Some of the things I called Nixon obviously were not accurate. Nixon does not, as far as I know, fuck pigs and sell used cars with cracked blocks. Nor is he corrupt beyond the ability of modern man to describe it. Those are exaggerations to make a point. My concern with accuracy is on a higher level than nickels and dimes, in a word, line by line.

Woody Creek, January 1990

ED MUSKIE DOOMED BY

IBOGABVE: BIZARRE DRUG

PLOT REVEALED

The most common known source of Ibogaine is from the roots of Tahernanthe Iboga, a shrub indigenous to West Africa. As early as 1869, roots of T.L were reported effective in combating sleep or fatigue and in maintaining alertness when ingested by African natives. Extracts of T.I. are used by natives while stalking game; it enables them to remain motionless for as long as two days while retaining mental alertness. It has

been used for centuries by natives of Africa, Asia, and South America in conjunction with fetishistic and mythical ceremonies. In 1905 the gross effects of chewing large quantities of T.I. were described: "Soon his nerves get tense in an extraordinary way; an epileptic-like madness comes over him, during which he becomes unconscious and pronounces words which are interpreted by the older members of the group as having a prophetic meaning and to prove that the fetish has entered him."

At the turn of the century, iboga extracts were used as stimulants, aphrodisiacs, and inebriants. They have been available in European drugstores for over thirty years. Much of the research with Ibogaine has been done with animals. In the cat, for example, 2-10 mglkg given intravenously caused marked excitation, dilated pupils, salivation, and tremors leading to a picture of rage. There was an alerting reaction; obvious apprehension and fear, and attempts to escape. . . . In human studies, at a dose of 300 mg given orally, the subject experiences visions, changes in perception of the environment, and delusions or alterations of thinking. Visual imagery becomes more vivid, with animals often appearing. Ibogaine produces a state of drowsiness in which the subject does not wish to move, open his eyes, or be aware of his environment. Since there appears to be an inverse relationship between the presence of physical symptoms and the richness of the psychological experience, the choice of environment is an important consideration. Many are disturbed by lights or noises. . . . Dr. Claudio Naranjo, a psychotherapist, is responsible for most current knowledge regarding Ibogaine effects in humans. He states: '7 have been more impressed by the enduring effects resulting from Ibogaine than by those from sessions conducted with any other drug."

—From a study by PharmChem Laboratories, Palo Alto, California

Not much has been written about the Ibogaine Effect as a serious factor in the presidential campaign, but toward the end of the Wisconsin primary race—about a week before the vote—word leaked out that some of Muskie's top advisers had called in a Brazilian doctor who was said to be treating the candidate with "some kind of strange drug" that nobody in the press corps had ever heard of.

It had been common knowledge for many weeks that Humphrey was using an exotic brand of speed known as Wallot . . . and it had long been whispered that Muskie was into something very heavy, but it was hard to take the talk seriously until I heard about the appearance of a mysterious Brazilian doctor. That was the key.

I immediately recognized the Ibogaine Effect—from Muskie's tearful breakdown on the flatbed truck in New Hampshire, the delusions and altered thinking that characterized his campaign in Florida, and finally the condition of ''total rage" that gripped him in Wisconsin.

There was no doubt about it: the Man from Maine had turned to massive doses of Ibogaine as a last resort. The only remaining question was, "When did he start?" But nobody could answer this one, and I was not able to press the candidate himself for an answer because I was permanently barred from the Muskie campaign after that incident on the Sunshine Special in Florida . . . and that scene makes far more sense now than it did at the time.

Muskie has always taken pride in his ability to deal with hecklers; he has frequently challenged them, calling them up to the stage in front of big crowds and then forcing the poor bastards to debate with him in a blaze of TV lights.

But there was none of that in Florida. When the Boohoo began grabbing at his legs and screaming for more gin. Big Ed went all to pieces . . . which gave rise to speculation, among reporters familiar with his campaign style in '68 and '70, that Muskie was not himself. It was noted, among other things, that he had developed a tendency to roll his eyes wildly during TV interviews, that his thought patterns had become strangely fragmented, and that not even his closest advisers could predict when he might suddenly spiral off into babbling rages or neo-comatose funks.

In retrospect, however, it is easy to see why Muskie fell apart on that caboose platform in the Miami train station. There he was—far gone in a bad Ibogaine frenzy—suddenly shoved out in a rainstorm to face a sullen crowd and some kind of snarling lunatic going for his legs while he tried to explain why he was "the only Democrat who can beat Nixon."

It is entirely conceivable—given the known effects of Ibogaine— that Muskie's brain was almost paralyzed by hallucinations at the time; that he looked out at the crowd and saw gila monsters instead of people, and that his mind snapped completely when he felt something large and apparently vicious clawing at his legs.

We can only speculate on this, because those in a position to know have flatly refused to comment on rumors concerning the Senator's disastrous experiments with Ibogaine. I tried to find the Brazilian doctor on election night in Milwaukee, but by the time the polls closed he was long gone. One of the hired bimbos in Milwaukee's Holiday Inn headquarters said a man with fresh welts on his head had been dragged out the side door and put on a bus to Chicago, but we were never able to confirm this.

Milwaukee, 1972

WASHINGTON POLITICS

Fd go mad if I had to live in the midst of all the weird shit I write about. I think that's why it's so easy for me to write from what seems like an original or even bizarre point of view about scenes or situations that a lot of writers tend to ignore because they live right in the middle of them. A typical Washington dinner party^ for instance, is just part of the daily routine for most political writers. They do that kind of thing five nights a week, and they get very insulted when somebody calls it weird — which it is. What passes for everyday social reality in Washington strikes me as very peculiar and baroque.

Which is harmless enough, I guess, until you realize that these atavistic rituals are taken very seriously by the same people who have the power to plunge the whole world into a nuclear war every time they figure some boatload of uppity heathens in the South China Sea needs to be ''taught a lesson " by the U. S. Marines for not showing the proper respect for God and the American Eagle.

Toward the end of '73 / got a letter from The New York Times. Charlotte Curtis was going to take over the Op Ed page as of January ist, and they wanted to mark the changing of the guard with something very heavy, a piece that would sort of announce to everybody that the Op Ed page was no longer going to be written by a bunch of stale seventy-year-old peace-talk hacks from Washington, paid-off social butterflies, and political wizards.

This is what they told me. They were going to bring some life to it, and a new approach to journalism. And to announce this to the world they proposed that I write a long piece for January i, for the first page Charlotte Curtis produced. Which I did, and it took up almost a whole page.

It dumbfounded them. Td sent it in on the mojo and they didn't know they had mojos in the building. They found some in the basement.

It was a violent attack on Nixon. And somewhere about two-thirds down through the piece, the subject of Arab oil and Kissinger came up. I wrote then what appeared, even to me, an outlandish scenario for an American invasion of the oil fields with Russia, making a deal

with the Russians, and just seizing the oil. I said this was what Kissinger would do. I was proposing it in the same kind of tongue-in-cheek style of the Ibogaine thing. I didn't say that I had heard Kissinger was planning this, or that I had some inside information. I just proposed it as a likelihood for the coming year.

Several days later the Times got a letter from one of the Arab embassies denouncing them for this incredible kind of incendiary irresponsibility, that they would allow some kind of madness like this to appear in the pages of The New York Times.

Christ, it wasn't seven months before Kissinger himself proposed this, as well as Ford, and the idea of invading the Middle East to seize the Arab oil became a definite policy option in the energy crisis.

But none of them approached Nixon. He had a classic absolute lack of any integrity or honesty or decency.

Nixon was a monument to everything rotten in the American dream — he was a monument to why it failed.

He is our monument.

Woody Creek, January 1990

SUMMIT CONFERENCE IN

ELKO: SECRET GATHERING

OF THE POWER ELITE

It started with me, and Adam.

Adam Walinsky is a very bright boy and has been perceived that way for a long time. I don't know what he's doing now — I think he went back to serious private law in New York — but he was the main speechwriter for Bobby Kennedy in '68.

And like a lot of the Kennedy people he'd been frozen out at the beginning of the McGovern situation.

He was out here at the house in '73- ^nd he told me, if you run for the Senate, let me tell you about some of the things you'll be facing. There are a hell of a lot of things happening down the line here. He brought up things like baby boomers and their problem with Social Security, fewer people working to pay for more people, and the cra-ziness in the criminal justice system, all kinds of things I hadn't had to think about.

Oddly enough, the McGovern campaign had sharpened my appetite for politics, and a lot of other people's. Looking back on it, that seems strange.

But once Vd seen how easy it was here in Aspen to grab the wheels and handles of politics, even with insane positions, and once Fd seen what McGovern had done wrong, once Fd learned national politics, I was loath to come back to Aspen and deal with local issues. By then, anyway, we'd taken over here. For the moment, that battle was won.

So I was serious about getting into national politics. It looked to me as if that could be won, too. McGovern had lost because of mistakes. If the next person running could avoid his mistakes . . .

I was teetering for a while about whether or not to run for the Senate. If Gary Hart had not decided to run, I might have. He had not announced when I started thinking about it. At that time I was thinking hard about the numbers. I thought I had a solid 20 percent. The kind of base that is unshakable and is likely to grow. But I figured Gary would come in with, maybe, 40. I talked with Gary about it.

Keep in mind, I was dead serious about politics. I had become more and more on the inside during the 'j2 campaign. I had gone to Washington for that, just like I said I would, pulling a trailer and driving the same fucking Volvo that's sitting outside now with a foot and a half of snow on it, eighteen years ago. As a matter of fact I drove through snow most of the way. God. Driving across goddamn Nebraska with a huge Doberman, pulling a giant U-Haul trailer, driving through a storm like this. These big i8-wheelers looming up on me suddenly out of the white. I couldn't go fast enough, couldn't see, blind in the snow, trying to pull left in the lane, put it in third, move out a little bit into the driving lane . . . ZOOOOM! Right beside you, huge blast of snow, the trailer jumps . . . they'd go by, 80 mph, barely missing me . . . but the car did well.

I went there ignorant not just about how it was run and what it all meant, but how to cover it; '68 had politicized me, and I had come back and gotten into it here, but I was really innocent. That campaign was a real education, and I think it shows through in the book.

Anyway, I decided not to run, but I still wanted to do something. And after I talked to Adam, I talked to Dick Goodwin, Doris Kearns . . . Vd met a lot of people on the campaign. I had seen what happened to the Democratic Party. I knew all the players. I had compiled a list of all the important campaign workers, cross-indexed, alliances noted. I figured if we could get the best people in the party together we could begin to create a national political machine. In essence, I was thinking, if I were running for president, whom would I want?

So, astoundingly enough, I persuaded Wenner to have a secret conference. My notion was to set the agenda, the platform for y6, bring together massive talent, heal divisions. Wenner agreed to have Rolling Stone finance the whole thing.

I picked Elko as a site because it was so far from anything that it would be safe. It was the most unlikely place I could think of. I figured that if this were known, if this group were seen together anywhere, it would fail. It had to be as secret as possible. It couldn't be here, it couldn 't be New York, so I picked Elko. Hiked the Commercial Hotel, with the big white polar bear in front.

The legendary White King, now a major attraction of the Monte Carlo Casino at the Commercial Hotel in Elko, Nevada. It was taken near Point Hope in igsj by a group of native Eskimos, who accepted the challenge of finding the largest polar bear in the wide expanse of the Arctic Circle. Polars usually grow seven to eight feet in length and between i,ooo and i,600pounds. White King stands ten feet, four inches and weighs 2,200 pounds.

I had a bit of a romantic attachment to it.

I had to set up the conference before we talked to anybody. Adam sort of knew what I had in mind, and he helped me talk to Jann. But I didn 'f dare talk to too many people because the invitations themselves had to be a secret.

We couldn 'f invite very many. We had only eight, and I had to make the final cuts. The Kennedy wing and the McGovern wing had fought viciously with each other throughout the campaign, and I was setting out to heal that.

I started with my list . . . all the people I had picked as the best of the campaigns I had seen. I got it down to twenty people, then I asked each one of them for five names of the people they thought were the best. I made a card for each person, how often they were named. It was incredibly hard to narrow it down. Gary Hart, for instance, didn't

make it. . . he was like a second-round draft pick, like Mankiewicz, Rich Johns, Bill Dixon, and Sandy Bender. We had to choose from the real intellectuals, the organizers and tacticians, the numbers junkies. . . . We just couldn't pick everybody, and the word did filter out to some of these people eventually, Dixon, Sam Jones, and it was quite hurtful to me. It was a bitch.

We'd initially talked about having some journalists there, sworn to secrecy, Greider, I.F. Stone, but we just wanted to keep it tight. There was never any hint of it in the media.

Keep in mind, it was a strategy meeting, but it was more than that. It was intended to produce a platform, and a book. The idea was to go out and have the book published, get Wenner to do it. Doris was going to edit it. I insisted that everybody bring one paper to the conference.

I was the advance man. I went out there and made reservations in the name of the National Studebaker Society. I said we were a group of Studebaker owners and enthusiasts who convened every year. I made the reservations at the Stockmen's Hotel, across from the Commercial. A little more staid. I figured I had to keep them away from the casino, or the fuckers would gamble all night. We're talking about players, gamblers by nature.

But I knew they would like Elko. No matter what they thought ahead of time, they would like it. And everybody did. . . .

Everybody who was invited came: Pat Caddell, Dick Goodwin, Dave Burke. He would later be president of CBS news. He was Kennedy's AA, and had taken some job on Wall Street; he'd signed on after the campaign to become president of Shearson Lehman, or something.

He and I were the first ones there. He came on some DC-3. Somehow to get to Elko he'd had to make about five stops, like from LaGuardia to Minneapolis to St. Louis to Denver to Salt Lake. The plane never got above, like, 5,000 feet all the way.

He and I had a night there before anyone else showed up. Jann came in the next day on a Lear jet with Goodwin, Doris, Caddell, everybody.

I'd been there about a week. I had all the rooms set up, a giant conference room, everything. I wanted to take it right up to the opening gavel, chair the first meeting, then turn it over to Wenner and the others.

We had the Kennedy axis — Walinsky, Goodwin, Keams, Burke — and the McGovem axis — Caddell, Carl Wagner, Rick Stems, Sandy Berger.

We were still pissed off about Chicago. We were still pissed off at being crushed twice by Nixon, who was still in control. It was not a happy time. We were on the run.

But it was exhilarating.

I stepped out for a while after chairing the opening session. I was happy to turn it over to Wenner then, although I probably should have stayed, chaired the whole thing, and rammed it through.

But that first night I ate acid and — oh, God — ran off with the Goodwins' babysitter, to a town named Wells, where I knew there was a giant truck stop.

I was pissed off at the people. They were being too contentious, and I was ready for a little break. So I went berserk and went down to this truck stop, where I bought sixteen tire checkers, big things like billy clubs that truckers use to check their tires. And I brought them back and gave one to each of them, and said, okay, you bastards, if you want to argue, here, use these.

Goodwin and Doris were mad for maybe the first twenty minutes when I got back, but no more. They understood. It was a lapse of a sort, but I had a right to a lapse. . . .

Anyway, from then on, they sat around the room with these big clubs in their hands. It helped, got the aggression out and got people to laugh. One person getting really pissed off and walking out would have killed the whole thing.

But it worked. It was one of the heaviest conferences Vve ever heard about in politics. I was on a roll, of course. I had achieved a stranglehold on the political scene. I had been right for so long that nobody questioned me.

It catapulted Wenner right into the national political scene. Rolling Stone was a force, and I intended to use it.

We talked about potential candidates for 'j6, of course. Jimmy Carter wasn't mentioned. But for the most part it was, fuck this candidate business, we're here to talk about how to win again. We knew the arty desperately needed to win in 'j6, and to do that it had to be reshaped. We had to change our approach. Overcome the factional hatreds.

We really did heal the wounds of the past campaigns. It's hard to understand why we didn't come out of there with a platform. I didn't follow up on it much. My role was to make it happen, and I did. Wenner didn't really pursue it. Part of the reason may be that our collective attention soon was refocused on Watergate.

But I didn't forget about it. I figured that if we were going to do this I needed to get out on the road and start traveling with candidates . . . and that's how I met Carter.

Woody Creek, January 1990

OPENING STATEMENT: HST

A-76

Memo #Xoi

Elko, Nevada

Organizing Conference: Feb 21-24, i974

This is a first-draft, last-minute attempt to lash together a vague preamble, of sorts, with regard to the obvious question: What the fuck are we doing here in Elko, Nevada, in a corner of the Stockmen's Hotel about 200 feet from the Burlington Northern RR tracks on a frozen weekend in late February? Sharing the hotel with a state/sectional bridge tournament—at a time when the rest of the country seems to be teetering on the brink of an ugly, mean-spirited kind of long-term chaos that threatens, on an almost day-to-day basis, to mushroom beyond anything we can say, think, or plan out here in this atavistic sanctuary with nothing to recommend it except the world's largest dead Polar Bear and the biggest commercially available hamburger west of the Ruhr. (Both of these are in the Commercial Hotel, directly across the RR tracks from our plush HQ in the Stockmen's Motor Hotel.)

Indeed . . . This is a valid question, and in the next forty-eight hours we will not have much else to do except try to answer it. . . . Or maybe just hang weird at the gambling tables and try to ignore the whole thing.

Both the bars and casinos in Elko are open twenty-four hours a day, in addition to several nearby whorehouses staffed by middle-aged Indian ladies, so anybody who doesn't feel like getting into poHtics has a variety of options (the train doesn't stop here, and all departing flights are fully booked until Sunday) to while away these rude and lonesome hours until we can all flee back to our various sinecures in those bastions of Hberalism where hired guns and dilletantes are still honored.

In any case, the original impulse that led to this gathering bubbled up from a conversation I had in Aspen last summer with Adam Walinsky,

in which I expressed considerable reluctance vis-a-vis my long-neglected idea about running for the U.S. Senate from Colorado. I had, at that point, received several hundred letters from people who wanted to work in "my campaign," and the notion of backing off was beginning to fill me with guilt—which Adam nicely compounded by saying that, if I decided not to run, I'd be one of the few people in the country who could honestly say that he had "the Senator he deserved."

Which is not true, of course—given the gang-bang nature of the '74 Senate race in Colorado—but after brooding on that remark for many months I find it popping up in my head almost every time I start thinking about politics. And especially about the elections in 1976— which, until the unexpected demise of Spiro Agnew—I was inclined to view in very extreme and/or apocalyptic terms. Prior to Agnew's departure from the White House and (presumably) from the '76 presidential scene, I saw the 1976 elections as either a final affirmation of the Rape of the American Dream or perhaps the last chance any of us would ever have to avert that rape—if only temporarily—or perhaps even drive a stake of some kind into the heart of that pieced-off vampire that Agnew would have represented in '76, if "fate" had not intervened.

But things have changed now. Agnew is gone, Nixon is on the ropes, and in terms of realpolitic the Republican party is down in the same ditch with the Democrats—they are both looking back into their now loyaHst ranks for names, ideas, and possibilities: the GOP has been stripped all the way back to 1964, with Goldwater/Reagan vs. Rockefeller and maybe Percy on the outside . . . but in fact Nixon's mind-bending failure has effectively castrated the aggressive/activist core of the GOP (all the Bright Young Men, as it were), and barring totally unforeseen circumstances between now and November '76, the GOP looks at a future of carping opposition until at least 1984.

Which would seem to be nice, for Democrats—but I wouldn't know about that, because I share what seems to be a very active and potentially massive sentiment among the erstwhile "youth generation" (between ages twenty-five and forty now) to the effect that all career politicians should be put on The Rack—in the name of either poetic or real justice, and probably for The Greater Good.

This sentiment, reflected in virtually all age, income, and even demographic groups (sic/Caddell . . .) is broad and deep enough now— and entirely justified, to my mind—to have a massive effect not only on the '76 elections, which might in turn have a massive effect on the

realities of life in America for the next several generations, but also on the life expectancy of the whole concept of Participatory Democracy all over the globe.

As a minor and maybe even debatable forerunner of this, we can look back at what happened in South America (in the time span of five or six years) when it suddenly became obvious in the mid-1960s that the Alliance for Progress was all bullshit. In half a decade, we saw a whole continent revert to various forms of fascism—an almost instinctive reversion that was more inevitable than programmed, and which will take at least five decades to cure.

Ah . . . that word again: "Cure."

Manifest Destiny.

The question raised by the ostensibly complex but essentially simple reality of what happened in South America in the late sixties—and also in Africa and most of Asia, for different reasons—is only now beginning to seriously haunt the so-called civilized or at least industrialized nations in Europe and the northern Americas. President Marcos of the Philippines put it very bluntly about a year ago in a quote I can't find now—but I think it went something Uke this: "Your idea of 'democracy' was right for your development, but it's not what we need for ours.''

I've been meaning to go to the Philippines to see what kind of working alternative Marcos had in mind, but I haven't had the time. . . .

Maybe later. If we decide even tentatively here in Elko that Marcos was right, I want to spend some time over there very soon—because regardless of what happens in the Philippines, the question Marcos raised has a nasty edge on it.

Was Thomas Jefferson a dingbat?

Ten days before he died, on July 4, 1826, Jefferson wrote his own valedictory, which included the following nut:

All eyes are opened, or opening, to the rights of man. The general spread of the light of science has already laid open to every view the palpable truth, that the mass of mankind has not been born with saddles on their backs, nor a favored few booted and spurred, ready to ride them legitimately, by the grace of God. . . .

President Marcos would probably agree, but he would also probably argue that Jefferson's reality was so different from what was happening

100 years later in Russia or 200 years later in the Philippines that his words, however admirable, are just as dated and even dangerous now as Patrick Henry's wild-eyed demand for "liberty or death."

Ah . . . madness, madness . . . where will it end?

I think I know, with regard to the way I live and intend to keep on living my own life—but as I grow older and meaner and uglier it becomes more and more clear to me that only a lunatic or an ego-maniacal asshole would try to impose the structure of his own lifestyle on people who don't entirely understand it, unless he's ready to assume a personal responsibiUty for the consequences.

When the price of liberty includes the obligation to be drafted and have your legs blown off at the age of twenty-two in a place called " Veet-Naam" for some reason that neither Democratic nor Republican presidents can finally claim to understand, then maybe death is not such an ugly alternative. Thomas Jefferson kept slaves, but there is nothing in history to indicate that he routinely sacrificed any of their lives and limbs for the sake of his fiscal security.

Jesus, here we go again. Is there anyone in this star-crossed group with access to a doctor of psychic-focus drugs? If so, please meet me in the northwest corner of the Commercial Hotel casino at dawn on Saturday.

Meanwhile, I want to wind this thing out and down as quickly as possible . . . and, since I asked most of the other people here to bring some kind of Focus Document for the rest of us to cope with, I think this will have to be mine—if only because it's Wednesday morning now and I've already sunk six pages into what seems like a single idea, and it also strikes me as an idea (or question) that rarely if ever gets mentioned at political conferences.

This is the possibility that maybe we're all kidding ourselves about the intrinsic value of taking politics seriously in 1970's America, and that maybe we (or the rest of you, anyway—since I'm a Doctor of Journalism) are like a gang of hired guns on New Years Eve in 1899. Things changed a bit after that, and the importance of being able to slap leather real fast at High Noon on Main Street seemed to fade very precipitously after 1900. A few amateurs hung on in places like San Diego and Seattle until The War came, but by 1920 the Pros took over for real.

Which is getting off the point, for now. What I want to do is raise the question immediately—so we'll have to deal with it in the same

1

context as all the others—as to whether Frank Mankiewicz was talking in the past, present, or future when he said, in the intro to his book on Nixon, that he learned from Robert Kennedy that "the practice of American politics . . . can be both joyous and honorable."

Whether or not Frank still agrees with that is not important, for now—but in the context of why we're all out here in this god-forsaken place I think it's important not to avoid the idea that reality in America might in fact be beyond the point where even the most joyous and honorable kind of politics can have any real effect on it. And I think we should also take a serious look at the health/prognosis for the whole idea of Participatory Democracy, in America or anywhere else.

That, to me, is an absolutely necessary cornerstone for anything else we might or might not put together—because unless we're honestly convinced that the Practice of Politics is worth more than just a short-term high or the kind of short-term money that power pimps pay for hired guns, my own feehng is that we'll be a lot better off avoiding all the traditional liberal bullshit and just saying it straight out: that we're all just a bunch of fine-tuned PoUtics Junkies and we're ready to turn Main Street into a graveyard for anybody who'll pay the price and even pretend to say the Right Things.

But we don't want to get carried away with this Olde West gig—except to recognize a certain connection between politics/campaign Hit Men in I9J4 and hired guns all over the West in 1874. It's just as hard to know for sure what Matt Dillon thought he was really doing then as it is, today, to know what the fuck Benn Wattenberg might describe as the "far, far better thing" he really has in mind. . . .

One of the primary ideas of this conference, in my own head, is to keep that kind of brutal option open—if that's what we seem to agree on. Maybe tilting with windmills really is the best and most honorable way to go these days. I get a definite kick out of it, myself—but I have a feehng that my time is getting short, and I'm becoming unnaturally curious about how much reality we're really dealing with.

This is what the rest of you are going to have to come up with. My only role in this trip, as I see it right now, is to eventually write the introduction to some kind of book-form statement that the rest of you (and probably a few others) will eventually crank out. We are dealing with a genuinely ominous power vacuum right now, in terms of political reality. Both major parties seem to be curling back into an ill-disguised fetal crouch—and the stuporous horror of a Jackson-Ford race in '76

is as easily conceivable as the barely avoided reality of another Nixon-Humphrey contest in 1972.

There is no way to get away from names and personalities in any serious talk about the '76 election—but if that's all we can talk about, I think we should write this whole project off, as of Sunday, as a strange bummer of sorts that never got untracked. Shit, we'd be better off at the crap tables, or watching the Keno balls.

On the other hand, I don't think we're here to write some kind of an all-purpose Platform for a (presumably) Democratic candidate in '76. Massive evidence suggests that there are plenty of people around who are already into that.

What we might do, I think, is at least define some of the critical and unavoidable questions that any presidential candidate will have to deal with, in order to be taken seriously in '76. We have a long list of these goddamn things to hassle with, in the very short space of two days— and the best we can do for right now is: (i) Decide if the patient is worth saving ... (2) What's basically wrong with the patient ... (3) And if the saving is worth the effort, how to define and begin dealing with the basics.

At the same time, we want to keep in mind that a really fearful (or "fearsome") chunk of the voting population is in a very vengeful and potentially dangerous mood with regard to national or even local politics. If George Metesky decided to run for the Senate in N. Y. against Javits this year, I suspect he would do pretty well. . . .

And, for the same reason(s), I'm absolutely certain I could fatally cripple any Democratic candidate for the U.S. Senate in Colorado by merely entering the race as a serious Independent . . . but that would only guarantee Dominick's reelection, I think, and besides that I have a great fear of having to move back to Washington.*

Which is neither here nor there. My only real concern is to put something together that will force a genuine alteration of consciousness in the realm of national politics, and also in the heads of national politicians. Given the weird temper of all the people I've talked to in the past year, this is the only course that could possibly alter the drift of at least a third of the electorate away from politics entirely . . . and without that third, the White House in '76 is going to become the same kind of mine field that Gracie Mansion became about ten years ago, and for many of the same reasons.

*I have formally "withdrawn" from the race.

Okay for now. I have to get this bastard Xeroxed and then catch the bush plane for Elko in two hours. The agenda will have to wait—not only in terms of time, but also for people who will hopefully have a much better sense of priorities than I do.

If not, you bastards are going to wish you never heard the word "Elko."

Sincerely,

Hunter S. Thompson

ROLLING STONE: ABANDON

ALL HOPE YE VVHO ENTER

HERE

Wenner folded Straight Arrow Books shortly after the Saigon piece. I had to write that piece because the War had been such a player in my Hfe for ten years. I needed to see the end of it and be a part of it somehow. Wenner folded Straight Arrow at a time when they owed me $j5,ooo. I was enraged to find that out. It had been an advance for Shark Hunt. / wrote a seriously vicious letter — finally saying all I was thinking when I was taking off for Saigon. While in Saigon, I found I'd been fired when Wenner flew into a rage upon receiving the letter. Getting fired didn 't mean much to me. I was in Saigon, I was writing — except that I lost health insurance. Here I was in a war zone, and no health insurance. . . .

So, essentially, I refused to write anything once I found out. I found out when I tried to use my Telex card and it was refused. I called Rolling Stone to find out why (perfect phone system right to the end of the war). I talked to Paul Scanlon, who was sitting in for Wenner (off skiing) — he told me I was fired, but fixed my Telex card, etc. The

business department had ignored the memo to hre me because iVd happened too many times before. They didn't want to be bothered with the paperwork, so Wenner's attempt had been derailed.

Anyone who would fire a correspondent on his way to disaster . . . I vowed not to work for them. It was the end of our working relationship except for special circumstances. About that time, they moved to New York. Rolling Stone began to be run by the advertising and business departments and not by the editorial department. It was a financial leap forward for Wenner and Rolling Stone, but the editorial department lost any real importance.

You shouldn 't work for someone who would fire you en route to a War Zone. . . .

I got off the plane greeted by a huge sign that read, ''Anyone caught with more than $ioo U.S. currency will go immediately to prison.'' Imagine how I felt with $30,000 taped to my body. I was a pigeon to carry the Newsweek payroll and communication to those in Saigon. I thought we'd all be executed. It was total curfew when we got off the plane so we were herded into this small room with all these men holding machine guns. There I was with 300 times the maximum money allowance. We got out and I leapt on a motor scooter and told the kid to run like hell. I told Loren I wouldn't give him the money until he got me a suite in a hotel. Not an easy task, but he came through.

The Leap of Faith . . . I had already picked up on Carter in 'J4. It was a special assignment as everything was after Saigon. I was still on the masthead. It was an honor roll of journalists, but the people on it — well, all of them were no longer with Rolling Stone. / didn't like that they put on the cover that I endorsed Carter. I picked him as a gambler. Endorsing isn't something a journalist should do.

Essentially, the fun factor had gone out of Rolling Stone. It was an Outlaw magazine in California. In New York it became an Establishment magazine and I have never worked well with people like that.

Today at Rolling Stone there are rows and rows of white cubicles, each with its own computer. That's how I began to hate computers. They represented all that was wrong with Rolling Stone. It became like an insurance office with people communicating cubicle to cubicle.

But my relationship had ended with the firing. The attempt was enough.

Woody Creek, January 1990

DANCE OF THE DOOMED

Last Notes from Indochina, Lost Memo from the Global Affairs Desk . . . the Fall of Saigon, the Seige of Laos ... a Way You'll Never Be

"World ideologies play little part in Asian thinking and are little understood. What the people strive for is the opportunity for a little more food in their stomachs, a little better clothing on their backs, a little firmer roof over their heads and the realization of the normal, nationalist urge for political freedom. These political, social conditions have but an indirect bearing upon our own national security. But they do form a backdrop to contemporary planning that must be thoughtfully considered if we are to avoid the pitfalls of unrealism."

—General Douglas Mac Arthur, addressing the U.S. Congress, 1951

COMMUNISTS TAKE OVER SAIGON; U.S. RESCUE FLEET IS PICKING UP VIETNAMESE WHO FLED IN BOATS

Communications Cut Soon After Raising of Victory Flag

SAIGON, South Vietnam, April 30 (AP). Communist troops of North Vietnam and the Provisional Revolutionary Government of South Vietnam poured into Saigon today as a century of Western influence came to an end.

Scores of North Vietnamese tanks, armored vehicles, and camouflaged Chinese-built trucks rolled to the presidential palace.

The President of the former neo-Communist Government of South Vietnam, Gen. Duong Van Minh, who had gone on radio and television to announce his administration's surrender, was taken to a microphone later by North Vietnamese soldiers for another announcement. He appealed to all Saigon troops to lay down their

arms and was taken by the North Vietnamese soldiers to an undisclosed destination. (Soon after, the Saigon radio fell silent, normal telephone and telegraph communications ceased, and the Associated Press said its wire link to the capital was lost at 7 p.m. Wednesday, Saigon time. . . .)

Saigon, April 1975

CHECKING INTO THE LANE XANG

^Tll talk with Your Daughter Tomorrow . . ."

I have finally arrived in Vientiane after a long and torturous five-day journey from Saigon, via Hong Kong and Bangkok. When I walked into the Lane Xang Hotel, sometime around two-thirty this morning in a drenching monsoon rain, the man at the desk first refused to let me register because he said I had no reservation. Which may or may not have been true, depending on which view of the understandably scrambled Indochinese mind one subscribes to in these menacing times. But, in fact, I had sent a cable from Hong Kong, requesting a large room with a king-size bed, quick access to the pool, and a view of the Mekong River, which flows in front of the hotel.

After a fairly savage argument, the night clerk agreed to a compromise. He would give me the best suite in the hotel for as long as I wanted, provided I gave him twenty green American dollars at once for the company of his daughter for the rest of the night. He described her as a "young and beautiful student, not a bar girl," who spoke excellent English and would certainly have no objection to being awakened at three in the morning and hauled over to the hotel by taxi in a hellish rainstorm, just in order to make me happy.

"Look," I said, "you are dealing with a very tired person. The only thing I want right now is a long sleep in a big bed with nobody bothering me. I have nothing against meeting your daughter; I'm sure she's a wonderful person, but why don't I just give you twenty dollars and

never mind about waking her up tonight. If she's free around noon tomorrow, maybe we can have lunch at the White Rose."

The man winced. Nobody's ''daughter" goes near the White Rose. It is one of the scurviest and most infamous bangios in all of Indochina, even worse than "Lucy's" in Saigon, and the moment I said that name and saw the man's face, I knew I'd said both the right and wrong thing at the same time. He was deeply insulted, but at least we understood each other. So he carried my bags up to No. 224, a rambling suite of rooms half hidden under the top flight of wide white-tiled stair/ramps that rise out of the middle of the Lane Xang lobby. When I first went into 224, it took me about two minutes to find the bed; it was around the corner and down a fifteen-foot hallway from the refrigerator and the black-leather-topped bar and the ten-foot-long catfish-skin couch and five matching easy chairs and the hardwood writing desk and the sliding glass doors on the pool-facing balcony outside the living room. At the other end of the hallway, half hidden by the foundation of the central stairway, was another big room with a king-size bed, another screened balcony, another telephone, and another air-conditioner, along with a pink-tiled bathroom with two sinks, a toilet and a bidet and a deep pink bathtub about nine feet long. There was no view of the river, but I was in no mood to argue.

I asked the night clerk if he would get me a bucket of ice. Somewhere in the bowels of my luggage I had a film can full of extremely powerful Cambodian red, along with a quart of Jack Daniel's I'd just bought in Hong Kong, and the prospect of a few iced drinks along with a pipeload of paralytic hallucinations seemed just about right for that moment . . . followed by fifteen or sixteen hours of stuporous sleep.

But my new buddy had not yet tied the knot in his half of the bargain. "Very good," he said finally. "I will get your ice when I go downstairs to call my daughter."

"What?"

"Of course," he said. "You will Hke her. She is very beautiful." Then he smiled and held out his hand. "Twenty dollars, please ..."

I hesitated for a moment, listening to the rain pounding the palm trees outside my window, then I reluctantly pulled out my wallet and gave him a twenty-dollar bill. I had seen enough of Vientiane on the drive in from the airport to know I'd be in grave trouble if I got thrown out of the Lane Xang at three-thirty in the morning in the middle of a blinding monsoon, hauling an electric typewriter and a soft-leather suitcase, with no currency except U.S. and Hong Kong dollars, and not speaking a word of Laotian or even enough French to beat on

somebody's door and ask for directions to another hotel. No, I couldn't stand that; but I wasn't sure I could stand the kind of nasty scene I suspected this humorless, fat little hustler was planning to lay on me, either. As he opened the door to leave, I said, "That money is for ice, okay? Just bring me a bucket of ice and keep the money yourself. I'll talk to your daughter tomorrow."

He paused for a moment, looking back at me, but his eyes were blank and I could tell his brain was busy with other matters. Then he pulled the door shut behind him and left me alone in the room. I slumped back on the couch and opened the bottle of hot bourbon, propping it up on my chest and my chin so I could drink with only a slight movement of my lower lip while I listened to the rain and tried not to think about anything at all.

Laos is as different from Vietnam as Long Island is from Big Sur . . . which is interesting, but not the kind of tangent I want to get off on right now because every time I think of Laos, my mind slips strangely out of focus and I see a chorus line of transvestites dancing crazily in a sort of hypnotic trance at an all-night fertility festival while the government crumbles and grinning little men wearing huge wooden dildoes pass out leaflets saying the first act of the new Communist regime will be to legalize the use and cultivation of opium.

Compared to Laos, the Communist victory in Vietnam seems eminently rational, if only because it was accomplished more or less on American terms, by means of brute force and sheer military skill.

On the day I arrived at Ton San Nhut Airport in Saigon, the afternoon of April 8, the city was almost entirely surrounded by anywhere from fifteen to twenty full-strength Communist divisions, the Saigon branch of the Chase Manhattan Bank announced that it would no longer exchange U.S. dollars for South Vietnamese piastres, the First National City Bank of New York was refusing to cash its own travelers checks, and just a few hours before, a disgruntled South Vietnamese Air Force pilot had flipped out and dropped all the bombs from his American-made F-5 on the presidential palace in the middle of downtown Saigon, causing widespread panic and a twenty-four-hour shoot-to-kill curfew. He made two screaming, low-level runs that almost clipped leaves off the treetops in John F. Kennedy Square and loosened the bowels of a dozen American journalists half relaxing over late-morning breakfast in the garden of the Continental Hotel. But all four of his bombs missed the palace. One killed the presidential gardener, two others destroyed a few trees on the lawn, and the fourth came

alarmingly close to landing in the Olympic-size pool of the Cercle Sportif, an almost preternaturally elegant and exclusive French tennis and swimming club just across the street.

This last alleged "eyewitness" report on the trajectory of the fourth bomb was generally dismissed as either unreliable or apocryphal, or both, by almost every correspondent who knew the source—a notorious drunkard, lecher, and foul-mouthed bigot who had just emerged from the Reuters office on Kennedy Square, en route to the Cercle Sportif with his tennis racket in one hand and a thermos of iced gin in the other, when the bombs began falling. His first report on the incident, which he immediately rushed back to the Reuters office and filed on the hot line to London, said the would-be assassin's F-5 came in so low that the pilot was easily recognizable as former South Vietnamese premier and Vice-Air Marshal Nguyn Cao Ky, a one-time favorite of both Lyndon Johnson and former Defense Secretary Robert McNamara. Ky had garnered a certain amount of fame for himself in the days of his ill-fated premiership back in the mid-1960s by making sure that every American correspondent who interviewed him understood that his personal hero was the late Adolf Hitler.

This was as close as the Cercle Sportif ever came to sustaining any damage. The Viet Cong and North Vietnamese generals were very careful to preserve it for their own use, and the swinish French colonels who ran the place became more and more anti-American as the deep rumbUng of Communist artillery grew louder and closer to the city. Less than a week before Saigon surrendered, with the advance units of the Red Menace less than five miles away, I was thrown out of the Cercle Sportif by a liver-lipped Frenchman who claimed to be the president of the club and denounced me at poolside for being "improperly dressed." My baggy L. L. Bean shorts were not right for the club's atmosphere, he said. Bikini trunks were the only proper attire, and since I obviously couldn't meet the dress standards of his club, he was giving me exactly two minutes to get off the premises or he would call the police.

What police? Jesus, I thought, we've finally found Martin Bormann. But before I could laugh I had a terrible vision of what it would be like to be locked in a Saigon jail cell while the Communists launched a full-scale assault on the city, totally helpless while the holocaust raged all around me, maybe burned alive in a firestorm or gunned down by crazed jailers, and then waiting in terror when the sounds of battle ceased for whatever fate the victors might decide for me, anything from death by flagellation to being freed as a hero of the people.

No, I thought, not jail. I had brought ten hits of extremely powerful

blotter acid with me to Vietnam, taped to the back of my press card for use in a terminal emergency, but if I was going to die in Saigon with my brain on fire from a massive dose of acid, I didn't want to do it in a jail cell. So I left the Cercle Sportif and never returned.

Now, a few weeks later, lounging beside the Lane Xang swimming pool in Laos, I read in the Bangkok Post that the Cercle Sportif has been officially seized by the new Communist government in Saigon for use as an officers' club, and no Frenchmen are allowed on the premises. That is the coup de grace for the last remnants of the exotic colonial empire once known as French Indochina. Not even the name remains, except as a quaint and nostalgic designation for what is now just a chunk of Southeast Asia. Saigon, once known as ''the Paris of the Orient," had degenerated into an American military ghetto almost a decade before I arrived there in the final weeks of the war. And in the last hours, it became a desperate, overcrowded nightmare full of thieves, losers, pimps, conmen, war junkies, and many, many victims. Including me, although I am just beginning to understand this.

Laos, May 4, 1975

WHOOPING IT UP WITH THE WAR JUNKIES

The Last Great Indochina Reunion . . . Conversations from the Garden of Agony . . . "We Tried Our Best To Save Your Life" . . .

So bye, bye. Miss American Pie . . .

Drove my Chevy to the levee but the levee was dry . . .

And good old boys were drinking whiskey and rye

Singing ''This'II be the day that I die . . . this'II be the day that I die."

— Don McLean

That song booming out of the Muzak in the air-conditioned top-floor bar of the Hotel Continental while we sat by the window and watched

incoming artillery hitting the rice paddies about five miles south across the Saigon River is one of my clearest memories of those last weird weeks of the thirty-year war in Vietnam.

I was sitting with London Sunday Times correspondent Murray Sayle, and we were eating fresh crab salad, pondering a big geophysical map of Indochina and spotting the rumored locations of the fifteen or twenty NVA and VC divisions in the ring around Saigon, drawing arrows and dots on the map while the Muzak kept croaking "Bye, bye, Miss American Pie" and the soft thump of those distant howitzer explosions occasionally made us look up and watch another cloud of muddy white smoke rising out of the rice paddies.

We had just come back in a Harley-Davidson-powered trishaw from the weekly Viet Cong press conference in the heavily guarded VC compound right in the middle of Saigon's Ton San Nhut air base, less than a mile from the city's only commercial air terminal and about halfway between the South Vietnamese Air Force headquarters and the huge American military complex that used to be called "Pentagon East," or "Mac V."

That was one of the last press conferences the Provisional Revolutionary Government (or Viet Cong, as the American press called it) ever held at Ton San Nhut. About ten days later, they emerged from their barbed-wire compound and took over the whole base, along with all the rest of Saigon, just Uke the carbon-steel voice of PRG spokesman Colonel Vo Dan Giang had told us they would do, whenever they felt hke it and a lot sooner than most of us thought. One of the American correspondents had asked Giang how long it would be before he'd feel free to come downtown and have a drink with us at the Hotel Continental, and Giang had replied, with an oddly gentle smile, that he wasn't much of a drinker but that we might run into him in one of the downtown markets "sometime next week" if we were still in town.

At that point and all the way up to the morning less than two weeks later when the American evacuation dissolved in a panic, about half the round-eyed press corps in Saigon had seriously considered staying on, after South Vietnam finally fell and the PRG took over, and at least a half dozen of the questions Col. Giang had dealt with that morning were phrased, in one way or another, to find out how the PRG planned to treat any foreign journalists who stayed on after the fall.

Giang had not gone out of his way to reassure the questioners. The fate of the foreign press, he said, was low on the list of the PRG's priorities, but the only ones who had anything to worry about were

"the many American military personnel posing as journalists." He had used this phrase three or four times, and each time I noticed that he was looking directly at me, which was not especially surprising, to me or anyone else, because if there was anybody among the hundred or so journalists crowded into the sweaty, screened-in barracks press room that morning who looked like every career VC colonel's perfect image of an ex-Green Beret major trying to pass for a journalist, it was me.

Here was a tall, bow-legged thug of some kind, wearing white Converse sneakers, tan L. L. Bean hiking shorts, black-rimmed Ray-Ban shades and an Arnold Palmer sport shirt straight out of the Baron's men's store on Lincoln Road in Miami Beach . . . constantly taking pictures with a black, nonreflecting 35mm camera, taping the whole press conference with a mini-cassette recorder, and pouring an inordinate volume of sweat off an almost completely hairless head while consuming one warm beer after another and never even trying to ask a question.

The only thing Giang missed was the silver "McGovern 72" belt buckle I was wearing, and since I was one of the journalists giving serious thought, at that time, to staying on in Saigon and taking my chances with the new owners, rather than suffer the humiliation of having to be rescued by the U.S. Marines, I went back to the Global Affairs Suite in the Continental that night and wrote Col. Giang a letter, explaining that if he was even half as smart as he seemed to be, he might at least go to the trouble of having me and my writings checked out with his Intelligence people in Hanoi before deciding to have me beheaded on the diving board of the U.S. Embassy swimming pool or shot out of the barrel of a 90mm cannon on one of his captured U.S. tanks in the middle of Tu Do Street.

It had taken me about forty-four minutes of watching and listening to Giang's act that morning to know that we were dealing with a genuine razor-edged heavy. There was nothing particularly impressive in what he said. It was mainly gibberish, in fact; a stale mix of canned VC propaganda and Kissinger-style non sequiturs, but there was no mistaking the fact that this mean-looking, flinty-eyed bastard understood exactly what he was doing and that he was getting a definite kick out of making us listen to it.

There was also an unmistakable hint of humor in some of his off-camera talk with the handful of American correspondents who had been around Saigon long enough to get to know him personally. In this small circle, Giang was universally admired and regarded as more

of a friendly adversary than some kind of natural, robot enemy. AP photographer Neil Vukovitch, for instance, invited Col. Giang to his wedding in Saigon, and got a friendly sort of black-humored note in return, saying that due to circumstances beyond his control (de facto imprisonment in the PRG compound at Ton San Nhut), the Colonel had to regretfully decline the invitation, which he nonetheless valued and appreciated.

Another correspondent, Loren Jenkins of Newsweek, discovered almost by accident that Col. Giang spoke excellent Spanish—the result of a two-year apprenticeship in Cuba with Che Guevara. Jenkins was born in South America, so whenever he wanted to talk personally with Giang, he would find him outside the press barracks after one of the Saturday press conferences and ask all his questions in Spanish.

I noticed this, and since Giang speaks no English—or none that he admits to—and I speak no Vietnamese, I figured the next best thing would be to seize on the Colonel and begin rambling at him in my bastard, street-level Spanish and maybe learn something more than he'd been telling us for the record through his young English-speaking interpreters.

"Don't bother," Jenkins told me. "I've been talking to him for almost a year in Spanish, and we've become pretty good friends, on one level, but when it comes to the kind of stuff you want to ask him, it wouldn't even help if you spoke perfect Vietnamese. He hasn't spent twenty years fighting the round-eyes for nothing."

I met Nick Profit, a Newsweek correspondent, in the garden of the Hotel Continental about the time Newsweek and the Washington Post were trying to get their people out of Saigon. It was about ten days too early and everybody knew it, but Ben Bradley or Katherine Graham supposedly had some inside information, and it was a question of which two of the four correspondents had to go.

PROFIT: I called the foreign editor, KHne, and said, "Look, I've got my airplane ticket, I've got my exit visa, but I really don't want to go and I really don't think I should go, and I want to make a pitch to stay." And he said, "Well. I'll switch you over to Kosner, but you're going to have to really be persuasive because he really wants you out of there." So I get on with Kosner and Auchincloss and KHne, and Kosner's got this sort of high, whiny . . .

HST: Yeah, I know.

PROFIT: Madison Avenue (imitates high, whiny, Madison Avenue voice), "Hi, Nick, baby. What's happening?" And I said, ''I, uh . . ." He said, "Speak, speak." So I said, "Well, I want to stay." He said, "Reasons, reasons." So I told him the reasons. Number one. I don't think it's dangerous. Number two, the Washington Post has been taking a lot of shit because they were hysterical for a while and I don't want to see Newsweek join the joke. And I resent ... I don't relish the professional and personal embarrassment of bugging out of here at this time. And I don't want to spend the next three fucking years of my life explaining just how I was ordered out and trying to make colleagues believe it. And if you want an evacuation story, the way to do it is not from the ship but from here. So he says, "All right, all right. You're a grown man. If your assessment is it's okay to stay, stay. We tried our best to save your life. We tried to get you out of there. If you want to get yourself killed, go ahead. Go ahead."

HST: That's something I wouldn't have thought about, this fear of being ostracized behind your back.

PROFIT: Oh well, look, the press corps is the most suspicious little group around. And especially for the people who cover wars, the guys that become war correspondents. I mean, they're always looking for cracks in the armor. A guy decides that he's feeling sick or he's just tired, and he wants to leave the front, well, he really has to consider it, because the minute he's gone . . . "Oooh, bugging out early. Well, he used to be a damn good war correspondent, but they all get the shakes at one time or another." And you can't just go off and say, "Well, I was ordered out," because that's not good enough. People say. "Well, fuck you. Why didn't you tell them to fuck off?" It's always easy for them to say. It's not a matter of being afraid to have your nuts questioned. I mean, this is my third or fourth war, if I really wanted to count them. And you know, all you need is one. One, and you've proven yourself. You don't have to prove any more shit, except you just don't like those kind of stories going around. They start, who knows, sometimes justifiably, sometimes not justifiably. And it really undermines you. I mean, all you got in this fucking profession is your reputation.

HST: Yeah, I was a little surprised at the heaviness of it. You people are all nuts, aren't you? It's almost unanimous among war correspondents.

PROFIT: Well, it's stupid, because everybody is always watching everybody else and judging all the time. And so you find yourself

doing stupid things. You find yourself standing around out in the open when you should be groveling on your fucking face someplace, simply because if you hit the ground too early and try to burrow too deep, the story goes about how you freaked out and then tried to crawl to China.

HST: You tried to lay that one on me.

PROFIT: No, I was just joking. You did the exact right thing. You heard a bang and you jumped for the ditch. I knew the artillery was outgoing, so I didn't move. I mean, I just knew it. I saw them loading up and that tank was getting ready to fire a round. I knew it was coming.

HST: I don't worry about the macho number. I'd rather be down in some ditch like a fool and be alive than to be walking around with my head knocked off by some shrapnel.

It was not long thereafter that Loren Jenkins, the Newsweek bureau chief, recounted to those of us in the garden the embassy's official evacuation plans. Jenkins had just been summoned to a high-powered briefing for the bureau chiefs, people who were going to be in charge of getting the press out of Saigon. The embassy really didn't have much obligation to do anything, and nobody was really planning on their doing anything. Whatever they did, it was free-fall. There was no real belief, I don't think, that the North Vietnamese were going to sweep into town and butcher the populace. The evacuation was always seen as a matter of inconvenience. You worried only about being locked up or wounded by some drunken American running around with a .45 in a panic. Or having your arm jerked out of its socket by a frantic Vietnamese collaborator, desperate to get on a plane.

JENKINS: They're so fucked up. The embassy wants us to organize our own evacuation because they obviously don't seem to be able to organize anything. Apparently this plan was designed in 1969. They said it was revised, updated, in January of this year, which means it was updated before they had any idea of what could happen in Danang. It was based on the assumption that they would have friendly South Vietnamese to protect their retreat, that there would be a secure city, that you would be evacuating among friendly people and friendly soldiers. And there'd be no interference by their allies, by the South Vietnamese. They admit they did not anticipate a breakdown of order. They're now revising like mad. They've got all sorts of different

grades of contingency plans, but the basic plan is to evacuate five to ten thousand people. This includes Americans, Vietnamese dependents of Americans, and other foreigners—the British embassy, the Japanese, you know, various others.

HST: Where do they draw the Hne?

JENKINS: The U.S. apparently has a lot of arrangements with other nations, third-country nationals, as they call them. I mean, they're pushing people out, but almost as fast as they do, new people come out of the woodwork. Some ex-GI who retired here, who wasn't registered here, you know, got a Vietnamese wife, six, seven kids— they've all been appearing.

They were talking about there being five thousand Americans still here. It's clear there's a hell of a lot more that they had no fucking knowledge of. So if you talk about five thousand Americans, what they're talking about evacuating is something like six times that— thirty thousand, not five thousand. I talked to a guy this morning who's trying to get his wife's sister on. The guy said, "We can't have sisters-in-law. Why don't you say she's your adopted daughter?" I don't think they're being overly strict on it.

HST: Well, it doesn't matter now.

JENKINS: Yeah, I mean, that's good. What they gotta do is get as many of these people out as possible before they have to try a helicopter evacuation. Obviously, the whole state of events in Da-nang has just shell-shocked them. It put the kibosh on their whole fucking plan, and there's no fucking way it's gonna work. They thought they'd have a secure air base, a secure port—we're not gonna have any of those. We're not gonna have secure streets. The fucking ARVN may be running around shooting, chaos. They originally had twenty-five assembly points; they've now reduced that to thirteen. They realize that more assembly points are going to be harder to defend from anything. They were going to move on foot to these assembly points, where they would be bused out to Ton San Nhut where American planes would take everyone on. Now they've had to modify that.

These thirteen assembly points are too small to handle big Marine helicopters. So now they'll have to take these people out of here on Hueys, which carry only eight to ten people, to another staging area. They're setting up really big, secure defense areas, three in particular: the U.S. embassy, the military advisory committee headquarters (now called the DAO headquarters) out at Ton San Nhut, and

another place in town, at the DAO annex, I'm not sure where. They're apparently fortifying these places so they can defend them against charging, rampaging mobs—which means they're putting in Marines and barbed wire and bunkers and everything else. Now these three centers, the next range of centers, are gonna be big enough to take these big Marine helicopters, the CH53 and CH46S, which is what the Marines use, these Jolly Green Giant fucking birds that they used in Phnom Penh. So the next contingency plan is to get people into these centers, where they'll be housed, and flown out of there. If conditions permit, people would only be flown to the air base and flown out of there, but if the air base is under fire, and they can't get the planes in, they'll just try to fly people straight out to carriers. They've talked about plans to just put some Navy ships up the Saigon River—which would be absurd, since the river can be mined, has been mined in the past. It's also open to attack. But that's another contingency that they're toying with. They figure if they have a large evacuation, they'll try to make it at night. Get people to these assembly points just before the curfew. They figure they can move about fifteen hundred people an hour out to Ton San Nhut.

HST: By Huey? Are they assuming there's gonna be a panic?

JENKINS: Yeah, I have a feeling they're assuming the worst. They are obviously trying to buy off key people, like the police chief, the colonels who are in command of Ton San Nhut air base, and people like that, by saying "Look, when it comes to the crunch, we need you and you need us. We will get you and your family out. But you have to help us maintain security." So they're hoping that they will have a certain segment of the South Vietnamese under control, maybe certain police forces. At Ton San Nhut they may have the base people themselves. Now, whether or not the officers can control their men, obviously, is another matter. They certainly couldn't control them in Da Nang.

They're scared shitless about being followed by local Vietnamese who are watching the Americans like hawks. Afraid that when an American takes off, five cars of Vietnamese are gonna follow him to find out where they're planning to leave from. They're sort of issuing warnings: "Don't tell your Vietnamese about this. Don't leave your fucking evacuation plans lying around so your servants can read them." Really frightening, which again leads me to believe that this whole fucking thing about taking the Vietnamese out is a

hoax. A real cruel fucking hoax. They keep talking about two hundred thousand. The only plan they have is this plan to take out Americans, their dependents, foreigners, and obviously a few select people like the president and his family and any other goddamned collaborators that they've held on a string for so long.

Now, they figure it will take two hours to get the Marines to defend this place.

HST: When they first call. When the whistle blows.

JENKINS: The Marines have to come in from the ship, but they don't have enough Marines to defend all these places. Until they get helicopters in from the Marine ships, from the aircraft carriers, they can only operate with twenty-five or twenty-eight small Hueys. That's all Air America has, apparently, which isn't much at all. It sort of shows you how ridiculous this whole plan is. It really comes down to trying to ship people out on choppers. But big choppers can't land at these collection points, and all they've got are twenty-eight small choppers that can carry eight to ten people.

HST: On the theory that only the first one will get out of any assembly point, that means that only two hundred people are likely to escape. Good God.

JENKINS: They were asked, "What were the conditions which would trigger this?" This guy delivering the briefing says that once artillery got into range and started popping into Saigon, when that happened, that would be time to really haul ass out of here.

HST: Since I've never heard artillery popping around me, what does that constitute? The first rocket? The first three rockets? The first one hundred thirty?

JENKINS: It would probably depend. I think what they're really worried about is one hundred thirties. If artillery shells start popping in here, and with regularity—I think a couple of rockets probably wouldn't do it—if they go screaming in here wild, one or two would probably hit. One would explode, another one wouldn't. I've seen this happen. It doesn't come immediately. There's not gonna be a fucking Stalingrad rumble all of a sudden one night. There will probably be days when the first early elements will put a few rockets in, and maybe the next night there'll be a few more, and then three or four nights later maybe they'll have artillery in range. And then it might start getting hotter. And when this thing goes, the press is not going to be any different

than any other Americans. People are gonna come in waving Japanese passports, American passports, and it's gonna be: Get on the choppers. Get 'em out.

It was nearly a fortnight after Pyle's death before I saw Vigot again.

I was going up the Boulevard Charner when his voice called me from

Le Club. It was the restaurant most favored in those days by members

of the Surete, who, as a defiant gesture to those who hated them, would

lunch and drink on the ground floor while the general public fed upstairs

out of reach of a partisan with a hand grenade.

I joined him and he ordered me a vermouth cassis. "Play for it?"

"If you Uke," and I took out my dice for the ritual game of Quatre

Cent Vingt-et-Un. How those figures and the sight of dice bring back

to mind the war years in Indochina. Anywhere in the world when I see

two men dicing I am back in the streets of Hanoi or Saigon or among

the blasted buildings of Phat Diem. I see the parachutists, protected

like caterpillars by their strange markings, patrolling by the canals, I

hear the sound of mortars closing in, and perhaps I see a dead child.

—From The Quiet American by Graham Greene, 1955

My own sharpest memories of Indochina are not the same as Greene's, but he was there twenty years earlier, in the ruins of a different empire, when the losers still had plenty of time to spend their afternoons "dicing for drinks" on the shaded patios of French colonial hotels while they pondered the terrible cancer that was growing on The White Man's Burden; and to occasionally glance up from their dice and gin tonics to look for the faithful dwarf newsboy who delivered two copies of the Paris Herald Tribune to their table every afternoon about this time ... a friendly little bugger, with big brown eyes and legs like wet spaghetti from some kind of congenital syphilis that his mother picked up from the Japs back in World War II, which was tragic, but no fault of theirs, and they always tipped him well. But whenever he was late with the newspapers, they would start to feel sHghtly nervous, because when he was late they would have to think about him, and whenever that happened they'd start wondering if maybe this was the day they had known would come sooner or later— when the evil little monster would show up with the same friendly smile on his face and toss a hand grenade onto their table, instead of the newspaper.

That kind of subliminal tension was always a part of the charm of living the soft colonial life in an outpost of progress like Saigon. It

lent just enough hint of menace to "the mystery of the Orient" to keep hfe interesting for the "round-eyes" who were sent out from France and England to protect the natural resources of this weird subcontinent from the opium-crazed natives.

Saigon, Hotel Continental Plaza, in the Garden, May 1975

CONFIDENTIAL MEMO TO

COLONEL GIANG VO DON

GIANG

May 1975

Col. Vo Dan Giang, PRG

c/o Tan Son Nhut Air Base

Saigon

Dear Colonel Giang,

I am the National Affairs editor of Rolling Stone, a San Francisco-based magazine, with offices in New York, Washington, and London, that is one of the most influential journalistic voices in America right now—particularly among the young and admittedly left-oriented survivors of the antiwar Peace Movement in the 1960s. I'm not an especially good typist, but I am one of the best writers currently using the English language as both a musical instrument and a poHtical weapon . . . and if there is any way you can possibly arrange it in the near future, I'd be very honored to have a private meeting with you and talk for an hour or so about your own personal thoughts right now.

We would need the help of one of your interpreters, because my French is a joke, my Spanish is embarrassing, and my command of Vietnamese is nonexistent. I came to Saigon two weeks ago, just after

the panic at Da Nang, because I wanted to see the end of this stinking war with my own eyes after fighting it in the streets of Berkeley and Washington for the past ten years.

And the reason I'm writing you this note is that I was very much impressed by the way you handled your Saturday press conference the first time I attended, on the Saturday before last. That was the one in which you made three or four specific references to the dark fate awaiting "American military advisers posing as journalists"—and each time you mentioned that phrase, you seemed to be looking directly at me.

Which is understandable, on one level, because I've been told by my friend Jean-Claude Labbe that I definitely look like that type. But we both know that "looks" are very often deceiving, and almost anybody among the American press in Saigon today will tell you that— despite my grim appearance—I am the most obvious and most well known politically radical journalist in your country today.

In any case: shortly after leaving your press conference I called my associate, Tom Hay den, at his home in Los Angeles and asked him what he knew about you. Tom, as you know, is married to the American actress Jane Fonda, and they have both been among the strongest voices in the Peace Movement for the past ten years. Tom Hay den is also an editor of Rolling Stone, as you can see by the enclosed masthead . . . and when I asked him about you on the phone, he said I should make every effort to meet you because he considered you one of the most inteUigent and humane leaders of the PRG. He also said you have a sense of humor and that I'd probably Hke you personally.

I had already picked up that feeling, after watching your press conference, and I am writing you now with the hope that we can arrange a brief and informal private meeting very soon. I think I understand the poHtical reahty of the PRG, but I'm not sure I understand the Human reality—and I have a sense that you could help me on that latter point. You might be surprised to know how many of the American journaUsts in Saigon today admire you and call you their friend.

I understand that a letter like this one puts you in a difficult position at this time, so I won't be personally offended if you decide against having a talk with me . . . but I trust you to understand that, as a professional para-journalist, I am in the same situation today that you were as a para-military professional about three years ago . . . and if you have any serious doubts about my personal and political views, please ask one of your friends to stop by the Hotel Continental, #37, and pick up a copy of my book on the 1972 presidential campaign in

America. I will give the book to anybody who asks me for "the book for Che." Or Til bring it to you myself, if there is any way you can invite me into your compound out there. . . . And, as a matter of fact, if there is going to be any real "battle for Saigon," I think I'd feel safer out there with you and your people than I would in the midst of some doomed and stupid "American Evacuation Plan" dreamed up by that senile death-monger, Graham Martin.

If you think it might be of any help to you to have a well-known American writer with you out there in the compound when the "battle" starts, ril be happy to join you for a few days in your bunker. . . . But that is not the kind of arrangement I can make on my own; it would require some help from you, to let me pass quietly through the checkpoints outside your compound . . . and I give you my word that I'll do that, if you can make the arrangements and let me know.

Okay for now. I hope to see you soon . . . but even if I don't, allow me to offer my personal congratulations for the work you've done and the very pure and dramatic victory you've accomplished. I can only feel saddened by all the pain and death and suffering this ugly war has caused on all sides . . . but your victory, I think, is a victory for all of us who believe that man is still capable of making this world a better, more peaceful and generous place for all our sons and daughters to live in.

This is the kind of thing I'd like to talk to you about—not such things as "battle strategy" or your current political plans. That is not my style—as a journalist or a human being—and besides, you'll soon be getting all the questions you can handle on those subjects. No pack of jackals has ever been more single-mindedly obtuse in their hunger for news/meat than the army of standard-brand American journalists who will soon be hounding you for wisdom and explanations. I can only wish you luck with that problem, and I hope we can have a quick and friendly private visit before you get caught up on that tiresome merry-go-round.

As for me, I won't stay in Vietnam much longer, unless I hear from you in the next few days. I may return in a few months, but I am homesick for the peace and quiet of my log house in Colorado and I want to get back there as soon as possible. My home address in America is Owl Farm, Woody Creek, Colorado 81656—or you can reach me in care of any one of the Rolling Stone offices listed on the enclosed masthead. I am also a friend of Senator George McGovern, Senators Gary Hart and Ted Kennedy, and former Senators Eugene McCarthy and Fred Harris ... so if I can be of any help to you as a friendly

contact in Washington, feel free to communicate with me at any time and I'll do whatever I can . . . but in the meantime, I hope you'll let me know, by whatever means you think best, if there is any chance for us to get together: perhaps even here in the Continental for a quiet bit of drink and talk with a few of your friends in the American press. I have a feeling you'll be a welcome guest in this place fairly soon and I think you'll enjoy it.

And that's all I have to say at this time. It is five minutes before six in the morning and I need to get some sleep, so I'll end this letter now and take it around to my friend who plans to deliver it to you.

Very sincerely.

Hunter S. Thompson Suite 37

Hotel Continental Plaza Saigon, Vietnam

MEMO TO JIM SILBERMAN ON THE DEATH OF THE AMERICAN DREAM

The cord is cut now: I have quit that outpost of progress called the National Affairs Desk that I founded at Rolling Stone, and in the slow process of quitting I drifted so far from the backstairs complexities of national poHtics that I couldn't go back to it now, even if I wanted to . . . and that, I think, is a point I had to reach and recognize on my own, and for my own reasons. As long as the constant speedy lure of political journalism seemed more essential and important to me than the ugly, slow-burning reality of writing a novel, any effort to write fiction would have been a part-time, left-handed gig (like my recent journalism). . . . And in any other line of work except writing.

people who try to deal with the world and life and reality off a split-focus base are called ''schizoid" and taken off the streets, as it were, for their own and the greater good.

Now, after more than a week of extremely disorienting conversations regarding the ultimate fate of this story—a novel? a screenplay? or both?—I feel in the grip of a serious confusion, to wit: the story as I originally conceived it, more than two years ago, was a first-person "journalistic novel," set in Texas and rooted in a genuine conflict between Innocence and Violence, that seemed to be the source of a unique and classically ''American" style of energy that I hadn't felt since my first visit to Brazil in 1962, or to California in 1959. It was the same level of energy that I sensed on my first contact with the HelFs Angels, my first visit to Las Vegas, and my first few days in the frenzied vortex of a U.S. presidential campaign. . . . But I knew that, in order to deal properly with any story set in Texas, I would have to move for a year to Houston or Dallas or Austin and actually live there; and this was the harsh reality that I wasn't quite ready to face two years ago. There were other stories to get involved in, other places to go, and the sudden millstone of personal notoriety that caused so many unexpected changes in my life stance that I still haven't regained my balance. . . . It was one thing to slip into Texas as an anonymous young journalist with a subsistence-level book contract, and quite another to boom into a state full of boomers with a national reputation as some kind of lunatic felon, a journalistic Billy the Kid and a cartoon character that appeared every day in newspapers all over Texas. That kind of act is known, among boomers, as a "hard dollar"—and anybody who thinks otherwise should try it for a while.

In any case, that and a few other good reasons is why I kept postponing the book on Texas. . . . But I continued to brood on it, and one of the people I brooded with from time to time was Bob Rafelson, a film director and personal friend who listened to my gibberish about Texas and violence and energy for so long that he eventually began brooding on the story himself, and finally suggested that it might work better as a film than as a book.

At that point I was still thinking vaguely about writing a book on the '76 presidential campaign and taking all the 50-1 bets I could get on my own lonely dark horse—some yahoo from Georgia named Carter—and so for all the obvious reasons that seemed at the time to mandate another HST/Campaign book, my "Texas Project" remained in an oddly intense state of "talking limbo" for most of 1975. Rafelson was totally involved in the making of Stay Hungry, and since there

was nobody else to prod me along in "Texas," I ignored my own fast-rising conviction that another HST/Campaign book would be a fatal mistake that would lock me for life into Teddy White's footsteps, and fell prey to the natural gambler's affection for his own long shot—and it was not until I went up to New Hampshire to cover the first primary that I understood the finality of the choice I was drifting into. The New Hampshire results were all I needed to prove my point as a gambler and a seer, but the personal notoriety I'd accrued since 1972 had changed my role as a journaUst so drastically that even the Secret Service treated me with embarrassing deference, and I couldn't walk into a bar without total strangers wanting to argue with me or ask for my autograph. . . . And for two days after the New Hampshire primary I sat around Charles Gaines' house on a hill near a hamlet called Contoocook, trying to decide whether I should keep on covering the '76 campaign and adjust to my new persona, or to quit pohtical journalism altogether and get seriously to work on a novel—which is something I've been planning to do ever since I finished my ill-fated "Rum Diary" almost fifteen years ago. I have never had much respect or affection for journaHsm, but for the past ten years it has been both a dependable meal ticket and a vaHd passport to the cockpit(s) of whatever action, crisis, movement, or instant history I wanted to be a part of.

And it worked, folks. Between 1962, when I was working for the National Observer and got the first private interview with the new president of Peru in the wake of a military takeover, until 1975 when I failed to get the first interview with the VC/NVA colonel who orchestrated the fifth-column seizure of Saigon as the last Americans fled, I managed—by using almost any kind of valid or invalid journalistic credentials I could get my hands on—to get myself personally involved in just about everything that interested me: from Berkeley to Chicago, Las Vegas to the White House, shark-fishing, street-fighting, dope-smuggling. Hell's Angels, Super Bowls, local politics, and a few things I'd prefer not to mention until various statutes of limitations expire.

Indeed. Those were good years for almost any kind of journalism; itwasthemainlanguageof a very public and pohtical decade. . . . But I suspect it will not be the main language of the 1970s, or at least not for me and most of the people I know. Very few of them subscribe to the same papers or magazines now that they subscribed to five or even two years ago, and even fewer plan to vote in the '76 general election. Not even the best and most perceptive journalists covering the pres-

idential campaign seem to care who will win it, or why. . . . And neither do I, for that matter: after ten years of the most intense kind of personal and professional involvement in national politics, it occurs to me now that I could have left it all alone, and—except for my role as a journalist and all the constant action it plunged me into—my hfe would not have been much different, regardless of who won or lost any one of the myriad clashes, causes, confrontations, elections, brawls, chases, and other high-adrenaline situations that I found myself drawn to.

Ah . . . but this is a hasty judgment, and probably not true: I can think of at least a half-dozen public realities that I managed, for good or ill, to affect by my presence, participation, or journalistic advocacy—and in retrospect I'm about 98 percent happy with whatever ripples I caused in the great swamp of history—and there were also those handful of moments when my life might have been drastically changed by what did not happen: like dying a violent death, a fate I seem to narrowly avoid about once every year, or going to prison, or becoming a junkie, or becoming an indentured servant to Jann Wen-ner, or running off to Bermuda with Eleanor McGovern, or becoming sheriff of Pitkin County, the governor of American Samoa, or a speech writer for Jimmy Carter. . . .

Indeed . . . and on balance, my behavior as a person, writer, advocate, midnight strategist, hatchet man, and serious gambler for at least the past ten years has been generally beneficial to myself, my friends, my wife and son, and most of the people I tend to side with, whenever the deal goes down. . . . Which is not a bad thing to look back on: and if I seem a bit cynical, at this point, or a trifle uncertain about The Meaning of It All, it is probably because of my secret conviction that a whole generation of journalists and journalism went over the hump with the Nixon/Watergate story, and that the odds against any of us ever hitting that kind of peak again are impossibly long. It was not just the Watergate story itself, but the fact that nobody who worked on the leading edge of journalism in the years between i960 and 1975 could have asked for or even hoped for a better or more dramatically perfect climax to what now seems like one long violent and incredibly active story. When I proposed that book on 'The Death of the American Dream" back in 1967 and then rushed off to cover the first act of Nixon's political "comeback" in the '68 New Hampshire primary, my instinct was better than any of us knew at the time— because the saga of Richard Nixon is The Death of the American Dream. He was our Gatsby, but the light at the end of his pier was

black instead of green. . . . Whoever writes the true biography of Richard Nixon will write the definitive book on "The Death of the American Dream."

We should keep that in mind, because that is the book I was just beginning to scent ten years ago. I was hearing the music, but I am not a musician and I couldn't "put it to words," and even when I found the right lyrics, in bits and pieces of almost everything I wrote in those years, it was not until I stood in the wet grass of the White House rose garden and watched Nixon stumble onto the helicopter that would carry him into exile that I heard the music again. . . .

And I am still hearing it; but I am not quite ready to write the lyrics yet—and in the meantime I want to write a story that will leap and roll and crackle, a quick and brutal tale of life in a world without Nixon. What I need right now, I think, is a bit of a workout, something more along the lines of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas than The Saga of Horatio Nixon and the Death of the American Dream.

(NO . . . don't say it, Jim. Don't even think it right now. We both know what kind of pain and suffering and preternatural concentration the Nixon book will require, and I simply can't stand it right now. It's too goddamn heavy, and it would take at least two and probably three years of extremely focused research, thinking, and writing; because it is obviously the one book I've been instinctively gearing down to write for these many years. . . . But that one will have to wait at least until we get Nixon's own version of his ugly rise and fall, and in the meantime I think I've paid enough dues to justify another sort of busman's vacation, on the order of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, which is far and away my personal favorite of the three books I've written: it was also the most fun to write, the best and most economical piece of sustained "pure writing" I've ever done, and sooner or later it will prove to be the most financially successful of the three. . . . Which is fitting, because Vegas is a book that no other living writer could have written. . . .

Indeed, and to hell with all that. What I'm saying now is that I think it's about time for me to indulge, once again, that whole high-powered stratum of my writer's energy that keeps bubbling up to the surface of all my journalism and confusing my standard-brand colleagues so badly that even the ones who consistently feel free to plagiarize my best concepts and perceptions seem almost personally offended by the style and stance of my "gonzo journalism."

Which rarely bothers me—but Rarely is different from Never, and every once in a while I think it's healthy to clear the deck and lay a

serious fireball on some of these bastards who lack either the grace or the integrity or both to understand that they can't have it both ways. There are numerous lame and sterile ways to counter surface plagiarism, but the only sure and final cure is to write something so clearly and brutally original that only a fool would risk plagiarizing it . . . and that's what I'd like to do now: if "gonzo journalism" is essentially the "art" (or compulsion) of imposing a novelistic form on journalistic content then the next logical step in the ''gonzo process" would seem to be a i8o-degree reversal of that process, by writing a "journalistic novel."

Which is bullshit, of course, because on the high end there is only one real difference between the two forms—and that is the rigidly vested interest in the maintenance of a polar (or strictly polarized) separation of "fiction" and "journalism" by at least two generations of New York-anchored writers who spent most of their working lives learning, practicing, and finally insisting on the esthetic validity of that separation.

And what the hell? I suspect it's genuinely important to them, so why not concede it? Ten years from now I might feel in a mood to force that kind of merger, but for now the formal separation works in my favor, because it gives me a straw man to beat on, and stir the buggers up. (Just for the record, however—and one of these days I hope to find enough time to explain this notion properly—the only real difference between "journalism" and "fiction" in my own mind is legalistic: with our contemporary, standard-brand journalism as nothing more than a sloppy lay extension of the Rules of Evidence, rooted in the Adversary Relationship that governs our twentieth-century American trial procedure; and the best and highest kind of contemporary fiction or even High Novelistic Journalism with its roots in the thinking of those essentially Jeffersonian pragmatists often referred to by historians as "the great Stoic lawyers of ancient Rome. ..."

And, mother of babbling Jesus, how did I get into this? The only point I wanted to make was that—by conceding what I consider a false distinction between journalism and fiction—I can jangle the rules even further by claiming to have made a i8o-degree turn, quitting journalism and going back to The Novel, while in fact making no turn at all, and holding exactly the same course I began with Hell's Angels. . . . Selah.)

Woody Creek, 1977

LETTER TO RUSSELL CHATHAM

Woody Creek, Colorado February 17, 1979

Dear Russell,

Thanks for the elegant print. It arrived yesterday by UPS and I took it down to the Woody Creek Tavern to show to the cowboys. It is a bleak landscape, for sure, and some of them recognized it. One of them called it ugly and we had a brief scuffle, but in the end they agreed it was Art.

Which is true, and it was a moment of pure pleasure to reach into that finely packed box and lift the bugger out and hold it up in the sunlight, a fine little unexpected surprise on my way to the tavern for lunch. It was one of those moments that can change a man's whole attitude for a while. . . .

You should stay away from inscriptions, however; history is rife with tragic examples of what happens when primitive artists try to express themselves in words. I have had this argument with Steadman for many years. Stay away from words, I tell him, but he persists, he fouls his art with the kind of jabbering you'd normally expect to hear from an old woman weeding a garden.

Take it as a lesson, Russell. Nobody needs that kind of confusion. It is no accident that Ralph's hair turned white when he was sixteen years old. His nuts shriveled up and fell off his body like raisins off a bush, and he has been like a chow ever since. He has sired five children, all with obvious brain damage, and he says he wants to sire more . . . horrible, horrible.

In any case, I'm enclosing a copy of our LONO Experiment. It is a noble effort, although flawed in certain ways, to push back the barriers of art. Somewhere in this three-legged crank is the seed of a good idea—the same thing we briefly discussed at the bar that night in Aspen and which you and Tom [McGuane] seem to be coming at, from a slightly different direction, with In the Crazies. I'll be curious to see what kind of a mix you'll come up with. I suspect we're on the

brink of a whole new format that will make us all dangerously rich. We can travel in the style of young Buddhas all over the globe for the rest of our lives. It is definitely a thing worth pondering, the next time we get together.

I am planning to be down in the Keys for most of the spring. I issued a bad check to the landlord yesterday and told him I would be taking the house through June. The idea is to hunker down and finish my Cuban novel, then sell my passport and become a citizen of Hong Kong, living on coupons and taking my lunch alone each day at a table near the window in the Press Club, drinking gin in the morning and playing cards at night with strangers. . . .

Jesus. I think it's time to quit. I just smoked a bowl of hash and then had to change the ribbon, which took about twenty-five minutes. And now I seem to have lost my will to write ... let me know if you think you'll be in Florida; we can go out on my boat and run the Flats like real men.

Okay. That's it, for me. Some animal killed one of my peacocks last night and I am sitting here with the 12-gauge, hoping the thing will come back for another one. Probably I will end up killing the neighbor's dog, and the neighbor. . . . Anyway, thanks again for the Art.

Hunter

The

EIGHTES

HOW MUCH MONEY DO YOU HAVE?

WELCOME TO THE '80s

There's no sane reason for all these runners. Only a fool would try to explain why four thousand Japanese ran at top speed past the U.S.S. Arizona, sunken memorial in the middle of Pearl Harbor, along with another four or five thousand certified American liberals cranked up on beer and spaghetti and all taking the whole thing so seriously that only one in two thousand could even smile at the idea of a twenty-six-mile race featuring four thousand Japanese that begins and ends within a stone's throw of Pearl Harbor on the morning of December 7, 1980. . . .

Thirty-nine years later. What are these people celebrating? And why on this bloodstained anniversary? . . .

At least one person has suggested that we may be looking at the Last Refuge of the Liberal Mind, or at least the Last Thing That Works.

Run for your life, sport, because that's all you have left. The same people who burned their draft cards in the sixties and got lost in the seventies are now into running. When politics failed and personal relationships became unmanageable; after McGovern went down and Nixon exploded right in front of our eyes . . . after Ted Kennedy got Stassenized and Jimmy Carter put the fork to everybody who ever believed anything he said about anything at all, and after the nation turned en masse to the atavistic wisdom of Ronald Reagan.

Well, these are, after all, the eighties and the time has finally come to see who has teeth, and who doesn't. . . . Which may or may not account for the odd spectacle of two generations of political activists and social anarchists finally turning—twenty years later—into runners.

Why is this?

This is what we came out here to examine. Ralph came all the way from London—with his wife and eight-year-old daughter—to grapple with this odd question that I told him was vital but which in fact might not mean anything at all.

Why not come to Aspen and have some fun with the New Dumb?

Or why not skewer Hollywood? If only to get even with that scum ... or even back to Washington, for the last act of Bedtime for Bonzol

Why did we come all the way out here to what used to be called "the Sandwich Islands" to confront some half-wit spectacle like eight thousand rich people torturing themselves in the streets of Honolulu and calling it sport?

Well . . . there is a reason; or at least there was, when we agreed to do this thing.

The Fata Morgana.

Yes, that was the reason—some wild and elegant hallucination in the sky. We had both retired from journahsm; but then years of working harder and harder for less and less money can make a man kinky. Once you understand that you can make more money simply by answering your telephone once a week than by churning out gibberish for the public prints at a pace keyed to something Hke three hours of sleep a night for thirty, sixty, or even eighty-odd hours in a stretch, it is hard to get up for the idea of going back into hock to American Express and MasterCharge for just another low-rent look at what's happening.

Journalism is a Ticket to Ride, to get personally involved in the same news other people watch on TV—which is nice, but it won't pay the rent, and people who can't pay their rent in the '80s are going to be in trouble. We are into a very nasty decade, a brutal Darwinian crunch that will not be a happy time for free-lancers.

Indeed. The time has come to write books —or even movies, for those who can keep a straight face. Because there is money in these things; and there is no money in journalism.

But there is action, and action is an easy thing to get hooked on. It is a nice thing to know that you can pick up a phone and be off to anywhere in the world that interests you—on twenty-four hours' notice, and especially on somebody else's tab.

That is what you miss: not the money, but the action—and that is why I finally drilled Ralph out of his castle in Kent for a trip to Hawaii and a look at this strange new phenomenon called "running." There was no good reason for it; I just felt it was time to get out in the world ... get angry and tune the instruments ... go to Hawaii for Christmas.

Honolulu, December 7, 1980

HUNTER S. THOMPSON I9I

BAD CRAZBVESS IN PALM

BEACH: I TOLD HER IT WAS

WRONG . ..

Notes from the Behavioral Sink and Other Queer Tales from Palm Beach . . . and Wild Lies and Relentless Perjury ... a Fishhead Judge Meets a Naked Cinderella . . . Dark, Dark Days on the Gold Coast, Long Nights for Animals

There is a lot of wreckage in the fast lane these days. Not even the rich feel safe from it, and people are looking for reasons. The smart say they can't understand it, and the dumb snort cocaine in rich discos and stomp to a feverish beat. Which is heard all over the country, or at least felt. The stomping of the rich is not a noise to be ignored in troubled times. It usually means they are feeling anxious or confused about something, and when the rich feel anxious and confused, they act like wild animals.

That is the situation in Palm Beach these days, and the natives are not happy with it. The rich have certain rules, and these are two of the big ones: maintain the privacy and the pipeline at all costs—although not necessarily in that order—it depends on the situation, they say; and everything has its price, even women.

There are no jails or hospitals in Palm Beach. It is the ultimate residential community, a lush sandbar lined with palm trees and mansions on the Gold Coast of Florida—millionaires and old people, an elaborately protected colony for the seriously rich, a very small island and a very small world. The rules are different here, or at least they seem to be, and the people Hke it that way.

There are hideous scandals occasionally—savage lawsuits over money, bizarre orgies at the Bath and Tennis Club or some genuine outrage like a half-mad eighty-eight-year-old heiress trying to marry her teenage Cuban butler—but scandals pass like winter storms in Palm Beach, and it has been a long time since anybody got locked up

for degeneracy in this town. The community is very tight, connected to the real world by only four bridges, and is as deeply mistrustful of strangers as any lost tribe in the Amazon.

The rich like their privacy, and they have a powerful sense of turf. God has given them the wisdom, they feel, to handle their own problems in their own way. In Palm Beach there is nothing so warped and horrible that it can't be fixed, or at least tolerated, just as long as it stays in the family.

The family lives on the island, but not everybody on the island is family. The difference is very important, a main fact of life for the people who live here, and few of them misunderstand it. At least not for long. The penalty for forgetting your place can be swift and terrible. I have friends in Palm Beach who are normally very gracious, but when word got out that I was in town asking questions about the Pulitzer divorce trial, I was shunned like a leper.

The Miami Herald called it the nastiest divorce trial in Palm Beach history, a scandal so foul and far-reaching that half the town fled to France or Majorca for fear of being dragged into it. People who normally stay home in the fall to have all their bedrooms redecorated or to put a new roof on the boathouse found reasons to visit Brazil. The hammer of Palm Beach justice was coming down on young Roxanne Pulitzer, a girl from the wrong side of the tracks who had married the town's most eligible bachelor a few years back and was now in the throes of divorce. Divorce is routine in Palm Beach, but this one had a very different and dangerous look to it. The whole life-style of the town was suddenly on trial, and prominent people were being accused of things that were not fashionable.

A headline in the Denver Post said Pulitzer trial seething with TALES OF SEX, DRUGS, OCCULT. The New York Post upped the ante with

tycoon's wife named in PULITZER DIVORCE SHOCKER and I SLEPT WITH

A TRUMPET. The Boston Herald American made a whole generation of journalists uneasy with a front-page banner saying pulitzer was a

DIRTY OLD MAN.

Some of the first families of Palm Beach society will bear permanent scars from the Pulitzer v. Pulitzer proceedings. The Filthy Rich in America were depicted as genuinely filthy, a tribe of wild sots and sodomites run amok on their own private island and crazed all day and all night on cocaine. The very name Palm Beach, long synonymous with old wealth and aristocratic style, was coming to be associated with berserk sleaziness, a place where price tags mean nothing and the rich are always in heat, where pampered animals are openly wor-

shiped in church and naked milHonaires gnaw brassieres off the chests of their own daughters in pubhc.

I arrived in Palm Beach on a rainy night in November, for no particular reason. I was on my way south, to Miami, and then on to Nassau for a wedding. But it would not be happening for two weeks, so I had some time to kill, and Miami, I felt, was not the place to do it. Two weeks on the loose in Miami can change a man's life forever. It is the Hong Kong of the Western world. Not even the guilty feel safe in Miami these days.

Money is cheap on the Gold Coast, and there is a lot of it floating around. A thirteen-year-old boy recently found a miUion dollars' worth of big, finely cut diamonds in a brown bag on the railroad tracks near Hollywood. His aunt made him turn in the loot, but nobody claimed it, and his neighbors called him a fool. Which was true. There is no place for Horatio Algers down here on the Gold Coast; hard work and clean living will get you a bag of potato chips and a weekend job scraping scum off the hull of your neighbor's new Cigarette boat.

There is a whole new ethic taking shape in South Florida these days, and despite the rich Latin overlay, it is not so far from the taproot of the old American Dream. It is free enterprise in the raw, a wide-open Spanish-speaking kind of Darwinism, like the Sicilians brought to New York a hundred years ago and Hke the Japanese brought to Hawaii after World War II, and not really much different from what the Israelis are bringing to Lebanon today. The language is different, the music is faster, the food is not meat and potatoes, but the message is still the same. Rich is strong, poor is weak, and the government works for whoever pays its salaries.

The Palm Beach County Courthouse is not much different from others all over the country. It is just another clearinghouse on the street of broken dreams, a grim maze of long corridors full of people who would rather not be there. Young girls wearing neck braces sit patiently on wooden benches, waiting to testify against young men wearing handcuffs and jail denim. Old women weep hysterically in crowded elevators. Wild blacks with gold teeth are dragged out of courtrooms by huge bailiffs. Elderly jurors are herded around like criminals, not knowing what to expect. Only lawyers can smile in this atmosphere. They rush from one trial

to another with bulging briefcases, followed by dull-eyed clerks carrying cardboard boxes filled with every kind of evidence, from rusty syringes to human fingers and sworn depositions from the criminally insane with serious grudges to settle.

The Pulitzer divorce trial was held in a small hearing room at the end of a hall on the third floor. There was no room for spectators, and the only way to get one of the nine press seats was to be there in person at seven o'clock in the morning—or even earlier, on some days—and put your name on the list. Under Florida law, however. Judge Carl Harper was compelled to allow one stationary TV camera in the courtroom so that the trial could be filmed for the public and watched on closed circuit in a room across the hall, where anybody could watch the proceedings in relative comfort, with cigarettes and doughnuts from the courthouse coffee shop.

These were the bleacher seats at the PuHtzer trial, a strange and sometimes rowdy mixture of everything from CBS-TV producers to lanky six-foot women with no bras and foreign accents who claimed to be from Der Spiegel and Paris Match. It was a lusty crowd, following the action intently, sometimes cheering, sometimes booing. It was like a crowd of strangers who came together each day in some musty public room to watch a TV soap opera like "General Hospital." On one afternoon, when Roxanne Pulitzer lost her temper at some particularly degenerate drift in the testimony, the bleachers erupted with shouting: "Go get 'em, Roxy! Kick ass! That's it, Rox baby! Don't let 'em talk that way about you!"

Some people made notes, and others played constantly with tape-recording equipment. A man from the National Enquirer came in one day but left quickly and never returned. "We don't need it," he said later. "It's too serious."

On the surface, the story was not complex. Basically, it was just another tale of Cinderella gone wrong, a wiggy little saga of crime, hubris, and punishment: Herbert "Pete" PuHtzer, Jr., fifty-two-year-old millionaire grandson of the famous newspaper publisher and heir to the family name as well as the fortune, had finally come to his senses and cast out the evil golddigger who'd caused him so much grief. She was an incorrigible coke slut, he said, and a totally unfit mother. She stayed up all night at discos and slept openly with her dope pusher, among others. There was a house painter, a real-estate agent, a race-car driver, and a French baker—and on top of all that, she was a

lesbian, or at least some kind of pansexual troilist. In six-and-a-half years of marriage, she had humped almost everything she could get her hands on.

Finally, his attorneys explained, Mr. Pulitzer had no choice but to rid himself of his woman. She was more like Marilyn Chambers than Cinderella. When she wasn't squawking wantonly in front of the children with Grand Prix driver Jacky Ickx or accused Palm Beach cocaine dealer Brian Richards, she was in bed with her beautiful friend Jacquie Kimberly, thirty-two, wife of seventy-six-year-old socialite James Kim-berly, heir to the Kleenex fortune. There was no end to it, they said. Not even when Pulitzer held a loaded .45-caliber automatic pistol to her head—and then to his own—in a desperate last-ditch attempt to make her seek help for her drug habits, which she finally agreed to do.

And did, for that matter, but five days in Highland Park General Hospital was not enough. The cure didn't take, Pete's attorneys charged, and she soon went back on the whiff and also back to the pusher, who described himself in the courtroom as a "self-employed handyman" and gave his age as twenty-nine.

Roxanne Pulitzer is not a beautiful woman. There is nothing especially striking about her body or facial bone structure, and at age thirty-one, she looks more Hke a jaded senior stewardess from Pan Am than an international sex symbol. Ten years on the Palm Beach Express have taken their toll, and she would have to do more than just sweat off ten pounds to compete for naked space in the men's magazines. Her legs are too thin, her hips are too wide, and her skin is a bit too loose for modeling work. But she has a definite physical presence. There is no mistaking the aura of good-humored, out-front sexuality. This is clearly a woman who likes to sleep late in the morning.

Roxanne blew into town more than ten years ago, driving a Lincoln Continental with a sixty-foot house trailer in tow, a ripe Httle cheerleader just a year or so out of high school in Cassadaga, New York, a small town of 900 near Buffalo. After graduation from Cassadaga High, she got a job in nearby Jamestown as a personal secretary to the general counsel for the American Voting Machine Corporation— a serious young man named Lloyd Dixon III, who eventually committed suicide. His father, who was later sent to prison, was president of AVM at the time and took such a shine to the new secretary that he hastened to marry her off to his other son, a callow youth named Peter, just back from the Air Force Reserve.

The newlyweds hauled their trailer down to West Palm Beach, where

young Peter had often spent winter vacations with the family, and set up housekeeping in a local trailer park. They both enrolled in local colleges and lived more or less like their neighbors. But the marriage turned sour and the couple soon separated. The trailer was sold to gypsies, and Roxanne got half, which she used to finance the rest of her education at Palm Beach Junior College in West Palm Beach. After she graduated, she went immediately to work for a local insurance agency, selling policies.

That is where she met Randy Hopkins, who at the time was also selling policies to supplement his income as an heir to the Listerine mouthwash fortune. Everybody in Palm Beach is an heir to something, and there is no point in checking them out unless you want to get married. Hopkins was the real thing, for Roxanne, and soon they were living together.

These were the weird years in Palm Beach, with a sort of late-blooming rock and roll crowd, champagne hippies who drove Porsches and smoked marijuana and bought Rolling Stones records and even snorted cocaine from time to time. Some ate LSD and ran naked on the beach until they were caught and dragged home by the police, who were almost always polite. Their parties got out of hand occasionally, and the servants wept openly at some of the things they witnessed, but it was mainly a crowd of harmless rich kids with too many drugs.

It was in the heat of the mid-seventies that Roxanne Dixon moved in with Randy Hopkins and took herself a seat on the Palm Beach Express.

One of Hopkins' good friends at the time was Pete Pulitzer, a forty-five-year-old recently divorced millionaire playboy who bore a certain resemblance to Alexander Haig on an ether binge and was known in some circles as the most eligible bachelor in town. Pulitzer was also the owner of Doherty's, a fashionable downtown pub and late-night headquarters for the rock and roll set. Doherty's was a fast and randy place in the years when Pete owned it. John and Yoko would drop in for lunch, the bartenders were from Harvard, and Pete's patrons were anything but discreet about their predilection for dirty cocaine and a good orgy now and then.

It was the place to be seen, and Pulitzer was the man to be seen with. He had his pick of the ladies, and he particularly enjoyed the young ones. When his friend Randy Hopkins introduced him to Roxanne one night, he liked her immediately.

All the evidence in the case was trundled around the courthouse in a grocery cart that some bailiff had apparently borrowed from a local supermarket. It contained everything from family tax returns to the tin trumpet Roxanne allegedly slept with while trying to communicate with the dead. The cart was parked next to a Xerox machine in the county clerk's office on all days when the court was not in session, and under the curious provisions of Florida's much-admired public-records statute, it was open to public inspection at all times. The contents of the cart were shuffled and reshuffled by so many people that not even the judge could have made any sense of it by the time the trial was over, but journalists found it a source of endless amusement. You could go in there with a satchel of cold beers on a rainy afternoon and whoop it up for hours by just treating the cart like a grab bag and copying anything you wanted.

I spent a lot of time poring over copies of the Pulitzers' personal tax returns and financial ledgers submitted as evidence by the Pulitzer family accountants, and I have made a certain amount of wild sense of it all, but not enough. I understood, for instance, that these people were seriously rich. Family expenditures for 1981 totaled $972,980 for a family of four: one man, one woman, two four-year-old children, and a nanny who was paid $150 a week.

That is a lot of money, but so what? We are not talking about poor people here, and a million dollars a year for family expenditures is not out of line in Palm Beach. The rich have special problems. The Puhtzers spent $49,000 on basic "household expenditures" in 1981 and another $272,000 for "household improvements." That is about $320,000 a year just to have a place to sleep and play house. There was another $79,600 Usted for "personal expenses" and $79,000 for boat maintenance. "Business" expenditures came in at $11,000 and there was no listing at all for taxes. As for "charity," the Pulitzers apparently followed the example of Ronald Reagan that year and gave in private, so as not to embarrass the poor.

There was, however, one item that begged for attention. The figure was $441,000 and the column was "miscellaneous and unknown." Right. Miscellaneous and unknown: $441,000. And nobody in the courtroom even blinked. Here were two coke fiends who came into court because their marriage didn't seem to be working and the children were getting nervous.

And the servants were turning weird and on some nights there were naked people running around on the lawn and throwing rocks at the upstairs bedroom windows and people with white foam in their

mouths were jacking off like apes in the hallways . . . people screeching frantically on the telephone at four in the morning about volcanic eruptions in the Pacific that were changing the temperature of the ocean forever and causing the jet stream to move souths which would bring on a new Ice Age — and that's why neither of us could get any sleep, Your Honor, and the sky was full of vultures so we called a plastic surgeon because her tits were starting to sag and my eyes didn't look right anymore and then we drove halfway to Miami at 100 miles an hour before we realized it was Sunday and the hospital wouldn't be open so we checked into the Holiday Inn with Jim's wife and ye gods, Your Honor, this woman is a whore and I can't really tell you what it means because the children are in danger and we're afraid they might freeze in their sleep and I can't trust you anyway but what else can I do, I'm desperate — and, by the way, we spent $441,000 last year on things I can't remember.

Welcome to cocaine country. White line fever. Bad craziness. What is a judge to make of two coke fiends who spent $441,000 last year on "miscellaneous and unknown"? The figure for the previous year was only $99,000, at a time when the Pulitzers' cocaine use was admittedly getting out of hand. They said they were holding it down to just a few grams a week, at that point, a relatively moderate figure among the Brotherhood of the Bindle, but the evidence suggests a genuinely awesome rate of consumption—something like thirteen grams a day— by the time they finally staggered into divorce court and went public with the whole wretched saga.

The numbers are staggering, even in the context of Palm Beach. Thirteen grams a day would kill a whole family of polar bears.

With Mrs. Pulitzer sitting at a table only an arm's length away, Cheatham went on to say, "Your Honor, Jamie told me Roxanne was the wildest, strongest piece of ass that he ever had in his whole life."

— New York Post, October 4, 1982

That is not bad publicity in some towns, but it is definitely wrong for Palm Beach. And it is not the kind of thing most men want to read about their wives in the morning paper. A pimp might call it a windfall, but it is bad press with bells on for a fifty-two-year-old socialite known to big-time society page writers as a dashing millionaire sportsman from Palm Beach. Or maybe not. History has judged F. Scott Fitzgerald harshly for allegedly saying to Hemingway that "the very rich

are different from you and me," but perhaps he was on to something Ernest couldn't grasp.

What is the real price, for instance, of a seat on the Palm Beach Express? The island is more Hke a private club than a city. It is ten miles long and one mile wide, more or less, with a permanent population of 9,700. But these figures are too generous, the real ones are lower by half. The real Palm Beach—the colony itself, the gilded nexus—is only about five miles long and three blocks wide, bordered on the east by a fine stretch of white beach and Atlantic Ocean, and on the west by palm trees, private piers, and million-dollar boat-houses on the Intracoastal Waterway. There is North Palm Beach and South Palm Beach and the vast honky-tonk wasteland of West Palm Beach on the mainland, but these are not the people we're talking about. These are servants and suckfish, and they don't really matter in the real Palm Beach, except when they have to testify.

That is the weak reed, a cruel and incurable problem the rich have never solved — how to live in peace with the servants. Sooner or later, the maid has to come in the bedroom, and if you're only paying her $150 a week, she is going to come in hungry, or at least curious, and the time is long past when it was legal to cut their tongues out to keep them from talking.

The servant problem is the Achilles' heel of the rich. The only solution is robots, but we are still a generation or so away from that, and in the meantime it is just about impossible to hire a maid who is smart enough to make a bed but too dumb to wonder why it is full of naked people every morning. The gardener will not be comfortable with the sight of rope ladders hanging from the master-bedroom windows when he mows the lawn at noon, and any chauffeur with the brains to work a stick shift on a Rolls will also understand what's happening when you send him across the bridge to a goat farm in Loxahatchee for a pair of mature billies and a pound of animal stimulant.

Nakedness is a way of life in Palm Beach, and the difference between a picnic and an orgy is not always easy to grasp. If a woman worth $40 million wants to swim naked in the pool with her billy goat at four in the morning, it's nobody's business but hers. There are laws in Florida against sexual congress with beasts, but not everybody feels it is wrong.

''My roommate fucks dogs at parties," said a sleek blonde in her late twenties who sells cashmere and gold gimcracks in a stylish boutique on Worth Avenue. ''So what? Who gets hurt by it?"

/ shrugged and went back to fondling the goods on the shirt rack. The concept of victimless crime is well understood in Palm Beach, and the logic is hard to argue. No harm, no crime. If a pretty girl from Atlanta can sleep late in the morning, have lunch at the Everglades Clubs and make $^o,ooo tax-free a year fucking dogs in rich people's bedrooms on weekends, why should she fear the police? What's the difference between bestiality and common sodomy? Is it better to fuck swine at the Holiday Inn or donkeys in a penthouse on Tarpon Island? And what's wrong with incest, anyway? It takes 200 years of careful inbreeding to produce a line of beautiful daughters, and only a madman would turn them out to strangers. Feed them cocaine and teach them to love their stepsisters — or even their fathers and brothers, if that's what it takes to keep ugliness out of the family.

Look at the servants. They have warts and fat ankles. Their children are too dumb to learn and too mean to live, and there is no sense of family continuity. There is a lot more to breeding than teaching children good table manners, and a lot more to being rich than just spending money and wearing alligator shirts. The real difference between the Rich and the Others is not just that ''they have more money," as Hemingway noted, but that money is not a governing factor in their lives, as it is with people who work for a living. The truly rich are born free, like dolphins; they will never feel hungry, and their credit will never be questioned. Their daughters will be debutantes and their sons will go to prep schools, and if their cousins are junkies and lesbians, so what? The breeding of humans is still an imperfect art, even with all the advantages.

Where are the Aryan thoroughbreds that Hitler bred so carefully in the early days of the Third Reich? Where are the best and the brightest children of Bel Air and Palm Beach?

These are awkward questions in some circles, and the answers can be disturbing. Why do the finest flowers of the American Dream so often turn up in asylums, divorce courts, and other gray hallways of the living doomed? What is it about being born free and rich beyond worry that makes people crazy?

Nobody on the Palm Beach Express seemed very interested in that question. Instead, the community rallied around poor Pete Pulitzer when the deal started going down—even through eighteen days of weird courtroom testimony that mortified his friends and shocked half the civilized world. The most intimate aspects of his wild six-year marriage to an ambitious young cheerleader from Buffalo were splayed out in big headlines on the front pages of newspapers in New York,

Paris, and London. Total strangers from places like Pittsburgh and Houston called Pulitzer's wife at home on the telephone, raving obscene proposals. Vicious lawyers subpoenaed his most private belongings and leaked whatever they pleased to giggling reporters. Any tourist with a handful of dimes could buy Xerox copies of his personal tax returns or even his medical records for ten cents a page in the Palm Beach County Courthouse. His privacy was violated so totally that it ceased to exist. At the age of fifty-two, with no real warning at all, Herbert PuHtzer became a very public figure. Every morning he would wake up and go downtown with his lawyers and hear himself accused of everything from smuggling drugs to degrading the morals of minors and even committing incest with his daughter.

The only charge Judge Harper took seriously, though, was Rox-anne's "adultery," which was defined so many times by so many people that it came to be taken for granted. No adultery was ever proved, as I recall, but in the context of all the other wild charges it didn't seem to matter.

"He told me that if I didn't sign those documents, he would take my children. He said he had the power, the money and the name. He said he would bury me."

—Roxanne Pulitzer in court, November 15, 1982

The husband was never pressed to confirm that quote. The judge performed the burial for his own reasons, which he explained in a brutal nineteen-page final opinion that destroyed Roxanne's case like a hurricane. In the end she got even less than her lawyer, Joe Parish, whose fee was reduced by two-thirds. He got $102,500 for his efforts, and the wife came away with $2,000 a month for two years, no house, no children, a warning to get a job quick, and the right to keep her own personal jewelry and her own car. The whole package came to not much more than Pulitzer had spent on the day-to-day maintenance of his boats in 1981, which his accountants Hsted at $79,000.

The $441,000 the couple spent that year on "miscellaneous and unknown" was four times what the wife was awarded as a final settlement after six-and-a-half years of marriage and two children. It was nothing at all. A little more than $100,000 on paper and in fact less than $50,000. There are dentists all over Los Angeles who pay more alimony than that. But we are not talking about dentists here. We are talking about a dashing millionaire sportsman from Palm Beach, a wealthy jade of sorts who married an ex-cheerleader from the outskirts

of Buffalo and took her to live sex shows and gave her jars of cocaine for Christmas.

In a nut, Herbert "Pete" Pulitzer rented the Best Piece of Ass in Palm Beach for six-and-a-half years at a net cost of $i,ooo a month in alimony, and when it was over, he got the house and the children, along with everything else. That is not a bad deal, on the face of it. The worst piece of ass in San Francisco goes for at least a hundred dollars a night at the Siamese Massage Parlor, and that can add up to a lot more than $i,ooo a month. Dumb brutes. Women so mean and ugly that you don't want to be seen with them, even by a late-night room-service waiter. There is a bull market for whoremongers all over the country these days, and the price of women is still not going up.

Judge Harper had run the whole show with an evil ghnt in his eye enduring a shit train of perjury from both sides and day after day of relentless haggling and posturing by teams of Palm Beach lawyers and a circus parade of rich fools, dumb hustlers, and dope fiends who were all getting famous just for being in his courtroom—where smoking was not allowed, except for the judge, who smoked constantly.

That should have been the tip-off, but we missed it. The judge had made up his mind early on, and the rest was all show business, a blizzard of strange publicity that amused half the English-speaking world for a few months and in the end meant nothing at all.

Toward the end of the trial, it rained almost constantly. Logistics got difficult, and my suite overlooking the beach at the Ocean Hotel was lashed by wild squalls every night. It was like sleeping in a boathouse at the end of some pier in Nova Scotia. Big waves on the beach, strange winds banging the doors around like hurricane shutters, plastic garbage cans blowing across the parking lot at thirty miles an hour, darkness in chaos, sharks in the water, no room service tonight.

It was a fine place to sleep, wild storms on the edge of the sea— warm blankets, good whiskey, color TV, roast beef hash and poached eggs in the morning. . . . Fat City, a hard place to wake up at six o'clock in the morning and drive across the long, wet bridge to the courthouse in West Palm.

One morning, when I got there too late to make the list for a courtroom seat and too early to think straight, I found myself drifting aimlessly in a dimly lit bar on the fringes of the courthouse district, the kind of place where lawyers and bailiffs eat lunch and the bartender has a machine pistol and the waitresses are all on probation, and where

nobody reads anything in the newspapers except local gossip and legal notices. . . .

The bartender was trying to find limes for a Bloody Mary when I asked him what he thought about the Pulitzer divorce case. He stiffened, then leaned quickly across the bar to seize my bicep, and he said to me: "You know what I think? You know what it makes me feel Hke?"

"Well . . . ," I said, "not really. I only came in here to have a drink and read the newspaper until my trial breaks for lunch and—"

"Never mind your goddamn trial," he shouted, still squeezing my arm and staring intently into my eyes—not blinking—no humor.

I jerked out of his grasp, unsettled by the frenzy.

"It's not the goddamn Pulitzers," he shouted. "It's nothing personal—but I know how those people behave, and I know how it makes me feel!"

"Fuck off!" I snapped. "Who cares how you feel?"

"Like a goddamn animal!" he screamed. "Like a beast. I look at this scum and I look at the way they live and I see those shit-eating grins on their faces and I feel like a dog took my place.''

"What?" I said.

"It's a term of art," he replied, shooting his cuffs as he turned to deal with the cash register.

"Congratulations," I said. "You are now a Doctor of Torts."

He stiffened again and backed off.

"Torts?" he said. "What do you mean, torts?''

I leaned over the bar and smacked him hard on the side of the head.

''That's a tort," I said. Then I tossed him a handful of bills and asked for a cold beer to go. The man was slumped back on his rack of cheap bottles, breathing heavily: "You whoreface bastard," he said. "I'll kill you."

I laughed. "Shiteyes! People Hke you are a dime a dozen!" I reached over and grabbed him by the flesh on his cheek. "Where is your dog, swinesucker? I want to see the dog that did this to you. I want to kill that dog." I snapped him away from me and he fell back on the duckboards.

"Get out!" he screamed. "You're the one who should be on trial in this town! These Pulitzers are nothing compared to monsters like you."

I slapped him again, then I gathered my change and my mail and my newspapers and my notebooks and my drugs and my whiskey and my various leather satchels full of weapons and evidence and photographs. . . . I packed it all up and walked slowly out to my red Chrysler

convertible, which was still holding two feet of water from the previous night's rain.

"You skunk!" he was yelHng. "I'll see you in court."

"You must be a lawyer," I said. "What's your name? I work for the IRS."

"Get out!" he screamed.

"I'll be back," I said, lifting a small can of Mace out of my pocket and squirting it at him. "You'd better find a dog to take your place before you see me again—because once I croak these scumbags I'm working on now, I'm going to come back here and rip the nuts right off your ugly goddamn body."

The man was still screaming about dogs and lawyers as I got in my car and drove off. People in the street stopped to stare—but when he begged them for help, they laughed at him.

He was a Doctor of Torts, but in the end it didn't matter. A dog had taken his place anyway.

Long after the Pulitzer divorce case was finally over—after the verdict was in and there were no more headlines, and the honor of Palm Beach had been salvaged by running Roxanne out of town; after all the lawyers had been paid off and the disloyal servants had been punished and reporters who covered the trial were finally coming down from that long-running high that the story had been for so long that some of them suffered withdrawal symptoms when it ended . . . long after this, I was still brooding darkly on the case, still trying to make a higher kind of sense from it.

I have a fatal compulsion to find a higher kind of sense in things that make no sense at all. We were talking about hubris, delusions of wisdom and prowess that can only lead to trouble.

Or maybe we are talking about cocaine. That thought occurred to me more than once in the course of the Pulitzer divorce trial. Cocaine is the closest thing to instant hubris on the market these days, and there is plenty of it around. Any fool with an extra hundred-dollar bill in his pocket can whip a gram of cocaine into his head and make sense of just about anything.

Ah, yes. Wonderful. Thank you very much. I see it all very clearly now. These bastards have been lying to me all along. I should never have trusted them in the first place. Stand aside. Let the big dog eat. Take my word for it, folks. I know how these things work.

In the end it was basically a cocaine trial, which it had to be

from the start. There was no real money at stake: Peter Pulitzer ended up paying more money to lawyers, accountants, "expert witnesses," and other trial-related bozos than Roxanne would have happily settled for if the case had never gone to court in the first place.

I am living the Palm Beach life now, trying to get the feel of it: royal palms and raw silks, cruising the beach at dawn in a red Chrysler convertible with George Shearing on the radio and a head full of bogus cocaine and two beautiful lesbians in the front seat beside me, telling jokes to each other in French. . . .

We are on our way to an orgy, in a mansion not far from the sea, and the girls are drinking champagne from a magnum we brought from Dunhills, the chic and famous restaurant. There is a wet parking ticket flapping under the windshield wiper in front of me, and it bores me. I am giddy from drink, and the lesbians are waving their champagne glasses at oncoming police cars, laughing gaily and smoking strong marijuana in a black pipe as we cruise along Ocean Boulevard at sunrise, living our lives Uke dolphins. . . .

The girls are naked now, long hair in the wind and perfumed nipples bouncing in the dull blue light of the dashboard, white legs on red leather seats. One of them is tipping a glass of champagne to my mouth as we slow down for a curve near the ocean and very slowly and stylishly lose the rear end at seventy miles an hour and start sliding sideways with a terrible screeching of rubber past Roxanne Pulitzer's house, barely missing the rear end of a black Porsche that protrudes from her driveway. . . .

The girls shriek crazily and spill champagne on themselves, and the radio is playing "The Ballad of Claus von Bulow," a song I wrote last year with Jimmy Buffett and James Brown and which makes me nine cents richer every time it gets played on the radio, in Palm Beach or anywhere else. That is a lot of money when my people start adding it up. I am making ninety-nine cents a day out of Palm Beach alone, and ten times that much from Miami. The take from New York and L.A. is so massive that my accountant won't even discuss the numbers with me, and my agent is embarrassed by my wealth.

But not me. Jack. Not at all. I Hke being rich and crazy in Palm Beach on a pink Sunday morning in a new red Chrysler convertible on my way to an orgy with a magnum of French champagne and two gold-plated lesbian bimbos exposing themselves to traffic while

my own song croaks from the radio and palm trees flap in the early morning wind and the local police call me "Doc" and ask after my general health when we speak to each other at stoplights on the boulevard. . . .

The police are no problem in Palm Beach. We own them and they know it. They work for us, like any other servant, and most of them seem to like it. When we run out of gas in this town, we call the police and they bring it, because it is boring to run out of gas. The rich have special problems, and running out of gas on Ocean Boulevard on the way to an orgy at six o'clock on Sunday morning is one of them. Nobody needs that. Not with naked women and huge bags of cocaine in the car. The rich love music, and we don't want it interrupted.

A state trooper was recently arrested in Miami for trying to fuck a drunk woman on the highway, in exchange for dropping all charges. But that would not happen in Palm Beach. Drunk women roam free in this town, and they cause a lot of trouble—but one thing they don't have to worry about, thank God, is the menace of getting pulled over and fondled by armed white trash wearing uniforms. We don't pay these people much, but we pay them every week, and if they occasionally forget who really pays their salaries, we have ways of reminding them. The whole West Coast of Florida is full of people who got fired from responsible jobs in Palm Beach, if only because they failed to understand the nature of the Social Contract.

Which brings us back to the story, for good or ill: not everybody who failed to understand the nature of the Social Contract has been terminally banished to the West Coast. Some of them still live here, and every once in a while they cause problems that make headlines all over the world. The strange and terrible case of young Roxanne Pulitzer is one of these, and that is the reason I came to Palm Beach, because I feel a bond with these people that runs deeper and stronger than mere money and orgies and drugs and witchcraft and lesbians and whiskey and red Chrysler convertibles.

Bestiality is the key to it, I think. I have always loved animals. They are different from us and their brains are not complex, but their hearts are pure and there is usually no fat on their bodies and they will never call the police on you or take you in front of a judge or run off and hide with your money. . . .

Animals don't hire lawyers.

Rolling StonCy July 2i/August 4, 1983

SUGARLOAF KEY: TALES OF THE SWINE FAMILY

Adventures in the Conch RepubUc . . . Raw and Primitive People, Living Their Lives Like Sharks . . . Today's Pig Is Tomorrow's Victim

FUCK THESE PEOPLE

There is not much time to tell this story. The sun will come up in two hours and I want to be gone by then. But it will not be easy. I have a whole room full of weight to move out of this motel room by dawn— and, as always, there is nobody around to help. One friend could make a big difference now, but it is four o'clock in the morning and all decent people are in bed. So much for friends.

I am sitting in a motel room on the edge of a private marina in the Florida Keys. It is room number 202 at Sugarloaf Lodge, to be exact, and I am looking across the canal at a tall red, white, and blue Pepsi-Cola machine in front of the main marina building on the other side. The Pepsi-Cola machine is the brightest thing in my universe right now. It Hghts up the gasoline dock and the big white ice lockers where the fishing guides will be leaving from in two or three hours.

There are a dozen or so boats tied up around the canal, mostly white Makos—22- and 25-footers, pure fishing boats, center consoles, most with big white outboard engines, Johnsons and Evinrudes, 175 and 200 horsepower, white shrouds on the consoles to keep saltwater fog off the dashboard equipment, bait boxes floating off the stern, resting easy in the water on this wet black night.

My own boat—a 17-foot Mako with a big black Mercury engine on the back—is tied up about twenty feet in front of my typewriter, and I know the gas tank is full. I filled it up last night around seven o'clock in the evening, and when they asked me why I was gassing my boat up at the start of a bad moonless night, I said I might want to go to Cuba. The fishhead woman laughed but I didn't. I went back to mixing the oil: one quart to twelve gallons, be careful; give the engine what it needs—or whatever it wants, for that matter—because when you