Fear and Loathing at Rolling Stone (64 page)

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 assess 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 seventy-eight-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 twelve years ago . . . I felt the same way about the first wild, violent days of the FSM 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 Law 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.

__ __ __ __

Three years after the disappearance of Oscar Acosta—presumably somewhere in Mexico—Hunter wrote an extended roast-obituary-tribute of his old friend and counselor, whom he referred to variously as his attorney, his “Samoan attorney,” and, in
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas,
“Dr. Gonzo.” Oscar was a familiar figure around the
Rolling Stone
office in San Francisco (he carved his middle name, “Zeta,” into a wooden shelf in the men’s room), and initially threatened to prevent the publication of the
Vegas
book partly due to his being described as a “three-hundred-pound Samoan,” but eventually relented. To this day, no trace of Acosta has ever been found.

December 15, 1977

Nobody knows the weirdness I’ve seen
On the trail of the brown buffalo

—Old Black Joe

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 Buffalos 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 Jr.] 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 Juarez. 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 Queers 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” [in the La Raza Movement] 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 séance—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 TV 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 LAPD 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.”