Sabbath day and I don't talk about things like this on the Lord's day."

Well. . . that's fair enough, I guess. Jimmy Carter had said that he won't talk about his foreign policy until the day he delivers his inaugural address. Everybody has a right to their own quirks and personal convictions --as long as they don't try to lay them on me --but just for the pure, meanspirited hell of it, I am going to call Iladean Tribble when the sun comes up in about three hours and ask her the same question the A.P reporter insulted her faith by asking on the Sabbath.

By Mrs. Tribble's own logic, I should get a perfectly straight answer from her on Tuesday, which according to my calendar is not a religious holiday of any kind. . . So in just a few hours I should have the answer, from Iladean herself, to the question regarding her mysterious nonmarriage to Elvis Presley.

And after I talk to Iladean, I am going to call my old friend Pat Caddell, who is Jimmy Carter's pollster and one of the two or three main wizards in Carter's brain trust, and we will have another one of our daily philosophical chats.

When I read Mrs. Tribble's quote to Pat earlier tonight, in the course of a more or less bare-knuckled telephone talk, he said he didn't know any woman named Iladean in Athens, Alabama --and besides that he didn't see any connection between her and the main topic of our conversation tonight, which was Jimmy Carter --who is always the main topic when I talk to Caddell, and we've been talking, arguing, plotting, haggling and generally whipping on each other almost constantly, ever since this third-rate, low-rent campaign circus hit the public roads about four months ago.

That was before Pat went to work for Jimmy, but long after I'd been cited in about 33 dozen journals all over the country as one of Carter's earliest and most fervent supporters. Everywhere I went for at least the past year, from Los Angeles to Austin, Nashville, Washington, Boston, Chicago and Key West, I've been publicly hammered by friends and strangers alike for saying that "I like Jimmy Carter." I have been jeered by large crowds for saying this; I have been mocked in print by liberal pundits and other Gucci people; I have been called a brain-damaged geek by some of my best and oldest friends; my own wife threw a knife at me on the night of the Wisconsin primary when the midnight radio stunned us both with a news bulletin from a C.B.S station in Los Angeles, saying that earlier announcements by N.B.C and A.B.C regarding Mo Udall's narrow victory over Carter in Wisconsin were not true, and that late returns from the rural districts were running so heavily in Carter's favor that C.B.S was now calling him the winner.

Sandy likes Mo Udall; and so do I, for that matter. .. I also like Jerry Jeff Walker, the Scofflaw King of New Orleans and a lot of other people I don't necessarily believe should be president of the United States. The immense concentration of power in that office is just too goddamn heavy for anybody with good sense to turn his back on. Or her back. Or its back. .. At least not as long as whatever lives in the White House has the power to nil vacancies on the U.S. Supreme Court; because anybody with that kind of power can use it --like Nixon did --to pack- crowd the Court of Final Appeal in this country with the same kind of lame, vindictive yo-yos who recently voted to sustain the commonwealth of Virginia's ahtisodomy statutes. .. And anybody who thinks that 6 to 3 vote against "sodomy" is some kind of abstract legal gibberish that doesn't really affect them had better hope they never get busted for anything the Bible or any local vice-squad cop calls an "unnatural sex act." Because "unnatural" is denned by the laws of almost every state in the Union as anything but a quick and dutiful hump in the classic missionary position, for purposes of procreation only. Anything else is a felony crime, and people who commit felony crimes go to prison.

Which won't make much difference to me. I took that fatal dive off the straight and narrow path so long ago that I can't remember when I first become a felon --but I have been one ever since, and it's way too late to change now. In the eyes of The Law, my whole life has been one long and sinful felony. I have sinned repeatedly, as often as possible, and just as soon as I can get away from this goddamn Calvinist typewriter I am going to get right after it again. . . God knows, I hate it, but I can't help myself after all these criminal years. Like Waylon Jennings says, "The devil made me do it the first time. The second time, I done it on my own."

Right And the third time, I did it because of brain damage. . . And after that: well, I figured that anybody who was already doomed to a life of crime and sin might as well learn to love it.

Anything worth all that risk and energy almost has to be beyond the reach of any kind of redemption except the power of Pure Love. . . and this flash of twisted wisdom brings us back, strangely enough, to politics, Pat Caddell, and the 1976 presidential campaign. . . And, not incidentally, to the fact that any Journal on any side of Wall Street that ever quoted me as saying "I like Jimmy Carter" was absolutely accurate. I have said it many times, to many people, and I will keep on saying it until Jimmy Carter gives me some good reason to change my mind --which might happen about two minutes after he finishes reading this article: But I doubt it.

I have known Carter for more than two years and I have probably spent more private, human time with him than any other journalist on the '76 campaign trail. The first time I met him --at about eight o'clock on a Saturday morning in 1974 at the back door of the governor's mansion in Atlanta --I was about two degrees on the safe side of berserk, raving and babbling at Carter and his whole bemused family about some hostile bastard wearing a Georgia State Police uniform who had tried to prevent me from coming through the gate at the foot of the long, tree-shaded driveway leading up to the mansion.

I had been up all night, in the company of serious degenerates, and when I rolled up to the gatehouse in the back seat of a taxi I'd hailed in downtown Atlanta, the trooper was not amused by the sight and sound of my presence. I was trying to act calm but after about 30 seconds I realized it wasn't working; the look on his face told me I was not getting through to the man. He stared at me, saying nothing, while I explained from my crouch in the back seat of the cab that I was late for breakfast with "the governor and Ted Kennedy"... Then he suddenly stiffened and began shouting at the cabdriver: "What kind of dumb shit are you trying to pull, buddy? Don't you know where you are?"

Before the cabbie could answer, the trooper smacked the flat of his hand down on the hood so hard that the whole cab rattled. "You! Shut this engine!" Then he pointed at me: "You! Out of the cab. Let's see some identification." He reached out for my wallet and motioned for me to follow him into the gatehouse. The cabbie started to follow, but the trooper waved him back. "Stay right where you are, good buddy. I'll get to you." The look on my driver's face said we were both going to jail and it was my fault. "It wasn't my idea to come out here," he whined. "This guy told me he was invited for breakfast with the governor."

The trooper was looking at the press cards in my wallet. I was already pouring sweat, and just as he looked over at me I realized I was holding a can of beer in my hand. "You always bring your own beer when you have breakfast with the governor?" he asked.

I shrugged and dropped it in a nearby wastebasket.

"You!" he shouted. "What do you think you're doing?"

The scene went on for another 20 minutes. There were many phone calls, a lot of yelling, and finally the trooper reached somebody in the mansion who agreed to locate Senator Kennedy and ask if he knew "some guy name of Thompson, I got him down here, he's all beered up and wants to come up there for breakfast. . ."

Jesus, I though, that's all Kennedy needs to hear. Right in the middle of breakfast with the governor of Georgia, some nervous old darky shuffles in from the kitchen to announce that the trooper down at the gatehouse is holding some drunkard who says he's a friend of Senator Kennedy's and he wants to come in and have breakfast.

Which was, in fact, a lie. I had not been invited for breakfast with the governor, and up to that point I had done everything in my power to avoid it. Breakfast is the only meal of the day that I tend to view with the same kind of traditionalized reverence that most people associate with Lunch and Dinner.

I like to eat breakfast alone, and almost never before noon; anybody with a terminally jangled lifestyle needs at least one psychic anchor every 24 hours, and mine is breakfast. In Hong Kong, Dallas or at home --and regardless of whether or not I have been to bed --breakfast is a personal ritual that can only be properly observed alone, and in a spirit of genuine excess. The food factor should always be massive: four Bloody Marys, two grapefruits, a pot of coffee, Rangoon crepes, a half-pound of either sausage, bacon or corned beef hash with diced chilies, a Spanish omelette or eggs Benedict a quart of milk, a chopped lemon for random seasoning, and something like a slice of key lime pie, two margaritas and six lines of the best cocaine for dessert. . . Right, and there should also be two or three newspapers, all mail and messages, a telephone, a notebook for planning the next 24 hours, and at least one source of good music. . . All of which should be dealt with outside, in the warmth of a hot sun, and preferably stone naked.

It is not going to be easy for those poor bastards out in San Francisco who have been waiting all day in a condition of extreme fear and anxiety for my long and finely reasoned analysis of "The Meaning of Jimmy Carter" to come roaring out of my faithful mojo wire and across 2000 miles of telephone line to understand why I am sitting here in a Texas motel full of hookers and writing at length on The Meaning of Breakfast. .. But like almost everything else worth understanding, the explanation for this is deceptively quick and basic.

After more than ten years of trying to deal with politics and politicians in a professional manner, I have finally come to the harsh understanding that there is no way at all --not even for a doctor of chemotherapy with total access to the whole spectrum of legal and illegal drugs, the physical constitution of a mule shark and a brain as rare and sharp and original as the Sloat diamond --to function as a political journalist without abandoning the whole concept of a decent breakfast. I have worked like 12 bastards for more than a decade to be able to have it both ways, but the conflict is too basic and too deeply rooted in the nature of both politics and breakfast to ever be reconciled. It is one of those very few Great Forks in The Road of Life that cannot be avoided: like a Jesuit priest who is also a practicing nudist with a $200-a-day smack habit wanting to be the first Naked Pope (or Pope Naked the First, if we want to use the language of the church). .. Or a vegetarian pacifist with a 0.44 magnum fetish who wants to run for president without giving up his membership in the National Rifle Association or his New York City pistol permit that allows him to wear twin six-guns on Meet the Press, Face the Nation and all of his press conferences.

There are some combinations that nobody can handle: shooting bats on the wing with a double-barreled 0.410 and a head full of jimson weed is one of them, and another is the idea that it is possible for a freelance writer with at least four close friends named Jones to cover a hopelessly scrambled presidential campaign better than any six-man team of career political journalists on The New York Times or the Washington Post and still eat a three-hour breakfast in the sun every morning.

But I had not made the final decision on that morning when I rolled up to the gatehouse of the governor's mansion in Atlanta to have breakfast with Jimmy Carter and Ted Kennedy. My reason for being there at that hour was simply to get my professional schedule back in phase with Kennedy's political obligations for that day. He was scheduled to address a crowd of establishment heavies who would convene at the University of Georgia Law School at 10:30 in the morning to officially witness the unveiling of a huge and prestigious oil portrait of former secretary of state Dean Rusk, and his tentative schedule for Saturday called for him to leave the governor's mansion after breakfast and make the 60-mile trip to Athens by means of the governor's official airplane. . . So in order to hook up with Kennedy and make the trip with him, I had no choice but to meet him for breakfast at the mansion, where he had spent the previous night at Carter's invitation.

Oddly enough, I had also been invited to spend Friday night in a bedroom at the governor's mansion. I had come down from Washington with Kennedy on Friday afternoon, and since I was the only journalist traveling with him that weekend, Governor Carter had seen fit to include me when he invited "the Kennedy party" to overnight at the mansion instead of a downtown hotel.

But I am rarely in the right frame of mind to spend the night in the house of a politician --at least not if I can spend it anywhere else, and on the previous night I figured I would be a lot happier in a room at the Regency Hyatt House than I would in the Georgia governor's mansion. Which may or may not have been true, but regardless of all that, I still had to be at the mansion for breakfast if I wanted to get any work done that weekend, and my work was to stay with Ted Kennedy.

The scene at the gate had unhinged me so thoroughly that I couldn't find the door I'd been told to knock on when I finally got out of my cab at the mansion. . . and by the time I finally got inside I was in no shape at all to deal with Jimmy Carter and his whole family. I didn't even recognize Carter when he met me at the door. All I knew was that a middle-aged man wearing Levi's was taking me into the dining room, where I insisted on sitting down for a while, until the tremors passed.

One of the first things I noticed about Carter, after I'd calmed down a bit, was the relaxed and confident way he handled himself with Ted Kennedy. The contrast between the two was so stark that I am still surprised whenever I hear somebody talking about the "eerie resemblance" between Carter and John F. Kennedy. I have never noticed it, except every once in a while in some carefully staged photograph --and if there was ever a time when it seems like any such resemblance should have been impossible to miss, it was that morning in Atlanta when I walked into the dining room and saw Jimmy Carter and Ted Kennedy sitting about six feet apart at the same table.

Kennedy, whose presence usually dominates any room he walks into, was sitting there looking stiff and vaguely uncomfortable in his dark blue suit and black shoes. He glanced up as I entered and smiled faintly, then went back to staring at a portrait on the wall on the other side of the room. Paul Kirk, his executive wizard, was sitting next to him, wearing the same blue suit and black shoes --and Jimmy King, his executive advance man, was off in a distant corner yelling into a telephone. There were about 15 other people in the room, most of them laughing and talking, and it took me a while to notice that nobody was talking to Kennedy --which is a very rare thing to see, particularly in any situation involving other politicians or even politically conscious people.

Kennedy was obviously not in a very gregarious mood that morning, and I didn't learn why until an hour or so later when I found myself in one of the Secret Service cars with King, Kirk and Kennedy, running at top speed on the highway to Athens. The mood in the car was ugly. Kennedy was yelling at the S.S driver for missing a turnoff that meant we'd be late for the unveiling. When we finally got there and I had a chance to talk privately with Jimmy King, he said Carter had waited until the last minute --just before I got to the mansion --to advise Kennedy that a sudden change in his own plans made it impossible for him to lend Teddy his plane for the trip to Athens. That was the reason for the tension I half-noticed when I got to the mansion. King had been forced to get on the phone immediately and locate the Secret Service detail and get two cars out to the mansion immediately. By the time they arrived it was obvious that we would not get to Athens in time for the unveiling of Rusk's portrait --which was fine with me, but Kennedy was scheduled to speak and he was very unhappy.

I refused to participate in any ceremony honoring a warmonger like Rusk, so I told King I would look around on the edge of the campus for a bar, and then meet them for lunch at the cafeteria for the Law Day luncheon. . . He was happy enough to see me go, because in the space of three or four minutes I had insulted a half-dozen people. There was a beer parlor about ten minutes away, and I stayed there in relative peace until it was time for the luncheon.

There was no way to miss the campus cafeteria. There was a curious crowd of about 200 students waiting to catch a glimpse of Ted Kennedy, who was signing autographs and moving slowly up the concrete steps toward the door as I approached. Jimmy King saw me coming and waited by the door. "Well, you missed the unveiling," he said with a smile. "You feel better?"

"Not much," I replied. "They should have run the bloodthirsty bastard up a flagpole by his heels."

King started to smile again, but his mouth suddenly froze and I looked to my right just in time to see Dean Rusk's swollen face about 18 inches away from my own. King reached out to shake his hand. "Congratulations, sir," he said. "We're all very proud of you."

"Balls," I muttered.

After Rusk had gone inside, King stared at me and shook his head sadly. "Why can't you give the old man some peace?" he said. "He's harmless now. Jesus, you'll get us in trouble yet."

"Don't worry," I said. "He's deaf as a rock."

"Maybe so," King replied. "But some of those people with him can hear okay. One of the women over there at the ceremony asked me who you were and I said you were an undercover agent, but she was still pissed off about what you said. 'You should have Senator Kennedy teach him some manners,' she told me. 'Not even a government agent should be allowed to talk like that in public.'"

"Like what?" I said. "That stuff about the blood on his hands?"

King laughed. "Yeah, that really jolted her. Jesus, Hunter, you gotta remember, these are genteel people." He nodded solemnly. "And this is their turf. Dean Rusk is a goddamn national hero down here. What are his friends supposed to think when the senator comes down from Washington to deliver the eulogy at the unveiling of Rusk's portrait, and he brings some guy with him who starts asking people why the artist didn't paint any blood on the hands?"

"Don't worry," I said. "Just tell 'em it's part of my deep cover. Hell, nobody connects me with Kennedy anyway. I've been careful to stay a safe distance away from you bastards. You think I want to be seen at a ceremony honoring Dean Rusk?"

"Don't kid yourself," he said as we walked inside. "They know you're with us. You wouldn't be here if they didn't. This is a very exclusive gathering, my boy. We're the only ones on the guest list without some kind of very serious title: they're all either judges or state senators or the Right Honorable that..."

I looked around the room, and indeed there was no mistaking the nature of the crowd. This was not just a bunch of good ol' boys who all happened to be alumni of the University of Georgia Law School; these were the honored alumni, the ranking 150 or so who had earned, stolen or inherited enough distinction to be culled from the lists and invited to the unveiling of Rusk's portrait, followed by a luncheon with Senator Kennedy, Governor Carter, Judge Crater and numerous other hyper-distinguished guests whose names I forget. . . And Jimmy King was right: this was not a natural habitat for anybody wearing dirty white basketball shoes, no tie and nothing except Rolling Stone to follow his name on the guest list in that space reserved for titles. If it had been a gathering of distinguished alumni from the University of Georgia Medical School, the title space on the guest list would have been in front of the names, and I would have fit right in. Hell, I could even have joined a few conversations and nobody would have given a second thought to any talk about "blood on the hands."

Right. But this was law day in Georgia, and I was the only Doctor in the room. . . So I had to be passed off as some kind of undercover agent, traveling for unknown reasons with Senator Kennedy. Not even the Secret Service agents understand my role in the entourage. All they knew was that I had walked off the plane from Washington with Teddy, and I had been with them ever since. Nobody gets introduced to a Secret Service agent; they are expected to know who everybody is --and if they don't know, they act like they do and hope for the best.

It is not my wont to take undue advantage of the Secret Service. We have gone through some heavy times together, as it were, and ever since I wandered into a room in the Baltimore Hotel in New York one night during the 1972 campaign and found three S.S agents smoking a joint, I have felt pretty much at ease around them. . . So it seemed only natural, down in Georgia, to ask one of the four agents in our detail for the keys to the trunk of his car so I could lock my leather satchel in a safe place, instead of carrying it around with me.

Actually, the agent had put the bag in the trunk on his own, rather than give me the key. .. But when I sat down at our table in the cafeteria and saw that the only available beverage was iced tea, I remembered that one of the things in my satchel was a quart of Wild Turkey, and I wanted it. On the table in front of me --and everyone else --was a tall glass of iced tea that looked to be the same color as bourbon. Each glass had a split slice of lemon on its rim: so I removed the lemon, poured the tea into Paul Kirk's water glass, and asked one of the agents at the next table for the key to the trunk. He hesitated for a moment, but one of the law school deans or maybe Judge Crater was already talking into the mike up there at the speakers' table, so the path of least disturbance was to give me the key, which he did. ..

And I thought nothing of it until I got outside and opened the trunk...

Cazart!

If your life ever gets dull, check out the trunk of the next S.S car you happen to see. You won't need a key; they open just as easily as any other trunk when a six-foot whipsteel is properly applied. .. But open the bugger carefully, because those gentlemen keep about 69 varieties of instant death inside. Jesus, I was literally staggered by the mass of weaponry in the back of that car: there were machine guns, gas masks, hand grenades, cartridge belts, tear gas canisters, ammo boxes, bulletproof vests, chains, saws and probably a lot of other things. .. But all of a sudden I realized that two passing students had stopped right next to me on the sidewalk and I heard one of them say, "God almighty! Look at that stuff!"

So I quickly filled my glass with Wild Turkey, put the bottle back in the trunk and slammed it shut just like you'd slam any other trunk. . . and that was when I turned around to see Jimmy Carter coming at me with his head down, his teeth bared and his eyes so wildly dilated that he looked like a springtime bat. . .

What? No. That was later in the day, on my third or fourth trip to the trunk with the iced-tea glass. I have been sitting here in a frozen, bewildered stupor for 50 or 55 minutes trying to figure out where that last image came from. My memories of that day are extremely vivid, for the most part, and the more I think back on it now, the more certain I am that whatever I might have seen coming at me in that kind of bent-over, fast-swooping style of the springtime bat was not Governor Carter. Probably it was a hunchbacked student on his way to final exams in the school of landscaping, or maybe just trying to walk fast and tie his shoes at the same time. . . Or it could have been nothing at all; there is no mention in my notebook about anything trying to sneak up on me in a high-speed crouch while I was standing out there in the street.

According to my notes, in fact, Jimmy Carter had arrived at the cafeteria not long after Kennedy --and if he attracted any attention from the crowd that had come to see Teddy I would probably have noticed it and made at least a small note to emphasize the contrast in style --something like: "12:09, Carter suddenly appears in slow-moving crowd behind T.K. No autographs, no bodyguards & now a blue plastic suit instead of Levi's. .. No recognition, no greetings, just a small sandy-haired man looking for somebody to shake hands with. ."

That is the kind of note I would have made if I'd noticed his arrival at all, which I didn't. Because it was not until around ten o'clock on the night of the New Hampshire primary, almost two years later, that there was any real reason for a journalist to make a note on the time and style of Jimmy Carter's arrival for any occasion at all, and especially not in a crowd that had come to rub shoulders with big-time heavies like Ted Kennedy and Dean Rusk. He is not an imposing figure in any way: and even now, with his face on every T.V screen in the country at least five nights a week, I'd be tempted to bet $100 to anybody else's $500 that Jimmy Carter could walk --by himself and in a normal noonday crowd --from one end of Chicago's huge O'Hare Airport to the other, without being recognized by anybody...

Or at least not by anybody who had never met him personally, or who had not seen him anywhere except on T.V. Because there is nothing about Carter that would make him any more noticeable than anyone else you might pass in one of those long and crowded corridors in O'Hare. He could pass for a Fuller Brush man on any street in America. . . But if Jimmy Carter had decided, 15 years ago, to sign on as a brush and gim-crack salesman for the Fuller people, he would be president of the Fuller Brush Company today and every medicine chest in the country would be loaded with Carter-Fuller brushes. . . And if he had gone into the heroin business, every respectable household between Long Island and Los Angeles would have at least one resident junkie.

Ah... but that is not what we need to be talking about right now, is it?

The only thing I remember about the first hour or so of that luncheon was a powerful sense of depression with the life I was drifting into. According to the program, we were in for a long run of speeches, remarks, comments, etcetera, on matters connected with the law school. Carter and Kennedy were the last two names on the list of speakers, which meant there was no hope of leaving early. I thought about going back to the beer parlor and watching a baseball game on T.V, but King warned me against it. "We don't know how long this goddamn thing is gonna last," he said, "and that's a hell of a long walk from here, isn't it?"

I knew what he was getting at. Just as soon as the program was over, the S.S caravan would rush us out to the Athens airport, where Carter's plane was waiting to fly us back to Atlanta. Another big dinner banquet was scheduled for 6:30 that night, and immediately after that, a long flight back to Washington. Nobody would miss me if I wanted to go to the beer parlor, King said; but nobody would miss me when the time came to leave the airport, either.

One of the constant nightmares of traveling with politicians is the need to keep them in sight at all times. Every presidential campaign has its own fearful litany of horror stories about reporters --and, occasionally, even a key staff member --who thought they had plenty of time to "run across the street for a quick beer" instead of hanging around in the rear of some grim auditorium half-listening to the drone of a long-familiar speech, only to come back in 20 minutes to find the auditorium empty and no sign of the press bus, the candidate or anybody who can tell him where they went. These stories are invariably set in places like Butte, Buffalo or Icepick, Minnesota, on a night in the middle of March. The temperature is always below zero, there is usually a raging blizzard to keep cabs off the street, and just as the victim remembers that he has left his wallet in his overcoat on the press bus, his stomach erupts with a sudden attack of ptomaine poisoning. And then, while crawling around on his knees in some ice-covered alley and racked with fits of projectile vomiting, he is grabbed by vicious cops and whipped on the shins with a night stick, then locked in the drunk tank of the local jail and buggered all night by winos.

These stories abound, and there is just enough truth in them to make most campaign journalists so fearful of a sudden change in the schedule that they will not even go looking for a bathroom until the pain becomes unendurable and at least three reliable people have promised to fetch them back to the fold at the first sign of any movement that could signal an early departure. The closest I ever came to getting left behind was during the California primary in 1972, when I emerged from a bathroom in the Salinas railroad depot and realized that the caboose car of McGovern's "victory train" was about 100 yards further down the tracks than it had been only three minutes earlier. George was still standing outside the platform, waving to the crowd, but the train was moving --and as I started my sprint through the crowd, running over women, children, cripples and anything else that couldn't get out of my way, I thought I saw a big grin on McGovern's face as the train began picking up speed. . . I am still amazed that I caught up with the goddamn thing without blowing every valve in my heart, or even missing the iron ladder when I made my last-second leap and being swept under the train and chopped in half by the wheels.

Ever since then I have not been inclined to take many risks while traveling in strange territory with politicians. Even the very few who might feel a bit guilty about leaving me behind would have to do it anyway, because they are all enslaved by their schedules, and when it comes to a choice between getting to the airport on time or waiting for a journalist who has wandered off to seek booze, they will shrug and race off to the airport.

This is particularly true when you travel with Kennedy, who moves at all times with a speedy, split-second precision on a schedule that nobobdy except a perfectly organized presidential candidate would even try to keep pace with. When he is traveling with a detail of Secret Service agents, the caravan stops for nothing and waits for nobody... The S.S agents assigned to Kennedy are hypersensitive about anything that might jack up the risk factor, and they move on the theory that safety increases with speed.

There was no need for King and Kirk to warn me that the S.S detail would have a collective nervous breakdown at the prospect of taking Senator Kennedy and the governor of Georgia through the streets of downtown Athens --or any other city, for that matter --to search for some notoriously criminal journalist who might be in any one of the half-dozen bars and beer parlors on the edge of the campus.

So there was nothing to do except sit there in the university cafeteria, slumped in my chair at a table right next to Dean Rusk's, and drink one tall glass after another of straight Wild Turkey until the Law Day luncheon ceremonies were finished. After my third trip out to the trunk, the S.S driver apparently decided that it was easier to just let me keep the car keys instead of causing a disturbance every 15 or 20 minutes by passing them back and forth. . . Which made a certain kind of fatalistic sense, because I'd already had plenty of time to do just about anything I wanted to with the savage contents of his trunk, so why start worrying now? We had, after all, been together for the better part of two days, and the agents were beginning to understand that there was no need to reach for their weapons every time I started talking about the blood on Dean Rusk's hands, or how easily I could reach over and cut off his ears with my steak knife. Most Secret Service agents have led a sheltered life, and they tend to get edgy when they hear that kind of talk from a large stranger in their midst who has managed to stash an apparently endless supply of powerful whiskey right in the middle of their trunk arsenal. That is not one of your normal, everyday situations in the S.S life; and especially not when this drunkard who keeps talking about taking a steak knife to the head of a former secretary of state has a red flag on his file in the Washington S.S headquarters in addition to having the keys to the S.S car in his pocket.

Carter was already speaking when I came back from my fourth or fifth trip out to the car. I had been careful all along to keep the slice of lemon on the rim of the glass, so it looked like all the other iced-tea glasses in the room. But Jimmy King was beginning to get nervous about the smell. "Goddamnit Hunter, this whole end of the room smells like a distillery," he said.

"Balls," I said. "That's blood you're smelling."

King winced and I thought I saw Rusk's head start to swing around on me, but apparently he thought better of it. For at least two hours he'd been hearing all this ugly talk about blood coming over his shoulder from what he knew was "the Kennedy table" right behind him. But why would a group of Secret Service agents and Senator Kennedy's personal staff be talking about him like that? And why was this powerful stench of whiskey hanging around his head? Were they all drunk?

Not all --but I was rapidly closing the gap and the others had been subjected to the fumes for so long that I could tell by the sound of their laughter that even the S.S agents were acting a little weird. Maybe it was a contact drunk of some kind, acting in combination with the fumes and fiendish drone of the speeches. We were trapped in that place, and nobody else at the table liked it any better than I did.

I am still not sure when I began listening to what Carter was saying, but at some point about ten minutes into his remarks I noticed a marked difference in the style and tone of the noise coming from the speakers' table and I found myself listening, for the first time all day. Carter had started off with a few quiet jokes about people feeling honored to pay ten or twelve dollars a head to hear Kennedy speak, but the only way he could get people to listen to him was to toss in a free lunch along with his remarks. The audience laughed politely a few times, but after he'd been talking for about 15 minutes I noticed a general uneasiness in the atmosphere of the room, and nobody was laughing anymore. At that point we were all still under the impression that Carter's "remarks" would consist of a few minutes of friendly talk about the law school, a bit of praise for Rusk, an introduction to Kennedy, and that would be it.

But we were wrong, and the tension in the room kept increasing as more and more people realized it. Very few if any of them had supported Carter when he won the governorship, and now that he was just about finished with his four-year term and barred by law from running again, they expected him to bow out gracefully and go back to raising peanuts. If he had chosen that occasion to announce that he'd decided to run for president in 1976, the reaction would almost certainly have been a ripple of polite laughter, because they would know he was kidding. Carter had not been a bad governor, but so what? We were, after all, in Georgia; and besides that, the South already had one governor running for president. . . Back in the spring of 1974 George Wallace was a national power; he had rattled the hell out of that big cage called the Democratic National Committee in '72, and when he said he planned to do it again in '76 he was taken very seriously.

So I would probably have chuckled along with the others if Carter had said something about running for president at the beginning of his "remarks" that day, but I would not have chuckled if he'd said it at the end. . . Because it was a king hell bastard of a speech, and by the time it was over he had rung every bell in the room. Nobody seemed to know exactly what to make of it, but they knew it was sure as hell not what they'd come to hear.

I have heard hundreds of speeches by all kinds of candidates and politicians --usually against my will and for generally the same reasons I got trapped into hearing this one --but I have never heard a sustained piece of political oratory that impressed me any more than the speech Jimmy Carter made on that Saturday afternoon in May 1974. It ran about 45 minutes, climbing through five very distinct gear changes while the audience muttered uneasily and raised their eyebrows at each other, and one of the most remarkable things about the speech is that it is such a rare piece of oratorical artwork that it remains vastly impressive, even if you don't necessarily believe Carter was sincere and truthful in all the things he said. Viewed purely in the context of rhetorical drama and political theater, it ranks with General Douglas MacArthur's "old soldiers never die" address to the Congress in 1951 --which still stands as a masterpiece of insane bullshit, if nothing else.

There were, however, a lot of people who believed every word and sigh of MacArthur's speech, and they wanted to make him president --just as a lot of people who are still uncertain about Jimmy Carter would want to make him president if he could figure out some way to deliver a contemporary version of his 1974 Law Day speech on network T.V. . . Or, hell, even the same identical speech; a national audience might be slightly puzzled by some of the references to obscure judges, grade-school teachers and backwoods Georgia courthouses, but I think the totality of the speech would have the same impact today as it did two years ago.

But there is not much chance of it happening. .. And that brings up another remarkable aspect of the law Day speech: it had virtually no impact at all when he delivered it except on the people who heard it, and most of them were more stunned and puzzled by it than impressed. They had not come there to hear lawyers denounced as running dogs of the status quo, and there is still some question in my own mind --and in Carter's too, I suspect --about what he came there to say. There was no written text of the speech, no press to report it, no audience hungry to hear it, and no real reason for giving it --except that Jimmy Carter had a few serious things on his mind that day, and he figured it was about time to unload them, whether the audience liked it or not.

Which gets to another interesting point of the speech: although Carter himself now says, "That was probably the best speech I ever made," he has yet to make another like it --not even to the extent of lifting some of the best images and ideas of incorporation into his current speeches --and his campaign staff attached so little importance to it that Carter's only tape recording of his Law Day remarks got lost somewhere in the files and, until about two months ago, the only existing tape of the speech was the one I made and carried around with me for two years, playing it in some extremely unlikely situations for people who would look at me like I was finally over the hump into terminal brain damage when I'd say they were going to have to spend the next 45 minutes listening to a political speech by some ex-governor of Georgia.

It was not until I showed up in New Hampshire and Massachusetts for the '76 primaries and started playing my tape of the Law Day speech for a few friends, journalists and even some of Carter's top staff people who'd never heard it that Pat Caddell noticed that almost everybody who heard the speech was as impressed by it as I was. .. But even now, after Caddell arranged to dub 50 tape copies off of my copy, nobody in Carter's brain trust has figured out what to do with them.

I am not quite sure what I would do with them, myself, if I were Carter, because it is entirely possible that the very qualities that made the Law Day speech so impressive for me would have exactly the opposite effect on Carter's new national constituency. The voice I hear on my tape is the same one all those good conservative folk out there on the campaign trail have found so appealing, but very few of them would find anything familiar in what the voice is saying. The Jimmy Carter who has waltzed so triumphantly down the middle of the road through one Democratic primary after another is a cautious, conservative and vaguely ethereal Baptist Sunday school teacher who seems to promise, above all else, a return to normalcy, a resurrection of the national self-esteem, and a painless redemption from all the horrors and disillusion of Watergate. With President Carter's firm hand on the helm, the ship of state will once again sail a true and steady course, all the crooks and liars and thieves who somehow got control of the government during the turmoil of the Sixties will be driven out of the temple once and for all, and the White House will be so overflowing with honesty, decency, justice, love and compassion that it might even glow in the dark.

It is a very alluring vision, and nobody understands this better than Jimmy Carter. The electorate feels a need to be cleansed, reassured, and revitalized. The underdogs of yesteryear have had their day, and they blew it. The radicals and reformers of the Sixties promised peace, but they turned out to be nothing but incompetent trouble-makers. Their plans that had looked so fine on paper led to chaos and disaster when hack politicians tried to implement them. The promise of Civil Rights turned into the nightmare of busing. The call for law and order led straight to Watergate. And the long struggle between the Hawks and the Doves caused violence in the streets and a military disaster in Vietnam. Nobody won, in the end, and when the dust finally settled, "extremists" at both ends of the political spectrum were thoroughly discredited. And by the time the 1976 presidential campaign got under way, the high ground was all in the middle of the road.

Jimmy Carter understands this, and he has tailored his campaign image to fit the new mood almost perfectly. .. But back in May of '74 when he flew up to Athens to make his "remarks" at the Law Day ceremonies, he was not as concerned with preserving his moderate image as he is now. He was thinking more about all the trouble he'd had with judges, lawyers, lobbyists and other minions of the Georgia establishment while he was governor--and now, with only six more months in the office, he wanted to have a few words with these people.

There was not much anger in his voice when he started talking. But halfway through the speech it was too obvious for anybody in the room to ignore. But there was no way to cut him short and he knew it. It was the anger in his voice that first caught my attention, I think, but what sent me back out to the trunk to get my tape recorder instead of another drink was the spectacle of a Southern politician telling a crowd of Southern judges and lawyers that "I'm not qualified to talk to you about law, because in addition to being a peanut farmer, I'm an engineer and nuclear physicist, not a lawyer.... But I read a lot and I listen a lot. One of the sources for my understanding about the proper application of criminal justice and the system of equities is from Reinhold Niebuhr. The other source of my understanding about what's right and wrong in this society is from a friend of mine, a poet named Bob Dylan. Listening to his records about 'The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll' and 'Like a Rolling Stone' and The Times They Are A-Changin', I've learned to appreciate the dynamism of change in a modern society."

At first I wasn't sure I was hearing him right and I looked over at Jimmy King. "What the hell did I just hear?" I asked.

King smiled and looked at Paul Kirk, who leaned across the table and whispered, "He said his top two advisers are Bob Dylan and Reinhold Niebuhr."

I nodded and got up to go outside for my tape recorder. I could tell by the rising anger in Carter's voice that we were in for an interesting ride. . . And by the time I got back he was whipping on the crowd about judges who took bribes in return for reduced prison sentences, lawyers who deliberately cheated illiterate blacks, and cops who abused people's rights with something they called a "consent warrant."

"I had lunch this week with the members of the Judicial Selection Committee and they were talking about a 'consent search warrant,'" he said. "I didn't know what a consent search warrant was. They said, 'Well, that's when two policemen go to a house. One of them goes to the front door and knocks on it and the other one runs around to the back door and yells come in.'"

The crowd got a laugh out of that one, but Carter was just warming up and for the next 20 or 30 minutes his voice was the only sound in the room. Kennedy was sitting just a few feet to Carter's left, listening carefully but never changing the thoughtful expression on his face as Carter railed and bitched about a system of criminal justice that allows the rich and the privileged to escape punishment for their crimes and sends poor people to prison because they can't afford to bribe the judge.

(Jesus Babbling Christ! The phone is ringing again, and this time I know what it is for sure. Last time it was the Land Commissioner of Texas, threatening to have my legs broken because of something I wrote about him. . . But now it is the grim reaper; he has come for my final page and in exactly 13 minutes that goddamn mojo wire across the room will erupt in a frenzy of beeping and I will have to feed it again. . . But before I leave this filthy sweatbox that is costing me $39 a day I am going to deal with that rotten mojo machine. I have dreamed of smashing that fucker for five long years, but. . . Okay, okay, 12 more minutes and. . . yes. . .)

So this will have to be it. . . I would need a lot more time and space than I have to properly describe either the reality or the reaction to Jimmy Carter's Law Day speech, which was and still is the heaviest and most eloquent thing I have ever heard from the mouth of a politician. It was the voice of an angry agrarian populist, extremely precise in its judgments and laced with some of the most original, brilliant and occasionally bizarre political metaphors anybody in that room will ever be likely to hear.

The final turn of the screw was another ugly example of crime and degradation in the legal profession, and this time Carter went right to the top. Nixon had just released his own, self-serving version of "the White House tapes," and Carter was shocked when he read the transcripts. "The Constitution charges us with a direct responsibility for determining what our government is and ought to be," he said. And then, after a long pause, he went on: "Well... I have read parts of the embarrassing transcripts, and I've seen the proud statement of a former attorney general who protected his boss, and now brags of the fact that he tiptoed through a minefield and came out... quote, clean, unquote." Another pause, and then: "You know, I can't imagine somebody like Thomas Jefferson tiptoeing through a minefield on the technicalities of the law, and then bragging about being clean afterwards..."

Forty-five minutes latter, on our way back to Atlanta in the governor's small plane, I told Carter I wanted a transcript of his speech.

"There is no transcript," he said.

I smiled, thinking he was putting me on. The speech had sounded like a product of five or six tortured drafts. But he showed a page and a half of scrawled notes in his legal pad and said that was all he had.

"Jesus Christ," I said. "That was one of the damnedest things I've ever heard. You mean you just winged it all the way through?"

He shrugged and smiled faintly. "Well," he said, "I had a pretty good idea what I was going to say, before I came up here --but I guess I was a little surprised at how it came out."

Kennedy didn't have much to say about the speech. He said he'd "enjoyed it," but he still seemed uncomfortable and preoccupied for some reason. Carter and I talked about the time he invited Dylan and some of his friends out to the governor's mansion after a concert in Atlanta. "I really enjoyed it," he said with a big grin. "It was a real honor to have him visit my home."

I had already decided, by then, that I liked Jimmy Carter --but I had no idea that he'd made up his mind, a few months earlier, to run for the presidency in 1976. And if he had told me his little secret that day on the plane back to Atlanta, I'm not sure I'd have taken him seriously. .. But if he had told me and if I had taken him seriously, I would probably have said that he could have my vote, for no other reason except the speech I'd just heard.

Which hardly matters, because Jimmy Carter didn't mention the presidency to me that day, and I had other things on my mind. It was the first Saturday in May --Derby Day in Louisville --and I'd been harassing Jimmy King since early morning about getting us back to Atlanta in time to watch the race on T.V. According to the schedule we were due back at the governor's mansion around three in the afternoon, and post time for the Derby was 4:30. . . But I have learned to be leery of politicians' schedules; they are about as reliable as campaign promises, and when I'd mentioned to Kennedy that I felt it was very important to get ourselves back to Atlanta in time for the Derby, I could tell by the look on his face that the only thing that might cause him to go out of his way to watch the Kentucky Derby was a written guarantee from the Churchill Downs management that I would be staked down on the track at the finish line when the horses came thundering down the stretch.

But Carter was definitely up for it, and he assured me that we would be back at the mansion in plenty of time for me to make all the bets I wanted before post time. "We'll even try to find a mint julep for you," he said. "Rosalynn has some mint in the garden, and I notice you already have the main ingredient."

When we got to the mansion I found a big T.V set in one of the basement guest rooms. The mint juleps were no problem, but the only bet I could get was a $5 gig with Jody Powell, Carter's press secretary --which I won, and then compounded the insult by insisting that Powell pay off immediately. He had to wander around the mansion, borrowing dollars and even quarters from anybody who would lend him money, until he could scrape up five dollars.

Later that night we endured another banquet, and immediately afterward I flew back to Washington with Kennedy, King and Kirk. Kennedy was still in a funk about something, and I thought it was probably me. . . And while it was true that I had not brought any great distinction to the entourage, I had made enough of an effort to know that it could have been worse, and just to make sure he understood that --or maybe for reasons of sheer perversity --I waited until we were all strapped into our seats and I heard the stewardess asking Teddy if she could bring him a drink. He refused, as he always does in public, and just as the stewardess finished her spiel I leaned over the seat and said, "How about some heroin?"

His face went stiff and for a moment I thought it was all over for me. But then I noticed that King and Kirk were smiling. . . So I strangled the sloat and walked back to my hotel in the rain.

The Last Crazed Charge of the Liberal Brigade: The Shrewdness of Richard Nixon, the Deep and Abiding Courage of Hubert Humphrey and All of His New Found Friends. . . Jimmy Carter at Home in Plains, One Year Later the Leap of Faith

Special Bulletin

Boemont, Texas (Apr 29) --Anarchist presidential candidate Hunter S. Thompson announced yesterday during opening ceremonies at the Beaumont Annual Stock Auction that Democratic front-runner Jimmy Carter was "the only candidate who ever lied to me twice in one day." Thompson's harsh denunciation of Carter --who was also at the auction for purposes of wrestling his own bull --came as a nasty shock to the crowd of celebrities, bull wranglers and other politicos who were gathered to participate in ceremonies honoring Texas Land Commissioner Bob Armstrong, who followed Thompson's attack on Carter with an unexpected statement of his own, saying he would be the number two man on a dark-horse(s) Demo ticket with Colorado Senator Gary Hart. Armstrong also denounced Carter for "consciously lying to me, about the price of his bull." The Carter-owned animal, a two-year-old peanut-fed Brahman, had been advertised at a price of $2200 --but when the front-runner showed up in Beaumont to ride his own bull, the price suddenly escalated to $7750. And it was at this point that both Thompson and Armstrong stunned the crowd with their back-to-back assaults on Carter, long considered a personal friend of both men. Carter, who seemed shocked by the attacks, lied to newsmen who questioned him about the reasons, saying, "I didn't hear what they said."

The Law Day speech is not the kind of thing that would have much appeal to the mind of a skilled technician, and that kind of mind is perhaps the only common denominator among the strategists, organizers and advisers at the staff-command level of Carter's campaign. Very few of them seem to have much interest in why Jimmy wants to be president, or even in what he might do after he wins: their job and their meal ticket is to put Jimmy Carter in the White House, that is all they know and all they need to know --and so far they are doing their job pretty well. According to political odds-maker Billy the Geek, Carter is now a solid 3 to 2 bet to win the November election --up from 50 to 1 less than six months ago.

This is another likely reason why Carter's brain trust is not especially concerned with how to put the Law Day speech to good use: the people most likely to be impressed or even converted by it are mainly the ones who make up the left/liberal, humanist/intellectual wing of the Democratic party and the national press --and in the wake of Carter's genuinely awesome blitzkrieg in Pennsylvania and Texas, destroying all of his remaining opposition in less than a week, it is hard to argue with the feeling among his staff-command technicians that he no longer needs any converts from the left/liberal wing of the party. He got where he is without the help he repeatedly asked them for during most of 1975 and early '76, and now the problem is theirs. The train has left the station, as it were, and anybody who wants to catch up with it now is going to come up with the air fare.

But I have just been reminded by a terrible screeching on the telephone that the presses will roll in a few hours and that means there is no more time at Rolling Stone than there is in the Carter campaign for wondering why about anything. Idle speculation is a luxury reserved for people who are too rich, too poor or too crazy to get seriously concerned about anything outside their own private realities. . . and just as soon as I finish this goddamn wretched piece of gibberish I am going to flee like a rat down a pipe into one of those categories. I have maintained a wild and serious flirtation with all three of them for so long that the flirtation itself was beginning to look like reality. . . But I see it now for the madness it was from the start: there is no way to maintain four parallel states of being at the same time. I know from long experience that it is possible to be rich, poor and crazy all at once --but to be rich, poor, crazy and also a functioning political journalist at the same time is flat-out impossible, so the time has come to make a terminal choice. . .

But not quite yet. We still have to finish this twisted saga of Vengeance and Revelation in the shade of the Georgia pines. . . So, what the hell? Let's get after it. There is plenty of room at the top in this bountiful nation of ours for a rich, poor and crazy political journalist who can sit down at a rented typewriter in a Texas motel with a heart full of hate and a head full of speed and Wild Turkey and lash out a capsule/narrative between midnight and dawn that will explain the whole meaning and tell the whole tale of the 1976 presidential campaign. . .

Hell yes! Let's whip on this thing! Until I got that phone call a few minutes ago I would have said it was absolutely impossible, but now I know better. .. If only because I have just been reminded that until I saw Hubert Humphrey "quit the race" a few days ago I was telling anybody who would listen that there was no way to cure an egg-sucking dog. .. So now is the time to finish this rotten job that I somehow got myself into, and also to congratulate my old buddy Hubert for having enough sense to ignore his advisers and keep the last faint glimmer of his presidential hopes alive by crouching in the weeds and praying for a brokered convention, instead of shooting his whole wad by entering the New Jersey primary and getting pushed off the wall and cracked like Humpty Dumpty by Jimmy Carter's technicians.

I am beginning to sense a distinctly pejorative drift in this emphasis on the word "technician," but it is only half intentional. There is nothing wrong with technicians, in politics or anywhere else. Any presidential campaign without a full complement of first-class political technicians --or with a drastic imbalance between technicians and ideologues --will meet the same fate that doomed the Fred Harris campaign in New Hampshire and Massachusetts. But the question of balance is critical, and there is something a little scary about a presidential campaign run almost entirely by technicians that can be as successful as Carter's.

"Awesome" is the mildest word I can think of to describe a campaign that can take an almost totally unknown ex-governor of Georgia with no national reputation, no power base in the Democratic party and not the slightest reluctance to tell Walter Cronkite, John Chancellor and anyone else who asks that "the most important thing in my life is Jesus Christ" and to have him securely positioned, after only nine of 32 primaries, as an almost prohibitive favorite to win the presidential nomination of the nation's majority political party, and even bet to win the November election against a relatively popular G.O.P president who has managed somehow to convince both Big Labor and Big Business that he has just rescued the country from economic disaster. If the presidential election were held tomorrow I would not bet more than three empty beer cans on Gerald Ford's chances of beating Jimmy Carter in November.

... What? No, cancel that bet. The Screech on the telephone just informed me that Time has just released a poll --on the day after the Texas primary --saying Carter would beat Ford by 48% to 38% if the election were held now. Seven weeks ago, according to Time via The Screech, the current figures were almost exactly reversed. .. I have never been much with math, but a quick shuffling of these figures seems to mean that Carter has picked up 20 points in seven weeks, and Ford has lost 20.

If this is true, then it is definitely time to call Billy the Geek and get something like ten cases of 66 proof Sloat Ale down on Carter, and forget those three empty beer cans.

In other words, the panic is on and the last survivors of the ill-fated Stop Carter Movement are out in the streets shedding their uniforms and stacking their weapons on street corners all over Washington. . . And now another phone call from C.B.S correspondent Ed Bradley --who is covering Carter now after starting the '76 campaign with Birch Bayh --saying Bayh will announce at a press conference in Washington tomorrow that he has decided to endorse Jimmy Carter.

Well...how about that, eh? Never let it be said that a wharf rat can get off a sinking ship any faster than an 87% A.D.A liberal.

But this is no time for cruel jokes about liberals and wharf rats. Neither species has ever been known for blind courage or stubborn devotion to principle, so let the rotters go wherever they feel even temporarily comfortable. . . Meanwhile, it is beginning to look like the time has come for the rest of us to get our business straight, because the only man who is going to keep Jimmy Carter out of the White House now is Jimmy Carter.

Which might happen, but it is a hard kind of thing to bet on, because there is no precedent in the annals of presidential politics for a situation like this: with more than half the primaries still ahead of him, Carter is now running virtually unopposed for the Democratic nomination, and --barring some queer and unlikely development --he is going to have to spend the next two months in a holding action until he can go to New York in July and pick up the nomination.

Just as soon as I can get some sleep and recover from this grim and useless ordeal I will call him and find out what he plans to do with all that time. . . And if I were in that nervous position I think I would call a press conference and announce that I was off to a secret think tank on the Zondo Peninsula to finalize my plans for curing all the ills of society; because a lot of strange things can happen to a long-shot front-runner in two months of forced idleness, and a lot of idle minds are going to have plenty of time for brooding on all the things that still worry them about living for at least the next four years with a president who prays 25 times a day and reads the Bible in Spanish every night. Even the people who plan to vote for Jimmy Carter if he can hang on between now and November are going to have more time than they need to nurse any lingering doubts they might have about him.

I will probably nurse a few doubts of my own between now and July, for that matter, but unless something happens to convince me that I should waste any more time than I already have brooding on the evil potential that lurks, invariably, in the mind of just about anybody whose ego has become so dangerously swollen that he really wants to be president of the United States, I don't plan to spend much time worrying about the prospect of seeing Jimmy Carter in the White House, There is not a hell of a lot I can do about it, for one thing; and for another, I have spent enough time with Carter in the past two years to feel I have a pretty good sense of his candidacy. I went down to Plains, Georgia, to spend a few days with him on his own turf and to hopefully find out who Jimmy Carter really was before the campaign shroud came down on him and he started talking like a candidate instead of a human being. Once a presidential aspirant gets out on the campaign trail and starts seeing visions of himself hunkered down behind that big desk in the Oval Office, the idea of sitting down in his own living room and talking openly with some foul-mouthed, argumentative journalist carrying a tape recorder in one hand and a bottle of Wild Turkey in the other is totally out of the question.

But it was almost a year before the '76 New Hampshire primary when I talked to Carter at his home in Plains, and I came away from that weekend with six hours of taped conversation with him on subjects ranging all the way from the Allman Brothers, stock car racing and our strongly conflicting views on the use of undercover agents in law enforcement, to nuclear submarines, the war in Vietnam and the treachery of Richard Nixon. When I listened to the tapes again last week I noticed a lot of things that I had not paid much attention to at the time, and the most obvious of these was the extremely detailed precision of his answers to some of the questions that he is now accused of being either unable or unwilling to answer. There is no question in my mind, after hearing him talk on the tapes, that I was dealing with a candidate who had already done a massive amount of research on things like tax reform, national defense and the structure of the American political system by the time he announced his decision to run for president.

Nor is there any question that there are a lot of things Jimmy Carter and I will never agree on. I had warned him, before we sat down with the tape recorder for the first time, that --although I appreciated his hospitality and felt surprisingly relaxed and comfortable in his home --I was also a journalist and that some of the questions I knew I was going to ask him might seem unfriendly or even downright hostile. Because of this, I said, I wanted him to be able to stop the tape recorder by means of a remote-pause button if the talk got too heavy. But he said he would just as soon not have to bother turning the tape on and off, which surprised me at the time, but now that I listen to the tapes I realize that loose talk and bent humor are not among Jimmy Carter's vices.

They are definitely among mine, however, and since I had stayed up most of the night, drinking and talking in the living room with his sons Jack and Chip Carter and their wives --and then by myself in the guest room over the garage --I was still feeling weird around noon, when we started talking "seriously," and the tape of that first conversation is liberally sprinkled with my own twisted comments about "rotten fascist bastards," "thieving cocksuckers who peddle their asses all over Washington," and "these goddamn brainless fools who refuse to serve liquor in the Atlanta airport on Sunday."

It was nothing more than my normal way of talking, and Carter was already familiar with it, but there are strange and awkward pauses here and there on the tape where I can almost hear Carter gritting his teeth and wondering whether to laugh or get angry at things I wasn't even conscious of saying at the time, but which sound on the tape like random outbursts of hostility or pure madness from the throat of a paranoid psychotic. Most of the conversation is intensely rational, but every once in a while it slips over the line and all I can hear is the sound of my own voice yelling something like "Jesus Christ! What's that filthy smell?"

Both Carter and his wife have always been amazingly tolerant of my behavior, and on one or two occasions they have had to deal with me in a noticeably bent condition. I have always been careful not to commit any felonies right in front of them, but other than that I have never made much of an effort to adjust my behavior around Jimmy Carter or anyone else in his family --including his 78-year-old mother, Miss Lillian, who is the only member of the Carter family I could comfortably endorse for the presidency, right now, with no reservations at all.

Whoops! Well... we will get to that in a moment. Right now I have other things to deal with and... No, what the hell? Let's get to it now, because time is running out and so is that goddamn sloat; so now is the time to come to grips with my own "Carter Question."

It has taken me almost a year to reach this point, and I am still not sure how to cope with it. . . But I am getting there fast, thanks mainly to all the help I've been getting from my friends in the liberal community. I took more abuse from these petulant linthead bastards during the New Hampshire and Massachusetts primaries than I have ever taken from my friends on any political question since the first days of the Free Speech Movement in Berkeley, and that was nearly 12 years ago. . . I felt the same way about the first wild violent days of the F.S.M as I still feel about Jimmy Carter. In both cases my initial reaction was positive, and I have lived too long on my instincts to start questioning them now. At least not until I get a good reason, and so far nobody has been able to give me any good reason for junking my first instinctive reaction to Jimmy Carter, which was that I liked him. . . And if the editors of Time magazine and the friends of Hubert Humphrey consider that "bizarre," fuck them. I liked Jimmy Carter the first time I met him, and in the two years that have passed since that Derby Day in Georgia I have come to know him a hell of a lot better than I knew George McGovern at this point in the '72 campaign, and I still like Jimmy Carter. He is one of the most intelligent politicians I've ever met, and also one of the strangest. I have never felt comfortable around people who talk about their feeling for Jesus, or any other deity for that matter, because they are usually none too bright. . . Or maybe "stupid" is a better way of saying it; but I have never seen much point in getting heavy with either stupid people or Jesus freaks, just as long as they don't bother me. In a world as weird and cruel as this one we have made for ourselves, I figure anybody who can find peace and personal happiness without ripping off somebody else deserves to be left alone. They will not inherit the earth, but then neither will I. . . And I have learned to live, as it were, with the idea that I will never find peace and happiness, either. But as long as I know there's a pretty good chance I can get my hands on either one of them every once in a while, I do the best I can between high spots.

And so much for all that gibberish. The bastards are taking the whole thing away from me now, and anything else I might have wanted to say about Jimmy Carter will have to wait for another time and place. At the moment, failing any new evidence that would cause me to change my mind, I would rather see Jimmy Carter in the White House than anybody else we are likely to be given a chance to vote for. And that narrows the field right down, for now, to Ford, Reagan and Humphrey.

Carter is the only unknown quantity of the four, and that fact alone says all I need to know. Admittedly, a vote for Carter requires a certain leap of faith, but on the evidence I don't mind taking it. I think he is enough of an ego maniac to bring the same kind of intensity to the task of doing the job in a way that will allow him to stay as happy with his own mirror in the White House as he is now with his mirror in Plains.

There is also the fact that I have the Law Day speech to fall back on, which is a lot better reason to vote for him than anything I've seen or heard on the campaign trail. I have never thought the problem with Carter is that he is two-faced in the sense of a two-headed coin. . . But he is definitely a politician above all else right now, and that is the only way anybody gets into the White House. If Carter has two faces, my own feeling is that they are mounted one behind the other, but both looking in the same direction, instead of both ways at once, as the friends of Hubert Humphrey keep saying.

It also occurs to me now and then that many of the people who feel so strongly about keeping Jimmy Carter out of the White House don't know him at all. And a lot of the people who accuse him of lying, dissembling, waffling and being "hazy" have never bothered to listen very carefully to what he says, or to try reading between the lines now when Carter comes out with some mawkish statement like the one he has used to end so many speeches: "I just want to see us once again with a government that is as honest and truthful and fair and idealistic and compassionate and filled with love as are the American people."

The first time I heard him say that up in New Hampshire I was stunned. It sounded like he had eaten some of the acid I've been saving up to offer him the first time he mentions anything to me about bringing Jesus into my life. .. But after I'd heard him say the same thing five or six more times, it began to sound like something I'd heard long before I'd ever heard Jimmy Carter's name. ..

It took me a while to dig it out of my memory, but when it finally surfaced I recognized the words of the late, great liberal, Adlai Stevenson, who once lashed it all together in one small and perfect capsule when he said "... in a democracy, people usually get the kind of government they deserve."

Rolling Stone, #214, June 3, 1976

Address by Jimmy Carter on Law Day: University of Georgia, Athens, G.A Senator Kennedy, distinguished fellow Georgians, friends of the Law School of Georgia and personal friends of mine:

Sometimes even a distinguished jurist on the Supreme Court doesn't know all of the background on acceptances of invitations. As a matter of fact, my wife was influential in this particular acceptance, but my son was even more influential. This was really an acceptance to repair my ego. There was established in 1969 the L.Q.C. Lamar Society. I was involved in the establishment of it, and I think a lot of it. As Governor of Georgia I was invited this year, along with two distinguished Americans, to make a speech at the annual meeting which is going on now.

I found out when the program was prepared that Senator Kennedy was to speak last night. They charged $10 to attend the occasion. Senator William Brock from Tennessee is speaking to the Lamar Society at noon today. I found out that they charged $7.50 for this occasion. I spoke yesterday at noon, and I asked the Lamar Society officials, at the last moment, how much they were charging to come to the luncheon yesterday. They said they weren't charging anything. I said, "You mean they don't even have to pay for the lunch?" They said, "No, we're providing the lunch free."

So, when my son Jack came and said, "Daddy, I think more of you than you thought I did; I'm paying $7.00 for two tickets to the luncheon," I figured that a $3.50 lunch ticket would salvage part of my ego and that's really why I'm here today.

I'm not qualified to talk to you about law, because in addition to being a peanut farmer, I'm an engineer and a nuclear physicist, not a lawyer. I was planning, really, to talk to you more today about politics and the interrelationship of political affairs and law, than about what I'm actually going to speak on. But after Senator Kennedy's delightful and very fine response to political questions during his speech, and after his analysis of the Watergate problems, I stopped at a room on the way, while he had his press conference, and I changed my speech notes.

My own interest in the criminal justice system is very deep and heartfelt. Not having studied law, I've had to learn the hard way. I read a lot and listen a lot. One of the sources for my understanding about the proper application of criminal justice and the system of equity is from reading Reinhold Niebuhr, one of his books that Bill Gunter gave me quite a number of years ago. The other source of my understanding about what's right and wrong in this society is from a friend of mine, a poet named Bob Dylan. After listening to his records about 'The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll' and "Like a Rolling Stone" and "The Times, They Are a Changing," I've learned to appreciate the dynamism of change in a modern society.

I grew up as a landowner's son. But, I don't think I ever realized the proper interrelationship between the landowner and those who worked on a farm until I heard Dylan's record, "I Ain't Gonna Work on Maggie's Farm No More." So I come here speaking to you today about your subject with a base for my information founded on Reinhold Niebuhr and Bob Dylan.

One of the things that Niebuhr says is that the sad duty of the political system is to establish justice in a sinful world. He goes on to say that there's no way to establish or maintain justice without law; that the laws are constantly changing to stabilize the social equilibrium of the forces and counterforces of a dynamic society, and that the law in its totality is an expression of the structure of government

Well, as a farmer who has now been in office for three years, I have seen firsthand the inadequacy of my own comprehension of what government ought to do for its people. I've had a constant learning process, sometimes from lawyers, sometimes from practical experience, sometimes from failures and mistakes that have been pointed out to me after they were made.

I had lunch this week with the members of the Judicial Selection Committee, and they were talking about a consent search warrant. I said I didn't know what a consent search warrant was. They said, "Well, that's when two policemen go to a house. One of them goes to the front door and knocks on it, and the other one runs around to the back door and yells 'come in.' " I have to admit that as Governor, quite often I search for ways to bring about my own hopes; not quite so stringently testing the law as that, but with a similar motivation.

I would like to talk to you for a few moments about some of the practical aspects of being a governor who is still deeply concerned about the inadequacies of a system of which it is obvious that you're so patently proud.

I have refrained completely from making any judicial appointments on the basis of political support or other factors, and have chosen, in every instance, Superior Court judges, quite often State judges, Appellate Court judges, on the basis of merit analysis by a highly competent, open, qualified group of distinguished Georgians. I'm proud of this.

We've now established in the Georgia Constitution a qualifications commission, which for the first time can hear complaints from average citizens about the performance in office of judges and can investigate those complaints and with the status and the force of the Georgia Constitution behind them can remove a judge from office or take other corrective steps.

We've now passed a Constitutional amendment, which is waiting for the citizenry to approve, that establishes a uniform Criminal Justice Court System in this state so that the affairs of the judiciary can be more orderly structured, so that work loads can be balanced and so that over a period of time there might be an additional factor of equity, which quite often does not exist now because of the wide disparity among the different courts of Georgia.

We passed this year a judge sentencing bill for noncapital cases with a review procedure. I've had presented to me, by members of the Pardons and Paroles Board, an analysis of some of the sentences given to people by the Superior Court judges of this state, which grieved me deeply and shocked me as a layman. I believe that over a period of time, the fact that a group of other judges can review and comment on the sentences meted out in the different portions of Georgia will bring some more equity to the system.

We have finally eliminated the unsworn statement law in Georgia --the last state to do it.

This year, we analyzed in depth the structure of the drug penalties in this state. I believe in the future there will be a clear understanding of the seriousness of different crimes relating to drugs. We've finally been able to get through the legislature a law that removes alcoholism or drunkenness as a criminal offense. When this law goes into effect next year, I think it will create a new sense of compassion and concern and justice for the roughly 150,000 alcoholics in Georgia, many of whom escape the consequences of what has been a crime because of some social or economic prominence, and will remove a very heavy load from the criminal justice system.

In our prisons, which in the past have been a disgrace to Georgia, we've tried to make substantive changes in the quality of those who administer them and to put a new realm of understanding and hope and compassion into the administration of that portion of the system of justice. Ninety-five percent of those who are presently incarcerated in prisons will be returned to be our neighbors. And now the thrust of the entire program, as initiated under Ellis MacDougall and now continued under Dr. Ault, is to try to discern in the soul of each convicted and sentenced person redeeming features that can be be enhanced. We plan a career for that person to be pursued while he is in prison. I believe that the early data that we have on recidivism rates indicates the efficacy of what we've done.

The G.B.I, which was formerly a matter of great concern to all those who were interested in law enforcement, has now been substantially changed --for the better. I would put it up now in quality against the F.B.I, the Secret Service or any other crime control organization in this Nation.

Well, does that mean that everything is all right?

It doesn't to me.

I don't know exactly how to say this, but I was thinking just a few moments ago about some of the things that are of deep concern to me as Governor. As a scientist, I was working constantly, along with almost everyone who professes that dedication of life, to probe, probe every day of my life for constant change for the better. It's completely anachronistic in the makeup of a nuclear physicist or an engineer or scientist to be satisfied with what we've got, or to rest on the laurels of past accomplishments. It's the nature of the profession.

As a farmer, the same motivation persists. Every farmer that I know of, who is worth his salt or who's just average, is ahead of the experiment stations and the research agronomist in finding better ways, changing ways to plant, cultivate, utilize herbicides, gather, cure, sell farm products. The competition for innovation is tremendous, equivalent to the realm of nuclear physics even.

In my opinion, it's different in the case of lawyers. And maybe this is a circumstance that is so inherently true that it can't be changed.

I'm a Sunday School teacher, and I've always known that the structure of law is founded on the Christian ethic that you shall love the Lord your God and your neighbor as yourself --a very high and perfect standard. We all know the fallibility of man, and the contentions in society, as described by Reinhold Niebuhr and many others, don't permit us to achieve perfection. We do strive for equality, but not with a fervent and daily commitment. In general, the powerful and the influential in our society shape the laws and have a great influence on the legislature or the Congress. This creates a reluctance to change because the powerful and the influential have carved out for themselves or have inherited a privileged position in society, of wealth or social prominence or higher education or opportunity for the future. Quite often, those circumstances are circumvented at a very early age because college students, particularly undergraduates, don't have any commitment to the preservation of the way things are. But later, as their interrelationship with the present circumstances grows, they also become committed to approaching change very, very slowly and very, very cautiously, and there's a commitment to the status quo.

I remember when I was a child, I lived on a farm about three miles from Plains, and we didn't have electricity or running water. We lived on the railroad --Seaboard Coastline railroad. Like all farm boys I had a flip, a sling shot. They had stabilized the railroad bed with little white round rocks, which I used for ammunition. I would go out frequently to the railroad and gather the most perfectly shaped rocks of proper size. I always had a few in my pockets, and I had others cached away around the farm, so that they would be convenient if I ran out of my pocket supply.

One day I was leaving the railroad track with my pockets full of rocks and hands full of rocks, and my mother came out on the front porch --this is not a very interesting story but it illustrates a point --and she had in her hands a plate full of cookies that she had just baked for me. She called me, I am sure with love in her heart, and said, "Jimmy, I've baked some cookies for you." I remember very distinctly walking up to her and standing there for 15 or 20 seconds, in honest doubt about whether I should drop those rocks which were worthless and take the cookies that my mother had prepared for me, which between her and me were very valuable.

Quite often, we have the same inclination in our everyday lives. We don't recognize that change can sometimes be very beneficial, although we fear it. Anyone who lives in the South looks back on the last 15 to 20 years with some degree of embarrassment, including myself. To think about going back to a county unit system, which deliberately cheated for generations certain white voters of this state, is almost inconceivable. To revert back or to forgo the one man, one vote principle, we would now consider to be a horrible violation of the basic principles of justice and equality and fairness and equity.

The first speech I ever made in the Georgia Senate, representing the most conservative district in Georgia, was concerning the abolition of 30 questions that we had so proudly evolved as a subterfuge to keep black citizens from voting and which we used with a great deal of smirking and pride for decades or generations ever since the War between the States --questions that nobody could answer in this room, but which were applied to every black citizen that came to the Sumter County Courthouse or Webster County Courthouse and said, "I want to vote." I spoke in that chamber, fearful of the news media reporting it back home, but overwhelmed with a commitment to the abolition of that artificial barrier to the rights of an American citizen. I remember the thing that I used in my speech, that a black pencil salesman on the outer door of the Sumter County Courthouse could make a better judgment about who ought to be sheriff than two highly educated professors at Georgia Southwestern College.

Dr. Martin Luther King, Junior., who was perhaps despised by many in this room because he shook up our social structure that benefited us, and demanded simply that black citizens be treated the same as white citizens, wasn't greeted with approbation and accolades by the Georgia Bar Association or the Alabama Bar Association. He was greeted with horror. Still, once that change was made, a very simple but difficult change, no one in his right mind would want to go back to circumstances prior to that juncture in the development of our Nation's society.

I don't want to go on and on, I'm part of it. But, the point I want to make to you is that we still have a long way to go. In every age or every year, we have a tendency to believe that we've come so far now, that there's no way to improve the present system. I'm sure when the Wright Brothers flew at Kitty Hawk, they felt that was the ultimate in transportation. When the first atomic bomb was exploded, that was the ultimate development in nuclear physics, and so forth.

Well, we haven't reached the ultimate. But who's going to search the heart and the soul of an organization like yours or a law school or state or nation and say, "What can we still do to restore equity and justice or to preserve it or to enhance it in this society?"

You know, I'm not afraid to make the change. I don't have anything to lose. But, as a farmer I'm not qualified to assess the characteristics of the 91 hundred inmates in the Georgia prisons, 50% of whom ought not to be there. They ought to be on probation or under some other supervision and assess what the results of previous court rulings might bring to bear on their lives.

I was in the Governor's Mansion for two years, enjoying the services of a very fine cook, who was a prisoner --a woman. One day she came to me, after she got over her two years of timidity, and said, "Governor, I would like to borrow $250.00 from you."

I said, "I'm not sure that a lawyer would be worth that much."

She said, "I don't want to hire a lawyer, I want to pay the judge."

I thought it was a ridiculous statement for her; I felt that she was ignorant. But I found out she wasn't. She had been sentenced by a Superior Court judge in the state, who still serves, to seven years or $750. She had raised, early in her prison career, $500. I didn't lend her the money, but I had Bill Harper, my legal aide, look into it. He found the circumstances were true. She was quickly released under a recent court ruling that had come down in the last few years.

I was down on the coast this weekend. I was approached by a woman who asked me to come by her home. I went by, and she showed me documents that indicated that her illiterate mother, who had a son in jail, had gone to the County Surveyor in that region and had borrowed $225 to get her son out of jail. She had a letter from the Justice of the Peace that showed that her mother had made a mark on the blank sheet of paper. They paid off the $225, and she has the receipts to show it. Then they started a 5-year program trying to get back the paper she signed, without success. They went to court. The lawyer that had originally advised her to sign the paper showed up as the attorney for the surveyor. She had put up 50 acres of land near the county seat as security. When she got to court she found that instead of signing a security deed, that she had signed a warranty deed. That case has already been appealed to the Supreme Court, and she lost.

Well, I know that the technicalities of the law that would permit that are probably justifiable. She didn't have a good lawyer. My heart feels and cries out that something ought to be analyzed, not just about the structure of government, judicial qualification councils and judicial appointment committees and eliminating the unsworn statement --those things are important. But they don't reach the crux of the point --that now we assign punishment to fit the criminal and not the crime.

You can go in the prisons of Georgia, and I don't know, it may be that poor people are the only ones who commit crimes, but I do know they are the only ones who serve prison sentences. When Ellis MacDougall first went to Reidsville, he found people that had been in solitary confinement for ten years. We now have 500 misdemeanants in the Georgia prison system.

Well, I don't know the theory of law, but there is one other point I want to make, just for your own consideration. I think we've made great progress in the Pardons and Paroles Board since I've been in office and since we've reorganized the government. We have five very enlightened people there now. And on occasion they go out to the prison system to interview the inmates, to decide whether or not they are worthy to be released after they serve one-third of their sentence. I think most jurors and most judges feel that, when they give the sentence, they know that after a third of the sentence has gone by, they will be eligible for careful consideration. Just think for a moment about your own son or your own father or your own daughter being in prison, having served seven years of a lifetime term and being considered for a release. Don't you think that they ought to be examined and that the Pardons and Paroles Board ought to look them in the eye and ask them a question and, if they are turned down, ought to give them some substantive reason why they are not released and what they can do to correct their defect?

I do.

I think it's just as important at their time for consideration of early release as it is even when they are sentenced. But, I don't know how to bring about that change.

We had an ethics bill in the State Legislature this year. Half of it passed --to require an accounting for contributions during a campaign --but the part that applied to people after the campaign failed. We couldn't get through a requirement for revelation of payments or gifts to officeholders after they are in office.

The largest force against that ethics bill was the lawyers.

Some of you here tried to help get a consumer protection package passed without success.

The regulatory agencies in Washington are made up, not of people to regulate industries, but of representatives of the industries that are regulated. Is that fair and right and equitable? I don't think so.

I'm only going to serve four years as governor, as you know. I think that's enough. I enjoy it, but I think I've done all I can in the Governor's office. I see the lobbyists in the State Capitol filling the halls on occasions. Good people, competent people, the most pleasant, personable, extroverted citizens of Georgia. Those are the characteristics that are required for a lobbyist. They represent good folks. But I tell you that when a lobbyist goes to represent the Peanut Warehousemen's Association of the Southeast, which I belong to, which I helped to organize, they go there to represent the peanut warehouseman. They don't go there to represent the customers of the peanut warehouseman.

When the State Chamber of Commerce lobbyists go there, they go there to represent the businessman of Georgia. They don't go there to represent the customers of the businessman of Georgia.

When your own organization is interested in some legislation there in the Capitol, they're interested in the welfare or prerogatives or authority of the lawyers. They are not there to represent in any sort of exclusive way the client of the lawyers.

The American Medical Association and its Georgia equivalent --they represent the doctors, who are fine people. But they certainly don't represent the patients of a doctor.

As an elected governor, I feel that responsibility; but I also know that my qualifications are slight compared to the doctors or the lawyers or the teachers, to determine what's best for the client or the patient or the school child.

This bothers me; and I know that if there was a commitment on the part of the cumulative group of attorneys in this State, to search with a degree of commitment and fervency, to eliminate many of the inequities that I've just described that I thought of this morning, our state could be transformed in the attitude of its people toward the government.

Senator Kennedy described the malaise that exists in this Nation, and it does.

In closing, I'd like to just illustrate the point by something that came to mind this morning when I was talking to Senator Kennedy about his trip to Russia.

When I was about 12 years old, I liked to read, and I had a school principal, named Miss Julia Coleman, Judge Marshall knows her. She forced me pretty much to read, read, read, classical books. She would give me a gold star when I read ten and a silver star when I read five.

One day, she called me in and she said, "Jimmy, I think it's time for you to read War and Peace." I was completely relieved because I thought it was a book about cowboys and Indians.

Well, I went to the library and checked it out, and it was 1,415 pages thick, I think, written by Tolstoy, as you know, about Napoleon's entry into Russia in the 1812 to 1815 era. He had never been defeated and he was sure he could win, but he underestimated the severity of the Russian winter and the peasants' love for their land.

To make a long story short, the next spring he retreated in defeat. The course of history was changed; it probably affected our own lives.

The point of the book is, and what Tolstoy points out in the epilogue is, that he didn't write the book about Napoleon or the Czar of Russia or even the generals, except in a rare occasion. He wrote it about the students and the housewives and the barbers and the farmers and the privates in the Army. And the point of the book is that the course of human events, even the greatest historical events, are not determined by the leaders of a nation or a state, like presidents or governors or senators. They are controlled by the combined wisdom and courage and commitment and discernment and unselfishness and compassion and love and idealism of the common ordinary people. If that was true in the case of Russia where they had a czar or France where they had an emperor, how much more true is it in our own case where the Constitution charges us with a direct responsibility for determining what our government is and ought to be?

Well, I've read parts of the embarrassing transcripts, and I've seen the proud statement of a former attorney general, who protected his boss, and now brags on the fact that he tiptoed through a mine field and came out "clean." I can't imagine somebody like Thomas Jefferson tiptoing through a mine field on the technicalities of the law, and then bragging about being clean afterwards.

I think our people demand more than that. I believe that everyone in this room who is in a position of responsibility as a preserver of the law in its purest form ought to remember the oath that Thomas Jefferson and others took when they practically signed their own death warrant, writing the Declaration of Independence --to preserve justice and equity and freedom and fairness, they pledged their lives, their fortunes and their sacred honor.

Thank you very much.

The Banshee Screams for Buffalo Meat

Requiem for a Crazed Heavyweight. . . An Unfinished Memoir on the Life and Doom of Oscar Zeta Acosta, First & Last of the Savage Brown Buffalo. . . He Crawled with Lepers and Lawyers, but He Was Tall on His Own Hind Legs When He Walked at Night with the King. . .

The following memoir by Dr. Thompson is the painful result of a nine-week struggle (between the Management and the author) regarding the style, tone, length, payment, etcetera --but mainly the subject matter of the National Affairs Desk's contribution to this star-crossed Tenth Anniversary Issue.

And in at least momentary fairness to the Management, we should note that the term "star-crossed" is Dr. Thompson's --as are all other harsh judgments he was finally compelled to submit.

"We work in the dark, we do what we can." Some poet who never met Werner Erhard said that, but so what? What began as a sort of riptide commentary on "the meaning of the Sixties" soon turned into a wild and hydra-headed screed on Truth, Vengeance, Journalism and the meaning, such as it is, of Jimmy Carter.

But none of these things could be made to fit in the space we had available--so we were finally forced to compromise with The Doc and his people, who had all along favored a long, dangerous and very costly piece titled: "The Search for the Brown Buffalo."

It was Dr. Thompson's idea to have Rolling Stone finance this open-ended search for one of his friends who disappeared under mean and mysterious circumstances in the late months of 1974, or perhaps the early months of 1975. The Brown Buffalo was the nom de plume of the Chicano attorney from East Los Angeles who gained international notoriety as the brutal and relentless "300-pound Samoan attorney" in Thompson's book, 'Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.' --The Editors

Nobody knows the weirdness I've seen

On the trail of the brown buffalo

--O L.D B Lack J O.E

I walk in the night rain until the dawn of the new day. I have devised the plan, straightened out the philosophy and set up the organization. When I have the 1 million Brown Buffalo on my side I will present the demands for a new nation to both the U.S. Government and the United Nations. . . and then I'll split and write the book. I have no desire to be a politician. I don't want to lead anyone. I have no practical ego. I am not ambitious. I merely want to do what is right. Once in every century there comes a man who is chosen to speak for his people. Moses, Mao and Martin [Luther King Junior.] are examples. Who's to say that I am not such a man? In this day and age the man for all seasons needs many voices. Perhaps that is why the gods have sent me into Riverbank, Panama, San Francisco, Alpine and wah-rez. Perhaps that is why I've been taught so many trades. Who will deny that I am unique.

--Oscar Acosta, The Autobiography of a Brown Buffalo

Well. .. not me, Old Sport. Wherever you are and in whatever shape --dead or alive or even both, eh? That's one thing they can't take away from you. .. Which is lucky, I think, for the rest of us: Because (and, yeah --let's face it, Oscar) you were not real light on your feet in this world, and you were too goddamn heavy for most of the boats you jumped into. One of the great regrets of my life is that I was never able to introduce you to my old football buddy, Richard Nixon. The main thing he feared in this life --even worse than Queens and Jews and Mutants --was people who might run amok; he called them "loose cannons on the deck," and he wanted them all put to sleep.

That's one graveyard we never even checked, Oscar, but why not? If your classic "doomed nigger" style of paranoia had any validity at all, you must understand that it was not just Richard Nixon who was out to get you --but all the people who thought like Nixon and all the judges and U.S. attorneys he appointed in those weird years. Were there any of Nixon's friends among all those Superior Court judges you subpoenaed and mocked and humiliated when you were trying to bust the grand jury selection system in L.A.? How many of those Brown Beret "bodyguards" you called "brothers" were deep-cover cops or informants? I recall being seriously worried about that when we were working on that story about the killing of Chicano journalist Ruben Salazar by an L.A. County sheriff's deputy. How many of those bomb-throwing, trigger-happy freaks who slept on mattresses in your apartment were talking to the sheriff on a chili-hall pay phone every morning? Or maybe to the judges who kept jailing you for contempt of court, when they didn't have anything else?

Yeah, and so much for the "Paranoid Sixties." It's time to end this bent seance --or almost closing time, anyway --but before we get back to raw facts and rude lawyer's humor, I want to make sure that at least one record will show that I tried and totally failed, for at least five years, to convince my allegedly erstwhile Samoan attorney, Oscar Zeta Acosta, that there was no such thing as paranoia: At least not in that cultural and political war zone called "East L.A." in the late 1960s and especially not for an aggressively radical "Chicano Lawyer" who thought he could stay up all night, every night, eating acid and throwing "Molotov cocktails" with the same people he was going to have to represent in a downtown courtroom the next morning.

There were times --all too often, I felt --when Oscar would show up in front of the courthouse at nine in the morning with a stench of fresh gasoline on his hands and a green crust of charred soap-flakes on the toes of his $300 snakeskin cowboy boots. He would pause outside the courtroom just long enough to give the T.V press five minutes of crazed rhetoric for the Evening News, then he would shepherd his equally crazed "clients" into the courtroom for their daily war-circus with the Judge. When you get into bear baiting on that level, paranoia is just another word for ignorance. .. They really are out to get you.

The odds on his being dragged off to jail for "contempt" were about fifty-fifty on any given day --which meant he was always in danger of being seized and booked with a pocket full of "bennies" or "black beauties" at the property desk. After several narrow escapes he decided that it was necessary to work in the Courtroom as part of a three-man "defense team."

One of his "associates" was usually a well-dressed, well-mannered young Chicano whose only job was to carry at least 100 milligrams of pure speed at all times and feed Oscar whenever he signaled; the other was not so well-dressed or mannered; his job was to stay alert and be one step ahead of the bailiffs when they made a move on Oscar --at which point he would reach out and grab any pills, powders, shivs or other evidence he was handed, then sprint like a human bazooka for the nearest exit.

This strategy worked so well for almost two years that Oscar and his people finally got careless. They had survived another long day in court --on felony arson charges, this time, for trying to burn down the Biltmore Hotel during a speech by then Governor Ronald Reagan --and they were driving back home to Oscar's headquarters pad in the barrio (and maybe running sixty or sixty-five in a fifty m.p.h. speed zone, Oscar later admitted) when they were suddenly jammed to a stop by two L.A.P.D cruisers. "They acted like we'd just robbed a bank," said Frank, looking right down the barrel of a shotgun. "They made us all lie face down on the street and then they searched the car, and --"

Yes. That's when they found the drugs: twenty or thirty white pills that the police quickly identified as "illegal amphetamine tablets, belonging to Attorney Oscar Acosta."

The fat spic for all seasons was jailed once again, this time on what the press called a "high speed drug bust." Oscar called a press conference in jail and accused the cops of "planting" him --but not even his bodyguards believed him until long after the attendant publicity had done them all so much damage that the whole "Brown Power Movement" was effectively stalled, splintered and discredited by the time all charges, both Arson and Drugs, were either dropped or reduced to small print on the back of the blotter.

I am not even sure, myself, how the cases were finally disposed of. Not long after the "high speed drug bust," as I recall, two of his friends were charged with Murder One for allegedly killing a smack dealer in the barrio, and I think Oscar finally copped on the drug charge and pled guilty to something like "possession of ugly pills in a public place."

But by that time his deal had already gone down. None of the respectable Chicano polls in East L.A. had ever liked him anyway, and that "high speed drug bust" was all they needed to publicly denounce everything Left of huevos rancheros and start calling themselves Mexican-American again. The trial of the Biltmore Five was no longer a do-or-die cause for La Raza, but a shameful crime that a handful of radical dope fiends had brought down on the whole community. The mood on Whittier Boulevard turned sour overnight, and the sight of a Brown Beret was suddenly as rare as a cash-client for Oscar Zeta Acosta --the ex-Chicago Lawyer.

The entire ex-Chicano political community went as public as possible to make sure that the rest of the city understood that they had known all along that this dope addict rata who had somehow been one of their most articulate and certainly their most radical, popular and politically aggressive spokesman for almost two years was really just a self-seeking publicity dope freak who couldn't even run a bar tab at the Silver Dollar Cafe, much less rally friends or a following. There was no mention in the Mexican-American press about Acosta's surprisingly popular campaign for sheriff of L.A. County a year earlier, which had made him a minor hero among politically hip Chicanos all over the city.

No more of that dilly-dong bullshit on Whittier Boulevard. Oscar's drug bust was still alive on the Evening News when he was evicted from his apartment on three days' notice and his car was either stolen or towed away from its customary parking place on the street in front of his driveway. His offer to defend his two friends on what he later assured me were absolutely valid charges of first degree murder were publicly rejected. Not even for free, they said. A dope-addled clown was worse than no lawyer at all.

It was dumb gunself thinking, but Oscar was in no mood to offer his help more than once. So he beat a strategic retreat to Mazatlan, which he called his "other home," to lick his wounds and start writing the Great Chicano novel. It was the end of an era! The fireball Chicano lawyer was on his way to becoming a half-successful writer, a cult figure of sorts --then a fugitive, a freak, and finally either a permanently missing person or an undiscovered corpse.

Oscar's fate is still a mystery, but every time his case seems to be finally closed, something happens to bring him back to life. . . And one of them just happened again, but it came in a blizzard of chaos that caused a serious time warp in my thinking: my nerves are still too jangled for the moment to do anything but lay back and let it blow over.

The Flash Man Cometh... Queer News from Coconut Grove... Murder, Madness & The Battle of Biscayne Bay... The Death of a Cigarette Boat & A $48,000 Misunderstanding... Res Ipsa Loquitor...

A screech owl the size of a chow killed two of my peacocks on the front porch. The county attorney called the cops on me for interfering with the work of a labor crew painting yellow stripes on the Woody Creek Road. The antique winch-powered crossbow that Steadman sent over from England was seized and destroyed by sheriff's deputies and a man named Drake from Miami spent all afternoon at the Hotel Jerome, demanding my phone number from the bartenders because he claimed to have a bizarre message for me.

Then Sandy came back from the store with the mail and the latest issue of Newsweek, the one with the photo of Caroline Kennedy rolling Jann through the door of Elaine's on that custom-built, cut-glass dolly from Neiman-Marcus. Sandy didn't even recognize him at first; she thought it was a photo of Caroline and Bella Abzug on the campaign trail.

We went out on the porch, where there was plenty of light, to get a better look at the photos --but the sun made me blind for a moment, and just then Tom Benton came howling into the driveway on his 880 Husquavarna, and when he saw that story in Newsweek (you know Tom, with that fine artist's eye that he has), he said, "Well I'll be fucked, that's Jann! And look at the wonderful smile on him. Wow! And look what he's done to his hair. . . and those teeth. No wonder he moved to New York."

Benton was taking off his leathers as he talked. He'd been riding up on the logging roads in the high pastures behind his house, looking for a rogue bear that tore the top off his jeep and killed his mule last week.

"I just want to hit him with this Taser, then chain him to a tree until we can go up and get him."

"Get him?"

He nodded. "It's that grizzly pup that Noonan turned loose before he left town. He's about a year and a half old by now, and he's starting to act crazy."

"Fuck the Taser," I said. "It's not good beyond fifteen feet. We'll need the M.79, with C.S grenades, then drag him down with a jeep."

"No," he said. "I want to get the bugger in a van, then drive him into town and back the van right up to the side door of that restaurant where all the lawyers eat lunch. They'll love him."

"Wonderful," I said. "Shoot him right into that private dining room where they have those Bar Association luncheons --feed him a whole bucket full of acid and raw meat, then take him into town for the meeting."

Benton started to laugh, then stopped and reached into one of his pockets and handed me a small envelope. "Speaking of lawyers," he said, "I almost forgot --there's a guy from Miami in town who says he has a message for you, from Oscar."

I flinched and stepped back. "What?" I said. "Who?"

"Yeah," Benton said. "Oscar Acosta, the Brown Buffalo." He shook his head. "This guy has a very very strange story. It's so strange that I wasn't even sure I should come out here and tell you."

"I know all those stories," I said. "Hell I wrote most of them --and besides, Oscar's dead."

Tom opened two more beers and handed me one.

"Not according to this guy Drake," he said quietly. "He says Oscar almost got killed about two months ago in Florida. They took a midnight ride out to Bimini in Drake's boat, and on the way back they got ambushed at sea and a friend of Oscar's got killed --and Drake's $48,000 Cigarette boat was a total wreck; he says it was so full of bullet holes that they almost sunk in midocean."

"Bullshit," I said. "That's impossible."

He shrugged. "Well, that's what Solheim said. But he talked to Drake for a long time last night and he says the guy is absolutely positive. He even had a photo." I suddenly remembered the envelope I'd been holding. "Let's see what this is," I said, tearing off the end. Inside was a paperback book cover, folded lengthwise --the cover of Oscar's Autobiography of a Brown Buffalo, with a picture of the author on the front and a message scrawled on the blank side. "Dear Thompson," it said. "Please call me as soon as you can. Very urgent. Acosta might be in bad trouble. Heat! Not much time. Call me in #353 Hotel Jerome. Thanks. Drake."

"Jesus," I muttered. "Why the hell does he want to talk to me?"

"He's looking for Oscar," Benton replied. "And so is the Coast Guard --and the D.E.A and the F.B.I and half the cops in Miami."

"So what?" I said. "He's been dead for two years."

Tom shook his head. "No, Drake says he's still working in and out of Florida, running a lot of white powder."

"I doubt it," I said.

"Well Drake doesn't," he replied, "and he's about to turn him over, unless Oscar pays for his boat. He wants forty grand and he says he knows Oscar has the money."

"Balls," I said. "We should have this bastard locked up for blackmail."

He shrugged again. "Hang on. You haven't heard the rest of it. Drake's talking about murder, not drugs."

"Murder?"

"Yeah. Drake says the Coast Guard came up with three bodies after that ambush, and two of them didn't have heads. Oscar ran that Cigarette boat right over the top of a Boston Whaler with at least two guys in it."

I stared at him for a moment, then went over to the couch and sat down. "Jesus Christ!" I said. "Let's go back and run the whole story again. I must have missed something."

You are better lost than found.

Clement Robinson Which was true. The story I got from Benton was from Mike Solheim, who got it in spades from a total stranger who said his name was Drake and who showed up in Aspen one afternoon, looking for me because he thought I could put him in touch with Oscar Acosta --a "dead man" who somehow showed up at Drake's home in Coconut Grove one night last summer and offered $5,000 in cash for a midnight ride out to Bimini and back in Drake's new $48,000 ocean racer with no questions asked.

It was not the kind of business proposition that a veteran dope smuggler like Drake would have been likely to misunderstand. There are only two possible reasons for even owning a thirty-five-foot-long bullet-shaped fiberglass hull with two 370 horsepower engines on the back: One is to win races in the open sea at speeds up to 90.555 miles an hour (the current world record, set by the "World Champion Cigarette Racing Team" in 1976) and the other has to do with the virtually priceless peace of mind that comes with doing business in a boat that will outrun anything the U.S. Coast Guard can put in the water.

So there was no need for Drake to ask why these two cash-heavy Mexicans needed his boat, or even why one of them came aboard with a Uzi submachine gun. He had made this run before, and even on moonless nights he felt he knew every bump in the water, even at sixty miles an hour.

But he was not ready for what happened on the way back from Bimini this time: They were almost home, slowing down to half-speed or less about a mile off the south tip of Key Biscayne, when he was suddenly blinded by spotlights coming into his face from the front and both sides and the whole night erupted with gunfire. The Mexican with the Uzi was dead on his feet before Drake even heard the first shots; the Uzi bounced into the water and the Mexican sat down in the cockpit with at least ten big holes in his chest. Drake felt his boat shuddering in the water as the hull started coming apart in the crossfire. "We're surrounded!" he screamed. "They're killing us!" Then he fell down and tried to hide himself under the dead man just as Oscar got his hands on both the wheel and the throttle at the same time. The big speedboat lunged forward with a roar and the next thing Drake felt was an airborne jolt as his boat ran straight over the top of a twenty-foot Boston Whaler. . . and suddenly there was no more shooting as he felt the boat moving toward Miami at sixty miles an hour with the cockpit six inches deep in blood-colored water and Oscar screaming in Spanish as they started coming up, too fast, on the lights of Dinner Key.

Drake stood up and took the wheel. The boat felt like it was coming apart in his hands as he aimed for a clump of trees on the dark end of the marina. By the time he felt the jolt of a sandbar under his feet, Oscar was already going over the side with the small suitcase they had picked up in Bimini, and that was the last time Drake saw him.

The boat stayed miraculously afloat long enough for him to hump the dead man and dump his $48,000 wreck about a half-mile down the beach in a place where he could drive it up under some branches and watch it sink out of sight in five feet of dark water. Drake covered the hulk as well as he could, then slogged out to Biscayne Boulevard and hitchhiked back to Coconut Grove where he spent the next forty-eight hours locked in his bedroom and trembling with a fear worse than anything he'd ever felt in his life.

This wild and puzzling story out of Coconut Grove was only the latest of a dozen or so "Brown Buffalo sightings" in the past two years. Everybody who knew him as even a casual friend has heard stories about Oscar's "secret life" and his high-speed criminal adventures all over the world. Ever since his alleged death/disappearance in 1973, '74 or even 1975, he's turned up all over the world --selling guns in Addis Ababa, buying orphans in Cambodia, smoking weed with Henry Kissinger in Acapulco, hanging around the airport bar in Lima with two or three overstuffed Pan Am flight bags on both shoulders or hunched impatiently on the steering wheel of a silver 450 mur-say-dees in the "Nothing to Declare" lane on the Mexican side of U.S. Customs checkpoint between San Diego and Tijuana.

There are not many gypsies on file at the Missing Persons Bureau --and if Oscar was not quite the classic gypsy, in his own eyes or mine, it was only because he was never able to cut that high-tension cord that kept him forever attached to his childhood home and hatchery. By the time he was twenty years old, Oscar was working overtime eight days a week at learning to live and even think like a gypsy, but he never quite jumped the gap.

Although I was born in El Paso, Texas, I am actually a small town kid. A hick from the sticks, a Mexican boy from the other side of the tracks. I grew up in Riverbank, California; Post Office Box 303; population 3969. It's the only town in the entire state whose essential numbers remained unchanged. The sign that welcomes you as you round the curve coming in from Modesto says the City of Action.

We lived in a two-room shack without a floor. We had to pump our water and use kerosene if we wanted to read at night. But we never went hungry. My old man always bought the pinto beans and the white flour for the tortillas in one-hundred-pound sacks which my mother used to make dresses, sheets and curtains. We had two acres of land which we planted every year with corn, tomatoes and yellow chiles for the hot sauce. Even before my father woke us, my old ma was busy at work making the tortillas at five a.m. while he chopped the logs we'd hauled up from the river on the weekends.

Riverbank is divided into three parts, and in my corner of the world there were only three kinds of people: Mexicans, Okies and Americans. Catholics, Holy Rollers and Protestants. Peach pickers, cannery workers and clerks.

We lived on the West Side, within smelling distance of the world's largest tomato paste cannery.

The West Side is still enclosed by the Santa Fe Railroad tracks to the east, the Modesto-Oakdale Highway to the north and the irrigation canal to the south. Within that concentration only Mexicans were safe from the neighborhood dogs, who responded only to Spanish commands. Except for Bob Whitt and Emitt Brown, both friends of mine who could cuss in better Spanish than I, I never saw a white person walking the dirt road of our neighborhood.

--Oscar Acosta, The Autobiography of a Brown Buffalo, 1972

The Lawn of Fire and Another Icepick for Richard Nixon for Old Times' Sake. . . Slow Fadeout for Brown Power & a Salute to Crazy Ed. . . Poison Fat Goes to Mazatlan; Libel Lawyers Go to the Mattresses. . . Fear of the Plastic Fork & a Twisted Compromise. . .

Oscar Zeta Acosta --despite any claims to the contrary --was a dangerous thug who lived every day of his life as a stalking monument to the notion that a man with a greed for the Truth should expect no mercy and give none.

... and that was the difference between Oscar and a lot of the merciless geeks he liked to tell strangers he admired: class acts like Benito Mussolini and Fatty Arbuckle.

When the great scorer comes to write against Oscar's name, one of the first few lines in the Ledger will note that he usually lacked the courage of his consistently monstrous convictions. There was more mercy, madness, dignity and generosity in that overweight, overworked and always overindulged brown cannonball of a body than most of us will meet in any human package even three times Oscar's size for the rest of our lives --which are all running noticeably leaner on the high side, since that rotten fat spic disappeared.

He was a drug-addled brute and a genuinely fiendish adversary in court or on the street --but it was none of these things that finally pressured him into death or a disappearance so finely plotted that it amounts to the same thing.

What finally cracked the Brown Buffalo was the bridge he refused to build between the self- serving elegance of his instincts and the self-destructive carnival of his reality. He was a Baptist missionary at a leper colony in Panama before he was a lawyer in Oakland and East L.A., or a radical-chic author in San Francisco and Beverly Hills. . . But whenever things got tense or when he had to work close to the bone, he was always a missionary. And that was the governing instinct that ruined him for anything else. He was a preacher in the courtroom, a preacher at the typewriter and a flat-out awesome preacher when he cranked his head full of acid.

That's L.S.D-25, folks --a certified "dangerous drug" that is no longer fashionable, due to reasons of extreme and unnatural heaviness. The C.I.A was right about acid: Some of their best and brightest operatives went over the side in the name of Top Secret research on a drug that was finally abandoned as a far too dangerous and unmanageable thing to be used as a public weapon. Not even the sacred minnock of "national security" could justify the hazards of playing with a thing too small to be seen and too big to control. The professional spook mentality was far more comfortable with things like nerve gas and neutron bombs.

But not the Brown Buffalo --he ate L.S.D-25 with a relish that bordered on worship. When his brain felt bogged down in the mundane nuts and bolts horrors of the Law or some dead-end manuscript, he would simply take off in his hotrod Mustang for a week on the road and a few days of what he called "walking with the King." Oscar used acid like other lawyers use Valium --a distinctly unprofessional and occasionally nasty habit that shocked even the most liberal of his colleagues and frequently panicked his clients.

I was with him one night in L.A., when he decided that the only way to meaningfully communicate with a Judge who'd been leaning on him in the courtroom was to drive out to the man's home in Santa Monica and set his whole front lawn on fire after soaking it down with ten gallons of gasoline. . . and then, instead of fleeing into the night like some common lunatic vandal, Oscar stood in the street and howled through the flames at a face peering out from a shattered upstairs window, delivering one of his Billy Sunday style sermons on morality and justice.

The nut of his flame-enraged text, as I recall, was this mind-bending chunk of eternal damnation from Luke 11:46 --a direct quote from Jesus Christ:

"And he said, Woe unto you also, ye lawyers, for ye lade men with burdens grievous to be borne, and ye yourselves touch not the burdens with one of your fingers."

The Lawn of Fire was Oscar's answer to the Ku Klux Klan's burning cross, and he derived the same demonic satisfaction from doing it.

"Did you see his face?" he shouted as we screeched off at top speed toward Hollywood. "That corrupt old fool! I know he recognized me but he'll never admit it! No officer of the court would set a Judge's front yard on fire --the whole system would break down if lawyers could get away with crazy shit like this."

I agreed. It is not my wont to disagree with even a criminally insane attorney on questions of basic law. But in truth it never occurred to me that Oscar was either insane or a criminal, given the generally fascist, Nixonian context of those angry years.

In an era when the Vice President of the United States held court in Washington to accept payoffs from his former vassals in the form of big wads of one hundred dollar bills --and when the President himself routinely held secretly tape-recorded meetings with his top aides in the Oval Office to plot illegal wiretaps, political burglaries and other gross felonies in the name of a "silent majority," it was hard to feel anything more than a flash of high, nervous humor at the sight of some acid-bent lawyer setting fire to a Judge's front yard at four o'clock in the morning.

I might even be tempted to justify a thing like that --but of course it would be wrong. . . And my attorney was Not a Crook and to the best of my knowledge, his mother was just as much "a saint" as Richard Nixon's.

Indeed. And now --as an almost perfect tribute to every icepick ever wielded in the name of Justice --I want to enter into the permanent record, at this point, as a strange but unchallenged fact that Oscar Z. Acosta was never disbarred from the practice of law in the state of California --and ex-President Richard Nixon was.

There are some things, apparently, that not even lawyers will tolerate; and in a naturally unjust world where the image of "Justice" is honored for being blind, even a blind pig will find an acorn once in a while.

Or maybe not --because Oscar was eventually hurt far worse by professional ostracism than Nixon was hurt by disbarment. The Great Banshee screamed for them both at almost the same time --for entirely different reasons, but with ominously similar results.

Except that Richard Nixon got rich from his crimes, and Oscar Acosta got killed. The wheels of justice grind small and queer in this life and if they seem occasionally unbalanced or even stupid and capricious in their grinding, my own midnight guess is that they were probably fixed from the start. And any Judge who can safely slide into full pension retirement without having to look back on anything worse in the way of criminal vengeance than a few scorched lawns is a man who got off easy.

There is, after all, considerable work and risk --and even a certain art --to the torching of a half-acre lawn without also destroying the house or exploding every car in the driveway. It would be a lot easier to simply make a funeral pyre of the whole place and leave the lawn for dilettantes.

That's how Oscar viewed arson --anything worth doing is worth doing well --and I'd watched enough of his fiery work to know he was right. If he was a King-Hell Pyromaniac, he was also a gut politician and occasionally a very skilled artist in the style and tone of his torchings.

Like most lawyers with an I.Q higher than sixty, Oscar learned one definition of Justice in Law school, and a very different one in the courtroom. He got his degree at some night school on Post Street in San Francisco, while working as a copy boy for the Hearst Examiner. And for a while he was very proud to be a lawyer --for the same reasons he'd felt proud to be a missionary and lead clarinet man in the leper colony band.

But by the time I first met him in the summer of 1967, he was long past what he called his "puppy love trip with The Law." It had gone the same way of his earlier missionary zeal, and after one year of casework at an East Oakland "poverty law center" he was ready to dump Holmes and Brandeis for Huey Newton and a Black Panther style of dealing with the laws and courts of America.

When he came booming into a bar called 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 250-pound Mexican and L.S.D-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. Specially if the bastard is already thirty-three and a half years old with a head full of Sandoz acid, a loaded 0.357 Magnum in his belt, a hatchet-wielding Chicano bodyguard on 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 L.A.P.D 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," R.S.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...

Peacocks Can't Live at This Altitude. . . New Home for Ebb Tide, False Dawn in Aztlan and a Chain of Bull Maggots on the Neck of the Fat Spic from Riverbank. . . May Leeches Crawl on his Soul until the Rivers Flow Up from the Sea and the Grass Grows Down into Hell. . . Beware of 300 Pound Samoan Attorneys Bearing Gifts of L.S.D-25

Follow not truth too near the heels, lest it dash out thy teeth.

--George Herbert, Jacula Prudentum

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 gabancos." 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 Bias 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 Mazatlan 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 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 Mazatlan 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 publishers' 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'll 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.

* Deleted at the insistence of Rolling Stone's attorney.

"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 Mazatlan 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 Synaloa.

The only thing that bothered him --bothered him very badly --was the fact that I'd repeatedly described him as a 300-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 "300 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 "300-pound Samoan attorney" who would soon be a far more public figure than any of us would have guessed at the time.

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 don't understand it myself --one of the darker skills involved in the kind of journalism I normally get involved with has to do with ability to write the Truth about "criminals" without getting them busted --and, in the eyes of the law, any person committing a crime is criminal: whether it's a Hell's 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 fuck-up 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 300-pound Samoan instead of a 250-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 his 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 Buffalo.

Last Train for the Top of the Mountain, Last Leap for the Great Skyhook. . . Good Riddance to Bad Rubbish. . . He Was Ugly & Vicious and He Sold Little Babies to Sand-Niggers. . . Mutant Rumors on the Weird Grapevine, Wild Ghosts on the Bimini Run, Lights In Fat City. . . No End to the Story and No Grave for the Brown Buffalo

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 neo-prophet 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, goddamnit! 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?

Nevermind. 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 Shakespeer, King Henry 6

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 300-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. I was tempted for a while to call that poor bastard Drake, down in Coconut Grove, to check a little deeper into that savage tale about Oscar and the Battle of Biscayne Bay --the one that ended with at least one murder and the total destruction of Drake's $48,000 Cigarette boat --but I just don't think I need it right now. . .

Nobody needs it, in fact --but then nobody really needed Oscar Zeta Acosta either. Or Rolling Stone. Or Jimmy Carter or the Hindenberg... 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 L.S.D-25. His formula for survival in a world full of rich Gabaucho 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

Rolling Stone, #254, December 15, 1977

The Hoodlum Circus and the Statutory Rape of Bass Lake

Man, when you were fifteen or sixteen years old did you ever think you'd end up as a Hell's Angel? How did I get screwed up with you guys anyway?... Christ, I got out of the Army and came back to Richmond, started ridin a bike around, wearin my chinos and clean sports shirts, even a crash helmet. .. And then I met you guys. I started gettin grubbier and grubbier, dirtier and dirtier, I couldn't believe it. .. Then I lost my job, started spendin all my time either goin on a run or gettin ready for one --Christ, I still can't believe it.

--Fat D., a Richmond Hell's Angel

Whaddayou mean by that word "right"? The only thing we're concerned about is what's right for us. We got our own definition of "right."

--A Hell's Angel sunk in philosophy

According to Frenchy, the run would take off at eight A.M. from the El Adobe, a tavern on East Fourteenth Street in Oakland. (Until the autumn of 1965 the El Abode was the unofficial headquarters of the Oakland chapter and a focal point for all Hell's Angels acitivity in northern California --but in October it was demolished to make way for a parking lot, and the Angels moved back to the Sinners Club.)

Early weather forecasts said the whole state would be blazing hot that day, but dawn in San Francisco was typically foggy. I overslept, and in the rush to get moving I forgot my camera. There was no time for breakfast but I ate a peanut-butter sandwich while loading the car. . . sleeping bag and beer cooler in back, tape recorder in front, and under the driver's seat an unloaded Luger. I kept the clip in my pocket, thinking it might be useful if things got out of hand. Press cards are nice things to have, but in riot situations a pistol is the best kind of safe-conduct pass.

By the time I left my apartment it was almost eight, and somewhere on the fog-shrouded Bay Bridge between San Francisco and Oakland, I heard the first radio bulletin:

The Sierra community of Bass Lake is bracing this morning for a reported invasion of the notorious Hell's Angels motorcycle gang. Heavily armed police and sheriff's deputies are stationed on all roads leading to Bass Lake. Madera County sheriff, Marlin Young, reports helicopters and other emergency forces standing by. Neighboring law enforcement agencies, including the Kern County sheriff's Canine Patrol, have been alerted and are ready to move. Recent reports say the Hell's Angels are massing in Oakland and San Bernardino. Stay tuned for further details.

Among those who made a point of staying tuned that morning were several thousand unarmed taxpayers en route to spend the holiday in the vicinity of Bass Lake and Yosemite. They had just got under way, most of them still irritable and sleepy from last-minute packing and hurrying the children through breakfast. .. when their car radios crackled a warning that they were headed right into the vortex of what might soon be a combat zone. They had read about Laconia and other Hell's Angels outbursts, but in print the menace had always seemed distant --terrifying, to be sure, and real in its way, but with none of that sour-stomach fright that comes with the realization that this time it's you. Tomorrow's newspapers won't be talking about people being beaten and terrorized three thousand miles away, but right exactly where you and your family are planning to spend the weekend.

The bridge was crowded with vacationers getting an early start. I was running late by twenty or thirty minutes, and when I got to the toll plaza at the Oakland end of the bridge I asked the gatekeeper if any Hell's Angels had passed through before me. "The dirty sonsabitches are right over there," he said with a wave of his hand. I didn't know what he was talking about until some two hundred yards past the gate, when I suddenly passed a large cluster of people and motorcycles grouped around a gray pickup truck with a swastika painted on the side. They seemed to materialize out of the fog, and the sight was having a bad effect on traffic. There are seventeen eastbound toll gates on the bridge, and traffic coming out of them is funneled into only three exits, with everyone scrambling for position in a short, high-speed run between the toll plaza and the traffic dividers about a half mile away. This stretch is hazardous on a clear afternoon, but in the fog of a holiday morning and with a Dread Spectacle suddenly looming beside the road the scramble was worse than usual. Horns sounded all around me as cars swerved and slowed down; heads snapped to the right; it was the same kind of traffic disruption that occurs near a serious accident, and many a driver went off on the wrong ramp that morning after staring too long at the monster rally that --if he'd been listening to his radio --he'd been warned about just moments before. And now here it was, in the stinking, tattooed flesh... the Menace.

I was close enough to recognize the Gypsy Jokers, about twenty of them, milling around the truck while they waited for late-running stragglers. They were paying no attention to the traffic but their appearance alone was enough to give anyone pause. Except for the colors, they looked exactly like any band of Hell's Angels: long hair, beards, black sleeveless vests. . . and the inevitable low-slung motorcycles, many with sleeping bags lashed to the handlebars and girls sitting lazily on the little pillow seats.

The outlaws are very comfortable with their inaccessibility. It saves them a lot of trouble with bill collectors, revenge seekers and routine police harassment. They are as insulated from society as they want to be, but they have no trouble locating each other. When Sonny flies down to Los Angeles, Otto meets him at the airport. When Terry goes to Fresno, he quickly locates the chapter president, Ray --who exists in some kind of mysterious limbo and can only be found by means of a secret phone number, which changes constantly. The Oakland Angels find it convenient to use Barger's number, checking now and then for messages. Some use various saloons where they are well known. An Angel who wants to be reached will make an appointment either to meet somewhere or to be at a certain phone at a designated time.

One night I tried to arrange a contact with a young Angel named Rodger, a one-time disc jockey. It proved to be impossible. He had no idea where he might be from one day to the next. "They don't call me Rodger the Lodger for nothing," he said. "I just make it wherever I can. It's all the same. Once you start worrying about it, you get hung up --and that's the end, man, you're finished." If he'd been killed that night he'd have left no footprints in life, no evidence and no personal effects but his bike --which the others would have raffled off immediately. Hell's Angels don't find it necessary to leave wills, and their deaths don't require much paperwork. .. A driver's license expires, a police record goes into the dead file, a motorcycle changes hands and usually a few "personal cards" will be taken out of wallets and dropped into wastebaskets.

Because of their gypsy style of life, their network has to be functional. A lost message can lead to serious trouble. An Angel who might have fled will be arrested; a freshly stolen bike will never reach the buyer; a pound of marijuana might miss a crucial connection; or at the very least, a whole chapter will never get word of a run or a big party.

The destination of a run is kept secret as long as possible --hopefully, to keep the cops guessing. The chapter presidents will figure it out by long-distance telephone, then each will tell his people the night before the run, either at a meeting or by putting the word with a handful of bartenders, waitresses and plugged-in chicks who are known contacts. The system is highly efficient, but it has never been leakproof, and by 1966 the Angels had decided that the only hope was to keep the destination a secret until the run was actually under way. Barger tried it once, but the police were able to track the outlaws by radioing ahead from one point to another. Radio tracking is only a device to give the cops an edge, a sense of confidence and control. Which it does, as long as no lapses occur. . . but it is safe to predict that on one of these crowded holidays a convoy of Angels is going to disappear like a blip shooting off the edge of a radar screen. All it will take is one of those rare gigs the outlaws are forever seeking: a ranch or big farm with a friendly owner, a piece of rural turf beyond the reach of the fuzz, where they can all get drunk and naked and fall on each other like goats in the rut, until they all pass out from exhaustion.

It would be worth buying a police radio, just to hear the panic:

"Group of eighty just passed through Sacramento, going north on U.S. Fifty, no violence, thought to be headed for Lake Tahoe area. ." Fifty miles north, in Placerville, the police chief gives his men a pep talk and deploys them with shotguns on both sides of the highway, south of the city limits. Two hours later they are still waiting and the dispatcher in Sacramento relays an impatient demand for a report on Placerville's handling of the crisis. The chief nervously reports no contact and asks if his restless troops can go home and enjoy the holiday.

The dispatcher, sitting in the radio room at Highway Patrol headquarters in Sacramento, says to sit tight while he checks around. . . and moments later his voice squawks out of the speaker: "Schwein! You lie! Vere are dey?"

"Don't call me no swine," says the Placerville chief. "They never got here."

The dispatcher checks all over northern California, with no result. Police cars scream up and down the highways, checking every bar. Nothing. Eighty of the state's most vicious hoodlums are roaming around drunk somewhere between Sacramento and Reno, hungry for rape and pillage. It will be another embarrassment for California law enforcement... to simply lose the buggers, a whole convoy, right out on a main highway... heads will surely roll.

By now, the outlaws are far up a private road, having left the highway at a sign saying: Owl Farm, no Visitors. They are beyond the reach of the law unless the owner complains. Meanwhile, another group of fifty disappears in the same vicinity. Police search parties stalk the highway, checking for traces of spittle, grime and blood. The dispatcher still rages over his mike; the duty officer's voice cracks as he answers urgent queries from radio newsmen in San Francisco and Los Angeles: "I'm sorry, that's all I can say. They seem to have. . . ah. . . our information is that they. . . they disappeared, yes, they're gone."

The only reason it hasn't happened is that the Hell's Angels have no access to private property in the boondocks. One or two claim to have relatives with farms, but there are no stories of the others being invited out for a picnic. The Angels don't have much contact with people who own land. They are city boys, economically and emotionally as well as physically. For at least one generation and sometimes two they come from people who never owned anything at all, not even a car.

The Hell's Angels are very definitely a lower-class phenomenon, but their backgrounds are not necessarily poverty-stricken. Despite some grim moments, their parents seem to have had credit. Most of the outlaws are the sons of people who came to California either just before or during World War 2. Many have lost contact with their families, and I have never met an Angel who claimed to have a home town in any sense that people who use that term might understand it. Terry the Tramp, for instance, is "from" Detroit, Norfolk, Long Island, Los Angeles, Fresno and Sacramento. As a child, he lived all over the country, not in poverty but in total mobility. Like most of the others, he has no roots. He relates entirely to the present, the moment, the action.

His longest bout with stability was a three-year hitch in the Coast Guard after finishing high school. Since then he has worked half-heartedly as a tree-trimmer, mechanic, bit actor, laborer and hustler of various commodities. He tried college for a few months but quit to get married. After two years, two children and numerous quarrels, the marriage ended in divorce. He had another child, by his second wife, but that union didn't last either. Now, after two hugely publicized rape arrests, he refers to himself as an "eligible bachelor."

Despite his spectacular rap sheet, he estimates his total jail time at about six months --ninety days for tress-passing and the rest for traffic offenses. Terry is one of the most arrest-prone of all the Angels; cops are offended by the very sight of him, In one stretch, covering 1964 and '65, he paid roughly $2,500 to bail bondsmen, lawyers and traffic courts. Like most of the other Angels he blames "the cops" for making him a full-time outlaw.

At least half the Hell's Angels are war babies, but that is a very broad term. There are also war babies in the Peace Corps, in corporate training programs, and fighting in Vietnam. World War 2 had a lot to do with the Hell's Angels' origins, but you have to stretch the war theory pretty thin to cover both Dirty Ed, in his early forties, and Clean Cut from Oakland, who is twenty years younger. Dirty Ed is old enough to be Clean Cut's father --which is not likely, though he's planted more seeds than he cares to remember.

It is easy enough to trace the Hell's Angels' mystique --and even their name and their emblems --back to World War 2 and Hollywood. But their genes and real history go back a lot further. World War 2 was not the original California boom, but a rebirth of a thing that began in the thirties and was already tapering off when the war economy made California a new Valhalla. In 1937 Woody Guthrie wrote a song called "Do-Re-Mi." The chorus goes like this:

California is a garden of Eden

A Paradise for you and for me,

But believe it or not.

You won't think it's so hot.

If you ain't got the Do-Re-Mi.

The song expressed the frustrated sentiments of more than a million Okies, Arkies and hillbillies who made a long trek to the Golden State and found it was just another hard dollar. By the time these gentlemen arrived, the Westward Movement was already beginning to solidify. The "California way of life" was the same old game to musical chairs --but it took a while for this news to filter back East, and meanwhile the Gold Rush continued. Once here, the newcomers hung on for a few years, breeding prolifically --until the war started. Then they either joined up or had their pick of jobs on a booming labor market. Either way, they were Californians when the war ended. The old way of life was scattered back along Route 66, and their children grew up in a new world. The Linkhorns had finally found a home.

Nelson Algren wrote about them in A Walk on the Wild Side, but that story was told before they crossed the Rockies. Dove Linkhorn, son of crazy Fitz, went to hustle for his fortune in New Orleans. Ten years later he would have gone to Los Angeles.

Algren's book opens with one of the best historical descriptions of American white trash ever written.* He traces the Linkhorn ancestry back to the first wave of bonded servants to arrive on these shores. These were the dregs of society from all over the British Isles --misfits, criminals, debtors, social bankrupts of every type and description --all of them willing to sign oppressive work contracts with future employers in exchange for ocean passage to the New World. Once here, they endured a form of slavery for a year or two --during which they were fed and sheltered by the boss --and when their time of bondage ended, they were turned loose to make their own way.

*A story called "Barn Burning," by William Faulkner, is another white-trash classic. It provides the dimensions of humanity that Algren's description lacks.

In theory and in the context of history the setup was mutually advantageous. Any man desperate enough to sell himself into bondage in the first place had pretty well shot his wad in the old country, so a chance for a foothold on a new continent was not to be taken lightly. After a period of hard labor and wretchedness he would then be free to seize whatever he might in a land of seemingly infinite natural wealth. Thousands of bonded servants came over, but by the time they earned their freedom the coastal strip was already settled. The unclaimed land was west, across the Alleghenies. So they drifted into the new states --Kentucky and Tennessee; their sons drifted on to Missouri, Arkansas and Oklahoma.

Drifting became a habit; with dead roots in the Old World and none in the New, the Linkhorns were not of a mind to dig in and cultivate things. Bondage too became a habit, but it was only the temporary kind. They were not pioneers, but sleazy rearguard camp followers of the original westward movement. By the time the Linkhorns arrived anywhere the land was already taken --so they worked for a while and moved on. Their world was a violent, boozing limbo between the pits of despair and the Big Rock Candy Mountain. They kept drifting west, chasing jobs, rumors, homestead grabs or the luck of some front-running kin. They lived off the surface of the land, like armyworms, stripping it of whatever they could before moving on. It was a day-to-day existence, and there was always more land to the west

Some stayed behind and their lineal descendants are still there --in the Carolinas, Kentucky, West Virginia and Tennessee. There were dropouts along the way: hillbillies, Okies, Arkies --they're all the same people. Texas is a living monument to the breed. So is southern California. Algren called them "fierce craving boys" with "a feeling of having been cheated." Freebooters, armed and drunk --a legion of gamblers, brawlers and whorehoppers. Blowing into town in a junk Model-A with bald tires, no muffler and one headlight. .. looking for quick work, with no questions asked and preferably no tax deductions. Just get the cash, fill up at the cut-rate gas station and hit the road, with a pint on the seat and Eddy Arnold on the radio moaning good back-country tunes about home sweet home, that Bluegrass sweetheart still waitin, and roses on Mama's grave.

Algren left the Linkhorns in Texas, but anyone who drives the Western highways knows they didn't stay there either. They kept moving until one day in the late 1930s they stood on the spine of a scrub-oak California hill and looked down on the Pacific Ocean --the end of the road. Things were tough for a while, but no tougher than they were in a hundred other places. And then came the war --fat city, big money even for Linkhorns.

When the war ended, California was full of veterans looking for ways to spend their separation bonuses. Many decided to stay on the Coast, and while their new radios played hillbilly music they went out and bought big motorcycles --not knowing exactly why, but in the booming, rootless atmosphere of those times, it seemed like the thing to do. They were not all Linkhorns, but the forced democracy of four war years had erased so many old distinctions that even Linkhorns were confused. Their pattern of intermarriage was shattered, their children mixed freely and without violence. By 1950 many Linkhorns were participating in the money economy; they owned decent cars, and even houses.

Others, however, broke down under the strain of respectability and answered the call of the genes. There is a story about a Linkhorn who became a wealthy car dealer in Los Angeles. He married a beautiful Spanish actress and bought a mansion in Beverly Hills. But after a decade of opulence he suffered from soaking sweats and was unable to sleep at night. He began to sneak out of the house through the servants' entrance and run a few blocks to a gas station where he kept a hopped-up '37 Ford with no fenders. . . and spend the rest of the night hanging around honky-tonk bars and truck stops, dressed in dirty overalls and a crusty green T-shirt with a Bardahl emblem on the back. He enjoyed cadging beers and belting whores around when they spurned his crude propositions. One night, after long haggling, he bought several mason jars full of home whiskey, which he drank while driving at high speed through the Beverly Hills area. When the old Ford finally threw a rod he abandoned it and called a taxi, which took him to his own automobile agency. He kicked down a side door, hot-wiped a convertible waiting for tune-up and drove out to Highway 101, where he got in a drag race with some hoodlums from Pasadena. He lost, and it so enraged him that he followed the other car until it stopped for a traffic light --where he rammed it from the rear at seventy miles an hour.

The publicity ruined him, but influential friends kept him out of jail by paying a psychiatrist to call him insane. He spent a year in a rest home; and now, according to the stories, he has a motorcycle dealership near San Diego. People who know him say he's happy --although his driver's license has been revoked for numerous violations, his business is verging on bankruptcy, and his new wife, a jaded ex-beauty queen from West Virginia, is a half-mad alcoholic.

It would not be fair to say that all motorcycle outlaws carry Linkhorn genes, but nobody who has ever spent time among the inbred Anglo-Saxon tribes of Appalachia would need more than a few hours with the Hell's Angels to work up a very strong sense of déjà vu. There is the same sulking hostility toward "outsiders," the same extremes of temper and action, and even the same names, sharp faces and long-boned bodies that never look quite natural unless they are leaning on something.

Most of the Angels are obvious Anglo-Saxons, but the Linkhorn attitude is contagious. The few outlaws with Mexican or Italian names not only act like the others but somehow look like them. Even Chinese Mel from Frisco and Charley, a young Negro from Oakland, have the Linkhorn gait and mannerisms.

Ashes to Ashes & Dust to Dust: The Funeral of Mother Miles

He who makes a beast of himself gets rid of the pain of being a man. --Dr. Johnson

The neighborhood suddenly exploded with excited, morbid crowds. Hysterical women surged forward in a frenzy, screeching in almost sexual ecstasy, scratching and fighting the agents and police in their attempt to reach the body. One fat-breasted woman with stringy red hair broke through the cordon and dipped her handkerchief in the blood, clutched it to her sweaty dress and waddled off down the street.

--From an account of the death of John Dillinger

Toward Christmas the action slowed down and the Angels dropped out of the headlines. Tiny lost his job, Sonny got involved in a long jury trial on the attempted-murder charge, and the El Adobe was demolished by the wrecker's ball. The Angels drifted from one bar to another, but they found it harder to establish a hangout than to maintain one. In San Francisco it was just as slow. Frenchy spent three months in General Hospital when a can of gasoline blew up on him, and Puff went to jail after a fray-kus with two cops who raided an Angel birthday party. Winter is always slow for the outlaws. Many have to go to work to stay eligible for next summer's unemployment insurance, it is too cold for big outdoor parties, and the constant rain makes riding an uncomfortable hazard.

It seemed like a good time to get some work done, so I dropped off the circuit. Terry came by now and then to keep me posted. One day he showed up with a broken arm, saying he'd wrecked his bike, his old lady had left him and the niggers had blown up his house. I'd heard about the house from Barger's wife, Elsie, who was handling the communications post at their home in Oakland. During one of the sporadic flare-ups between the Hell's Angels and the Oakland Negroes somebody had thrown a homemade bomb through the window of the house that Terry was renting in East Oakland. The fire destroyed the house and all of Marilyn's paintings. She was a pretty girl about nineteen, with long blond hair and a respectable family in one of the valley towns. She'd been living with Terry for nearly six months, covering the walls with her artwork, but she had no stomach for bombs. The divorce was effected soon after they moved to another dwelling. "I came back one night and she was gone," said Terry. "All she left was a note: 'Dear Terry, Fuck it.'" And that was that.

Nothing else happened until January, when Mother Miles got snuffed. He was riding his bike through Berkeley when a truck came out of a side street and hit him head on, breaking both legs and fracturing his skull. He hung in a coma for six days, then died on a Sunday morning, less than twenty-four hours before his thirtieth birthday --leaving a wife, two children and his righteous girl friend, Ann.

Miles had been president of the Sacramento chapter. His influence was so great that in 1965 he moved the whole club down to Oakland, claiming the police had made life intolerable for them by constant harassment. The outlaws simply picked up and moved, not questioning Miles' wisdom. His real name was James, but the Angels called him Mother.

"I guess it was because he was kind of motherly," said Gut. "Miles was great, great people. He took care of everybody. He worried. You could always depend on him."

I knew Miles in a distant kind of way. He didn't trust writers, but there was nothing mean about him, and once he decided I wasn't going to get him locked up somehow, he was friendly. He had the build of a pot-bellied stevedore, with a round face and a wide, flaring beard. I never thought of him as a hoodlum. He had the usual Hell's Angel police record: drunk, disorderly, fighting, vagrancy, loitering, petty larceny and a handful of ominous "suspicion of" charges that had never gone to trial. But he wasn't plagued by the same demons that motivate some of the others. He wasn't happy with the world, but he didn't brood about it, and his appetite for revenge didn't extend beyond the specific wrongs done to the Angels or to him personally. You could drink with Miles without wondering when he was going to swing on somebody or lift your money off the bar. He wasn't that way. Booze seemed to make him more genial. Like most of the Angels' leaders, he had a quick mind and a quality of self-control which the others relied on.

When I heard he'd been killed I called Sonny to ask about the funeral, but by the time I finally got hold of him the details were already on the radio and in the newspapers. Miles' mother was arranging for the funeral in Sacramento. The outlaw caravan would form at Barger's house at eleven on Thursday morning. The Angels have gone to plenty of funerals for their own people, but until this one they had never tried to run the procession for ninety miles along a major highway. There was also a chance that the Sacramento police would try to keep them out of town.

The word went out on Monday and Tuesday by telephone. This was not going to be any Jay Gatsby funeral; the Angels wanted a full-dress rally. Miles' status was not the point; the death of any Angel requires a show of strength by the others. It is a form of affirmation --not for the dead, but the living. There are no set penalties for not showing up, because none are necessary. In the cheap loneliness that is the overriding fact of every outlaw's life, a funeral is a bleak reminder that the tribe is smaller by one. The circle is one link shorter, the enemy jacks up the odds just a little bit more, and defenders of the faith need something to take off the chill. A funeral is a time for counting the loyal, for seeing how many are left. There is no question about skipping work, going without sleep or riding for hours in a cold wind to be there on time.

Early Thursday morning the bikes began arriving in Oakland. Most of the outlaws were already in the Bay Area, or at least within fifty or sixty miles, but a handful of Satan's Slaves rode all of Wednesday night, five hundred miles from Los Angeles, to join the main caravan. Others came from Fresno and San Jose and Santa Rosa. There were Hangmen, Misfits, Presidents, Nightriders, Grossmen and some with no colors at all. A hard-faced little man whom nobody spoke to wore an olive-drab bombardier's jacket with just the word "Loner" on the back, written in small, blue-inked letters that looked like a signature.

I was crossing the Bay Bridge when a dozen Gypsy Jokers came roaring past, ignoring the speed limit as they split up to go around me on both sides of the car. Seconds later they disappeared up ahead in the fog. The morning was cold and bridge traffic was slow except for motorcycles. Down in the Bay there were freighters lined up, waiting for open piers.

The procession rolled at exactly eleven --a hundred and fifty bikes and about twenty cars. A few miles north of Oakland, at the Carquinez Bridge, the outlaws picked up a police escort assigned to keep them under control. A Highway Patrol car led the caravan all the way to Sacramento. The lead Angels rode two abreast in the right lane, holding a steady sixty-five miles an hour. At the head, with Barger, was the scruffy Praetorian Guard: Magoo, Tommy, Jimmy, Skip, Tiny, Zorro, Terry and Charger Charley the Child Molester. The spectacle disrupted traffic all along the way. It looked like something from another world. Here was the "scum of the earth," the "lowest form of animals," an army of unwashed gang rapists. . . being escorted toward the state capital by a Highway Patrol car with a flashing yellow light. The steady pace of the procession made it unnaturally solemn. Not even Senator Murphy could have mistaken it for a dangerous run. There were the same bearded faces; the same earrings, emblems, swastikas and grinning death's-heads flapping in the wind --but this time there were no party clothes, no hamming it up for the squares. They were still playing the role, but all the humor was missing. The only trouble en route came when the procession was halted after a filling-station owner complained that somebody had stolen fourteen quarts of oil at the last gas stop. Barger quickly took up a collection to pay the man off, muttering that whoever stole the oil was due for a chain-whipping later on. The Angles assured each other that it must have been a punk in one of the cars at the rear of the caravan, some shithead without any class.

In Sacramento there was no sign of harassment. Hundreds of curious spectators lined the route between the funeral home and the cemetery. Inside the chapel a handful of Jim Miles' childhood friends and relatives waited with his body, a hired minister and three nervous attendants. They knew what was coming --Mother Miles' "people," hundreds of thugs, wild brawlers and bizarre-looking girls in tight Levis, scarves and waist-length platinum-colored wigs. Miles' mother, a heavy middle-aged woman in a black suit, wept quietly in a front pew, facing the open casket.

At one-thirty the outlaw caravan arrived. The slow rumble of motorcycle engines rattled glass in the mortuary windows. Police tried to keep traffic moving as T.V cameras followed Barger and perhaps a hundred others toward the door of the chapel. Many outlaws waited outside during the service. They stood in quiet groups, leaning against the bikes and killing time with lazy conversation. There was hardly any talk about Miles. In one group a pint of whiskey made the rounds. Some of the outlaws talked to bystanders, trying to explain what was happening. "Yeah, the guy was one of our leaders," said an Angel to an elderly man in a baseball cap. "He was good people. Some punk ran a stop sign and snuffed him. We came to bury him with the colors."

Inside the pine-paneled chapel the minister was telling his weird congregation that "the wages of sin is death." He looked like a Norman Rockwell druggist and was obviously repelled by the whole scene. Not all the pews were full, but standing room in the rear was crowded all the way back to the door. The minister talked about "sin" and "justification," pausing now and then as if he expected a rebuttal from the crowd. "It's not my business to pass judgment on anybody," he continued. "Nor is it my business to eulogize anybody. But it is my business to speak out a warning that it will happen to you! I don't know what philosophy some of you have about death, but I know the Scriptures tell us that God takes no pleasure in the death of the wicked. . . Jesus didn't die for an animal, he died for a man. . . What I say about Jim won't change anything, but I can preach the gospel to you and I have a responsibility to warn you that you will all have to answer to God!"

The crowd was shifting and sweating. The chapel was so hot that it seemed like the Devil himself was waiting in one of the anteroons, ready to claim the wicked just as soon as the sermon was over.

"How many of you --" asked the minister, "how many of you asked yourselves on the way up here. 'Who is next?' "

At this point several Angels in the pews rose and walked out, cursing quietly at a way of life they had long ago left behind. The minister ignored these mutinous signs and launched into a story about a Philippine jailer.

"Holy shit!" mumbled Tiny. He'd been standing quietly in the rear for about thirty minutes, pouring sweat and eying the minister as if he meant to hunt him down later in the day and extract all his teeth. Tiny's departure caused five or six others to leave. The minister sensed he was losing his audience, so he brought the Philippine story to a quick end.

There was no music as the crowd filed out. I passed by the casket and was shocked to see Mother Miles clean-shaven, lying peacefully on his back in a blue suit, white shirt and a wide maroon tie. His Hell's Angels jacket, covered with exotic emblems, was mounted on a stand at the foot of the casket. Behind it were thirteen wreaths, some bearing names of other outlaw clubs.

I barely recognized Miles. He looked younger than twenty-nine and very ordinary. But his face was calm, as though he were not at all surprised to find himself there in a box. He wouldn't have liked the clothes he was wearing, but since the Angels weren't paying for the funeral, the best they could do was make sure the colors went into the casket before it was sealed. Barger stayed behind with the nallbearers to make sure the thing was done right

After the funeral more than two hundred motorcycles followed the hearse to the cemetery. Behind the Angels rode all the other clubs, including a half dozen East Bay Dragons --and, according to a radio commentator, "dozens of teen-age riders who looked so solemn that you'd think Robin Hood had just died."

The Hell's Angels knew better. Not all of them had read about Robin Hood, but they understood that the parallel was complimentary. Perhaps the younger outlaws believed it, but there is room in their margin for one or two friendly illusions. Those who are almost thirty, or more than that, have been living too long with their own scurvy image to think of themselves as heroes. They understand that heroes are always "good guys," and they have seen enough cowboy movies to know that good guys win in the end. The myth didn't seem to include Miles, who was "one of the best." But all he got in the end was two broken legs, a smashed head and a tongue-lashing from the preacher. Only his Hell's Angels identity kept him from going to the grave as anonymously as any ribbon clerk. As it was, his funeral got nationwide press coverage: Life had a picture of the procession entering the cemetery, T.V newscasts gave the funeral a solemn priority, and the Chronicle headline said: Hell's Angels Bury their Own Black Jackets and an odd Dignity. Mother Miles would have been pleased.

Moments after the burial the caravan was escorted out of town by a phalanx of police cars, with sirens howling. The brief truce was ended. At the city limits the Angels screwed it on and roared back to Richmond, across the Bay from San Francisco, where they held an all-night wake that kept police on edge until long after dawn. On Sunday night there was a meeting in Oakland to confirm Miles' successor, Big Al. It was a quiet affair, but without the grimness of the funeral.

The banshee's wail that had seemed so loud on Thursday was already fading away. After the meeting there was a beer party at the Sinners Club, and by the time the place closed they had already set the date for the next run. The Angels would gather in Bakersfield, on the first day of Spring.

All my life my heart has sought

a thing I cannot name.

--Remembered line from a long-forgotten poem

Months later, when I rarely saw the Angels, I still had the legacy of the big machine --four hundred pounds of chrome and deep red noise to take out on the Coast Highway and cut loose at three in the morning, when all the cops were lurking over on 101. My first crash had wrecked the bike completely and it took several months to have it rebuilt. After that I decided to ride it differently: I would stop pushing my luck on curves, always wear a helmet and try to keep within range of the nearest speed limit. .. my insurance had already been canceled and my driver's license was hanging by a thread.

So it was always at night, like a werewolf, that I would take the thing out for an honest run down the coast. I would start in Golden Gate Park, thinking only to run a few long curves to clear my head. . . but in a matter of minutes I'd be out at the beach with the sound of the engine in my ears, the surf booming up on the sea wall and a fine empty road stretching all the way down to Santa Cruz. . . not even a gas station in the whole seventy miles; the only public light along the way is an all-night diner down around Rockaway Beach.

There was no helmet on those nights, no speed limit, and no cooling it down on the curves. The momentary freedom of the park was like the one unlucky drink that shoves a wavering alcoholic off the wagon. I would come out of the park near the soccer field and pause for a moment at the stop sign, wondering if I knew anyone parked out there on the midnight humping strip.

Then into first gear, forgetting the cars and letting the beast wind out. . . thirty-five, forty-five. . . then into second and wailing through the light at Lincoln Way, not worried about green or red signals, but only some other werewolf loony-who might be pulling out, too slowly, to start his own run. Not many of these. . . and with three lanes on a wide curve, a bike coming hard has plenty of room to get around almost anything. . . then into third, the boomer gear, pushing seventy-five and the beginning of a windscream in the ears, a pressure on the eyeballs like diving into water off a high board.

Bent forward, far back on the seat, and a rigid grip on the handlebars as the bike starts jumping and wavering in the wind. Taillights far up ahead coming closer, faster, and suddenly --zaaapppp --going past and leaning down for a curve near the zoo, where the road swings out to sea.

The dunes are flatter here, and on windy nights sand blows across the highway, piling up in thick drifts as deadly as any oil-slick. . . instant loss of control, a crashing, cartwheeling slide and maybe one of those two-inch notices in the paper the next day: "An unidentified motorcyclist was killed last night when he failed to negotiate a turn on Highway I."

Indeed... but no sand this time, so the lever goes up into fourth, and now there's no sound except wind. Screw it all the way over, reach through the handlebars to raise the headlight beam, the needle leans down on a hundred, and wind-burned eyeballs strain to see down the centerline, trying to provide a margin for the reflexes.

But with the throttle screwed on there is only the barest margin, and no room at all for mistakes. It has to be done right. . . and that's when the strange music starts, when you stretch your luck so far that fear becomes exhilaration and vibrates along your arms. You can barely see at a hundred; the tears blow back so fast that they vaporize before they get to your ears. The only sounds are wind and a dull roar floating back from the mufflers. You watch the white line and try to lean with it. . . howling through a turn to the right, then to the left and down the long hill to Pacifica. . . letting off now, watching for cops, but only until the next dark stretch and another few seconds on the edge. . . The Edge. . . There is no honest way to explain it because the only people who really know where it is are the ones who have gone over. The others --the living --are those who pushed their control as far as they felt they could handle it, and then pulled back, or slowed down, or did whatever they had to when it came time to choose between Now and Later.

But the edge is still Out there. Or maybe it's In. The association of motorcycles with L.S.D is no accident of publicity. They are both a means to an end, to the place of definitions.

Hell's Angels: A Strange and Terrible Saga, Random House, 1966

Welcome to Las Vegas: When the Going gets Weird, the Weird Turn Pro

We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold. I remember saying something like "I feel a bit lightheaded; maybe you should drive. ." And suddenly there was a terrible roar all around us and the sky was full of what looked like huge bats, all swooping and screeching and diving around the car, which was going about a hundred miles an hour with the top down to Las Vegas. And a voice was screaming: "Holy Jesus! What are these goddamn animals?"

Then it was quiet again. My attorney had taken his shirt off and was pouring beer on his chest, to facilitate the tanning process. "What the hell are you yelling about?" he muttered, staring up at the sun with his eyes closed and covered with wraparound Spanish sunglasses. "Never mind," I said. "It's your turn to drive." I hit the brakes and aimed the Great Red Shark toward the shoulder of the highway. No point mentioning those bats, I thought. The poor bastard will see them soon enough.

It was almost noon, and we still had more than a hundred miles to go. They would be tough miles. Very soon, I knew, we would both be completely twisted. But there was no going back, and no time to rest. We would have to ride it out. Press registration for the fabulous Mint 400 was already underway, and we had to get there by four to claim our sound-proof suite. A fashionable sporting magazine in New York had taken care of the reservations, along with this huge red Chevy convertible we'd just rented off a lot on the Sunset Strip. . . and I was, after all, a professional journalist; so I had an obligation to cover the story, for good or ill.

The sporting editors had also given me $300 in cash, most of which was already spent on extremely dangerous drugs. The trunk of the car looked like a mobile police narcotics lab. We had two bags of grass, seventy-five pellets of mescaline, five sheets of high-powered blotter acid, a salt shaker half full of cocaine, and a whole galaxy of multi-colored uppers, downers, screamers, laughers. . . and also a quart of tequila, a quart of rum, a case of Budweiser, a pint of raw ether and two dozen amyls.

All this had been rounded up the night before, in a frenzy of high-speed driving all over Los Angeles County --from Topanga to Watts, we picked up everything we could get our hands on. Not that we needed all that for the trip, but once you locked into a serious drug connection, the tendency is to push it as far as you can.

The only thing that really worried me was the ether. There is nothing in the world more helpless and irresponsible and depraved than a man in the depths of an ether binge. And I knew we'd get into that rotten stuff pretty soon. Probably at the next gas station. We had sampled almost everything else, and now --yes, it was time for a long snort of ether. And then do the next hundred miles in a horrible, slobbering sort of spastic stupor. The only way to keep alert on ether is to do up a lot of amyls --not all at once, but steadily, just enough to maintain the focus at ninety miles an hour through Barstow.

"Man, this is the way to travel," said my attorney. He leaned over to turn the volume up on the radio, humming along with the rhythm section and kind of moaning the words: "One toke over the line, Sweet Jesus. . . One toke over the line. ."

One toke? You poor fool! Wait till you see those goddamn bats. I could barely hear the radio .. slumped over on the far side of the seat, grappling with a tape recorder turned all the way up on "Sympathy for the Devil." That was the only tape we had, so we played it constantly, over and over, as a kind of demented counterpoint to the radio. And also to maintain our rhythm on the road. A constant speed is good for gas mileage --and for some reason that seemed important at the time. Indeed. On a trip like this one must be careful about gas consumption. Avoid those quick bursts of acceleration that drag blood to the back of the brain.

My attorney saw the hitchhiker long before I did. "Let's give this boy a lift," he said, and before I could mount any argument he was stopped and this poor Okie kid was running up to the car with a big grin on his face, saying, "Hot damn! I never rode in a convertible before!"

"Is that right?" I said. "Well, I guess you're about ready, eh?"

The kid nodded eagerly as we roared off.

"We're your friends," said my attorney. "We're not like the others."

O Christ, I thought, he's gone around the bend. "No more of that talk," I said sharply. "Or I'll put the leeches on you." He grinned, seemed to understand. Luckily, the noise in the car was so awful --between the wind and the radio and the tape machine --that the kid in the back seat couldn't hear a word we were saying. Or could he?

How long can we maintain? I wondered. How long before one of us starts raving and jabbering at this boy? What will he think then? This same lonely desert was the last known home of the Manson family. Will he make that grim connection when my attorney starts screaming about bats and huge manta rays coming down on the car? If so --well, we'll just have to cut his head off and bury him somewhere. Because it goes without saying that we can't turn him loose. He'll report us at once to some kind of outback nazi law enforcement agency, and they'll run us down like dogs.

Jesus! Did I say that? Or just think it? Was I talking? Did they hear me? I glanced over at my attorney, but he seemed oblivious --watching the road, driving our Great Red Shark along at a hundred and ten or so. There was no sound from the back seat.

Maybe I'd better have a chat with this boy, I thought. Perhaps if I explain things, he'll rest easy.

Of course. I leaned around in the seat and gave him a fine big smile. . . admiring the shape of his skull.

"By the way," I said. "There's one thing you should probably understand."

He stared at me, not blinking. Was he gritting his teeth?

"Can you hear me?" I yelled.

He nodded.

"That's good," I said. "Because I want you to know that we're on our way to Las Vegas to find the American Dream." I smiled. "That's why we rented this car. It was the only way to do it. Can you grasp that?"

He nodded again, but his eyes were nervous.

"I want you to have all the background," I said. "Because this is a very ominous assignment --with overtones of extreme personal danger. . . Hell, I forgot all about this beer; you want one?"

He shook his head.

"How about some ether?" I said.

"What?"

"Never mind. Let's get right to the heart of this thing. You see, about twenty-four hours ago we were sitting in the Polo Lounge of the Beverly Hills Hotel --in the patio section, of course --and we were just sitting there under a palm tree when this uniformed dwarf came up to me with a pink telephone and said, 'This must be the call you've been waiting for all this time, sir.'""

I laughed and ripped open a beer can that foamed all over the back seat while I kept talking. "And you know? He was right! I'd been expecting that call, but I didn't know who it would come from. Do you follow me?"

The boy's face was a mask of pure fear and bewilderment.

I blundered on: "I want you to understand that this man at the wheel is my attorney! He's not just some dingbat I found on the Strip. Shit, look at him! He doesn't look like you or me, right? That's because he's a foreigner. I think he's probably Samoan. But it doesn't matter, does it? Are you prejudiced?"

"Oh, hell no!" he blurted.

"I didn't think so," I said. "Because in spite of his race, this man is extremely valuable to me." I glanced over at my attorney, but his mind was somewhere else.

I whacked the back of the driver's seat with my fist. "This is important, goddamnit! This is a true story!" The car swerved sickeningly, then straightened out.

"Keep your hands off my fucking neck!" my attorney screamed. The kid in the back looked like he was ready to jump right out of the car and take his chances.

Our vibrations were getting nasty --but why? I was puzzled, frustrated. Was there no communication in this car? Had we deteriorated to the level of dumb beasts?

Because my story was true. I was certain of that. And it was extremely important, I felt, for the meaning of our journey to be made absolutely clear. We had actually been sitting there in the Polo Lounge --for many hours --drinking Singapore Slings with mescal on the side and beer chasers. And when the call came, I was ready.

The Dwarf approached our table cautiously, as I recall, and when he handed me the pink telephone I said nothing, merely listened. And then I hung up, turning to face my attorney. "That was headquarters," I said. "They want me to go to Las Vegas at once, and make contact with a Portuguese photographer named Lacerda. He'll have the details. All I have to do is check my suite and he'll seek me out."

My attorney said nothing for a moment, then he suddenly came alive in his chair. "God hell!" he exclaimed. "I think I see the pattern. This one sounds like real trouble!" He tucked his khaki undershirt into his white rayon bellbottoms and called for more drink. "You're going to need plenty of legal advice before this thing is over," he said. "And my first advice is that you should rent a very fast car with no top and get the hell out of L.A. for at least forty-eight hours." He shook his head sadly. "This blows my weekend, because naturally I'll have to go with you --and we'll have to arm ourselves."

"Why not?" I said. "If a thing like this is worth doing at all, it's worth doing right. We'll need some decent equipment and plenty of cash on the line --if only for drugs and a super-sensitive tape recorder, for the sake of a permanent record."

"What kind of story is this?" he asked.

"The Mint 400," I said. "It's the richest off-the-road race for motorcycles and dune-buggies in the history of organized sport --a fantastic spectacle in honor of some fatback grossero named Del Webb, who owns the luxurious Mint Hotel in the heart of downtown Las Vegas. .. at least that's what the press release says; my man in New York just read it to me."

"Well," he said, "as your attorney I advise you to buy a motorcycle. How else can you cover a thing like this righteously?"

"No way," I said. "Where can we get hold of a Vincent Black Shadow?"

"What's that?"

"A fantastic bike," I said. "The new model is something like two thousand cubic inches, developing two hundred brake-horsepower at four thousand revolutions per minute on a magnesium frame with two styrofoam seats and a total curb weight of exactly two hundred pounds."

"That sounds about right for this gig," he said.

"It is," I assured him. "The fucker's not much for turning, but it's pure hell on the straightaway. It'll outrun the F.111 until takeoff."

"Takeoff?" he said. "Can we handle that much torque?"

"Absolutely," I said. "I'll call New York for some cash."

Strange Medicine on the Desert... a Crisis of Confidence

I am still vaguely haunted by our hitchhiker's remark about how he'd "never rode in a convertible before." Here's this poor geek living in a world of convertibles zipping past him on the highways all the time, and he's never even ridden in one. It made me feel like King Farouk. I was tempted to have my attorney pull into the next airport and arrange some kind of simple, common-law contract whereby we could just give the car to this unfortunate bastard. Just say: "Here, sign this and the car's yours." Give him the keys and then use the credit card to zap off on a jet to some place like Miami and rent another huge fireapple-red convertible for a drug-addled, top-speed run across the water all the way out to the last stop in Key West. . . and then trade the car off for a boat. Keep moving.

But this manic notion passed quickly. There was no point in getting this harmless kid locked up --and, besides, I had plans for this car. I was looking forward to flashing around Las Vegas in the bugger. Maybe do a bit of serious drag-racing on the strip: Pull up to that big stoplight in front of the Flamingo and start screaming at the traffic:

"Alright, you chickenshit wimps! You pansies! When this goddamn light flips green, I'm gonna stomp down on this thing and blow every one of you gutless punks off the road!"

Right. Challenge the bastards on their own turf. Come screeching up to the crosswalk, bucking and skidding with a bottle of rum in one hand and jamming the horn to drown out the music. .. glazed eyes insanely dilated behind tiny black, gold-rimmed greaser shades, screaming gibberish. .. a genuinely dangerous drunk, reeking of ether and terminal psychosis. Revving the engine up to a terrible high-pitched chattering whine, waiting for the light to change. ..

How often does a chance like that come around? To jangle the bastards right down to the core of their spleens. Old elephants limp off to the hills to die; old Americans go out to the highway and drive themselves to death with huge cars.

But our trip was different. It was a classic affirmation of everything right and true and decent in the national character. It was a gross, physical salute to the fantastic possibilities of life in this country --but only for those with true grit. And we were chock full of that.

My attorney understood this concept, despite his racial handicap, but our hitchhiker was not an easy person to reach. He said he understood, but I could see in his eyes that he didn't. He was lying to me.

The car suddenly veered off the road and we came to a sliding halt in the gravel. I was hurled against the dashboard. My attorney was slumped over the wheel. "What's wrong?" I yelled. "We can't stop here. This is bat country!"

"My heart," he groaned. "Where's the medicine?"

"Oh," I said. "The medicine, yes, it's right here." I reached into the kit-bag for the amyls. The kid seemed petrified. "Don't worry," I said. "This man has a bad heart --Angina Pectoris. But we have the cure for it. Yes, here they are." I picked four amyls out of the tin box and handed two of them to my attorney. He immediately cracked one under his nose, and I did likewise.

He took a long snort and fell back on the seat, staring straight up at the sun. "Turn up the fucking music!" he screamed. "My heart feels like an alligator! Volume! Clarity! Bass! We must have bass!" He flailed his naked arms at the sky. "What's wrong with us? Are we goddamn old ladies?"

I turned both the radio and the tape machine up full bore. "You scurvy shyster bastard," I said. "Watch your language! You're talking to a doctor of journalism!"

He was laughing out of control. "What the fuck are we doing out here on this desert?" he shouted. "Somebody call the police! We need help!"

"Pay no attention to this swine," I said to the hitchhiker. "He can't handle the medicine. Actually, we're both doctors of journalism, and we're on our way to Las Vegas to cover the main story of our generation." And then I began laughing...

My attorney hunched around to face the hitchhiker. "The truth is," he said, "we're going to Vegas to croak a scag baron named Savage Henry. I've known him for years, but he ripped us off --and you know what that means, right?"

I wanted to shut him off, but we were both helpless with laughter. What the fuck were we doing out here on this desert, when we both had bad hearts?

"Savage Henry has cashed his check!" My attorney snarled at the kid in the back seat. "We're going to rip his lungs out!"

"And eat them!" I blurted. "That bastard won't get away with this! What's going on in this country when a scumsucker like that can get away with sandbagging a doctor of journalism?"

Nobody answered. My attorney was cracking another amyl and the kid was climbing out of the back seat, scrambling down the trunk lid. "Thanks for the ride," he yelled. "Thanks a lot. I like you guys. Don't worry about me." His feet hit the asphalt and he started running back towards Baker. Out in the middle of the desert, not a tree in sight.

"Wait a minute," I yelled. "Come back and get a beer." But apparently he couldn't hear me. The music was very loud, and he was moving away from us at good speed.

"Good riddance," said my attorney. "We had a real freak on our hands. That boy made me nervous. Did you see his eyes?" He was still laughing. "Jesus," he said. "This is good medicine!"

I opened the door and reeled around to the driver's side. "Move over," I said. "I'll drive. We have to get out of California before that kid finds a cop."

"Shit, that'll be hours," said my attorney. "He's a hundred miles from anywhere."

"So are we," I said.

"Let's turn around and drive back to the Polo Lounge," he said. "They'll never look for us there."

I ignored him. "Open the tequila," I yelled as the wind-scream took over again; I stomped on the accelerator as we hurtled back onto the highway. Moments later he leaned over with a map. "There's a place up ahead called Mescal Springs," he said. "As your attorney, I advise you to stop and take a swim."

I shook my head. "It's absolutely imperative that we get to the Mint Hotel before the deadline for press registration," I said. "Otherwise, we might have to pay for our suite."

He nodded. "But let's forget that bullshit about the American Dream," he said. "The important thing is the Great Samoan Dream." He was rummaging around in the kit-bag. "I think it's about time to chew up a blotter," he said. "That cheap mescaline wore off a long time ago, and I don't know if I can stand the smell of that goddamn ether any longer."

"I like it," I said. "We should soak a towel with the stuff and then put it down on the floorboard by the accelerator, so the fumes will rise up in my face all the way to Las Vegas."

He was turning the tape cassette over. The radio was screaming: "Power to the People --Right On!" John Lennon's political song, ten years too late. "That poor fool should have stayed where he was," said my attorney. "Punks like that just get in the way when they try to be serious."

"Speaking of serious," I said, "I think it's about time to get into the ether and the cocaine."

"Forget ether," he said. "Let's save it for soaking down the rug in the suite. But here's this. Your half of the sunshine blotter. Just chew it up like baseball gum."

I took the blotter and ate it. My attorney was now fumbling with the salt shaker containing the cocaine. Opening it. Spilling it. Then screaming and grabbing at the air, as our fine white dust blew up and out across the desert highway. A very expensive little twister rising up from the Great Red Shark. "Oh, jesus!" he moaned. "Did you see what God just did to us?"

"God didn't do that!" I shouted. "You did it. You're a fucking narcotics agent! I was on to your stinking act from the start, you pig!"

"You better be careful," he said. And suddenly he was waving a fat black 0.357 magnum at me. One of those snub-nosed Colt Pythons with the beveled cylinder. "Plenty of vultures out here," he said. "They'll pick your bones clean before morning."

"You whore," I said. "When we get to Las Vegas I'll have you chopped into hamburger. What do you think the Drug Bund will do when I show up with a Samoan narcotics agent?"

"They'll kill us both," he said. "Savage Henry knows who I am. Shit, I'm your attorney." He burst into wild laughter. "You're full of acid, you fool. It'll be a goddamn miracle if we can get to the hotel and check in before you turn into a wild animal. Are you ready for that? Checking into a Vegas hotel under a phony name with intent to commit capital fraud and a head full of acid?" He was laughing again, then he jammed his nose down toward the salt shaker, aiming the thin green roll of a $20 bill straight into what was left of the powder.

"How long do we have?" I said.

"Maybe thirty more minutes," he replied. "As your attorney I advise you to drive at top speed."

Las Vegas was just up ahead. I could see the strip/hotel skyline looming up through the blue desert ground-haze: The Sahara, the landmark, the Americana and the ominous Thunderbird --a cluster of grey rectangles in the distance, rising out of the cactus.

Thirty minutes. It was going to be very close. The objective was the big tower of the Mint Hotel, downtown --and if we didn't get there before we lost all control, there was also the Nevada State prison upstate in Carson City. I had been there once, but only for a talk with the prisoners --and I didn't want to go back, for any reason at all. So there was really no choice: We would have to run the gauntlet, and acid be damned. Go through all the official gibberish, get the car into the hotel garage, work out on the desk clerk, deal with the bellboy, sign in for the press passes --all of it bogus, totally illegal, a fraud on its face, but of course it would have to be done.

Kill the Body and the Head Will Die

This line appears in my notebook, for some reason. Perhaps some connection with Joe Frazier. Is he still alive? Still able to talk? I watched that fight in Seattle --horribly twisted about four seats down the aisle from the Governor. A very painful experience in every way, a proper end to the sixties: Tim Leary a prisoner of Eldridge Cleaver in Algeria, Bob Dylan clipping coupons in Greenwich Village, both Kennedys murdered by mutants, Owsley folding napkins on Terminal Island, and finally Cassius/Ali belted incredibly off his pedestal by a human hamburger, a man on the verge of death. Joe Frazier, like Nixon, had finally prevailed for reasons that people like me refused to understand --at least not out loud.

... But that was some other era, burned out and long gone from the brutish realities of this foul year of Our Lord, 1971. A lot of things had changed in those years. And now I was in Las Vegas as the motor sports editor of this fine slick magazine that had sent me out here in the Great Red Shark for some reason that nobody claimed to understand. "Just check it out," they said, "and we'll take it from there..."

Indeed. Check it out. But when we finally arrived at the Mint Hotel my attorney was unable to cope artfully with the registration procedure. We were forced to stand in line with all the others --which proved to be extremely difficult under the circumstances. I kept telling myself: "Be quiet, be calm, say nothing. .. speak only when spoken to: name, rank and press affiliation, nothing else, ignore this terrible drug, pretend it's not happening. ."

There is no way to explain the terror I felt when I finally lunged up to the clerk and began babbling. All my well-rehearsed lines fell apart under that woman's stoney glare. "Hi there," I said. "My name is. . . ah, Raoul Duke. . . yes, on the list, that's for sure. Free lunch, final wisdom, total coverage. . . why not? I have my attorney with me and I realize of course that his name is not on the list, but we must have that suite, yes, this man is actually my driver. We brought this Red Shark all the way from the Strip and now it's time for the desert, right? Yes. Just check the list and you'll see. Don't worry. What's the score here? What's next?"

The woman never blinked. "Your room's not ready yet," she said. "But there's somebody looking for you."

"No!" I shouted. "Why? We haven't done anything yet!" My legs felt rubbery. I gripped the desk and sagged toward her as she held out the envelope, but I refused to accept it. The woman's face was changing: swelling, pulsing. .. horrible green jowls and fangs jutting out, the face of a Moray Eel! Deadly poison! I lunged backwards into my attorney, who gripped my arm as he reached out to take the note. "I'll handle this," he said to the Moray woman. "This man has a bad heart, but I have plenty of medicine. My name is Doctor Gonzo. Prepare our suite at once. We'll be in the bar."

The woman shrugged as he led me away. In a town full of bedrock crazies, nobody even notices an acid freak. We struggled through the crowded lobby and found two stools at the bar. My attorney ordered two cuba libres with beer and mescal on the side, then he opened the envelope. "Who's Lacerda?" he asked. "He's waiting for us in a room on the twelfth floor."

I couldn't remember. Lacerda? The name rang a bell, but I couldn't concentrate. Terrible things were happening all around us. Right next to me a huge reptile was gnawing on a woman's neck, the carpet was a blood-soaked sponge --impossible to walk on it, no footing at all. "Order some golf shoes," I whispered. "Otherwise, we'll never get out of this place alive. You notice these lizards don't have any trouble moving around in this muck --that's because they have claws on their feet."

"Lizards?" he said. "If you think we're in trouble now, wait till you see what's happening in the elevators." He took off his Brazilian sunglasses and I could see he'd been crying. "I just went upstairs to see this man Lacerda," he said. "I told him we knew what he was up to. He says he's a photographer, but when I mentioned Savage Henry --well, that did it; he freaked. I could see it in his eyes. He knows we're onto him."

"Does he understand we have magnums?" I said.

"No. But I told him we had a Vincent Black Shadow. That scared the piss out of him."

"Good," I said. "But what about our room? And the golf shoes? We're right in the middle of a fucking reptile zoo! And somebody's giving booze to these goddamn things! It won't be long before they tear us to shreds. Jesus, look at the floor! Have you ever seen so much blood? How many have they killed already?" I pointed across the room to a group that seemed to be staring at us. "Holy shit, look at that bunch over there! They've spotted us!"

"That's the press table," he said. "That's where you have to sign in for our credentials. Shit, let's get it over with. You handle that, and I'll get the room."

Back Door Beauty... & Finally a Bit of Serious Drag Racing on the Strip

Sometime around midnight my attorney wanted coffee. He had been vomiting fairly regularly as we drove around the Strip, and the right flank of the Whale was badly streaked. We were idling at a stoplight in front of the Silver Slipper beside a big blue Ford with Oklahoma plates. . . . two hoggish-looking couples in the car, probably cops from Muskogee using the Drug Conference to give their wives a look at Vegas. They looked like they'd just beaten Caesar's Palace for about $33 at the blackjack tables, and now they were headed for the Circus-Circus to whoop it up. . .

... but suddenly, they found themselves next to a white Cadillac convertible all covered with vomit and a 300-pound Samoan in a yellow fishnet T-shirt yelling at them:

"Hey there! You folks want to buy some heroin?"

No reply. No sign of recognition. They'd been warned about this kind of crap: Just ignore it.

"Hey, honkies!" my attorney screamed. "Goddamnit, I'm serious! I want to sell you some pure fuckin' smack!" He was leaning out of the car, very, close to them. But still nobody answered. I glanced over, very briefly, and saw four middle-American faces frozen with shock, staring straight ahead.

We were in the middle lane. A quick left turn would be illegal. We would have to go straight ahead when the light changed, then escape at the next corner. I waited, tapping the accelerator nervously...

My attorney was losing control: "Cheap heroin!" he was shouting. "This is the real stuff! You won't get hooked! God-damnit, I know what I have here!" He whacked on the side of the car, as if to get their attention ... but they wanted no part of us.

"You folks never talked to a vet before?" said my attorney. "I just got back from Veet Naam. This is scag, folks! Pure scag!"

Suddenly the light changed and the Ford bolted off like a rocket. I stomped on the accelerator and stayed right next to them for about two hundred yards, watching for cops in the mirror while my attorney kept screaming at them: "Shoot! Fuck! Scag! Blood! Heroin! Rape! Cheap! Communist! Jab it right into your fucking eyeballs?"

We were approaching the Circus-Circus at high speed and the Oklahoma car was veering left, trying to muscle into the turn lane. I stomped the Whale into passing gear and we ran fender to fender for a moment. He wasn't up to hitting me; there was horror in his eyes.

The man in the back seat lost control of himself... lunging across his wife and snarling wildly: "You dirty bastards! Pull over and I'll kill you! God damn you! You bastards!" He seemed ready to leap out the window and into our car, crazy with rage. Luckily the Ford was a two-door. He couldn't get out.

We were coming up to the next stoplight and the Ford was still trying to move left. We were both running full bore. I glanced over my shoulder and saw that we'd left other traffic far behind; there was a big opening to the right. So I mashed on the brake, hurling my attorney against the dashboard, and in the instant the Ford surged ahead I cut across his tail and zoomed into a side-street. A sharp right turn across three lanes of traffic. But it worked. We left the Ford stalled in the middle of the intersection, hung in the middle of a screeching left turn. With a little luck, he'd be arrested for reckless driving.

My attorney was laughing as we careened in low gear, with the lights out, through a dusty tangle of back streets behind the Desert Inn. "Jesus Christ," he said. "Those Okies were getting excited. That guy in the back seat was trying to bite me! Shit, he was frothing at the mouth." He nodded solemnly. "I should have maced the fucker... a criminal psychotic, total breakdown... you never know when they're likely to explode."

I swung the Whale into a turn that seemed to lead out of the maze --but instead of skidding, the bastard almost rolled.

"Holy shit!" my attorney screamed. "Turn on the fucking lights!" He was clinging to the top of the windshield... and suddenly he was doing the Big Spit again, leaning over the side.

I refused to slow down until I was sure nobody was following us --especially that Oklahoma Ford: those people were definitely dangerous, at least until they calmed down. Would they report that terrible quick encounter to the police? Probably not. It had happened too fast, with no witnesses, and the odds were pretty good that nobody would believe them anyway. The idea that two heroin pushers in a white Cadillac convertible would be dragging up and down the Strip, abusing total strangers at stoplights, was prima facie absurd. Not even Sonny Listen ever got that far out of control.

We made another turn and almost rolled again. The Coupe de Ville is not your ideal machine for high speed cornering in residential neighborhoods. The handling is very mushy. . . unlike the Red Shark, which had responded very nicely to situations requiring the quick four-wheel drift. But the Whale --instead of cutting loose at the critical moment --had a tendency to dig in, which accounted for that sickening "here we go" sensation.

At first I thought it was only because the tires were soft, so I took it into the Texaco station next to the Flamingo and had the tires pumped up to fifty pounds each --which alarmed the attendant, until I explained that these were "experimental" tires.

But fifty pounds each didn't help the cornering, so I went back a few hours later and told him I wanted to try seventy-five. He shook his head nervously. "Not me," he said, handing me the air hose. "Here. They're your tires. You do it."

"What's wrong?" I asked. "You think they can't take seventy-five?"

He nodded, moving away as I stooped to deal with the left front. "You're damn right," he said, "Those tires want twenty-eight in the front and thirty-two in the rear. Hell, fifty's dangerous, but seventy-five is crazy --They'll explode!"

I shook my head and kept filling the left front. "I told you," I said. "Sandoz laboratories designed these tires. They're special. I could load them up to a hundred."

"God almighty!" he groaned. "Don't do that here."

"Not today," I replied. "I want to see how they corner with seventy-five."

He chuckled. "You won't even get to the corner, Mister."

"We'll see," I said, moving around to the rear with the air hose. In truth, I was nervous. The two front ones were tighter than snare drums; they felt like teak wood when I tapped on them with the rod. But what the hell? I thought. If they explode, so what? It's not often that a man gets a chance to run terminal experiments on a virgin Cadillac and four brand-new $80 tires. For all I knew, the thing might start cornering like a Lotus Elan. If not, all I had to do was call the V.I.P agency and have another one delivered. .. maybe threaten them with a lawsuit because all four tires had exploded on me, while driving in heavy traffic. Demand an Eldorado, next time, with four Michelin Xs. And put it all on the card. .. charge it to the St. Louis Browns.

As it turned out, the Whale behaved very nicely with the altered tire pressures. The ride was a trifle rough; I could feel every pebble on the highway, like being on roller skates in a gravel pit. .. but the thing began cornering in a very stylish manner, very much like driving a motorcycle at top speed in a hard rain: one slip and Zang, over the high side, cartwheeling across the landscape with your head in your hands.

About thirty minutes after our brush with the Okies we pulled into an all-night diner on the Tonopah highway, on the outskirts of a mean scag ghetto called "North Las Vegas." Which is actually outside the city limits of Vegas proper. North Vegas is where you go when you've fucked up once too often on the Strip, and when you're not even welcome in the cut-rate downtown places around Casino Center.

This is Nevada's answer to East St. Louis --a slum and a graveyard, last stop before permanent exile to Ely or Winnemuca. North Vegas is where you go if you're a hooker turning forty and the syndicate men on the Strip decide you're no longer much good for business out there with the high rollers. .. or if you're a pimp with bad credit at the Sands. .. or what they still call, in Vegas, "a hophead." This can mean almost anything from a mean drunk to a junkie, but in terms of commercial acceptability, it means you're finished in all the right places.

The big hotels and casinos pay a lot of muscle to make sure the high rollers don't have even momentary hassles with "undesirables." Security in a place like Caesar's Palace is super tense and strict. Probably a third of the people on the floor at any given time are either shills or watchdogs. Public drunks and known pickpockets are dealt with instantly --hustled out to the parking lot by Secret Service-type thugs and given a quick, impersonal lecture about the cost of dental work and the difficulties of trying to make a living with two broken arms.

The "high side" of Vegas is probably the most closed society west of Sicily --and it makes no difference, in terms of the day to day life-style of the place, whether the Man at the Top is Lucky Luciano or Howard Hughes. In an economy where Tom Jones can make $75,000 a week for two shows a night at Caesar's, the palace guard is indispensable, and they don't care who signs their paychecks. A gold mine like Vegas breeds its own army, like any other gold mine. Hired muscle tends to accumulate in fast layers around money/power poles. . . and big money, in Vegas, is synonymous with the Power to protect it.

So once you get blacklisted on the Strip, for any reason at all, you either get out of town or retire to nurse your act along, on the cheap, in the shoddy limbo of North Vegas. . . out there with the gunsels, the hustlers, the drug cripples and all the other losers. North Vegas, for instance, is where you go if you need to score smack before midnight with no references.

But if you're looking for cocaine, and you're ready up front with some bills and the proper code words, you want to stay on the Strip and get next to a well-connected hooker, which will take at least one bill for starters.

And so much for all that. We didn't fit the mold. There is no formula for finding yourself in Vegas with a white Cadillac full of drugs and nothing to mix with properly. The Fillmore style never quite caught on here. People like Sinatra and Dean Martin are still considered "far out" in Vegas. The "underground newspaper" here --the Las Vegas Free Press --is a cautious echo of The People's World, or maybe the National Guardian.

A week in Vegas is like stumbling into a Time Warp, a regression to the late fifties. Which is wholly understandable when you see the people who come here, the Big Spenders from places like Denver and Dallas. Along with National Elks Club conventions (no niggers allowed) and the All-West Volunteer Sheepherders' Rally. These are people who go absolutely crazy at the sight of an old hooker stripping down to her pasties and prancing out on the runway to the big-beat sound of a dozen 50-year-old junkies kicking out the jams on "September Song."

It was some time around three when we pulled into the parking lot of the North Vegas diner. I was looking for a copy of the Los Angeles Times, for news of the outside world, but a quick glance at the newspaper racks made a bad joke of that notion. They don't need the Times in North Vegas. No news is good news.

"Fuck newspapers," said my attorney. "What we need right now is coffee."

I agreed, but I stole a copy of the Vegas Sun anyway. It was yesterday's edition, but I didn't care. The idea of entering a coffee shop without a newspaper in my hands made me nervous. There was always the Sports Section; get wired on the baseball scores and pro-football rumors: "Bart Starr Beaten by Thugs in Chicago Tavern; Packers Seek Trade"... "Namath Quits Jets to be Governor of Alabama"... and a speculative piece on page 46 about a rookie sensation named Harrison Fire, out of Grambling: runs the hundred in nine flat, 344 pounds and still growing.

"This man Fire has definite promise," says the coach. "Yesterday, before practice, he destroyed a Greyhound Bus with his bare hands, and last night he killed a subway. He's a natural for color T.V. I'm not one to play favorites, but it looks like we'll have to make room for him."

Indeed. There is always room on T.V for a man who can beat people to jelly in nine flat... But not many of these were gathered, on this night, in the North Star Coffee Lounge. We had the place to ourselves --which proved to be fortunate, because we'd eaten two more pellets of mescaline on the way over, and the effects were beginning to manifest.

My attorney was no longer vomiting, or even acting sick. He ordered coffee with the authority of a man long accustomed to quick service. The waitress had the appearance of a very old hooker who had finally found her place in life. She was definitely in charge here, and she eyed us with obvious disapproval as we settled onto our stools.

I wasn't paying much attention. The North Star Coffee Lounge seemed like a fairly safe haven from our storms. There are some you go into --in this line of work --that you know will be heavy. The details don't matter. All you know, for sure, is that your brain starts humming with brutal vibes as you approach the front door. Something wild and evil is about to happen; and it's going to involve you.

But there was nothing in the atmosphere of the North Star to put me on my guard. The waitress was passively hostile, but I was accustomed to that. She was a big woman. Not fat, but large in every way, long sinewy arms and a brawler's jawbone. A burned-out caricature of Jane Russell: big head of dark hair, face slashed with lipstick and a 48 Double-E chest that was probably spectacular about twenty years ago when she might have been a Mama for the Hell's Angels chapter in Berdoo... but now she was strapped up in a giant pink elastic brassiere that showed like a bandage through the sweaty white rayon of her uniform.

Probably she was married to somebody, but I didn't feel like speculating. All I wanted from her, tonight, was a cup of black coffee and a 29¢ hamburger with pickles and onions. No hassles, no talk --just a place to rest and re-group. I wasn't even hungry.

My attorney had no newspaper or anything else to compel his attention. So he focused, out of boredom, on the waitress. She was taking our orders like a robot when he punched through her crust with a demand for "two glasses of ice water --with ice."

My attorney drank his in one long gulp, then asked for another. I noticed that the waitress seemed tense.

Fuck it, I thought. I was reading the funnies.

About ten minutes later, when she brought the hamburgers, I saw my attorney hand her a napkin with something printed on it. He did it very casually, with no expression at all on his face. But I knew, from the vibes, that our peace was about to be shattered.

"What was that?" I asked him.

He shrugged, smiling vaguely at the waitress who was standing about ten feet away, at the end of the counter, keeping her back to us while she pondered the napkin. Finally she turned and stared... then she stepped resolutely forward and tossed the napkin at my attorney.

"What is this?" she snapped.

"A napkin," said my attorney.

There was a moment of nasty silence, then she began screaming: "Don't give me that bullshit! I know what it means! You goddamn fat pimp bastard!"

My attorney picked up the napkin, looked at what he'd written, then dropped it back on the counter. "That's the name of a horse I used to own," he said calmly. "What's wrong with you?"

"You sonofabitch!" she screamed. "I take a lot of shit in this space, but I sure as hell don't have to take it off a spic pimp!"

Jesus! I thought. What's happening? I was watching the woman's hands, hoping she wouldn't pick up anything sharp or heavy. I picked up the napkin and read what the bastard had printed on it, in careful red letters: "Back Door Beauty?" The Question mark was emphasized.

The woman was screaming again: "Pay your bill and get the hell out! You want me to call the cops?"

I reached for my wallet, but my attorney was already on his feet, never taking his eyes off the woman... then he reached under his shirt, not into his pocket, coming up suddenly with the Gerber Mini-Magnum, a nasty silver blade which the waitress seemed to understand instantly.

She froze: her eyes fixed about six feet down the aisle and lifted the receiver off the hook of the pay phone. He sliced it off, then brought the receiver back to his stool and sat down.

The waitress didn't move. I was stupid with shock, not knowing whether to run or start laughing.

"How much is that lemon meringue pie?" my attorney asked. His voice was casual, as if he had just wandered into the place and was debating what to order.

"Thirty-five cents!" the woman blurted. Her eyes were turgid with fear, but her brain was apparently functioning on some basic motor survival level.

My attorney laughed. "I mean the whole pie," he said.

She moaned.

My attorney put a bill on the counter. "Let's say it's five dollars," he said. OK

She nodded, still frozen, watching my attorney as he walked around the counter and got the pie out of the display case. I prepared to leave.

The waitress was clearly in shock. The sight of the blade, jerked out in the heat of an argument, had apparently triggered bad memories. The glazed look in her eyes said her throat had been cut. She was still in the grip of paralysis when we left.

Parti

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Random House, 1972

Last Tango in Vegas: Fear and Loathing in the Near Room

Muhammad Ali Bites the Bullet, Leon Spinks Croaks a Legend... Sting Like a Butterfly, Float Like a Bee... Wild Notes of a Weird Cornerman

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.

--Muhammad Ali, 1967 Life had been good to Pat Patterson for so long that he'd almost forgotten what it was like to be anything but a free-riding, first-class passenger on a flight near the top of the world.

It is a long, long way from the frostbitten midnight streets around Chicago's Clark and Division to the deep-rug hallways of the Park Lane Hotel on Central Park South in Manhattan. .. But Patterson had made that trip in high style, with stops along the way in London, Paris, Manila, Kinshasa, Kuala Lumpur, Tokyo and almost everywhere else in the world on that circuit where the menus list no prices and you need at least three pairs of $100 sunglasses just to cope with the T.V lights every time you touch down at an airport for another frenzied press conference and then a ticker-tape parade along the route to the Presidential Palace and another princely reception.

That is Muhammad Ali's world, an orbit so high, a circuit so fast and strong and with rarefied air so thin that only "The Champ," "The Greatest," and a few close friends have unlimited breathing rights. Anybody who can sell this act for $5 million an hour all over the world is working a vein somewhere between magic and madness. . . And now, on this warm winter night in Manhattan, Pat Patterson was not entirely sure which way the balance was tipping. The main shock had come three weeks ago in Las Vegas, when he'd been forced to sit passively at ringside and watch the man whose life he would gladly have given his own to protect, under any other circumstances, take a savage and wholly unexpected beating in front of 5000 screaming banshees at the Hilton Hotel and something like 60 million stunned spectators on national/network T.V. The Champ was no longer The Champ: a young brute named Leon Spinks had settled that matter, and not even Muhammad seemed to know just exactly what that awful defeat would mean --for himself or anyone else; not even for his new wife and children, or the handful of friends and advisers who'd been working that high white vein right beside him for so long that they acted and felt like his family.

It was definitely an odd lot, ranging from solemn Black Muslims like Herbert Muhammad, his manager --to shrewd white hipsters like Harold Conrad, his executive spokesman, and Irish Gene Kilroy, Ali's version of Hamilton Jordon: a sort of all-purpose administrative assistant, logistics manager and chief troubleshooter. Kilroy and Conrad are The Champ's answer to Ham and Jody--but mad dogs and wombats will roam the damp streets of Washington, babbling perfect Shakespearean English, before Jimmy Carter comes up with his version of Drew "Bundini" Brown, Ali's alter ego and court wizard for so long now that he can't really remember being anything else. Carter's thin-ice sense of humor would not support the weight of a zany friend like Bundini. It would not even support the far more discreet weight of a court jester like J.F.K.'s Dave Powers, whose role in the White House was much closer to Bundini Brown's deeply personal friendship with Ali than Jordan's essentially political and deceptively hard-nosed relationship with Jimmy... and even Hamilton seems to be gaining weight by geometric progressions these days, and the time may be just about ripe for him to have a chat with the Holy Ghost and come out as a "born-again Christian."

That might make the nut for a while --at least through the 1980 reelection campaign --but not even Jesus could save Jordan from a fate worse than any hell he'd ever imagined if Jimmy Carter woke up one morning and read in the Washington Post that Hamilton had pawned the Great Presidential Seal for $500 in some fashionable Georgetown hockshop. .. eyes for collateral.

Indeed. . . and this twisted vision would seem almost too bent for print if Bundini hadn't already raised at least the raw possibility of it by once pawning Muhammad Ali's "Heavyweight Champion of the World" gold & jewel studded belt for $500 --just an overnight loan from a friend, he said later; but the word got out and Bundini was banished from The Family and the whole entourage for eighteen months when The Champ was told what he'd done.

That heinous transgression is shrouded in a mix of jive-shame and real black humor at this point: The Champ, after all, had once hurled his Olympic gold medal into the Ohio River, in a fit of pique at some alleged racial insult in Louisville --and what was the difference between a gold medal and a jewel-studded belt? They were both symbols of a "white devil's" world that Ali, if not Bundini, was already learning to treat with a very calculated measure of public disrespect. . . What they shared, far beyond a very real friendship, was a shrewd kind of street-theater sense of how far out on that limb they could go, without crashing. Bundini has always had a finer sense than anyone else in The Family about where The Champ wanted to go, the shifting winds of his instincts, and he has never been worried about things like Limits or Consequences. That was the province of others, like Conrad or Herbert. Drew B. has always known exactly which side he was on, and so has Cassius/Muhammad. Bundini is the man who came up with "Float like a Butterfly, Sting like a Bee," and ever since then he has been as close to both Cassius Clay and Muhammad Ali as anyone else in the world.

Pat Patterson, by contrast, was a virtual newcomer to The Family. A 200-pound, forty-year-old black cop, he was a veteran of the Chicago Vice Squad before he hired on as Ali's personal bodyguard. And, despite the total devotion and relentless zeal he brought to his responsibility for protecting The Champ at all times from any kind of danger, hassles or even minor inconvenience, six years on the job had caused him to understand, however reluctantly, that there were at least a few people who could come and go as they pleased through the wall of absolute security he was supposed to maintain around The Champ.

Bundini and Conrad were two of these. They have been around for so long that they had once called the boss "Cassius," or even "Cash" --while Patterson had never addressed him as anything but "Muhammad," or "Champ." He had come aboard at high tide, as it were, and even though he was now in charge of everything from carrying Ali's money --in a big roll of $100 bills --to protecting his life with an ever-present chrome-plated revolver and the lethal fists and feet of a black belt with a license to kill, it had always galled him a bit to know that Muhammad's capricious instincts and occasionally perverse sense of humor made it certifiably impossible for any one bodyguard, or even four, to protect him from danger in public. His moods were too unpredictable: one minute he would be in an almost catatonic funk, crouched in the back seat of a black Cadillac limousine with an overcoat over his head --and then, with no warning at all, he would suddenly be out of the car at a red light somewhere in the Bronx, playing stickball in the street with a gang of teenage junkies. Patterson had learned to deal with The Champ's moods but he also knew that in any crowd around The Greatest there would be at least a few who felt the same way about Ali as they had about Malcolm X or Martin Luther King.

There was a time, shortly after his conversion to the Black Muslim religion in the mid-Sixties, when Ali seemed to emerge as a main spokesman for what the Muslims were then perfecting as the State of the Art in racial paranoia --which seemed a bit heavy and not a little naive at the time, but which the White Devils moved quickly to justify.

Yes. But that is a very long story and we will get to it later. The only point we need to deal with right now is that Muhammad Ali somehow emerged from one of the meanest and most shameful ordeals any prominent American has ever endured as one of the few real martyrs of that goddamn wretched war in Vietnam and a sort of instant folk hero all over the world, except in the U.S.A.

That would come later...

The Spinks disaster in Vegas had been a terrible shock to The Family. They had all known it had to come sometime, but the scene had already been set and the papers already signed for that "sometime" --a $16 million purse and a mind-boggling, damn-the-cost television spectacle with Ali's old nemesis Ken Norton as the Bogyman, and one last king-hell payday for everybody. They were prepared, in the back of their hearts, for that one --but not for the cheap torpedo that blew their whole ship out of the water in Vegas for no payday at all. Leon Spinks crippled a whole industry in one hour on that fateful Wednesday evening in Las Vegas --The Muhammad Ali Industry, which has churned out roughly $56 million in over fifteen years and at least twice or three times that much for the people who kept the big engine running all this time. (It would take Bill Walton 112 years on an I knew it was too close for comfort. I told him to stop fooling around. He was giving up too many rounds. But I heard the decision and I thought, 'Well, what are you going to do? That's it. I've prepared myself for this day for a long time. I conditioned myself for it. I was young with him and now I feel old with him.'

--Angelo Dundee, Ali's trainer

Dundee was not the only person who was feeling old with Muhammad Ali on that cold Wednesday night in Las Vegas. Somewhere around the middle of the fifteenth round a whole generation went over the hump as the last Great Prince of the Sixties went out in a blizzard of pain, shock and angry confusion so total that it was hard to even know how to feel, much less what to say, when the thing was finally over. The last shot came just at the final bell, when "Crazy Leon" whacked Ali with a savage overhand right that almost dropped The Champ in his tracks and killed the last glimmer of hope for the patented "miracle finish" that Angelo Dundee knew was his fighter's only chance. As Muhammad wandered back to his corner about six feet in front of me, the deal had clearly gone down.

The decision was anticlimactic. Leon Spinks, a twenty-four-year-old brawler from St. Louis with only seven professional fights on his record, was the new Heavyweight Boxing Champion of the World. And the roar of the pro-Spinks crowd was the clearest message of all: that uppity nigger from Louisville had finally got what was coming to him. For fifteen long years he had mocked everything they all thought they stood for: changing his name, dodging the draft, beating the best they could hurl at him. But now, thank God, they were seeing him finally go down.

Six presidents have lived in the White House in the time of Muhammad Ali. Dwight Eisenhower was still rapping golf balls around the Oval Office when Cassius Clay Junior. won a gold medal for the U.S. as a light-heavy-weight in the 1960 Olympics and then turned pro and won his first fight for money against a journeyman heavyweight named Tunney Hunsaker in Louisville on October 29th of that same year.

Less than four years later and almost three months to the day after John Fitzgerald Kennedy was murdered in Dallas, Cassius Clay --the "Louisville Lip" by then --made a permanent enemy of every "boxing expert" in the Western world by beating World Heavyweight Champion Sonny Liston, the meanest of the mean, so badly that Liston refused to come out of his corner for the seventh round.

That was fourteen years ago. Jesus! And it seems like fourteen months.

Why?

Brain damage.

The Real Story: A Memo With Nails in Both Nostrils... by Raoul Duke, Sports Editor

This story is badly bogged down, and I think I know the reason: Dr. Thompson has been on it so long --in the belly of the beast, as it were --that he has lost all functional contact with his sense of humor; and where I come from they call that condition "insanity."

But there are a lot of high-powered fools where I come from, and it's been about fifteen years since I took any one of them seriously. And in fact it was Thompson himself who originally made that connection between humor and sanity; which changes nothing, because we come from the same place --from the elm-shaded, white-frame "Highlands" of Louisville, Kentucky, about halfway between the Cassius Clay residence down on South Fourth Street and the homes of the men who originally launched Cassius Clay Junior. on his long wild ride on the Great Roller-Coaster of professional boxing and paraprofessional show business. They lived out in Indian Hills or on Mockingbird Valley Road near the Louisville Country Club, and they owned every bank in the city --along with both newspapers, all the radio stations that white folks took seriously, and at least half the major distilleries and tobacco companies that funded the municipal tax base.

They knew a good thing when they saw one, and in the year of our Lord 1960 the good thing they saw was an eighteen-year-old local Negro boxer, a big, fast and impressively intelligent young light-heavyweight named Cassius Clay Junior., who had just won a gold medal for the U.S.A. in the 1960 Olympics. .. So ten of these gents got together and made the boy an offer he couldn't refuse: they were willing to take a long risk on him, they said, just as soon as he gained a few pounds and decided to fight professionally as the new morning star among heavyweights.

They would finance his move for the title in a division that Floyd Patterson and his crafty manager, Cus D'Amato, had dominated for so long --by means of a new gimmick known as "closed-circuit T.V" --that a whole generation of what might have been promising young heavyweight challengers had died on the vine while they waited in line for a chance to fight Patterson, who didn't really want to fight anybody.

Floyd was "The Champ" and he used that fact as leverage as Richard Nixon would later learn to retreat behind the odious truth that "I am, you know, The President."

Indeed... and they were both right for a while; but bad karma tends to generate its own kind of poison, which --like typhoid chickens and rotten bread cast out on the waters --will usually come home to either roost, fester or mutate very close to its own point of origin.

Richard Nixon abused karma, chickens and even bread for so long that they all came home at once and totally destroyed him. . . And Floyd Patterson's neurotic, anal-compulsive reluctance to get into the ring with anything at all with two arms and legs under thirty was what eventually created the vacuum that hatched Sonny Liston, an aging ex-con who twice turned poor Floyd to jelly, just by climbing into the ring.

... Hot damn! We may be approaching a heinous new record for mixed metaphors in this thing; the rats have swarmed into the belfry, and anything sane that survives will be hurled out to sea and stomped down like a dwarf in a shitrain...

Why not?

It was never my intention to make any real sense of this memo. The Sports Desk has never loved logic; mainly because there is no money in it --and pro sports without money is like a Vincent Black Shadow with no gas. Dumb greed is the backbone of all sports, except maybe college wrestling --which may or may not be a good & healthy thing for some people, in places like Kansas and Idaho, but not here. Those knotty little monsters can write their own stories, and toss them in over the transom. . . If we have enough room or maybe a bad check for a half-page ad from the Shotgun News or the "Billy Beer" people, that's when we'll focus the whole twisted energy of the Sports Desk on a college wrestling feature:

Utah Champ Drogo Pins Three-Armed Cowboy for West Slope Title in Nine-Hour Classic

How's that for a stylish headline?

Well. .. shucks; let's try it again, from the other side of the fence:

Crippled Cowboy Challenger Falls Short in Mat Finals; Angry Fans Maul Ref as Match Ends; Huge Drogo Gains Split Win

Jesus! I could get a job writing sports heads for the Daily News with that kind of feel for the word count... Right, with a big salary too, in the core of the Big Apple...

But that is not what we had in mind here, is it?

No. We were talking of Sport, and Big Money. Which gets us back to pro boxing, the most shameless racket of all. It is more a Spectacle than a Sport, one of the purest forms of atavistic endeavor still extant in a world that only big-time politicians feel a need to call "civilized." Nobody who has ever sat in a front-row, ringside seat less than six feet just below and away from the sickening thumps and cracks and groans of two desperate, adrenaline-crazed giants who are whipping and pounding each other like two pit bulls in a death battle will ever forget what it felt like to be there.

No T.V camera or any other kind will ever convey the almost four-dimensional reality of total, frenzied violence of seeing, hearing and almost feeling the sudden Whack of Leon Spinks' thinly padded fist against Muhammad Ali's cheekbone so close in front of your own face that it is hard to keep from flinching and trying to duck backward --while a whole row of $200-a-seat ringsiders right behind you are leaping and stomping and howling for more showers of flying sweat to fall down on them, more droplets of human blood to rain down on the sleeves and tailored shoulders of their tan cashmere sport coats. .. and then, with Leon still pounding and the sweat and blood still flying, some fist-failing geek screaming over your shoulder loses his balance and cracks you between the shoulder blades with a shot that sends you reeling into a cop hanging on to the ring apron --who reacts with a vicious elbow to your chest, and the next thing you see is shoes bouncing inches in front of your face on a concrete floor.

"The horror! The horror!... Exterminate all the brutes!"

Mistah Kurtz said that but the smart money called him a joker. . . Ho, ho, good ole Kurtz, that Prussian sense of humor will zing you every time.

I said that. We were sitting in a sauna at the health spa in the Las Vegas Hilton --me and my friend Bob Arum, the sinister promoter --when all of a sudden the redwood door swung open and in comes Leon Spinks.

"Hi there, Leon," said Arum.

Leon grinned and tossed his towel across the room at the stove full of hot rocks. "What's happenin', jewboy?" he replied. "I heard you was too stoned to be foolin' around down here with us health freaks."

Arum turned beet red and moved off toward the corner.

Leon laughed again, and reached for his teeth. "These damn things get hot," he snarled. "Who needs these goddamn teeth, anyway."

He turned to laugh at Arum again, and right then I saw my chance. I stood up in a sort of linebacker's crouch and hooked him hard in the ribs. He fell back on the hot rocks and I hooked him again.

"O my God!" Arum shrieked. "I heard something break!"

Leon looked up from where he was sitting on the duck-board floor, his face warped with pain. "Well," he said slowly, "now we know you ain't deaf, Bob." He was leaning back on both hands, wincing with every breath as he slowly raised his eyes to glare at me.

"Real smart friends you got, Arum," he whispered, "but this one's mine, now." He winced again; every breath was painful and he spoke very slowly. "Call my brother Michael," he said to Arum. "Tell him to fix a hook on this honky bastard's head and hang him up alongside the big bag, for when I get well."

Arum was kneeling beside him now, gently probing his rib cage... And it was just about then I felt myself waking up; but instead of lying down in a bed, I suddenly realized that something ugly had happened. My first thought was that I'd passed out from the heat of the sauna: indeed, a quick trip to the Near Room and some dim memory of violence, but only as part of a dream...

Or. . . well. . . maybe not. As my head began to clear and Arum's face came into focus --his beady eyes, his trembling hands, the sweat squirting out of his pores --I realized that I was not lying down or coming out of a faint, but standing naked in the middle of a hot wooden cell and staring down like a zombie at --ye gods! --it was Leon Spinks!

And Bob Arum, his eyes bulged out like a frog's, was massaging Leon's chest. I stared for a moment, then recoiled with shock. . . No, I thought, this can't be happening!

But it was. I was wide-awake now, and I knew this hideous thing was actually happening, right in front of my eyes. Arum was moaning and trembling, while his hands stroked the challenger's chest. Leon was leaning back with his eyes closed, his teeth clenched, and his whole body stiff as a corpse.

Neither one of them seemed to notice my recovery --from what was later diagnosed, by the nervous hotel doctor, as nothing more than a mild Acid Flashback. .. But I didn't learn that until later.

High Risk on the Low Road, New Boy on Queer Street. .. Five Million Dollars an Hour, Five Miles to the Terminal Hotel. .. The Devil and Pat Patterson. .. No Nigger Ever Called Me Hippie. ..

The Near Room

When he got in trouble in the ring, Ali imagined a door swung open and inside he could see neon, orange and green lights blinking, and bats blowing trumpets and alligators playing trombones, and he could hear snakes screaming. Weird masks and actors' clothes hung on the wall, and if he stepped across the sill and reached for them, he knew that he was committing himself to destruction.

--George Plimpton, Shadow Box

It was almost midnight when Pat Patterson got off the elevator and headed down the corridor toward 905, his room right next door to The Champ's. They had flown in from Chicago a few hours earlier and Muhammad had said he was tired and felt like sleeping. No midnight strolls down the block to the Plaza fountain, he promised, no wandering around the hotel or causing a scene in the lobby.

Beautiful, thought Patterson. No worries tonight. With Muhammad in bed and Veronica there to watch over him, Pat felt things were under control and he might even have time for a bit of refreshment downstairs, and then get a decent night's sleep for himself. The only conceivable problem was the volatile presence of Bundini and a friend, who had dropped by around ten for a chat with The Champ about his run for the Triple Crown. The family had been in a state of collective shock for two weeks or so after Vegas, but now it was the first week in March and they were eager to get the big engine cranked up for the return bout with Spinks in September. No contracts had been signed yet, and every sports-writer in New York seemed to be on the take from either Ken Norton or Don King or both. . . But none of that mattered, said Ali, because he and Leon had already agreed on the rematch, and by the end of this year he would be the first man in history to win the Heavyweight Championship of the World Three Times.

Patterson had left them whooping and laughing at each other, but only after securing a promise from Hal Conrad that he and Bundini leave early and let The Champ sleep. They were scheduled to tape a show with Dick Cavett the next day, then drive for three or four hours up into the mountains of eastern Pennsylvania to Ali's custom-built training camp at Deer Lake. Kilroy was getting the place ready for what Patterson and all the rest of The Family understood was going to be some very serious use. Ali had announced almost immediately after losing to Spinks in Vegas any talk of his "retiring from the ring was nonsense," and that soon he'd begin training for his rematch with Leon.

So the fat was in the fire: a second loss to Spinks would be even worse than the first --the end of the line for Ali, The Family, and in fact the whole Ali industry. No more paydays, no more limousines, no more suites and crab cocktails from room service in the world's most expensive hotels. For Pat Patterson and a lot of other people, another defeat by Spinks would mean the end of a whole way of life. And, worse yet, the first wave of public reaction to Ali's "comeback" announcement had been anything but reassuring. An otherwise sympathetic story in the Los Angeles Times described the almost universal reaction of the sporting press:

"There were smiles and a shaking of hands all around when the thirty-six-year-old ex-champion said after the fight last Wednesday night: 'I'll be back. I'll be the first man to win the heavyweight title three times.' But no one laughed out loud."

A touch of this doomsday thinking had even showed up in The Family. Dr. Ferdie Pacheco, who had been in The Champ's corner for every fight since he first won the title from Liston --except the last one --had gone on the Tom Snyder show and said that Muhammad was finished as a fighter, that he was a shadow of his former self, and that he (Pacheco) had done everything but beg Ali to retire even before the Spinks fight.

Pacheco had already been expelled from The Family for this heresy, but it had planted a seed of doubt that was hard to ignore. "The Doc" was no quack and he was also a personal friend; did he know something the others didn't? Was it even possible that The Champ was "washed up"? There was no way to think that by looking at him, or listening to him either. He looked sharp, talked sharp, and there was a calmness, a kind of muted intensity, in his confidence that made it sound almost understated.

Pat Patterson believed --or if he didn't, there was no way that even The Champ could guess it. The loyalty of those close to Muhammad Ali is so profound that it sometimes clouds their own vision. .. But Leon Spinks had swept those clouds away, and now it was time to get serious. No more show business, no more clowning. Now they had come to the crunch.

Pat Patterson had tried not to brood on these things, but every newspaper rack he'd come close to in Chicago, New York or anywhere else seemed to echo the baying of hounds on a blood scent. Every media voice in the country was poised for ultimate revenge on this Uppity Nigger who had laughed in their faces for so long that a whole generation of sportswriters had grown up in the shadow of a mocking dancing presence that most of them had never half-understood until now, when it seemed almost gone.

Even the rematch with Spinks was bogged down in the arcane politics of big-money boxing --and Pat Patterson, like all the others who had geared their lives to the fortunes of Muhammad Ali, understood that the rematch would have to be soon. Very soon. And The Champ would have to be ready this time --as he had not been ready in Vegas. There was no avoiding the memory of Sonny Liston's grim fate, after losing again to Ali in a fight that convinced even the "experts."

But Muhammad Ali was no Liston. There was magic in his head, as well as his fists and his feet --but time was not on his side, this time, and the only thing more important than slashing the Gordian Knot of boxing-industry politics that was already menacing the reality of a quick rematch with Spinks was the absolute necessity of making sure that The Champ would take this next fight as seriously as it was clearly going to be. A whole industry would be up for grabs --not to mention the fate of The Family --and the bizarre scenes of chaos and wild scrambling for position that had followed Spinks' first shocking upset would not be repeated if Ali lost the rematch.

Nobody was ready for Spinks' stunning victory in Vegas, but every power freak and leverage-monger with any real-life connection to boxing would be ready to go either way on this next one. There would be no more of this low-rent political bullshit about "recognition" by the World Boxing Council W.B.C or the World Boxing Association W.B.A if Ali lost the rematch with Leon --and no more big-money fights for Muhammad Ali, either. They would all be pushed over the brink that was already just a few steps in front of them --and no "comeback" would be likely, or even possible.

These things were among the dark shadows that Pat Patterson would rather not have been thinking about on that night in Manhattan as he walked down the corridor to his room in the Park Lane Hotel. The Champ had already convinced him that he would indeed be the first man in history to win the first Triple Crown in the history of heavyweight boxing --and Pat Patterson was far from alone in his conviction that Leon Spinks would be easy prey, next time, for a Muhammad Ali in top condition both mentally and physically. Spinks was vulnerable: the same crazy/mean style that made him dangerous also made him easy to hit. His hands were surprisingly fast, but his feet were as slow as Joe Frazier's and it was only the crafty coaching of his trainer, the ancient Sam Solomon, that had given him the early five-round edge in Las Vegas that Ali had refused to understand until he was so far behind that his only hope was a blazing last-minute assault and a knockout or at least a few knockdowns that he was too tired, in the end, to deliver.

Leon was dead on his feet in that savage fifteenth round --but so was Muhammad Ali, and that's why Spinks won the fight.

Yes. . . but that is no special secret and there will be plenty of time to deal with those questions of ego and strategy later on in this saga, if in fact we ever get there. The sun is up, the peacocks are screaming with lust, and this story is so far off the game plan that no hope of salvage exists at this time --or at least nothing less than a sweeping, all-points injunction by Judge Crater, who maintains an unlisted number so private that not even Bob Arum can reach him on short notice.

So we are left with the unhurried vision of Pat Patterson finally reaching the door of his room, number 905 in the Park Lane Hotel in Manhattan --and just as he pulls the room key out of his pocket on the way to a good night's sleep, his body goes suddenly stiff as he picks up the sound of raucous laughter and strange voices in room number 904.

Weird sounds from The Champ's suite. . . Impossible, but Pat Patterson knows he's stone sober and nowhere near deaf, so he drops his key back in his pocket and moves one step down the hallway, listening carefully now to these sounds he hopes are not really there. . . Hallucinations, bad nerves, almost anything but the sound of a totally unknown voice --and the voice of a "white devil," no doubt about that --from the room where Ali and Veronica are supposed to be sleeping peacefully. Bundini and Conrad had both promised to be gone at least an hour ago. . . But, no! Not this: not Bundini and Conrad and the voice of some stranger, too; along with the unmistakable sound of laughter from both The Champ and his wife. . . Not now, just when things were getting close to intolerably serious.

What was the meaning?

Pat Patterson knew what he had to do: he planted both feet in the rug in front of 904 and knocked. Whatever was going on would have to be cut short at once, and it was his job to do the cutting --even if he had to get rude with Bundini and Conrad.

Well. . . this next scene is so strange that not even the people who were part of it can recount exactly what happened. . . but it went more or less like this: Bundini and I had just emerged from a strategy conference in the bathroom when we heard the sudden sound of knocking on the door. Bundini waved us all into silence as Conrad slouched nervously against the wall below the big window that looked out on the snow-covered wasteland of Central Park; Veronica was sitting fully clothed on the king-size bed right next to Ali, who was stretched out and relaxed with the covers pulled up to his waist, wearing nothing at all except. . . Well, let's take it again from Pat Patterson's view from the doorway, when Bundini answered his knock:

The first thing he saw when the door opened was a white stranger with a can of beer in one hand and a lit cigarette in the other, sitting cross-legged on the bureau that faced The Champ's bed --a bad omen for sure and a thing to be dealt with at once at this ominous point in time; but the next thing Pat Patterson saw turned his face into spastic wax and caused his body to leap straight back toward the doorway like he'd just been struck by lightning.

His professional bodyguard's eyes had fixed on me just long enough to be sure I was passive and with both hands harmlessly occupied for at least the few seconds it would take him to sweep the rest of the room and see what was wrong with his Five-Million-Dollars-an-hour responsibility. . . and I could tell by the way he moved into the room and the look on his face that I was suddenly back at that point where any movement at all or even the blink of an eye could change my life forever. But I also knew what was coming and I recall a split second of real fear as Pat Patterson's drop- forged glance swept past me and over to the bed to Veronica and the inert lump that lay under the sheets right beside her.

For an instant that frightened us all, the room was electric with absolute silence --and then the bed seemed to literally explode as the sheets leaped away and a huge body with the hairy red face of the Devil himself leaped up like some jack-in-the-box out of hell and uttered a wild cry that jolted us all and sent such an obvious shock through Pat Patterson that he leaped backward and shot out both elbows like Kareem coming down with a rebound.

Part 2

Rolling Stone, #264, May 4, 1978

Last Tango in Vegas: Fear and Loathing in the Far Room

Wild Ravings of an Autograph Hound. .. A Threat of Public Madness. .. the Pantyhose Press Conference

I waited until I was sure the Muhammad Ali party was well off the plane and up the ramp before I finally stood and moved up the aisle, fixing the stewardess at the door with a blind stare from behind two mirror lenses so dark that I could barely see to walk --but not so dark that I failed to notice a touch of mockery in her smile as I nodded and stepped past her. "Goodbye, sir," she chirped. "I hope you got an interesting story."

You nasty little bitch! I hope your next flight crashes in a cannibal country. . . But I kept this thought to myself as I laughed bitterly and stomped up the empty tunnel to a bank of pay phones, in the concourse. It was New York's La Guardia airport, around eight-thirty on a warm Sunday night in the first week of March, and I had just flown in from Chicago --supposedly "with the Muhammad Ali party." But things had not worked out that way and my temper was hovering dangerously on the far edge of control as I listened to the sound of nobody answering the phone in Hal Conrad's West Side apartment. . . That swine! That treacherous lying bastard!

We were almost to the ten-ring limit, that point where I knew I'd start pounding on things unless I hung up quickly before we got to eleven. .. when suddenly a voice sounding almost as angry as I felt came booming over the line. "Yeah, yeah, what is it?" Conrad snapped. "I'm in a hell of a hurry. Jesus! I was just about into the elevator when I had to come back and answer this goddamn --"

You Crazy Bastard!" I screamed, cutting into his gravelly mumbling as I slammed my hand down on the tin counter and saw a woman using the phone next to me jump like a rat had just run up her leg.

"It's me, Harold!" I shouted. "I'm out here at La Guardia and my whole story's fucked and just as soon as I find all my baggage I'm going to get a cab and track you down and slit your goddamn throat!"

"Wait a minute!" he said. "What the hell is wrong? Where's Ali? Not with you?"

"Are you kidding?" I snarled. "That crazy bastard didn't even know who I was when I met him Chicago. I made a Goddamn Fool of Myself, Harold! He looked at me like I was some kind of autograph hound!"

"No!" said Conrad. "I told him all about you --that you were a good friend of mine and you'd be on the flight with him from Chicago. He was expecting you."

"Bullshit!" I yelled. "You told me he'd be traveling alone, too. . . So I stayed up all night and busted my ass to get a first-class seat on that Continental flight that I knew he'd be catching at O'Hare; then I got everything arranged with the flight crew between Denver and Chicago, making sure they blocked off the first two seats so we could sit together. . . Jesus, Harold," I muttered, suddenly feeling very tired, "what kind of sick instinct would cause you to do a thing like this to me?"

"Where the hell is Ali?" Conrad shouted, ignoring my question. "I sent a car out to pick you up, both of you!"

"You mean all of us," I said. "His wife was with him, along with Pat Patterson and maybe a few others --I couldn't tell, but it wouldn't have made any difference; they all looked at me like I was weird; some kind of psycho trying to muscle into the act, babbling about sitting in Veronica's seat..."

"That's impossible," Conrad snapped. "He knew --"

"Well, I guess he forgot!" I shouted, feeling my temper roving out on the edge again. "Are we talking about brain damage, Harold? Are you saying he has no memory?"

He hesitated just long enough to let me smile for the first time all day. "This could be an ugly story, Harold," I said. "Ali is so punch-drunk that his memory's all scrambled? Maybe they should lift his license, eh? 'Yeah, let's croak all this talk about comebacks, Dumbo. Your memory's fucked, you're on queer street --and by the way, Champ, what are your job prospects?"

"You son of a bitch," Conrad muttered. "Okay. To hell with all this bullshit. Just get a cab and meet us at the Plaza. I should have been there a half-hour ago."

"I thought you had us all booked into the Park Lane," I said.

"Get moving and don't worry about it," he croaked. "I'll meet you at the Plaza. Don't waste any time."

What I screamed. "What am I doing right now? I have a Friday deadline, Harold, and this is Sunday! You call me in the middle of the goddamn night in Colorado and tell me to get on the first plane to Chicago because Muhammad Ali has all of a sudden decided he wants to talk to me --after all that lame bullshit in Vegas --so I take the insane risk of dumping my whole story in a parachute bag and flying off on a 2000-mile freakout right in the middle of a deadline crunch to meet a man in Chicago who treats me like a wino when I finally get there. . . And now you're talking to me, you pigfucker, about Wasting Time?"

I was raving at the top of my lungs now, drawing stares from every direction --so I tried to calm down; no need to get busted for public madness in the airport, I thought; but I was also in New York with no story and no place to work and only five days away from a clearly impossible deadline, and now Conrad was telling me that my long-overdue talk with Ali had once again "gone wrong."

"Just get in a cab and meet me at the Plaza," he was saying. "I'll pull this mess together, don't worry..."

"Well. ." I said. "I'm already here in New York and I definitely want to see you, Harold --so yeah, I'll be there. But --" I paused for a moment, fascinated by a scene that was suddenly running very vividly behind my eyeballs as I stood there at the pay phone in the concourse " --let me tell you what I'm going to do at noon tomorrow, if you don't pull this mess together."

"Not now," he said. "I have to get going --"

"Listen!" I yelled. "I want you to understand this, Harold, because it could do serious things to your image."

Silence.

"What I plan to do when I wake up in the Plaza at exactly eleven o'clock tomorrow morning," I said calmly, "is have a few Bloody Marys and then go down to the hotel drugstore and buy some of those sheer pantyhose, along with a black wig and some shades like yours, Harold. .. Then I'll go back up to my room and call the Daily News to say they should have a photographer at the Plaza fountain exactly at noon for a press conference with Ali and Bob Arum. .. and, yes that my name is Hal Conrad, the well-known boxing wizard and executive spokesman for Muhammad Ali."

"And then, Harold," I continued, "exactly at noon I will leave my room in the Plaza, wearing nothing but a pair of sheer pantyhose and a wig and black shades. . . and I will take the elevator down to the lobby and stroll very casually outside and across the street and climb into the Plaza fountain, waving a bottle of Fernet Branca in one hand and a joint in the other. . . And I'll be Screaming, Harold, at anybody who gets in my way or even stops to stare."

"Bullshit!" he snapped. "You'll get yourself locked up."

"No," I said. "I'll get you locked up. When they grab me I'll say I'm Hal Conrad and all I wanted to do was get things organized for the upcoming Ali-Arum press conference --and then you'll have a new picture for your scrapbook, a frontpage shot in the News of 'famous boxing wizard Harold Conrad.' "

I suddenly saw the whole scene in that movie behind my eyes. I would intimidate anybody in the elevator by raving and screeching at them about things like "the broken spirit" and "fixers who steal clothes from the poor." That, followed by an outburst of deranged weeping, would get me down to the lobby where I would quickly get a grip and start introducing myself to everybody within reach and inviting them all to the press conference in the fountain. . . and then, when I finally climbed into the water and took a real stance for the noon/lunch crowd, I could hear myself screeching, "Cast out Vanity! Look at me --I'm not Vain! My name is Hal Conrad and I feel wonderful! I'm proud to wear pantyhose in the streets of New York --and so is Muhammad Ali. Yes! He'll be here in just a few moments, and he'll be dressed just like me. And Bob Arum too!" I would shriek, "He's not ashamed to wear pantyhose."

The crowd would not be comfortable with this gig; there was not much doubt about that. A naked man in the streets is one thing, but the sight of the recently dethroned Heavyweight Champion of the World parading around in the fountain, wearing nothing but sheer pantyhose, was too weird to tolerate.

Boxing was bad enough as it was, and wrestling was worse: but not even a mob of New Yorkers could handle such a nasty spectacle as this. They would be ripping up the paving stones by the time the police arrived.

"Stop threatening me, you drunken freak!" Conrad shouted. "Just get in a cab and meet me at the Plaza. I'll have everything under control by the time you get there --we'll go up to his room and talk there."

I shrugged and hung up the phone. Why not? I thought. It was too late to catch a turnaround flight back to Colorado, so I might as well check into the Plaza and get rid of another credit card, along with another friend. Conrad was trying; I knew that --but I also knew that this time he was grasping at straws, because we both understood the deep and deceptively narrow-looking moat that eighteen years of celebrity forced Ali to dig between his "public" and his "private" personas.

It is more like a ring of moats than just one, and Ali has learned the subtler art of making each one seem like the last great leap between the intruder and himself. . . But there is always one more moat to get across, and not many curious strangers have ever made it that far.

Some people will settle happily for a smile and joke in a hotel lobby, and others will insist on crossing two or even three of his moats before they feel comfortably "private" with The Champ. .. But very few people understand how many rings there really are:

My own quick guess would be Nine; but Ali's quick mind and his instinct for public relations can easily make the third moat seem like the ninth; and this world is full of sporting journalists who never realized where they were until the same "private thoughts" and "spontaneous bits of eloquence" they had worked so desperately to glean from The Champ in some rare flash of personal communication that none other would ever share, appeared word for word, in cold black type, under somebody else's byline.

This is not a man who needs hired pros and wizards to speak for him; but he has learned how to use them so skillfully that he can save himself for the rare moments of confrontation that interest him. . . Which are few and far between, but anybody who has ever met Muhammad Ali on that level will never forget it. He has a very lonely sense of humor, and a sense of himself so firmly entrenched that it seems to hover, at times, in that nervous limbo between Egomania and genuine Invulnerability.

There is not much difference in his mind between a challenge inside the ring, with Joe Frazier, or in a T.V studio with Dick Cavett. He honestly believes he can handle it all; and he has almost two decades of evidence to back him up, at this point; so it takes a rare sense of challenge to get him cranked up. He had coped with everything from the White Heavies of Louisville to Sonny Liston and the War in Vietnam; from the hostility of old white draft boards to the sullen enigma of the Black Muslims; from the genuine menace of Joe Frazier to the puzzling threat of Ken Norton... and he has beaten every person or thing that God or even Allah ever put in his way --except perhaps Joe Frazier and the Eternal Mystery of Women...

And now, as my cab moved jerkily through the snow-black streets of Brooklyn toward the Plaza Hotel, I was brooding on Conrad's deranged plot that I felt would almost certainly cause me another nightmare of professional grief and personal humiliation. I felt like a rape victim on the way to a discussion with the rapist on the Johnny Carson show. Not even Hal Conrad's fine sense of reality could take me past Moat #5 --which would not be enough, because I'd made it clear from the start that I was not especially interested in anything short of at least #7 or 8.

Which struck me as far enough, for my purposes, because I understood #9 well enough to know that if Muhammad was as smart as I thought he was, I would never see or even smell that last moat.

Wilfrid Sheed, an elegant writer who wrote a whole book titled Muhammad Ali without ever crossing the sixth or seventh moat, much less the ninth, has described that misty battlefield far better than I can. .. but he was paid a lot better, too, which tends to bring a certain balance to situations that would otherwise be intolerable.

In any case, here is Sheed recounting the agonies of merely trying to talk to the subject of his twenty-dollar-per-copy book:

". . . Ali moves so fast that he even outruns his own people, and no one seems to know for sure where he is. I am about to head for his training camp in the Poconos one more time when word arrives that he has broken camp for good. What? Where? Rumors of his comings and goings suddenly rival Patty Hearst's. His promoters say he's in Cleveland, and the Times says he's in New York, sparring at the Felt Forum, but he hasn't been seen at either place. It is a game he plays with the world: dancing out of range, then suddenly sticking out his face and pulling it back again. . .

"Meanwhile, his elusiveness is abetted by one of the cagiest inner circles since Cardinal Richelieu. Anyone can see him publicly --I think it is his secret wish to be seen by every man, woman and child on the planet earth --but to see him privately is harder than getting a visa from the Chinese Embassy."

Well. . . I have beat on both those doors in my time, meeting with failure and frustration on both fronts; but I have a feeling that Sheed never properly understood the importance of speaking Chinese. Or at least having the right interpreter; and not many of these are attached to either Muhammad Ali or the Chinese Embassy. . . But in Ali's case, I did, after all, have my old buddy Hal Conrad, whose delicate function as Muhammad's not-quite-official interpreter with the world of white media I was just beginning to understand...

I have known Conrad since 1962, when I met him in Las Vegas at the second Liston-Patterson fight. He was handling the press and publicity for that cruel oddity, and I was the youngest and most ignorant "sportswriter" ever accredited to cover a heavyweight championship fight. .. But Conrad, who had total control of all access to everything, went out of his way to overlook my nervous ignorance and my total lack of expense money --including me along with all "big names" for things like press parties, interviews with the fighters and above all, the awesome spectacle of Sonny Liston working out on the big bag, to the tune of "Night Train," at his crowded and carpeted base camp in the Thunderbird Hotel. .. As the song moved louder and heavier toward a climax of big-band, rock & roll frenzy, Liston would step into the 200-pound bag and hook it straight up in the air --where it would hang for one long and terrifying instant, before it fell back into place at the end of a one-inch logging chain with a vicious Clang and a jerk that would shake the whole room.

I watched Sonny work put on that bag every afternoon for a week or so, or at least long enough to think he had to be at least nine feet tall. . . until one evening a day or so prior to the fight when I literally bumped into Listen, and his two huge bodyguards at the door of the Thunderbird Casino, and I didn't even recognize The Champ for a moment because he was only about six feet tall and with nothing but the dull, fixed stare in his eyes to make him seem different from all the other rich/mean niggers a man could bump into around the Thunderbird that week.

So now, on this jangled Sunday night in New York --more than fifteen years and 55,000 olive-drab tombstones from Maine to California since I first realized that Sonny Liston was three inches shorter than me --it was all coming together, or maybe coming apart once again, as my cab approached the Plaza and another wholly unpredictable but probably doomed and dumb encounter with the world of Big Time Boxing. I had stopped for a six-pack of Ballantine Ale on the way in from the airport, and I also had a quart of Old Fitzgerald that I'd brought with me from home. My mood was ugly and cynical, tailored very carefully on the long drive through Brooklyn to match my lack of expectations with regard to anything Conrad might have tried to "set up" with Ali.

My way of joking is to tell the truth. That's the funniest joke in the world.

--Muhammad Ali

Indeed... And that is also as fine a definition of "Gonzo Journalism" as anything I've ever heard, for good or ill. But I was in no mood for joking when my cab pulled up to the Plaza that night. I was half-drunk, fully cranked, and pissed off at everything that moved. My only real plan was to get past this ordeal that Conrad was supposedly organizing with Ali, then retire in shame to my eighty-eight-dollar-a-night bed and deal with Conrad tomorrow.

But this world does not work on "real plans" --mine or anyone else's --so I was not especially surprised when a total stranger wearing a serious black overcoat laid a hand on my shoulder as I was having my bags carried into the Plaza:

"Doctor Thompson?" he said.

"What?" I spun away and glared at him just long enough to know there was no point in denying it. .. He had the look of a rich undertaker who had once been the Light-Heavyweight karate champion of the Italian Navy; a very quiet presence that was far too heavy for a cop. .. He was on my side.

And he seemed to understand my bad nervous condition; before I could ask anything, he was already picking up my bags and saying --with a smile as uncomfortable as my own: "We're going to the Park Lane; Mister Conrad is waiting for you..."

I shrugged and followed him outside to the long black limo that was parked with the engine running so close to the front door of the Plaza that it was almost up on the sidewalk. . . and about three minutes later I was face to face with Hal Conrad in the lobby of the Park Lane Hotel, more baffled than ever and not even allowed enough time to sign in and get my luggage up to the room.

"What took you so goddamn long?"

"I was masturbating in the limo," I said. "We took a spin out around Sheepshead Bay and I

"Sober up!" he snapped. "Ali's been waiting for you since ten o'clock."

"Balls," I said, as the door opened and he aimed me down the hall. "I'm tired of your bullshit, Harold --and where the hell is my luggage?"

"Fuck your luggage," he replied as we stopped in front of 904 and he knocked, saying, "Open up, it's me."

The door swung open and there was Bundini, with a dilated grin on his face, reaching out to shake hands. "Welcome!" he said. "Come right in, Doc --make yourself at home."

I was still shaking hands with Bundini when I realized where I was --standing at the foot of a king-size bed where Muhammad Ali was laid back with the covers pulled up to his waist and his wife, Veronica, sitting next to him: they were both eyeing me with very different expressions than I'd seen on their faces in Chicago.

Muhammad leaned up to shake hands, grinning first at me and then at Conrad: "Is this him?" he asked. "You sure he's safe?"

Bundini and Conrad were laughing as I tried to hide my confusion at this sudden plunge into unreality by lighting two Dunhills at once, as I backed off and tried to get grounded. . . but my head was still whirling from this hurricane of changes and I heard myself saying, "What do you mean --Is this him? You bastard! I should have you arrested for what you did to me in Chicago!"

Ali fell back on the pillows and laughed. "I'm sorry, boss, but I just couldn't recognize you. I knew I was supposed to meet somebody, but --"

"Yeah!" I said. "That's what I was trying to tell you. What did you think I was there for --an autograph?"

Everybody in the room laughed this time, and I felt like I'd been shot out of a cannon and straight into somebody else's movie. I put my satchel down on the bureau across from the bed and reached in for a beer. .. The pop-top came off with a hiss and a blast of brown foam that dripped on the rug as I tried to calm down.

"You scared me," Ali was saying. "You looked like some kind of a bum --or a hippie."

"What?" I almost shouted. "A bum? A hippie?" I lit another cigarette or maybe two, not realizing or even thinking about the gross transgressions I was committing by smoking and drinking in the presence of The Champ. (Conrad told me later that nobody smokes or drinks in the same room with Muhammad Ali --and Jesus Christ! Not --of all places --in the sacred privacy of his own bedroom at midnight, where I had no business being in the first place.). . . But I was mercifully and obviously ignorant of what I was doing. Smoking and drinking and tossing off crude bursts of language are not second nature to me, but first --and my mood, at that point, was still so mean and jangled that it took me about ten minutes of foulmouthed raving before I began to get a grip on myself.

Everybody else in the room was obviously relaxed and getting a wonderful hoot out of this bizarre spectacle --which was me; and when the adrenalin finally burned off I realized that I'd backed so far away from the bed and into the bureau that I was actually sitting on the goddamn thing, with my legs crossed in front of me like some kind of wild-eyed, dope-addled budda (Bhuddah? Buddah? Budda?... Ah, fuck these wretched idols with unspellable names --let's use Buddha, and to hell with Edwin Newman). .. and suddenly I felt just fine.

And why not?

I was, after all, the undisputed heavyweight Gonzo champion of the world --and this giggling yoyo in the bed across the room from me was no longer the champion of anything, or at least nothing he could get a notary public to vouch for. . . So I sat back on the bureau with my head against the mirror and I thought, "Well, shit --here I am, and it's definitely a weird place to be; but not really, and not half as weird as a lot of other places I've been. . . Nice view, decent company, and no real worries at all in this tight group of friends who were obviously having a good time with each other as the conversation recovered from my flaky entrance and got back on the fast-break, bump-and-run track they were used to. . ."

Conrad was sitting on the floor with his back to the big window that looks out on the savage, snow-covered wasteland of Central Park --and one look at his face told me that he was finished working for the night; he had worked a major miracle, smuggling a hyena into the house of mirrors, and now he was content to sit back and see what happened.

Conrad was as happy as a serious smoker without a serious smoke could have been right then. . . And so was I, for that matter, despite the crossfire of abuse and bent humor that I found myself caught in, between Bundini and the bed.

Ali was doing most of the talking: his mood seemed to be sort of wandering around and every once in a while taking a quick bite out of anything that caught his interest, like a good-humored wolverine. . . There was no talk about boxing, as I recall: we'd agreed to save that for the "formal interview" tomorrow morning, so this midnight gig was a bit like a warmup for what Conrad described as "the serious bullshit."

There was a lot of talk about "drunkards," the sacred nature of "unsweetened grapefruit" and the madness of handling money --a subject I told him I'd long since mastered: "How many acres do you own?" I kept asking him whenever he started getting too high on his own riffs. "Not as many as me," I assured him. "I'm richer than Midas, and nine times as shrewd --whole valleys and mountains of acres," I continued, keeping a very straight face: "Thousands of cattle, stallions, peacocks, wild boar, sloats. ." And then the final twist: "You and Frazier just never learned how to handle money --but for twenty percent of the nut I can make you almost as rich as I am."

I could see that he didn't believe me. Ali is a hard man to con --but when he got on the subject of his tragic loss of "all privacy," I figured it was time for the frill.

"You really want a cure for your privacy problem?" I asked him, ripping the top out of another Ballantine Ale.

He smiled wickedly. "Sure boss --what you got?"

I slid off the bureau and moved toward the door, "Hang on," I told him. "I'll be right back."

Conrad was suddenly alert. "Where the hell are you going?" he snapped.

"To my room," I said. "I have the ultimate cure for Muhammad's privacy problem."

"What room?" he asked. "You don't even know where it is, do you?"

More laughter.

"It's 1011," Conrad said, "right upstairs --but hurry back," he added. "And if you run into Pat, we never heard of you."

Pat Patterson, Ali's fearfully diligent bodyguard, was known to be prowling the halls and putting a swift arm on anything human or otherwise that might disturb Ali's sleep. The rematch with Spinks was already getting cranked up, and it was Patterson's job to make sure The Champ stayed deadly serious about his new training schedule.

"Don't worry," I said. "I just want to go up to the room and put on my pantyhose. I'll be a lot more comfortable." The sound of raucous laughter followed me down the hall as I sprinted off toward the fire exit, knowing I would have to be fast or I'd never get back in that room --tonight or tomorrow.

But I knew what I wanted, and I knew where it was in my parachute bag: yes, a spectacularly hideous full-head, real-hair, seventy-five-dollar movie-style red devil mask --a thing so fiendishly real and ugly that I still wonder, in moments like these, what sort of twisted impulse caused me to even pack the goddamn thing, much less wear it through the halls of the Park Lane and back into Muhammad Ali's suite at this unholy hour of the night

Three minutes later I was back at the door, with the mask zipped over my head and the neck-flap tucked into my shirt. I knocked twice, then leaped into the room when Bundini opened the door, screaming some brainless slogan like Death to the Weird!"

For a second or two there was no sound at all in the room --then the whole place exploded in wild laughter as I pranced around, smoking and drinking through the molded rubber mouth and raving about whatever came into my head.

The moment I saw the expression on Muhammad's face, I knew my mask would never get back to Woody Creek. His eyes lit up like he'd just seen the one toy he'd wanted all his life, and he almost came out of the bed after me...

"Okay," I said, lifting it off my head and tossing it across the room to the bed. "It's yours, my man --but let me warn you that not everybody thinks this thing is real funny."

("Especially black people," Conrad told me later. "Jesus," he said, "I just about flipped when you jumped into the room with that goddamn mask on your head. That was really pushing your luck.")

Ali put the mask on immediately and was just starting to enjoy himself in the mirror when. ye Gods, we all went stiff as the sound of harsh knocking came through the door, along with the voice of Pat Patterson. "Open up," he was shouting. "What the hell is going on in there?"

I rushed for the bathroom, but Bundini was two steps ahead of me. . . Ali, still wearing the hideous mask, ducked under the covers and Conrad went to open the door.

It all happened so fast that we all simply froze in position as Patterson came in like Dick. Butkus on a blood scent... and that was when Muhammad came out of the bed with a wild cry and a mushroom cloud of flying sheets, pointing one long brown arm and a finger like Satan's own cattle prod, straight into Pat Patterson's face.

And that, folks, was a moment that I'd just as soon not have to live through again. We were all lucky, I think, that Patterson didn't go for his gun and blow Muhammad away in that moment of madness before he recognized the body under the mask.

It was only a split second, but it could easily have been a hell of a lot longer for all of us if Ali hadn't dissolved in a fit of whooping laughter at the sight of Pat Patterson's face. . . And although Pat recovered instantly, the smile he finally showed us was uncomfortably thin.

The problem, I think, was not so much the mask itself and the shock it had caused him but why The Champ was wearing the goddamn thing at all; where had it come from? And why? These were serious times, but a scene like this could have ominous implications for the future --particularly with Ali so pleased with his new toy that he kept it on his head for the next ten or fifteen minutes, staring around the room and saying with no hint of a smile in his voice that he would definitely wear it for his appearance on the Dick Cavett show the next day. "This is the new me," he told us. "I'll wear it on T.V tomorrow and tell Cavett that I promised Veronica that I won't take it off until I win my title back. I'm gonna wear this ugly thing everywhere I go --even when I get into the ring with Spinks next time." He laughed wildly and jabbed at himself in the mirror. "Yes indeed!" he chuckled. "They thought I was crazy before, but they ain't seen nothin' yet."

I was feeling a little on the crazy side myself, at that point --and Patterson's accusing presence soon told us it was time to go.

"Okay, boss," Ali said to me on the way out. "Tomorrow we get serious, right? Nine o'clock in the morning. We'll have breakfast, and get real serious."

I agreed, and went upstairs to my room for a bit of the good smoke.

Muhammad Speaks... A Second Shot from Spinks... The Hippie in the Wing Tips...

The Triple Greatest of All Times...

I was up at eight-thirty the next day, but when I called Ali's suite, Veronica said he'd been up since seven and "was wandering around downstairs somewhere."

I found him in the restaurant, sitting at one end of a table full of cut glass and silver, dressed almost as formally as the maître d' in a dark blue pin-stripe suit and talking very seriously with a group of friends and very earnest black businessmen types who were all dressed the same way he was. It was a completely different man from the one I'd been sparring and laughing with the night before. The conversation around the table ranged from what to do about a just received invitation to visit some new country in Africa, to a bewildering variety of endorsement offers, to book contracts, real estate and the molecular structure of crabmeat.

It was midmorning before we finally went upstairs to his suite "to get serious."... And what follows is a ninety-nine percent verbatim transcript of our conversation for almost the next two hours. Muhammad was stretched out on the bed, still wearing his "senator's suite," and balancing my tape recorder on his stomach while he talked. I was sitting cross-legged right next to him on the bed, with a bottle of Heineken in one hand, a cigarette in the other and my shoes on the floor beside me.

The room was alive with the constant comings and goings of people bearing messages, luggage, warnings about getting to the Cavett show on time. . . and also a very alert curiosity about me and what I was up to. The mask was nowhere in sight, but Pat Patterson was, along with three or four other very serious-looking black gentleman who listened to every word we said. One of them actually kneeled on the floor right next to the bed, with his ear about thirteen inches away from the tape recorder, the whole time we talked.

Okay, we might as well get back to what we were talking about downstairs. You said you're definitely going to fight Spinks again, right?

I can't say I'm definitely going to fight Spinks again. I think we are. I'm sure we are --but I might die, he might die.

But as far as you're concerned, you want to, you're counting on it.

Yeah, he plans to fight me. I gave him a chance and he will give me a shot back at it. The people won't believe he's a true champion until he beats me twice. See, I had to beat Liston twice, Johansson had to beat Patterson twice, but he didn't. Randy Turpin had to beat Sugar Ray twice, but he didn't. If he can beat me twice, then people will really believe that he might possibly be the greatest.

Okay, let me ask you. . . at what point, at what time --I was in Vegas for the fight--when did you realize that things were getting real serious?

Round twelve.

Up to then you still thought you had control.

I was told that I was probably losing, but maybe I was even. I had to win the last three and I was too tired to win the last three, then I knew I was in trouble.

But you figured you could pull it off... up until round twelve.

Yeah, but I couldn't, 'cause he is confident, 'cause he is winning and I had to pull it off and he was 197 and I'm 228 and that's too heavy.

Didn't you tell me downstairs at breakfast that you're going to come in at 205 next time?

I don't know what I'm going to come in at, 205 is really impossible. If I get to 220 I'll be happy. Just be eight pounds lighter. . . I'll be happy. I did pretty good at that weight, to be in condition around 220, even if it's 225, 223, I could do better.

Well, on a scale of one hundred, what kind of condition were you in for Spinks?

Scale of one hundred? I was eighty.

Where should you have been?

Should have been... ninety-eight.

Why didn't you know him better? You didn't seem ready...

Why didn't anybody know him? He slipped up on the press, a ten to one underdog, they called him. He hadn't gone over ten rounds and only seven pro fights. What can you know about him?

Okay, let's get to another point: I was down there in Vegas for two weeks and there wasn't much to do except talk and gossip, and there was a lot of talk about whether it would be better for you to come out and zing him right away, take charge --or do what I think you did, sort of lay back and...

No, you couldn't have said it was better for me to take charge.

Well, there were two schools of thought: one was you come out zooming and cracking --and the other was the sort of slow start, rope-a-dope trip.

No, that wouldn't be wise at my age and my weight to come out zooming and wear myself out in case I didn't knock him out. When you don't know a man you got to feel him out... but I know one thing, everybody tires, that's why I laid on the ropes for four, five or six rounds hoping he'd tire, but he didn't. We didn't know he had the stamina and I wasn't in shape so for me to come off bing bing bing real fast, I know for sure I'm going to tire but I don't know for sure I'm going to stop him. But after I tired then I'm in trouble.

How long could you have gone, if you came out zinging right from the start?

I could have zinged about six rounds.

So you would have died after six?

No, I wouldn't have died after six, I would have just slowed down and been on defense, but nobody can tell me how to come out, or how I should have come out, I did the best thing for my condition.

This may be an odd question but I want to ask you anyway, at the press conference after the fight I remember Leon saying, "I just wanted to beat this nigger." And it seems to me it was done with a smile, but when I heard that I felt the whole room get tense.

No, that's okay. I say the same things. We black people talk about each other that way, in a humorous way. "Ah, nig-gah, be quiet." "Ah --ahh, I can whop that niggah." "Niggah, you crazy." Those are our expressions. If you say it, I'll slap you. The white man can't call me nigger like they do.

So it was a joke? It struck me as a very raw note, but...

I can't blame you. When I beat Sonny Listen, I didn't say those words, but I was glad to win, so I can't take nothing from Spinks --he's good, he's a lot better fighter than people thought he was.

Tell me a little about this tri-cornered thing between you and Norton and Spinks.

Well, Norton feels he deserves the next shot.

Do you think he does?

No, he deserves a shot a the winner between me and Spinks. I gave Spinks a shot, he owes me a shot for giving him a shot. The champion always gets a return. They used to have return clauses. We didn't have that, I don't have that. He's giving me a shot 'cause I gave him a break. I beat Norton twice. Foreman annihilated Norton, so therefore he's not better than me. I'm the number one contender, not him.

What did Leon tell you? When I talked to him in Vegas, I got the feeling he honestly wants to give you a return shot. I think he's ready for that.

Sure he will. By the time this article will come out the fight probably will have been signed and everything, the date set and we ready to fight. Don't say yet, but I'm sure it's getting pretty close and I'm the one they'll choose. He makes $5 million with me and $1.5 million with Norton. Who would you fight?

Anyway, what happens if it turns out that Leon is legally obligated to fight Norton first?

That's all right, I ain't tired. I got four or five more years of good fighting.

Four or five years?

[Ali nods, grins] Plenty of time, boss. All the time I need.

How do you think Spinks would do against Norton?

I think he'd beat Norton.

Did I hear you say that you were going up to the camp today?

I start training in about two weeks.

And that's going to be straight through for five or six months? You've never done that before, have you?

Never in my life, never more than two months. But this time I'm going to be in there five months, chopping trees, running up hills, I'll be coming in dancing! [Sudden grin] I'll be winning my title for the third time. ... [Shouting] The greatest of all times! Of all times!! [Laughing and jabbing]

Come on now! We're not on T.V! Let's get back to this Norton-Spinks thing. Why do you say Spinks will win?

'Cause he's too fast, he's aggressive, he's young, he takes a punch, the mere fact that he can beat me means he can beat Norton. I'm better than Norton. I pick him, it don't have to be that way, but I pick him.

How about Frazier? Could Leon have beaten the Joe Frazier of four or five years ago?

Around the first or second time you fought him? Who does Leon compare to?

Leon, compare to, he compare to Frazier's style, always coming in, Spinks... Frazier.

Frazier at his best?

Frazier at his best, yeah.

How good is Leon? I don't really know myself.

Leon is unexplored, unknown --and after I beat him, he'll come back and win the title and he'll hold it four or five years and he'll go down in history as one of the great heavyweights. Not the greatest, but one of the greatest.

So if you fought him one more time, you think that'd be it? Is that what you're saying?

I'm not sure that'll be it for me. . . I might take another fight --don't know yet, according to how I feel when that time comes.

Did you see Kallie Knoetze, that South African fighter? The one who beat Bobick?

I heard about him.

Me and Conrad spent a lot of time talking to him before the fight. I was trying to work up a really serious spectacle between you and him down in South Africa.

He seemed like a nice fellow.

Oh yeah, he was really eager to have you come down there and fight. Does that interest you, to fight a white cop in South Africa?

On the basis that on that day there'd be equality in the arena where I'm fighting.

But would that interest you? With all the heavy political overtones? How do you feel about something like that? Along with a million-dollar gate?

Yeah, I like it. With the approval of all the other African nations and Moslem countries. I wouldn't go against their wishes, regardless of how they made the arena that night, if the masses of the country and the world were against it, I wouldn't go. I know that I have a lot of fans in South Africa, and they want to see me. But I'm not going to crawl over other nations to go. The world would have to say: "Well, this case is special, they've given the people justice. His going is helping the freedom."

There's a dramatic quality to that thing --I can't think of any other fight that would have that kind of theater. Actually it might even be too much politics...

What worries me is gettin' whupped by a white man in South Africa.

Oh ho Yeah! [Nervous chuckle] [Room breaks into laughter]

[Laughing] That's what the world needs... me getting whupped by a white man in South Africa! [Still laughing]

Oh yeah...

Getting whupped by a white man period, but in South Africa? If a white South African fighter beat me...?

Jesus...

Oh, Lord. [Chuckles]

Oh, you'd have to win. . . You would definitely have to win. Did you see the film of his fight with Bobick? When he took him out in the third round? Was he good?

He was a little slow, but he looked powerful. . . He didn't look to me like you would have any trouble with him, but I'm not an expert. He looked like you'd have to watch it. . .

Yeah, he took Bobick real hard. I don't think it would be wise for me to fight him in South Africa. If I beat him too bad and then leave the country, they might beat up some of the brothers. [Laughter in the room] Or if he whup me too bad then there might be riots. . . People crazy. You know what I mean? If I whup him up too bad and look too good, then the brothers might get beat up after I leave. I wouldn't fool with it. I'm a representative of black people. . . It'd be good if I don't go to nothing like that. It's too touchy --it's more than a sport when I get involved.

But it's the fact that he's white...

[Confidentially] Did you know he called me a nigger?

What?

You didn't hear it? The South African...

[Aghast] No!

You was in Vegas, right?

[Confused] Yeah...we talked to him...

He said, "That cocky nigger, that's one nigger I want..."

[Laughing] Aw, c'mon. He didn't say that. That guy was on his best behavior.

He said: "I want that nigger."

C'mon...

[Deep laugh] I was jokin'...

He was on best behavior. .. The lawyer said, "You don't understand our country. I mean, it's not like you've heard at all. ." And Conrad was saying, "Bullshit! You got cages for those black people down there." He was rude.

Conrad: He gave me a big argument.

Did he slap you?

Conrad: Slap me? [Laughs] I had Hunter with me!

I had a can of mace in my pocket...

[Ali, laughing and looking at his watch] Okay, now you've got five minutes.

Let's see... five minutes.

I'll give you ten minutes. .. See, see the clock?

Yeah, don't worry, I've got my own clock --see this magnesium Rolex? Heavy, eh?... And see these? After you called me a bum and a hippie last night, look what I wore for you this morning [holding up perforated wing tips].

You're getting a good interview, man.

Yeah [reached for one of the shoes], look at that shine too.

Those are some good shoes --those shoes must've cost about fifty dollars.

Yeah. They're about ten years old.

Are they? Same soles?

Yeah, these are my F.B.I shoes. I only wear them for special occasions --nobody's called me a bum and a hippie for a long time.

[Laughs] You're not going to drink your beer? You an alcoholic?

Alcoholic! Bum! Hippie! Remember I've got to write an article about you before Friday!

Heh, hell, hell. You've got the beer. . . Hell, hell, hell. Bum and a hippie.

Where you going?

Right here, I'll talk louder so you can hear... What else you want to ask me?

My head's, uh, I'm still on that South Africa trip, I guess there'd be no way you could go down there without beating Leon first, right?

No, I got to beat Leon first. I will defeat Leon first. I will go down as the triple greatest of all time.

Oh yeah, I think you might. If you train, if you get serious.

If I get serious? I'm as serious as cancer. Is cancer serious?

Well, yeah, I didn't realize, uh... if you're going to start training now that is serious, that's five months, six months.

I'm going to be ready!

Would you call him a fast fighter... Leon? It seems like a funny word to use for him.

Fast? Yeah he was fast. Faster than I was that night. He's fast period.

Fast hands? Fast feet?

Fast hands. Not as fast as reflexes because of his weight. When I'm down to my weight that I would like to be I know I'm faster.

I noticed in the third round the first time I smelled a little bit of trouble was when I saw you missing him with the jab. . . it would be about six inches.

The one thing I did wrong, I didn't do no boxing hardly before this fight.

Why?

Well, my belief was at this age, too much pounding and getting hit and unnecessary training wasn't necessary.

Well, if too much training would have been bad for that fight, how about the next one, why would it be good for the next fight?

My timing was lost. Well, I'm going to have to box. . . I'm not saying it would have been bad to box; better for me, see, I wasn't boxing nobody and I was missing a lot of punches in that fight.

Yeah, I noticed that, that's when I first thought, "Oh oh... it'll be a long fight."

That's 'cause I wasn't boxing, I was hitting bad.

You think you could knock Leon out?... I thought you could have in the fifteenth round.

I couldn't follow him up, might knock him out and might not...

Was there any time you thought maybe you might have. . . did you ever think he was going to

knock you out. .. was there any time you thought, oh, oh, he might even put you down?

No, nothing like that.

Would it be more important next time to get faster?

No, next time it's to be in better shape, to take him more serious, to know him.

Why the hell didn't you this time?

Didn't know him.

You got some of the smartest people in the business working with you.

Didn't know him. . . See all of my worst fights was when I fought nobodies. Jurgen Blin, Zurich, Switzerland, seven rounds with him, didn't look too good. Al Lewis, Dublin, Ireland, a nobody, went eleven rounds. Jean-Pierre Coopman, San Juan, Puerto Rico. . . a nobody.

Bonavena?

He was pretty good. Alfredo Evangelista. A nobody, didn't look that hot.

Yeah, but Leon, you saw him fight several times, didn't you?

Amateurs, just seven. . . what can this man do with seven pro fights, never been over ten rounds...

But you had about fifteen or eighteen pro fights when you fought Liston the first time.

I don't know.

I think I counted them up the other day... nineteen maybe.

I caught him off guard too, I was supposed to have been annihilated like this boy was. But my best fights were those fights where I was the underdog: George Foreman's comeback, two Liston fights, Frazier fights, Norton...

Is that something in your head?

It makes you hungry, got something to work for. I'm doing good. Everything is going my way. I'm eating dinner. I'm living with my wife and my two children all up to the fight which ain't that good. Least six weeks before the fight I should get away from my children 'cause they make you soft. You hug 'em and you kiss them, you know, you 'round babies all day. Day before the fight, I'm babysitting 'cause my wife done some shopping. She didn't mean no harm.

You can't blame it on her, though.

No. I got to get away from the babies, I got to get evil. Got to chop trees, run up hills, get in my old log cabin.

You plan to go up there to stay, at the camp, live there until the fight?

Where... what fight...?

You say you're going to go up there and do a monk sort of trip?

No, my wife and babies would be with me, but my babies they cry at night and they'll be in another cabin...

What about Leon's rib, do you think you broke his rib?

He got hurt in the fight some kind of way, and I was told after the fight he was hurt and some doctor was looking at him and that it wasn't that bad, and I guess when it looked like he was going to fight Norton they had to admit he was hurt 'cause Norton's a body puncher.

Well, speaking of that, I don't want to bring up any sore subject, but did you see Pacheco on the Tom Snyder show when he was talking about all athletes getting old. ..? He seemed to come down pretty hard. He said physically it would just be impossible for you to get back in shape to beat Leon.

I was fighting years before I knew Pacheco. He got famous hanging around me. They all got known... popular. They'd never admit it... and also Pacheco don't know me, he works in my corner, he's not my real physical doctor.

So you think you can get back in ninety-eight on a scale of a hundred?

Yeah. What I like, this is what I love. .. to do the impossible, be the underdog. Pressure makes me go. I couldn't. .. I didn't beat Frazier the first time, I didn't beat Norton the first time. I gotta beat the animal. I almost got to lose to keep going. It would be hard for me to keep getting the spirit up, what have I got to accomplish, who have I got to prove wrong?

Speaking of that, how did you ever get yourself in the situation where you had so much to lose and so little to gain by fighting Leon down there?

How did I get in what?

You got yourself in an almost no-win situation there where you had very little to win and a hell of a lot to lose. It struck me as strategically bad...

That's the way it is, that's the way it's been ever since I held the crown, I didn't have nothing to gain by fighting Bugner. I didn't have nothing to gain by fighting Jean-Pierre Co-opman. I didn't have nothing to gain by fighting a lot of people.

You sure as hell will next time by fighting Leon. That will be real pressure.

Oh yeah, I like the pressure, need the pressure. .. the world likes. .. people like to see miracles. .. people like to see people like to see underdogs that do it. .. people like to be there when history is made.

Raw Eggs and Beer in the Top Rank Suite. .. A Sea of Noise and Violence. .. An Eerie, Roaring Chant. .. The Final Bell

One thing that Ernest Hemingway had always told me was that it was a bad idea to get to know an active fighter and become interested in his career. Sooner or later he was going to get hurt in the ring, and beaten, and it would be an almost unbearable thing to see if he were a friend.

George Plimpton, Shadow Box

Well. . . I wondered why George never showed up in Las Vegas. Muhammad Ali is a friend of Norman Mailer's, too, and also Budd Schulberg's; along with most of the other big-time boxing writers who skipped the Spinks fight. I was too strung out on the simple horror of spending two weeks in the Las Vegas Hilton to understand anything more complex than fear, hunger and daytime T.V, at the time, to grasp my own lack of sensitivity.

And at first I thought it was some kind of monumental botch on my part. Sybil Arum tried to reassure me, but others said I was paranoid. Day after endless day, I would check into Top Rank Headquarters on the fifth floor "Director's Suite" and ask as casually as possible if George or Norman had showed up yet --and the answer was always the same.

Or perhaps I was overcompensating, somehow, for my shameful malaria freakout in Zaire by showing up for this one two weeks earlier than anybody except Arum and Leon.

After a week or so of feeling so conspicuously alone in my role of "behind the scenes fight writer" I finally began passing myself off as the official Top Rank bartender, instead. I began to get seriously paranoid about the situation. What was wrong, I wondered? Had I chosen the wrong hotel? Were all the heavies staying somewhere else like the Aladdin or Caesar's Palace, where the real action was?

Or maybe I was working too hard; doing unnatural things like waking up at ten o'clock in the morning to attend the daily promo/strategy meetings down in Arum's Top Rank "Director's Suite" ... taking voluminous notes on such problems as the Ghanaian featherweight challenger's baffling refusal to wear "Everlast" gloves for his fight with Danny Lopez; and whether the public should be charged one or two dollars to attend Ali's daily workouts --if and when Ali finally showed up for any workouts at all; he was not taking the fight seriously, according to rumors out of Dundee's gym in Miami, and to make matters worse he was also refusing to talk to anybody except his wife.

There was also the matter of how to cope with a mind-set ranging from blank apathy to outright mockery on the part of the national boxing press. The only fight writers who could be counted on for daily ink were locals such as Tommy Lopez from the Review Journal and Mike Marley from the Las Vegas Sun --which was good for me, because they both knew a hell of a lot more about the "fight game" than I did, and between the two of them I was getting a dose of education about the technical aspects of boxing that I have never known much about. .. But the New York media continued to dismiss the fight as either a farce or a fraud --or perhaps even a fix, as frustrated challenger Ken Norton would suggest afterward; and Arum's humor grew more and more foul as Leon absorbed more and more bum-of-the-month jokes from the national boxing press. Arum was shocked and genuinely outraged as the prefight coverage dwindled down to a one-line joke about "this upcoming mystery match between one fighter who won't talk, and another who can't."

Spinks wandered in and out of the suite from time to time, seeming totally oblivious to what anybody in the world --including me and Arum --had to say about the fight or anything else. He was not even disturbed when his mother arrived in Las Vegas and told the first reporter she met that she thought it was "a shame" that her son was going to have to "get beat up on T.V" just to make a bundle of money for "big business people from New York."

Leon Spinks is not one of your chronic worriers. His mind moves in pretty straight lines, and the more I saw of him in Las Vegas, the more I became convinced that the idea of fighting his boyhood idol for the Heavyweight Championship of the World didn't bother him at all, win or lose. "Sure he's The Greatest," he would say to the few reporters who managed to track him down and ask him how he felt about Ali, "but he has to give it up sometime, right?"

He was polite with the press, but it was clear that he had no interest at all in their questions --and even less in his own answers, which he passed off as casually as he dropped two raw eggs in every glass of beer he drank during interviews.

Nor did he have any interest in Arum's desperate scrambling for pre-fight publicity.

No half-bright presidential candidate, rock star or championship boxing promoter would do anything but fire any ranking adviser who arranged for him and his wife to spend two weeks in a small bedroom adjoining the main suite/bar/war room and the base of all serious business. .. But this is what Bob Arum did in Las Vegas, and it was so entirely out of character for anybody dealing in Power & Leverage & Money on that scale that it made me suspicious. Bob and I have been friends long enough for me to be relatively certain he wasn't either dumb or crazy. But I have a lot of strange friends and I still trust my instincts in this area about nine-eight percent, despite a few glaring exceptions in the area of Southern politicians and black drug dealers wearing Iron Boy overalls, and until Arum pulls that kind of switch on me I will still call him my friend and treat him the same way.

Indeed... and now that we've settled that, let's get back to this twisted saga and my feeling in Las Vegas, as the day of the fight approached and my lonely perceptions with regard to its possible meaning and in fact my whole understanding of professional boxing as either a sport or a business came more and more into question. ... Well, I began to feel very isolated, down there in the huge Vegas Hilton, and when even my good friends smiled indulgently when I said on the phone that I was having a hell of a hard time getting a bet on Leon Spinks at ten or even eight to one, I had a few nervous moments wondering if perhaps I really was as crazy as so much of the evidence suggested.

This was, however, before I'd read Plimpton's book and found out that I was the only writer in America so cold-hearted as to show up in Las Vegas to watch Muhammad Ali get beaten.

Whatever else I might or might not have been, I was clearly no friend of The Champ's. . . Which was true on one level, because I not only showed for the fight, but wallowed so deep in the quicksands of human treachery as to bet against him.

At ten to one.

Let's not forget those numbers --especially not if the difference between ten and five is really the difference between a friend and an enemy.

When the bell rang to start number fifteen in Vegas, Leon Spinks was so tired and wasted that he could barely keep his balance for the next three minutes --and now, after watching that fight on videotape at least twenty times, I think that even World Lightweight Champ Roberto Duran could have taken Leon out with one quick and savage combination; a hard jab in the eyes to bring his hands up in front of his face just long enough to crack him under the heart with a right uppercut --then another left into the stomach to bring his head forward again, to that target point in the cross hairs of Ali's brittle but still murderous bazooka right hand, at twenty or twenty-one inches. . .

No fighter except Joe Frazier had ever survived one of Muhammad's frenzied killer-combinations in a round as late as the fifteenth; and, until those last, incredibly brutal three minutes in Las Vegas, Leon Spinks had never gone more than ten rounds in his life. When he shuffled half-blindly out of his corner for number fifteen against The Champ, who was obviously and terminally behind on points after fourteen, Leon Spinks was "ready to go," as they say in that merciless, million-dollar-a-minute world of "the Squared Circle."

... But so was Muhammad Ali: fight films shot from a catwalk directly above the ring, looking straight down from the high ceiling of the Hilton Pavilion, show both fighters reeling off balance and virtually holding on to each other at times, just to keep from falling down in that vicious final round.

There was no more strategy at that point, and the blood-lust-howl of the small crowd of 5000 or so white-on-white pro-Spinks high rollers who had made the fight a cynical and almost reluctant sellout in a town where a shrewd promoter like Arum or Don King or even Raoul Duke could sell 5000 tickets to a World Championship Cock Fight, told Muhammad Ali all he needed to know at that point in time. The same people who'd been chanting "All-eee! All-eee!" just a few minutes ago, when it looked like The Champ had once again known exactly what he was doing, all along, as Leon looked to be fading badly in the late rounds. . . These same people were now chanting, as if led by some unseen cheerleader: but they were no longer saying "All-eee!"

As it became more and more obvious that Muhammad was just as dead on his feet as Spinks seemed to be, the hall slowly filled with a new sound. It began late in the fourteenth, as I recall, and since I was by that time engulfed in the hell-on-earth chaos that had overtaken the fifty or so close friends and Family members in The Champ's corner where people like ex-Heavyweight Champ Jimmy Ellis and Ali's hot-tempered brother, Rachaman had been clawing at the ring ropes and screaming doomed advice at Muhammad ever since Bundini had become sick and collapsed right next to Angelo Dundee in the corner at the end of round number twelve, causing Kilroy and Patterson to start yelling into the mob for a doctor. Patterson, right in front of me, was holding Bundini with one arm and waving at Kilroy with the other. "Drew's had a heart attack," he shouted. "A heart attack."

Ali's corner was a deafening mix of fear, madness and emotional dysfunction at that point, a sea of noise and violence...

Total chaos; and then came the eerie roaring chant from the crowd: Leeonn! Leeonn The chant grew louder and somehow malignant as the fifteenth round staggered on to its obvious end... Leeonn! Leeonn! Leeonn!"

Muhammad Ali had never heard that chant before --and neither had Leon Spinks.

Or me, either.

Or Angelo, or Bundini, or Kilroy, or Conrad, or Pat Patterson --or Kris Kristofferson either; who was hanging on to Rita Coolidge just a few feet away from me and looking very stricken while the last few seconds ticked off until the bell finally rang and made every one of us in that corner feel, suddenly, very old.

Billy the Geek Calls New Orleans: Even Odds & Rancid Karma

The Ali-Spinks rematch on September 15th will not be dull. The early rumor line has Ali a two to one favorite, but these numbers will not hold up--or, if they do, Spinks as a two to one underdog will be a very tempting bet, even for me: and anything higher than that will be almost irresistible.

When I arrived in Las Vegas two weeks before the last fight I told Bob Arum that I figured Leon had a twenty percent chance of winning. That translates into four to one odds, which even the nickel-and-dime "experts" said was a bad joke. The fight was considered such a gross mismatch that every bookie in Vegas except one had it "Off the Board," meaning no bets at all, because Ali was such a prohibitive favorite even ten to one was deemed a sure way to lose money. As late as the thirteenth round, in fact, freelance bookies at ringside were still laying eight to one on Muhammad. My friend Semmes Luckett, sitting in one of the $200 seats with a gaggle of high rollers, watched the round-by-round destruction of one poor bastard who lost at least $402,000 in forty-five minutes --betting on Ali first at ten to one, then down to eight to one after the first six or seven rounds --then four to one after eleven, and finally all the way down to two to one at the end of thirteen.

The man was in a blathering rage by the time the fight was over. "I was betting on a goddamn legend," he shouted. "I must have been out of my mind." I have watched the videotape of that fight enough times to risk wondering out loud, at this point, on the subject of what may or may not have been wrong with Ali's right hand in that fight. It was totally ineffective. The jab was still there, even with five or six pounds of flab to slow it down. . . and the right was getting through Leon's guard with a consistency that would have ended the fight in ten or eleven rounds if Muhammad had been able to land it with any power at all. Spinks must have taken twenty-five or thirty right-hand shots from Ali, and I doubt if he felt more than one or two of them. That was the real key to the fight, and if Ali's right hand is as useless in New Orleans as it was in Las Vegas, Spinks will win by a T.K.O in eight or nine rounds. Both fighters understand, at this point, that Ali has already tried what he and his handlers felt was the best strategy for dealing with Leon: that was the time-tested rope-a-dope, which assumed that a frenzied, undisciplined fighter like Spinks would punch himself out in the early rounds, like George Foreman, and become a tired sitting duck for Ali by the time the bell rang for number ten. That was a very bad mistake, because Leon did not punch himself out --and there is no reason to think he will in the rematch. Which means that Ali will have to fight a very different fight this time: he will have to risk punching himself out in the first five or six rounds in what Arum is calling "The Battle of New Orleans," and the odds on his getting away with it are no better than fifty-fifty. And he will have to be in miraculously top shape, even then --because if he can't come zooming out of his corner at the opening bell and whack Leon off balance real quick, Muhammad will not last ten rounds. If I were a bookie I would make Leon a sixty-forty favorite, which is exactly the same way Bob Arum was seeing it, even before the fight finally found a home in New Orleans. There are some people in "the Fight Game" who will tell you that Arum doesn't know boxing from badminton --but not one of them went on the record last time with anything riskier than the idea that Leon "might have a chance." Bob Arum called it sixty-forty Ali at least six weeks prior to the fight --which stunned me at first, because I thought my own twenty percent figure was borderline madness, at best. But Arum stuck with his forty percent bet on Leon, all the way up to the fight. . . and after watching Leon for two weeks in Vegas my own figure went up to thirty or thirty-five percent; or perhaps even forty or forty-five percent on the day of the fight when I heard Arum screaming at Spinks on the house phone at 2:30 in the afternoon, telling him to stop worrying about getting tickets for his friends and get ready to do battle against a man that a lot of people including me still call the best fighter who ever climbed into a ring. . . and if I had known, before the fight, that Leon forced his handlers to get him a steak for lunch at 5:00, I would probably have called the fight even. That's how The Battle of New Orleans looks to me now: Dead Even --and if the numbers turn up that way on September 15th, I will bet on Muhammad Ali, for reasons of my own. I hate to lose any bet, but losing on this one would not hurt that much. The last twenty years of my life would have been just a little bit cheaper and duller if Muhammad Ali had not been around to keep me cranked up, and there is no way I could bet against him this time, in what could well be his last fight. I figure I can afford to bet on him and lose; that is an acceptable risk. . . But something very deep inside me curdles at the thought of what kind of rancid karma I could bring down on myself if I bet against him, and he won. That is not an acceptable risk. The Roving Trinod, the Experts at the Hilton Bar... A Final Adventure in Fish-Wrap

The Roving Tripod, the Experts at the Hilton Bar... A Final Adventure in Fish-Wrap Journalism Muhammad Ali has interested a lot of different people for a lot of very different reasons since he became a media superstar and a high-energy national presence almost two decades ago. And he has interested me, too, for reasons that ranged from a sort of amused camaraderie in the beginning, to wary admiration, then sympathy & a new level of personal respect, followed by a dip into a different kind of wariness that was more exasperation than admiration. . . and finally into a mix of all these things that never really surfaced and came together until I heard that he'd signed to fight Leon Spinks as a "warmup" for his $16 million swan song against Ken Norton.

This was the point where my interest in Muhammad Ali moved almost subconsciously to a new and higher gear. I had seen all of Leon's fights in the 1976 Montreal Olympics, and I recall being impressed to the point of awe at the way he attacked and destroyed whatever they put in front of him. I had never seen a young fighter who could get away with planting both feet and leaning forward when he hooked with either hand.

Archie Moore was probably the last big fighter with that rare combination of power, reflexes and high tactical instinct that a boxer must have to get away with risking moments of total commitment even occasionally. But Leon did it constantly, and in most of his fights that was all he did.

It was a pure kamikaze style: The Roving Tripod, as it were --with Leon's legs forming two poles of the tripod, and the body of his opponent forming the third. Which is interesting for at least two reasons: 1) There is no tripod until a punch off that stance connects with the opponent's head or body, so the effect of a miss can range from fatal to unnerving, or at the very least it will cause raised eyebrows and even a faint smile or two among the ringside judges who are scoring the fight. .. and, 2) If the punch connects solidly, then the tripod is formed and an almost preternatural blast of energy is delivered at the point of impact, especially if the hapless target is leaning as far back on the ropes as he can get with his head ducked in and forward in a coverup stance --like Ali's rope-a-dope.

A boxer who plants both feet and then leans forward to lash out with a hook has his whole weight and also his whole balance behind it; he cannot pull back at that point, and if he fails to connect he will not only lose points for dumb awkwardness, but he'll plunge his head out front, low and wide open for one of those close-in jackhammer combinations that usually end with a knockdown.

That was Leon's style in the Olympics, and it was a terrifying thing to see. All he had to do was catch his opponent with no place to run, then land one or two of those brain-rattling tripod shots in the first round --and once you get stunned and intimidated like that in the first round of a three-round (Olympic) bout, there is not enough time to recover.

... or even want to, for that matter, once you begin to think that this brute they pushed you into the ring with has no reverse gear and would just as soon attack a telephone pole as a human being.

Not many fighters can handle that style of all-out assault without having to back off and devise a new game plan. But there is no time for devising new plans in a three-round fight --and perhaps not in ten, twelve or fifteen rounds either, because Leon doesn't give you much time to think. He keeps coming, swarming, pounding; and he can land three or four shots from both directions once he gets braced and leans out to meet that third leg of the tripod.

On the other hand, those poor geeks that Leon beat silly in the Olympics were amateurs. . . and we are all a bit poorer for the fact that he was a light-heavyweight when he won that Gold Medal; because if he'd been a few pounds heavier he would have had to go against the elegant Cuban heavyweight champion, Teofilo Stevenson, who would have beaten him like a gong for all three rounds.

But Stevenson, the Olympic heavyweight champ in both 1972 and '76, and the only modern heavyweight with the physical and mental equipment to compete with Muhammad Ali, has insisted for reasons of his own and Fidel Castro's on remaining the "amateur heavyweight champion of the world," instead of taking that one final leap for the great ring that a fight against Muhammad Ali could have been for him.

Whatever reasons might have led Castro to decide that an Ali-Stevenson match --sometime in 1973 or '74 after Muhammad had won the hearts and minds of the whole world with his win over George Foreman in Zaire --was not in the interest of either Cuba, Castro or perhaps even Stevenson himself, will always be clouded in the dark fog of politics and the conviction of people like me that the same low-rent political priorities that heaped a legacy of failure and shame on every other main issue of this generation was also the real reason why the two great heavyweight artists of our time were never allowed in the ring with each other.

This is one of those private opinions of my own that even my friends in the "boxing industry" still dismiss as the flaky gibberish of a half-smart writer who was doing okay with things like drugs, violence and presidential politics, but who couldn't quite cut the mustard in their world.

Boxing.

These were the same people who chuckled indulgently when I said, in Las Vegas, that I'd take every bet I could get on Leon Spinks against Muhammad Ali at ten to one, and with anybody who was seriously into numbers I was ready to haggle all the way down to five to one, or maybe even four. .. but even at eight to one it was somewhere between hard and impossible to get a bet down on Spinks with anybody in Vegas who was even a fifty-fifty bet to pay off in real money.

One of the few consistent traits shared by "experts" in any field is that they will almost never bet money or anything else that might turn up in public on whatever they call their convictions. That is why they are "experts." They have waltzed through that mine field of high-risk commitments that separates politicians from gamblers, and once you've reached that plateau where you can pass for an expert, the best way to stay there is to hedge all your bets, private and public, so artistically that nothing short of a thing so bizarre that it can pass for an "act of God" can damage your high-priced reputation.

I remember vividly, for instance, my frustration at Norman Mailer's refusal to bet money on his almost certain conviction that George Foreman was too powerful for Muhammad Ali to cope with in Zaire. . . And I also recall being slapped on the chest by an Associated Press boxing writer in Las Vegas while we were talking about the fight one afternoon at the casino bar in the Hilton. "Leon Spinks is a dumb midget," he snarled in the teeth of all the other experts who'd gathered on that afternoon to get each other's fix on the fight. "He has about as much chance of winning the heavyweight championship as this guy."

"This guy" was me, and the A.P writer emphasized his total conviction by giving me a swift backhand to the sternum.

I have talked to him since, on this subject, and when I said I planned to quote him absolutely verbatim with regard to his prefight wisdom in Vegas, he seemed like a different man and said that if I was going to quote him on his outburst of public stupidity that I should at least be fair enough to explain that he had "been with Muhammad Ali for so long and through so many wild scenes that he simply couldn't go against him on this one."

Well. . . this is my final adventure in fish-wrap journalism and I frankly don't give a fuck whether or not it makes sense to the readers. . . especially since you chintzy greedheads tried to put a double-page, full-color H----* ad right in the middle of this story. . .

Somewhere in my files I have a letter from Honda's U.S. ad agency that says they would just as soon avoid any image identification with Rolling Stone... and those lame/tin bastards have heaped enough abuse on me over the years to make me wonder what kind of mentality we're dealing with if they've come so far around the bend that they now want to put a gigantic Honda ad right in the middle of my article.

Fuck those people. I wouldn't ride a Honda to Richard Nixon's funeral. . . and in fact the last person I knew who owned a Honda was Ron Ziegler; that was down in San Clemente, just before The Resignation, and I recall that Ron was eager to lend the thing to me, for reasons I never quite understood. . . but I remember a cocktail party down at Nixon's house, crazed on mescaline and bending the casual elbow with Ron, Henry Kissinger, General Haig and others of that stripe, who were all very friendly at that point in time. Even to me. . . Annie Leibovitz was there and I was negotiating with Ziegler about trading me his Honda for my Z-Datsun for a few days, while Ziegler's deputy, Gerald Warren, was laughing with Annie about how Kissinger thought I was "an Air Force Colonel in mufti. . ."

"Tell him he's right," I whispered to Annie. "Then let's trade for Ziegler's bike and run it straight off the Laguna Beach pier tomorrow morning. I'll take the bugger out over the water at top speed while you get a few good shots, then I'll get off in midair before it hits. .. Right, and we'll give Ron an autographed photo from 'The Colonel.' "

Whoops... here we go again, drifting back to the good old days, when men were men and fun was fun and a well-mannered Air Force Doctor could still have cocktails with the President without causing a scandal.

That was "before the circus left town," as Dick Goodwin put it so starkly as we sat in a Washington peg-house on the day of Nixon's resignation. . . And, indeed, everything since then has been downhill. Hamilton Jordan is too fat to ride a motorcycle and Jody Powell is too slow.

Jesus! How low have we sunk! Was Ron Ziegler the last free spirit in the White House? Jimmy's sister, Gloria, rides a big Honda --but they won't let her north of Chattanooga and the rest of the family is laying low, working feverishly on a formula to convert peanuts into Swiss francs.

Ah... mother of raving God! What are we into? How did we get down in this hole! And how can we get out?

Or --more on the point --how can this cross-eyed story be salvaged, now that I've spent a whole night babbling about Ron Ziegler and Hondas and that crowd of flabby clubfoots in the White House?

What about the rest of the story? What about serious journalism? And decency. . . And truth? and Beauty. . . the Eternal Verities. . . and Law Day in Georgia? Yes, that's almost on us again, and this time they want me to deliver the main address. Why not?

For $100,000 I'll do anything, just as long as the cash comes up front. . . What? Ye Gods! What have I said? Should we cut that last outburst? Or maybe just print the bugger and get braced for a Spinks-like assault from the Secret Service?

No, this shit can't go on. . . it could get me in serious trouble. . . And what a tragedy it would be if I got locked up now, after ten years of abusing the White House for what were always good reasons. Ziegler said it was because I was crazy and Kissinger thought I was some kind of rogue Air Force Colonel: but my old friend Pat Buchanan called it "a character defect". . . which may or may not have been true; but if calling Richard Nixon a liar and a thief was evidence of a "character defect," what in the hell kind of defect, disease or even brain damage would cause a man to spend ten years of his life writing angry, self-righteous speeches for Richard Nixon and Spiro Agnew?

"No Vietcong Ever Called Me 'Nigger.'"

Muhammad Ali said that, back in 1967, and he almost went to prison for it --which says all that needs to be said right now about justice & gibberish in the White House.

Some people write their novels and others roll high enough to live them and some fools try to do both --but Ali can barely read, much less write, so he came to that fork in the road a long time ago and he had the rare instinct to find that one seam in the defense that let him opt for a third choice: he would get rid of words altogether and live his own movie.

A brown Jay Gatsby --not black and with a head that would never be white: he moved from the very beginning with the same instinct that drove Gatsby --an endless fascination with that green light at the end of the pier. He had shirts for Daisy, magic leverage for Wolfsheim, a delicate and dangerously vulnerable Ali-Gatsby shuffle for Tom Buchanan and no answers at all for Nick Carraway, the word junkie.

There are two kinds of counter punchers in this world: one learns early to live by his reactions and quick reflexes, and the other --the one with a taste for high rolling --has the instinct to make an aggressor's art of what is essentially the defensive, survivor's style of the Counter Puncher.

Muhammad Ali decided one day a long time ago, not long after his twenty-first birthday that he was not only going to be King of the World on his own turf, but Crown Prince on everybody else's.

Which is very, very High Thinking --even if you can't pull it off. Most people can't handle the action on whatever they chose or have to call their own turf; and the few who can usually have better sense than to push their luck any further.

That was always the difference between Muhammad Ali and the rest of us. He came, he saw, and if he didn't entirely conquer --he came as close as anybody we are likely to see in the lifetime of this doomed generation.

Res Ipsa Loquitor.

Rolling Stone, #265, May 18, 1978

Bibliography of Works by Dr. Hunter S. Thompson, by Kihm Winship

^{*} no is used below as an abbreviation for National Observer.

"Renfro Valley" Chicago (Sunday) Tribune; February 18, 1962

" 'Leary Optimism' at Home for Kennedy Visitor," National Observer, June 24, 1962, p. 11. On President Valencia of Colombia.

"Nobody Is Neutral Under Aruba's Hot Sun," no, July 16, 1962, p. 14. Bar chat and politics in Aruba, with photo of Thompson on the beach. "The author, Hunter S. Thompson, is a free lance writer reporting for the National Observer during a lengthy tour of S. America."

"A Footloose American in a Smugglers' Den," no, August 6, 1962, p. 13. Smuggling from Aruba to Colombia, with photos by Thompson.

"Democracy Dies in Peru, But Few Seem to Mourn Its Passing," no, August 27, 1962, p. 16. Aftermath of Peruvian election and subsequent coup, with photos by Thompson.

"How Democracy is Nudged Ahead in Equador," no, September 17, 1962, p. 13. Role of U.S.I.S. in Equador.

"Ballots in Brazil Will Measure the Allure of Leftist Nationalism," no, October 1, 1962, p. 4. Upcoming elections in Brazil.

Thompson's Coverage of the Election Campaign for Rolling Stone

Bibliography of Works on Dr. Hunter S. Thompson, by Kihm Winship

"What 'The Spire' Inspires Among Reviewers," National Observer, June 1, 1964, p. 17. Mentions Thompson's review of The Spire (no, April 27, 1964 p. 16)

"In and Out of Books," Lewis Nichols, The New York Times Book Review, March 5, 1967, p. 8. Brief discussion of Thompson's trip to N.Y.C to promote Hell's Angels.

"Thompson, Hunter," Contemporary Authors, Detroit: Gale, 1968, v. 19 to 20, p. 429 to 30. Standard bio.

The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Tom Wolfe, New York: Bantam, 1969. 700 Chapter 13: The Hell's Angels pp. 150 to 51. Describes how Ken Kesey met the Angels through Thompson.

" 'Freak Power' Candidate May Be the Next Sheriff in Placid Aspen, Colorado," Anthony Ripley, photo by David Hiser, The New York Times, October 19, 1970, p. 44.

"Will Aspen's Hippies Elect a Sheriff?" Edwin A. Roberts, Junior., National Observer, November 2, 1970, p. 6. Good photo of Thompson, shaved scalp, can of Bud and large poster of J. Edgar Hoover in background; excellent article.

Aspen Rejects Bid of Hippie Candidate for Sheriffs Office," The New York Times, November 5, 1970, p. 32. Short A.P news release.

Catcher in the Wry," Newsweek, May 1, 1972, p. 65. With photo.

"Covering Politics and Getting High," Women's Wear Daily credit, in San Francisco Chronicle, July 10, 1972, p. 17. Good photo of Thompson with bottle of Ballantine Ale.

"For Hunter Thompson, Outrage Is the Only Way Out," Henry Allen, Book World (Washington Post), July 23, 1972, p. 4. Interview and article.

From The Journal of Popular Culture, Summer 1975:

"Member of the Lynching," Craig Vetter, Aspen Anthology, Winter 1976, pp. 63 to 80. A gonzo memoir by the author of the Playboy interview, concerning mutual adventures in Washington, D.C., in the summer of 1974.

The Book of Lists, David Wallechinsky, New York: Morrow, 1977. "12 Writers Who Ran (Unsuccessfully) for Public Office," p. 245, "15 People Who Have Taken Peyote or Mescaline," p. 404.

"The Last Laugh," George Plimpton. New York Review of Books, August 4, 1977, p. 2. Plimpton's article is on death & death fantasies; mentions that Thompson has contributed one to a forthcoming book, Shadow Box.

Shadow Box, George Plimpton, New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1977. Numerous Thompson stories; the book is indexed, but it's worth the time to read the whole thing.

"Hunter Thompson: The good doctor tells all. . . about Carter, cocaine, adrenaline and the birth of Gonzo Journalism," Ron Rosenbaum, High Times, September 1977, pp. 31 to 39.

"Literary Lasagna," Charles T. Powers, Rolling Stone, October 6, 1977, p. 47. Interview with Elaine Kaufman of "Elaine's" in N.Y.C; she describes cashing a check for Thompson as if it were a high-wire act.

"After Begelman: The Whiz Kids Take Over," Maureen Orth, New York, June 12, 1978, pp. 59 to 64. Mentions film in progress on Thompson.

"The Aspen Story," Outside, September/October 1978, p. 25+. Three articles on Aspen, with mentions of Thompson's run for Sheriff; photo on p. 33.

"Notes from the Battle of New Orleans," George Plimpton, Rolling Stone #277, November 2, 1978, pp. 52 to 56. Article on the second Ali-Spinks heavyweight title fight; reference to H.S.T as intended collaborator for this article on p. 55.