Fear and Loathing at Rolling Stone (35 page)

Morning again in downtown Los Angeles; dawn comes up on this city like a shitmist. Will it burn off before noon? Will the sun eventually poke through? That is the question they’ll be asking each other down there on the Pool Terrace below my window a few hours from now. I’m into my eighteenth day as a resident of the Wilshire Hyatt House Hotel, and I am getting to know the dreary routine of this place pretty well.

Outside of that pigsty in Milwaukee, this may be the worst hotel in America. The Sheraton-Schroeder remains in a class of its own: passive incompetence is one thing, but aggressive Nazi hostility on the corporate level is something else again. The only thing these two hotels have in common is that the Sheraton (ITT) chain got rid of them: the Schroeder was sold to a local business magnate, and this grim hulk ended up as a part of the Hyatt House chain.

As far as I know there was no pool in the Schroeder. Maybe a big grease pit or a scum vat of some kind on the roof, but I never saw a pool. There were rumors of a military-style S&M gallery in the basement, with maybe an icewater plunge for the survivors, but I never saw that one either. There was no way to deal with management personnel in the Schroeder unless your breath smelled heavily of sauerbraten . . . and in fact one of the happiest things about my life, these days, is that my memories of life in the Sheraton-Schroeder are becoming mercifully dim. The only open sore that remains from that relationship is the trouble I’m still having with the IBM typewriter-rental service in Milwaukee—with regard to the $600 Selectric typewriter I left behind on the desk when I checked out. It was gone when the IBM man came around to pick it up the next morning, and now they want me to pay for it.

Right. Another contribution to the Thousand-Year Reich: “We will march on a road of bones . . .” Tom Paxton wrote a song about it. And now I get these harsh letters from Milwaukee: “Herr Docktor Thompson—Der Typewriting machine you rented hass disappeared! And you will of course pay!”

No. Never in hell. Because I have a receipt for that typewriter.

But first things first. We were talking about motorcycles; Jackson and I were out there in Ventura fucking around with a 750 Honda and an experimental prototype of the new Vincent—a 1000-cc brute that proved out to be so awesomely fast that I didn’t even have time to get scared of it before I found myself coming up on a highway stoplight at 90 miles an hour and then skidding halfway through the intersection with both wheel-brakes locked.

A genuinely hellish bike. Second gear peaks around 65—cruising speed on the freeways—and third winds out somewhere between 95 and 100. I never got to fourth, which takes you up to 120 or so—and after that you shift into fifth.

Top speed is 140, more or less, depending on how the thing is tuned—but there is nowhere in Los Angeles County to run a bike like that. I managed to get it back from Ventura to McGovern’s downtown headquarters hotel, staying mainly in second gear, but the vibration almost fused my wrist bones, and boiling oil from the breather pipes turned my right foot completely black. Later, when I tried to start it up for another test run, the backlash from the kick-starter almost broke my leg. For two days afterward I limped around with a golf-ball-size blood-bruise in my right arch.

Later in the week I tried the bastard again, but it stalled on a ramp leading up to the Hollywood Freeway and I almost broke my hand when I exploded in a stupid, screaming rage and punched the gas tank. After that, I locked it up and left it in the hotel parking lot—where it sat for many days with a “McGovern for President” tag on the handlebars.

George never mentioned it, and when I suggested to Gary Hart that the senator might like to take the machine out for a quick test-ride and some photos for the national press, I got almost exactly the same reaction that Mankiewicz laid on me in Florida when I suggested that McGovern could pick up a million or so votes by inviting the wire-service photographers to come out and snap him lounging around on the beach with a can of beer in his hand and wearing my Grateful Dead T-shirt.

Looking back on it, I think that was the moment when my relationship with Mankiewicz turned sour. Twenty-four hours earlier I had showed up at his house in Washington with what John Prine calls “an
illegal smile” on my face—and the morning after that visit he found himself sitting next to me on the plane to Florida and listening to some lunatic spiel about how his man should commit political suicide by irreparably identifying himself as the candidate of the Beachbums, Weirdos, and Boozers.

The Samoan Tragedy

The Villon quote was lifted from a book I wrote a few years ago on outlaw motorcycle gangs, and at the time it seemed like a very apt little stroke—reaching back into time and French poetry for a reminder that a sense of doomed alienation on your own turf is nothing new.

But why use the same quote to lead off another one of these rambling screeds on American politics in 1972? On the California Democratic primary? The McGovern campaign?

There has to be a reason. And there is, in fact—but I doubt if I’m up to explaining it right now. All I can say for sure is that I walked into the room and stared at the typewriter for a long time . . . knowing I’d just spent seventeen days and $2,000 in California lashing together this thirty-three-pound satchel of notes, tapes, clippings, propaganda, etc. . . . and also knowing that somewhere in one of these goddamn drawers is a valid contract that says I have to write a long article, immediately, about whatever happened out there.

How long, O Lord, how long? Where will it end?

All I ever wanted out of this grueling campaign was enough money to get out of the country and live for a year or two in peaceful squalor in a house with a big screen porch looking down on an empty white beach, with a good rich coral reef a few hundred yards out in the surf and
no neighbors
.

Some book reviewer whose name I forgot recently called me a “vicious misanthrope” . . . or maybe it was a “cynical misanthrope” . . .but either way, he (or she) was right; and what got me this way was
politics
. Everything that is wrong-headed, cynical & vicious in me today traces straight back to that evil hour in September of ’69 when I decided to get heavily involved in the political process . . .

But that is another story. What worries me now—in addition to this still-unwritten saga of the California primary—is the strong possibility that my involvement in politics has become so deep and twisted that I can no longer think rationally about that big screen porch above the beach except in terms of an appointment as governor of American Samoa.

I coveted that post for many years. For a while it was my only ambition. I pursued it relentlessly, and at one point in either 1964 or ’65 it seemed within my grasp. Larry O’Brien, now the chairman of the Democratic Party, was the man in charge of pork-barrel/patronage appointments at the time, and he gave me excellent reason to believe my application was on the verge of bearing fruit. I was living at the Holiday Inn in Pierre, South Dakota, when the good news arrived. It came on a Wednesday, as I recall, by telegram. The manager of the Inn was ecstatic; he called a cab immediately and sent me downtown to a dry-goods store where I bought six white sharkskin suits—using a Sinclair Oil card, which was subsequently revoked and caused me a lot of trouble.

I never learned all the details, but what was finally made clear—in the end, after a bad communications breakdown—was that O’Brien had pulled a fast one on me. As it turned out, he never had any intention of making me governor of American Samoa, and when I finally realized this it made me very bitter and eventually changed my whole life.

Like George Metesky—the “Mad Bomber” who terrorized New York for fifteen years to get even with Con Edison for overcharging him on his light bill and finally cutting off his electricity—I changed my whole lifestyle and channeled my energies into long-range plotting for vengeance on O’Brien and the Democratic Party. Instead of going into government service in the South Pacific, I fled Pierre, S.D., in a junk Rambler and drove to San Francisco—where I fell in with the Hells Angels and decided to become a writer instead of a diplomat.

Several years later I moved to Colorado and tried to live quietly. But I never forgot O’Brien. In the solitude of the Rockies I nursed a lust for vengeance . . . saying nothing to anyone, until suddenly in the summer of ’69 I saw an opportunity to cripple the Democratic Party in Aspen.

This took about fifteen months, and by the time it was done, I was hopelessly hooked again on the politics of vengeance. The next step
would have to be national. O’Brien was riding high in Washington, commanding a suite of offices in the Watergate and reluctantly gearing up to send a party with no real candidate and a $9 million debt from ’68 into a hopeless battle with Nixon—a battle that would not only humiliate the candidate (The Man from Maine, they said), but also destroy the party by plunging it into a state of financial and ideological bankruptcy from which it would never recover.

Wonderful, I thought. I won’t even have to
do
anything. Just watch, and write it all down.

That was six months ago. But things are different now—and in the strange calm of those first few days after the votes were counted in California, I began to see that George McGovern had scrambled my own carefully laid plans along with all the others—except his—and that I was suddenly facing the very distinct possibility that I might have to drag myself into a voting booth this November and actually pull the lever for the presidential candidate of the Democratic Party. O’Brien’s party. That same gang of corrupt and genocidal bastards who not only burned me for six white sharkskin suits eight years ago in South Dakota and chased me through the streets of Chicago with clubs & tear gas in August of ’68, but also forced me to choose for five years between going to prison or chipping in 20 percent of my income to pay for napalm bombs to be dropped on people who never threatened me with anything; and who put my friends in jail for refusing to fight an undeclared war in Asia that even Mayor Daley is now opposed to . . .

Ah . . . careful, careful: that trip has been done. No point getting off on another violent tangent. And besides, now that the Republicans are running The War, the Democrats are against it . . . or at least
some
of them are against it, including such recent converts as Ed Muskie and Hubert Humphrey. But it is also worth noting that the only Democrat to survive this hellish six-month gauntlet of presidential primaries is also the only genuine anti-war candidate.

Six months ago McGovern was dismissed by the press and the pols as a “one-issue candidate.” And to a certain extent they were right. He has branched out a bit since then, but The War in Vietnam is still the only issue in McGovern’s jumbled arsenal that he never has to explain,
defend, or modify. All he has to do is start talking about Vietnam, and the crowd begins cheering and clapping.

For a “one-issue candidate,” George McGovern has done pretty well. Four years ago Gene McCarthy was another “one-issue candidate”—the same issue poor McGovern is stuck with today—and if McCarthy had somehow managed to put together the kind of political organization that McGovern is riding now, he would be the incumbent president and the ’72 campaign would be a very different scene.

Gene Pokorny, one of McGovern’s key managers, who also worked for McCarthy in ’68, describes the difference between the two campaigns as “the difference between an organization and a happening.” . . . Which is probably true, but that “happening” dumped a Democratic president and made McCarthy the front-runner all the way to California, where he lost to Robert Kennedy by only 3 percentage points. They were still counting the votes when Sirhan Sirhan fired a bullet into Kennedy’s head.

What if McCarthy had won California? Would Sirhan have gone after him, instead of Kennedy? . . . Like Artie Bremer, who stalked Nixon for a while, then switched to Wallace. Assassins, like politicians and journalists, are not attracted to losers.

“That’s One Story You’ll Never Hear”