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

I took another big hit off the amyl, and by the time I got to the bar my heart was full of joy. I felt like a monster reincarnation of Horatio Alger...a Man on the Move, and just sick enough to be totally confident.

It been a waste of time, a lame fuckaround that was only—in clear retrospect—a cheap excuse for a thousand cops to spend a few days in Las Vegas and lay the bill on the taxpayers. Nobody had learned anything- or at least nothing except new. Except maybe me .. . and all I learned was that the District Attorneys' Association is about ten years behind the grim truth and harsh kinetic realities of what they just recently learned to call “the Drug Culture” in tyhe Year of Our lord, 1971.

... Why bother with newspapers, if this is all they offer? Agnew was right. The press is a gang of cruel faggots. Journalism is not a profession or a trade. It is a cheap catchall for fuckoffs and misfits- a false doorway to the backside of life, a filthy pissridden little hole nailed off by the building inspector, but just deep enough for a wine to curl up from the sidewalk and masturbate like a chimp in a zoocage.

Under normal circumstances I would have been seized and arrested when l tried to turn it in...but not at this of the morning, with only this kid to deal with. I was, all, a “VIP.” Otherwise, they would never have chartered the car to me in the first place.....

Let the chickens come home to roost, I thought as I hurried into the airport. It was still too early to act normal, so I hunkered down in the coffee shop behind the LA. Times.

” He seemed suprised. “You found the American Dream?” he said. “In this town?” I nodded. “We’re sitting on the main nerve rightnow,” I said. “You remember that story the manager told us about the owner of this place? How he always wanted to run away and join the circus when he was a kid?” Bruce ordered two more beers. He looked over the casino for a moment, then shrugged. “Yeah, I see what you mean,” he said. “Now the bastard has his own circus, and a license to steal, too.” He nodded. “You’re right—he’s the model."

“Absolutely,” I said. “It’s pure Horatio Alger, all the way down to his attitude.

they figured anybody crazy enough to pose as a cop while driving around Vegas in a white Cadillac convertible with a drink in his hand almost had to be Heavy, and perhaps even dangerous.

This proved to be an historic schism in the then Rising Tide of the Youth Movement of the Sixties. It was the first open break between the Greasers and the Longhairs, and the importance of that break can be read in the history of SDS, which eventually destroyed in the doomed effort to reconcile the interests of the 'working class biker/dropout types and the upper/mid Berkeley/student activists.

What Leary took down with him was the central illusion of a whole lifestyle that he helped to create...a generation of permanent cripples, failed seekers, who never understood the essential oldmystic fallacy of the Acid Culture: the desperate assumption that somebodyor at least some forceis tending that Light at the end of the tunnel.

This is the same cruel and paradoxically benevolent bullshit has kept the Catholic Church going for so many centuries. It is also the military ethic...a blind faith in some higher and wiser “authority.” The Pope, The General, The Prime Minister . . . all the way up to “God.” One of the crucial moments of the Sixties came on that day when the Beatles cast their lot with the Maharishi. It was like Dylan going to the Vatican to kiss the Pope's ring.

First “gurus.” Then, when that didn't work, back to Jesus. And now, following Manson's primitive/instinct lead, a whole new wave of clantype commune Gods

But what is sane? Especially here in “our own country”-in this doomstruck era of Nixon. We are all wired into a survival trip now. No more of the speed that fueled the Sixties. Uppers are going out of style. This was the fatal flaw in Tim Leary's trip. He crashed around America selling “con sciousness expansion” without ever giving a thought to the grim meathook realities that were lying in wait for all the people who took him too seriously. After West Point and the Priesthood, LSD must have seemed entirely logical to him...but there is not much satisfaction in knowing that he blew it very badiy for himself, because he took too many oth ers down with him.

The mentality of Las Vegas is so grossly atavistic that a really massive crime often slips by unrecognized. One of my neighbors recently spent a week in the Vegas jail for “vagrancy.”