Fear and Loating in Las Vegas. A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream

I looked pretty bad: wearing old Levis and white Chuck Taylor All-Star basketball sneakers ...and my ten-peso Acapulco shirt had long since come apart at the shoulder seams from all that road-wind. My beard was about three days old, bordering on standard wino trim, and my eyes were totally hidden by Sandy Bull’s Saigon-mirror shades.

But my voice had the tone of a man who knows he has a reservation. I was gambling on my attorney’s foresightbut I couldn’t pass a chance to put the horn into a cop:and I was right. The reservation was in my attorney’s name. The desk-clerk hit his bell to summon the bag-boy. “This is all I have with me, right now,” I said, “The rest is out there in that white Cadillac convertible.” I pointed to the car that we could all see parked just outside the front door. “Can you have somebody drive it around to the room?”

The desk-clerk was friendly. “Don’t worry about a thing, sir. Just enjoy your stay here—and if there’s anything you need, just call the desk.”

I nodded and smiled, half-watching the stunned reaction of the cop-crowd right next to me. They were stupid with shock. Here they were arguing with every piece of leverage they could command, for a room they’d already paid for—and suddenly their whole act gets side—swiped by some crusty drifter who looks like something out of an upper-Michigan hobo jungle. And he checks in with a handful of credit cards! Jesus! What’s happening in this world?

3. Savage Lucy ...”Teeth Like Baseballs, Eyes Like Jellied Fire”

I gave my bag to the boy who scurried up, and told him to bring a quart of Wild Turkey and two fifths of Bacardi Anejo with a night’s worth of ice.

Our room was in one of the farthest wings of the Flamingo. The place is far more than a hotel: It is a sort of huge underfinanced Playboy Club in the middle of the desert. Something like nine separate wings, with interconnecting causeways and pools—a vast complex, sliced up by a maze of car-ramps and driveways. It took me about twenty minutes to wander from the desk to the distant wing we’d been assigned to.

My idea was to get into the room, accept the booze and baggage delivery, then smoke my last big chunk of Singapore Grey while watching Walter Cronkite and waiting for my attorney to arrive. I needed this break, this moment of peace and refuge, before we did the Drug Conference. It was going to be quite a different thing from the Mint 400. That had been observer gig, but this one would need participation—and a special stance: At the Mint 400 we were dealing with anessentially simpatico crowd, and if our behavior was gross outrageous ... well, it was only a matter of degree.this time our very presence would be an outrage. We be attending the conference under false pretenses and from the start, with a crowd that was convened for d purpose of putting people like us in jail. We were the Menace—not in disguise, but stone—obvious drug abusers, with a flagrantly cranked-up act that we intended to push all the way to the limit ... not to prove any final, sociological point, and not even as a conscious mockery: It was mainly a matter of life-style, a sense of obligation and even duty. If the Pigs were gathering in Vegas for a top-level Drug Conference, we felt the drug culture should be represented.

Beyond that, I’d been out, of my head for so long now, that a gig like this seemed perfectly logical. Considering the circumstances, I felt totally meshed with my karma.

Or at least I was feeling this way until I got to the big grey door that opened into Mini-Suite 1150 in the Far Wing. I rammed my key into the knob-lock and swung the door open, thinking, “Ah, home at last!” ...but the door hit something, which I recognized at once as a human form: a girl of indeterminate age with the face and form of a Pit Bull. She was wearing a shapeless blue smock and her eyes were angry ...

Somehow I knew that I had the right room. I wanted to think otherwise, but the vibes were hopelessly right ...and she seemed to know, too, because she made no move to stop me when I moved past her and into the suite. I tossed my leather satchel on one of the beds and looked around for what I knew I would see ...my attorney .. . stark naked, standing in the bathroom door with a drug-addled grin on his face.

“You degenerate pig,” I muttered.

“It can’t be helped,” he said, nodding at the bulldog girl.

“This is Lucy.” He laughed distractedly. “You know—like Lucy in the sky with diamonds . .

I nodded to Lucy, who was eyeing me with definite venom. I was clearly some kind of enemy, some ugly intrusion on her scene ... and it was clear from the way she moved around the room, very quick and tense on her feet, that she was sizing me up. She was ready for violence,there was not much doubt about that. Even my attorney picked up on it.