are out on the ocean at night the engine is going to be your best friend. Cuba is only ninety miles away, and I think I could get to Havana on a night like this a lot easier than I am going to get even ten miles away from the nightmare situation I have got myself into in this place.

Sugarloaf Lodge is a "fishing resort," they say; just another place to stay in the Keys if you want to bring your boat down and get serious about the water. Which is true, as far as it goes. This is a nice place. It is a sprawling 200-acre complex with its own airstrip, a twenty-four-hour liquor license, sixty-five waterfront rooms at sixty-five dollars a night, its own grocery store and gas station, a massive generator for electrical power, and even its own water tank. It is a completely self-contained community, secure in every way from the storms of the outside world. And it is worth about twenty $20,000,000.

The owner is Lloyd Good, a one-time district attorney from Philadelphia who bought the whole place on a whim about ten years ago and moved into a position of considerable power in the low end of the Florida Keys, where there is basically no law at all that can't be broken or bought or at least casually ignored by the right people.

I am a paying guest in Lloyd Good's motel, and from my desk I can see his apartment behind the General Store about 100 yards away from me across the canal . . . and I know he is sleeping heavily on a king-size bed over there with his wife, Miriam, a fine and friendly woman about fifty years old who has always been my friend. She has been asleep since midnight, and she will wake up early to supervise the breakfast shift at the restaurant.

Lloyd will wake up later. Or at least he would on most days, but on this one I suspect he will be an early riser. It could happen at any moment, in fact, and that is why I want to get this story down quick and get out of this place before dawn. Because ugly things are about to happen.

There is a huge pig's head in Lloyd Good's toilet tonight. I put it there about three hours ago, just before he walked home from the bar. The snout is poking straight up out of the family toilet and the pig's lips are glistening with Ruby Red lipstick and the eyes are propped open and the toilet bowl is filled with red commercial catsup.

The first time anybody in that house goes into the bathroom and turns the light on, I am going to have to be very alert. We will have serious action. Hysteria, wild rage. I have seen a lot of hideous things in my time, but the sight of that eerie-white pig's head in the white toilet bowl with its mouth covered with lipstick and its dead gray eyes looking straight up at me—or at anyone else who comes near that

toilet—will live in my memory forever as one of the most genuinely hideous things I've ever seen. The idea of waking up half drunk in the middle of the night and wandering into your own bathroom and pissing distractedly into your own toilet and realizing after not many seconds that there is something basically wrong with the noise that normally happens when you piss into a bowl full of water in the middle of the night, and feeling the splash of warm urine on your knees because it is bouncing off the lipstick-smeared snout of a dead pig's head that is clogging up your toilet . . . that is a bad thing to see when you're drunk.

And Lloyd will see it soon. He should have seen it a long time ago, in fact, but tonight he broke his normal routine of relieving himself before falling into bed. And at that point the joke went out of control. I thought. What have I done?

What if his wife wakes up first? Which she almost certainly will. ... Or maybe John, the thirteen-year-old son, will be the first to visit the bathroom. I was not counting on this. My plan has turned weird on me, and now I have to flee. The thing is so ugly that I almost got sick while I was putting the Hpstick on it. We all enjoy humor, but this is very far over the line. We are not talking about jokes here; we are talking about Crazy Ugly, real malice, terrible shock and weeping for a fifty-year-old lady or a thirteen-year-old child, people screaming out of control at a sight too vile to see. Innocent people crawHng out of the bathroom on their knees and calling wildly for help from the father. . . .

And that evil drunken bastard is going to be jerked out of his sleep very soon, by the terrified screams of his loved ones—and when that happens he is going to turn crazy and want to kill somebody; or maybe send others to do it, and they will come to number 202.

My room is the only one with lights on tonight. I am still up, and I will be on the road very soon. I have a friend up the road on Ramrod Key who will take me in and hide me for a while, and my partner in the Gonzo Salvage Co. will get my boat out of the marina, if we do it early enough, and we will hide it up there in the trailer court on Summerland.

Jesus! I just looked to my left and saw the curtains moving. My sliding glass door is wide open, and he could jump me at any moment. That is why I have this big gray flashlight sitting next to me on the desk. It is a fully charged Taser, a savage Httle tool capable of delivering a 50,000-volt whack on anybody who comes within eighteen feet, and I have the bugger primed. . . . WHAPPO! Fifty thousand volts, flapping around like a fish, eyes rolled back in the head, screeching help-

lessly and then taking another shock. The Taser will deliver five separate and distinctly massive jolts, once the barbs are fired into the victim. You can keep the buggers jumping around on the end of the little wire lines for almost an hour, if the machine is fully charged. I don't want to have to do it; the Taser is a felony crime in some states and I am not sure right now about Florida—but I know that anybody who comes through my door at this hour of the night will not have good news for me, and they will have to be shot with something. I am not a violent person, but I know there is a time and place for everything, and this is unfortunately one of them.

I sawed the head off the pig around midnight. Lloyd had it stored in the meat locker at the Lodge, planning to marinate it for a big barbeque for his friends on Sunday, with the head as a main piece of art. I chopped it off with a meat saw in forty-five seconds, and it took about forty-five more to put the lipstick on. The tube broke, so I had to do it by hand, rubbing a lump of red lipstick around that dead thing's gums like I was waxing up some kind of dummy. . . . And meanwhile his wife was asleep in the next room, ten feet away, and then the head wouldn't sit right in the bowl so I had to jerk it up by the ears and jam it back in a proper position. And I also had to prop the eyes open, so they would be looking straight up at him. . . . All this took about ninety more seconds, sneaking into his home and putting a pig's head in his toilet.

Okay. The joke's over now. I have to flee. It is 6:25 on a wet Thursday morning and I know that somebody over there will be using the bathroom very soon. The time has come. I don't want to be around here when it happens, despite a pressing deadline that will cost me a lot of money to miss. That bastard will not take this thing gently— and besides that I owe him about $3,000, my food and beverage bill for the past three months, and he is worried about getting the money.

Indeed. I am preparing to flee, even now. I told him that pig was going to be very expensive. He and his boys put it in my bed the other night, tied up and drugged and half hidden under the covers so that I sat down on the bed right next to the beast and began talking seriously on the telephone to my accountant, who was not amused when the thing suddenly began moving and I said, "I'm sorry, I'll have to call you back, there's a pig in my bed."

Which was true. I calmed the beast down with a billyclub and then hauled it up to the restaurant, where I cut it loose in the dining room at the peak of the dinner hour. People screamed and cursed me and

ran around like rats while I was chopping the pig loose. Two of the fishing guides cornered it and dragged it out to a van . . . and then they slit its throat the next day, and hung it up to bleed; and then they put it in the meat locker, to cool off.

The moral of this story is Never Let Strangers Get Their Hands on the Key to Your Meat Locker. And also, Get Out While You Can. Which I will have to do now. Immediately. The fat is in the fire. Selah.

EPILOGUE

The boy found it, when he woke up to go to school. His mother heard him screaming on his way out of the house. And then she saw it. Ye gods, she thought. What has he thrown up now?

I couldn't make that up. You have to live here a long time before you start thinking that way.

"I ate three or four Valiums," she said, "then I called Ernie to take the thing away. It was three and a half hours before we could use the toilet. Lloyd didn't wake up until noon and by the time he went into the bathroom, the head was lying in the bathtub."

And I was gone.

But I am back now, standing around the bar at night, and people are a lot nicer to me. I buy drinks for women and put liters of Chivas Regal on my tab, and I may be here for a while.

Florida Keys, March i8, 1983

THE SILK ROAD

FISHHEAD BOYS

We WERE CALLING a cab in the Key West airport when I saw these two Fishhead boys grab my bags off the carousel. The skinny one was

halfway to the parking lot with the big red, white, and blue seabag full of diving gear before I realized what was happening. . . .

No, 1 thought. No, this can't be true. Not right here in front of my eyes, in the blue-lit glare of the breezeway in this friendly little airport, with palm trees all around and Mother Ocean rolling up on the beach just a few hundred yards to the south.

It must be a setup, I thought; some nark in the pay of the White House; that evil bastard Hamilton has been trying to bust me ever since I set him on fire in Orlando . . . and this was, after all, another election year.

In the good old days I might have thought it was Gordon Liddy, just running one of his capers. But Gordon doesn't work for the White House anymore, and Hamilton has other problems—like trying to reelect what Dick Goodwin calls "the only truly Republican president since Herbert Hoover" on the Democratic ticket.

So I was puzzled. Election years tend to create their own priorities, for the White House and even the DEA . . . and on a "need to be busted" basis, I figured my name was not even on the list for 1980. I was not even covering the campaign.

I still had the phone in my hand when I saw the fat one. He came shuffling out of the darkness, where he'd obviously been standing lookout for his buddy; he glanced around to see that nobody was watching, then reached down and picked up my triple-locked leather satchel.

Whoops, I thought, let's have a word with these boys. They were locals—punks, maybe nineteen or twenty years old, and they did it so casually that I knew they had been here before. Semi-pro luggage thieves, the lowest and crudest kind of scum. I felt the phone pulling out of the wall as I suddenly moved toward the action.

Cut the thumbs off these vultures, I thought. Carve on them.

Then I remembered that my bone knife was in the red, white, and blue diving bag. All I had for leverage was this baby blue telephone receiver that I'd just ripped off the wall by the Travelers' Aid counter. It was trailing about six feet of coiled blue rubber wire as I ran.

"Goddamn you rotten bastards I'll kill you goddamn brainless—"

This savage screaming confused me for a moment. Then I realized it was me. Was I moving faster than my own sounds?

Maybe not. But pure rage is a serious fuel, and now I was moving at least like Dick Butkus on speed toward this poor doomed screwhead who had already staggered and fallen to one knee under the weight

of my leather satchel. I was still about lOO feet away when he heard my screams and saw me coming. I knew I had the angle on him, even before he staggered ... he was out in the open now and his face was stupid with terror.

''Eat shit and dier

It was a thundering brutal scream, and for a moment I thought it was me again, still moving faster than sound. . . .

But this time the scream was really behind me. It was Skinner: He'd been raving, drooling drunk all the way from Aruba, but the sudden screech of battle had jerked him awake from his stupor and now he was right behind me, screaming as he ran. I pointed left toward the parking lot, at the skinny geek with my diving bag. I smelled the whiskey pumping up from Skinner's lungs as he passed me and angled left to where I'd pointed.

It was not quite an hour after sunset. We had come in on the last flight and then Ungered for a while in the pilots' lounge, so now there was nobody else in that end of the airport. A magic moment in the tropics: just the four of us, Hke beasts gone into a frenzy, back to the fang and the claw . . . and for just a few seconds the only other sound in that empty white corridor where we were closing with terrible speed and craziness on these two Fishhead boys was the high-speed rubbery slap of Skinner's new Topsiders on the tile as we bore down on them . . . wild shouts and the squeal of new rubber. . . .

A punk's nightmare: like getting sucked into the blades of a jet engine, for no good reason at all. . . .

Right. Just another late gig at the airport. . . . Just you and Bubba, Uke always; maybe two or three times a week: just hang around the baggage area until something worth stealing shows up late on the carousel . . . and then, with perfect dumb style and timing, you seize the bags you've been watching and . . .

YE FUCKING GODS! Two drunken screaming brutes, coming wild out of nowhere and moving with awesome speed . . .

"Hey Bubba! Who's all that screaming? I thought there was nobody—

"O God, no! Run, Bubba, runr

Killer Drunks! They jumped us hke mad dogs. At first I saw only one of them. He had big brown eyes and no hair ... I was scared, man. I mean the way he was running and screaming just scared the shit out of me. ... It was CRAZY.

Bubba never had a chance. These were serious Killer Drunks, man.

I mean they were out of their fucking minds. The last thing I remember is when Bubba started to scream and then all of a sudden I didn't hear anything . . . and that's when the other one hit me. It almost broke my back, and all I remember after that is pain all over my head and somebody yelling, ''Eat Shit and Die!" They were serious, man. They were trying to kill us. They were crazy!

Well . . . maybe so. But we were there to cover the Boat Races, not to act crazy.

And certainly not to kill Fishhead boys . . . although Skinner was so crazed on whiskey that for a while I thought he really was going to kill that skinny bleeder he ran down out there in the parking lot.

"You screwhead bastard!" he was yelling. Then I heard the awful smack of bone against bone. . . . The sound drove me wild; somewhere in that madness I recall a flash of remorse, but it had to be very brief. My last coherent thought before we made physical contact with these people was, Why are we doing this?

There was not much time to think. All of a sudden the whole airport came alive with the sounds of violence. A pitiful cry drifted in from the palm-shrouded darkness of the parking lot as Skinner made his hit . . . and then I crashed into the fat boy at top speed, leg-whipping him in the groin as we collided and then tumbled wildly across the tile floor and into the wall of the Avis booth.

I grabbed him by the hair and bit deeply into the flesh on the side of his neck. The sudden taste of hot blood caused me to bite him twice again before he went stiff and started making sounds like a chicken. I got a grip on his hair and dragged him out to the parking lot, where I heard Skinner still whipping on the other one.

''Let's tie these bastards to a tree and play hurricane," I said. He was still kicking the body of the unconscious thief—but he heard what I said, and smiled.

So we lashed these two Fishhead boys to a palm tree with some yellow nylon cord from my diving bag; then we beat them with tree limbs for twenty or thirty minutes. Finally, when we were too exhausted to whip on them anymore, I wanted to cut off their thumbs with the bone knife, but Skinner said it would be wrong.

Later, in my penthouse suite at the Pier House, I felt vaguely unsatisfied.

"We don't need it," Skinner insisted. 'The joke's over when you start mutilating people—hacking off thumbs and weird shit like that. We're not in Damascus, Doc. Get a grip on yourself."

I shrugged. Why not? Why push it?

Skinner was drinking heavily now, but his mind seemed clear. "There could be a few questions when they find those boys tied up to that tree in the morning," he said.

"Never mind that," I told him. "We have work to do in the morning; we have our own questions to ask."

He stared into his drink for a long moment. "Ah yes," he said finally, "The Race."

Indeed. We were there to cover the boat race—big off-shore boomers Uke Cigarettes and Scarabs and Panteras, ninety miles an hour on the open sea. When I asked if I could ride in one of the race boats, the driver repHed, "Sure you can—but if you have any filHngs in your teeth, you'll probably lose them."

"What?"

"That's right," he said. "We kick ass. We never slow down."

"Okay," I said. "I guess I'll ride with you:'

The driver looked up at me from his seat in the cockpit of the boat. It was forty feet long and the whole rear end was two 300-horsepower Chrysler engines. "No you won't," he said after waiting a moment while Skinner took some pictures of his boat. "It's against the rules."

Skinner spit down into the cockpit. "Fuck you, man," he said. "We're riding on this boat. We're taking it to Cuba."

The driver seized a wrench handle and quickly stood up in the cockpit. "You conch bastard!" he snarled. "You spit on my boat!"

Skinner was wearing three Nikons around his neck, and I grabbed him by one of the straps. "Are you sick?'' I said quietly. "Is this how you act when I finally get you a decent assignment?"

OVERVIEW

"The Silk Road" is a story about people who got caught in the fast and violent undercurrents and, finally, the core of the action of the great Cuba-to-Key West Freedom Flotilla in the spring of 1980—a bizarre and massively illegal "sea lift" which involved literally thou-

sands of small private boats that brought more than 100,000 very volatile Cuban refugees to this country in less than three months and drastically altered the social, political, and economic reahties of South Florida for the rest of this century.

By 1980, the biUion-dollar drug-smuggling industry and influx of Latin-American millionaire refugees had turned Miami into the Hong Kong of the Western World and the cash capital of the United States. It was also the nation's murder capital, with a boom-town economy based on the smuggling of everything from drugs and gold bullion to guns and human beings. What Havana was to the 1950s, Marseilles to the '60s, and Bangkok to the '70s, Miami is to the '80s.

The Freedom Flotilla began on April Fool's Day. In less than two weeks the Coast Guard had abandoned all hope of stopping the boat traffic; the port of Key West was overwhelmed, and any boat longer than fifteen feet was for sale or rent. Cubans from Miami roamed the bars and local docks with fistfuls of hundred-dollar bills, and drug smugglers had already begun to take advantage of the general confusion and the helplessness of the Coast Guard. Not even the White House or the U.S. Marines could stop the tidal wave of Cubans pouring into South Florida.

To accelerate the exodus of refugees already granted asylum at the Peruvian embassy in Havana, Castro put out the word: Miami's Cubans could take out one relative for every four refugees taken from Cuba to America. The reaction of the Miami Cuban community was near hysteria. The 150-mile length of Highway AiA—from Key West to Miami—became strangled by a huge caravan of destitute refugees in busloads with blacked-out windows, headed north, and the southbound lane was jammed with Cuban-Americans towing a strange armada of fiberglass speedboats, cabin cruisers, and ungainly fishing boats. . . . All this in a constant frenzy of traffic through police and military roadblocks all along the way.

As the traffic jam got worse, pockets of stranded people began to build up in places along the way. There was simply no way to move on the highway without risk or delay.

People who lived in the Keys were afraid to go anywhere at all: you could go out for a drink on Wednesday night and not get back home until Friday. What was "easy money" in April became a shit train by May . . . but by that time the thing was out of control; and the going price for refugees was still $1,000 a head.

The locals began turning on each other, and growing resentment over the Cuban refugee invasion was compounded by constant TV news bulletins about the national humiliation of the Iran Hostage Crisis. People began carrying guns and hunkering down wherever they could be sure of getting a drink.

One of these pockets of doom along Highway AiA was an isolated fishing resort called Spanish Key Lodge, about twenty miles up the island chain from Key West—a sprawling, run-down motel and marina with its own airstrip and a twenty-four-hour liquor license, owned by an ex-commodities broker from Chicago named Frank Mont, who came to the Keys to get rich.

The chaos of the Cuban refugee invasion and the resulting nightmare at Spanish Key is the baseline of the narrative: a once-lazy backwater fishing resort is transmogrified, overnight, into a seething fortress of thieves, smugglers, and criminally insane Cuban refugees, who soon take it over completely, by force of sheer numbers.

The raw elements of the story are (in no special order): sex, violence, greed, treachery, big money, fast boats, blue water, Cuba, CIA politics, Fidel Castro's sense of humor, one murder, several rapes, heavy gambling, massive drug smuggling, naked women, mean dogs, total breakdown of law and order, huge public cash transactions, the Iran Hostage Crisis, overloaded boats catching fire and sinking at night in the Gulf Stream, the nervous breakdown of a U.S. Coast Guard commander, fast cars running roadblocks on Highway AiA, savage brawls in Key West bars, Boog Powell, sunken treasure, wild runs on the ocean at night, personality disintegration, desperate wagering on NBA playoff (TV) games and 1980 presidential primaries, a grim and violent look at American politics in the eighties, dangerously tangled love affairs, warm nights and full moons, one hurricane, stolen credit cards, false passports, deep-cover CIA agents, the U.S. Marines, a jailbreak in Key West at the peak of the refugee invasion, political corruption in South Florida, the emergence of Miami as the Hong Kong of the Western World, Colombian coke dealers, crooked shrimp-fishermen, scuba diving with shotguns (powerheads, mounted on spears) . . . and all the other aspects of high crime, bad craziness, and human degradation that emerged from that strange and shameful episode in our history. I could list a few more, on request . . . but this seems like enough, for now. The true story of the Freedom Flotilla is weird enough, on its own, to be a good book if it were written as pure and factual

journalism. And the fact that I happened to be there at the time, with my own boat, almost convinced me to write it that way.

But there was not enough room in a journalistic format for the characters I wanted. So I finally decided to write the story as a novel, told in the first person by a narrator who is also a main character and who speaks from a POV not unlike that of Nick Carraway in The Great Gatsby —and Gene Skinner, the main character and high-rolling protagonist of The Silk Road, may in fact be a lineal descendant of Jay Gatsby, in a different time and a very different place.

Gene Skinner is a professional adventurer who worked in Vietnam as a helicopter pilot for a CIA-owned property called Air America and who now lives (at the time of the Freedom Flotilla) with his beautiful half-Cuban fiancee in a double-wide Airstream mobile home in a trailer park on Marathon Key . . . which is nine worlds away from Long Island in every way except that it sits on the edge of the sea and fits Skinner's idea of The American Dream in the same way that West Egg fit Gatsby's.

And Skinner's hired fiancee, Anita, is an ex-debutante from Miami whose life has been changed more than once by her own strange lust . . . which need not be described, at this time, but will figure strongly in the story.

There was no way I could fit an exotic creature like Anita into a purely journaHstic story about the Freedom Flotilla—and no way I can describe her in a i,ooo-word outline, either. The odd and eventually unspeakable "love triangle" involving Anita, Gene Skinner, and The Narrator is one aspect of the story that I think we can save for later. . . . Except to say that Bill Buckley and all the rest of those lame masturbators who've been whipping on me for "not writing about sex" are about to get what they wanted. Or at least what they need.

In any case, these are the main characters in a story of free enterprise gone amok in the tropics. The narrator goes to Key West (Chap, i) to cover a boat race and to do some scuba diving with his old friend Gene Skinner, but the boat race is disrupted when the whole city of Key West is plunged into a feeding frenzy by what amounts to a hurricane of suddenly available cash. Anybody who can get his hands on a boat seaworthy enough to make the ninety-mile run over to Cuba can make $i,ooo a head for every refugee he brings back.

Which was true, for a while, and a lot of local boat captains got instantly rich on the refugee traffic. I was on the Coast Guard pier in Key West one night when a huge cruise boat called The Viking Starship came in with 500 passengers. It looked like a scene from the last days of the war in Vietnam. The crew was armed, the refugees were being

herded into pens by U.S. Marines with bullhorns and spotlights, and huge fines were being levied on boat captains who came in with illegal refugees.

But not all of them were technically illegal, and in the chaos on the docks it was impossible to sort out the legal ones from all the others. Castro, in a flash of high humor, had turned what began as a political embarrassment for Cuba into a nightmare for the U.S. by emptying his jails and insane asylums and loading the boats in Mariel Bay with all the "undesirables" he could round up.

These were the ones the Coast Guard were doing their best to arrest and detain on the pier of Key West—and these were also the ones that boat captains were being fined $i,ooo a head for bringing in.

Skinner's idea, then, was to use the narrator's boat to off-load the most obvious of these undesirables from bigger boats, out at sea, and bring them in somewhere else —for $500 a head, instead of $1,000. The math, laws, and logistics of the scheme are too complex to explain here. . . .

The place where we decided to bring them in was the marina at Spanish Key Lodge, where they would be immediately crammed into rental cars and sent up the road to Miami. The idea was to skim off the scum, as it were, and smuggle them through the undermanned roadblocks like so many bales of marijuana.

Which worked well enough, for a while, but the scheme began coming apart when Key West ran out of rental cars and a nasty backlog of refugees started building up at the headquarters of the operation at Spanish Key.

The situation becomes more and more intolerable as the rooms and cabins fill up with a nasty crowd of stranded refugees and paranoid drug smugglers. The whole place turns into a madhouse, a wild microcosm of the larger madness in Key West. Gangs of Cuban thugs roam the grounds and naked prostitutes lounge by the swimming pool. Fights break out between the Cubans and the smugglers. The Lodge runs short of food and refugees begin stealing chickens from local backyards and roasting them over driftwood bonfires on the beach.

The local police are too busy controlling street crime in Key West to respond to the increasingly desperate phone calls from Frank Mont, the owner of Spanish Key Lodge, who is slowly going to pieces under the strain of trying to control the lawless mob that has taken over his resort. He is afraid to sleep and begins living on a diet of cocaine and Chivas Regal. His family flees to Miami, leaving him to run the Lodge with a flaky skeleton staff of dope addicts and rummies.

The only nonlethal forms of amusement for the criminal mob at the

Lodge are orgies, wild boat races in the bay, and frantic gambling on TV basketball games and the presidential primaries. Thousands of dollars change hands in the bar every night. Mont is going broke and fears for his life.

The first half of the story is basically a building process and a tale of wild humor, fast boats, and big profits—along with a relentlessly cranked-up tale of day-to-day events in the eye of the human hurricane at the Lodge—but the humor suddenly gets thin when a mid-level character (a local politico named Colonel Evans—USAF Ret.) gets killed in a sudden gunfight in the bar at Spanish Key, while raging at a TV special on the Iranian Hostage Crisis.

Gene Skinner, whose CIA background is one of the continuing mysteries of the story, is accused of the murder by Frank Mont, who finally goes over the edge.

Skinner flees to Cuba, leaving his girlfriend and the narrator to run the Scum-Lift operation, which eventually gets busted and cleaned out by the U.S. Marines. Frank Mont is arrested for Trading With The Enemy* and is sentenced to nineteen years in prison and the Lodge is destroyed by fire in the midst of a hurricane.

Meanwhile—before the holocaust—the narrator and Anita receive a desperate radio call from Skinner and set off in the narrator's boat to rescue him off a rocky beach in Cuba, where he's hiding from Russian soldiers. . . . This is the cHmax of the story, but not quite the end. There is one more brutal twist to come.

But we'll save that. This is all ye know (for now) and all ye need to know. Selah.

THE MURDER OF COLONEL EVANS

Our room-service bills are massive—Frank is now in a state of frantic, drunken fear. He is a lawyer from New York who bought the Lodge five years ago on a whim and got himself on a very strange train; he became—with his magic marina and his private airstrip—a man of leverage in a business he knew nothing about except that if he ever got arrested for what he was doing there was no doubt at all that his picture would be on the front page of the next day's Miami Herald, over a headline saying: feds bust cud joe connection; ringleader

*An obscure 1917 federal statute, unused for fifty years.

SEIZED WITH 2 TONS—DISBARRED NEW YORK ATTORNEY NAMED AS MAIN LINK IN KEY WEST MIAMI DRUG PIPELINE.

Frank had come to grips with this reality.

But five years in the Keys had made him a serious bigot on the question of Cubans (not "Castro"—but Cubans). The mayor of Cud Joe was alleged to be Cuban and Frank brooded constantly on what he called the Cuban Cancer. . . .

So now he was half mad with rage and greed at the sight of his lodge filling up with illegal Cuban refugees.

And also with drugs—the Sunday hurricane that knocked out the TV cable for the basketball games had also ripped the huge U.S. Navy observation blimp out of its moorings on Cud Joe Key and sent it off at 80 mph in the general direction of Cuba. The bUmp was the Navy's eye in the sky, scanning the whole southern horizon of the Caribbean twenty-four hours a day with NASA-style cameras that could take stunningly detailed photos of Havana Harbor—and fatally detailed photos of any boat on the ocean within loo miles of Florida. Smugglers feared the blimp—and they rejoiced when the hurricane blew it away.

The Freedom Flotilla was now joined by literally hundreds of boats full of weed, coke, and Quaaludes from Colombia.

The Coast Guard was totally tied up with the Cubans (50,000 by now) and the seas were open for smugglers.

We now had nine rooms rented—and out-front smugglers were operating out of at least ten more.

Frank was sinking deeper into fear and still no Avis cars or anything else—except one or two strays every day from no-shows, so we kept going out to meet Steve's boats full of dangerous Cubans.

They got weirder and weirder. These people were nobody's relatives—they were the first wave of the criminally insane that Castro had decided to set free.

They were not easy people to board at Frank's place while we scavenged for cars to ship these savage buggers off to Miami.

They began to drink heavily in their rooms, screaming all night and lying around the pool during the day (hookers, cockfights, brawls). Finally they got into the bar; they drank on our bill and Frank was too far in the hole to object.

Our bill for less than three weeks was already $9,000—and now with nine rooms and two suites rented and anywhere from fifteen to fifty-five hysterical Cubans eating and drinking on our bill at any given time, we were running a tab with Frank of about $1,000 a day.

The place became a sleepless nightmare of gambling and fighting and nervous breakdowns . . . along with the constant loading and unloading of ton-level week shipments by a crew of at least twenty top professionals working twenty-four hours a day.

The place hummed constantly with movement—either scammers moving their loads or us moving our Cubans.

The whole compound—the Lodge and the marina and all the rooms and grounds—was also alive with cocaine, which compounded and lent frenzy to the prevailing madness.

I never slept. Despite the violent ravings of Colonel Evans and other conch regulars at the bar, we still managed to bring in two loads a day, but we were building up a dangerous backlog in the Lodge because we still couldn't move them out fast enough to Miami.

Frank appeared to be losing his grip—we now had sixteen rooms on our tab and the dopers had all the others. Millions of dollars' worth of illegal contraband was moving out of his parking lot every day, along with dozens of what he now knew to be criminally insane Cuban convicts, lepers, and spies.

He was $8,000 down to me on the NBA playoffs at this point; the local sheriff was warning him that things were getting out of control: too many Cubans, too much dope, too much traffic for anybody's offseason . . . and the governor was appointing a special prosecutor to investigate "drugs and corruption" in the Keys (see Miami Herald series: April '80).

It was too much. On paper the Lodge was functioning at super-maximum capacity. The dopers were paying $500 a night for every room that was empty the next morning—a long-standing arrangement that had made Frank rich almost by accident in the five years since he'd come down from New York—but the dopers refused to pay until the weed was out of the room and on the road . . . they had a dozen boats waiting full of marijuana out there in the mangrove creeks; waiting for an empty room at the marina.

But it was too dangerous to move the weed now—roadblocks everywhere, 600 border patrol agents imported from Texas to "screen Cubans"—Marines in Jeeps on the streets, TV cameras everywhere . . . and no Avis cars for our Cubans.

Convoys of freshly painted black buses moved by on the highway at all hours. There was so much traffic in and out of the Boca Chica Naval Air Station that the air for ten miles in both directions was so heavy with jet fuel that you had to close the windows and punch Max AC just to breathe air.

They were moving the refugees up to north Florida and Arkansas now—there was no more room in Miami and Alabama was closed to refugees.

This ugly limbo was in full force at the Lodge when the TV brought us news of Carter's failed Rescue Attempt in Iran—total rage and despair.

Colonel Evans cried after hearing the first bulletins and he threatened to blow Skinner's head off for calling it all a bad joke. The colonel was seriously shaken. "This is the worst tragedy for the human race since the kiUing of Christ," he told us one afternoon in the bar.

''Bullshit," said Skinner. 'Tt's two thousand years of white trash dumbness."

"You evil bastard!" Evans screamed. "You can mock everything else in this world—but you can't mock thisP' (he raged back from the bar). ''Those men gave their lives!"

"So what?" said Skinner. Evans went visibly stiff at the bar and nobody laughed. "So what?" Skinner said again. "Who asked for their lives, Colonel? Who needs their fucking lives!"

There was a high wild edge in his voice that I hadn't heard in a while. He kept his eyes on the blank TV set while he talked.

"They didn't give their lives, Colonel—they wasted their lives!" He was suddenly on his feet and pointing a finger at Evans. "Those men failed, Colonel! They blew the mission! They killed each other for no good reason at all. . . ." He smacked both palms on the bar. . . ."And you don't know the difference, do you?" He stared at Evans. "You don't know the fucking difference!'' He was screaming now and so was Colonel Evans.

"God damn you!" the old man blurted . . . and then he raised a big chrome-plated automatic and fired point blank at Skinner.

One shot, like a bomb going off in the room—a blank white shock of a noise that paralyzed everybody. Skinner disappeared without a sound and the rest of us scrambled around on the floor for what seemed hke eighty or ninety terrible seconds . . . until we heard the second shot and I looked up just in time to see the colonel die on his feet as another deafening blast of gunfire lit up the room. Colonel Evans walked backward away from the bar for two steps and then fell face down on the tile floor with both hands dangHng at his sides. His body fell almost on top of me, hitting with a nasty, dead-sounding thump that shook the whole room.

For a moment nobody moved—and then everybody moved, including Skinner. "Jesus Christ," he muttered. "Who did that?"

The bar was suddenly empty. No Cubans, no dopers—just me and Skinner and Frank and the high smell of cordite—and Colonel Evans, bleeding quietly from three or four holes. "Mother of God," said Frank. "I don't need this shit." He was leaning with both arms on the bar, looking down at the colonel's body.

Skinner was already gone. . . . Evans had somehow missed him at point-blank range; but at least one other person in the room had not missed.

"Those Cuban bastards!" Frank said quietly. "They shot him fifteen times.'' He looked up at me, tears rolling down from his eyes. "That's it for you. Jocko," he said. "Take your scum and get out of this place!" He banged on the bar with his fist. "Right nowF' he screamed. "Get out! You bastards can't murder people in my place!"

I picked up a long-handled broom from the end of the bar and hit him, a two-handed shot on the back of his head. He fell forward and I hit him again, swinging the broom like an axe. He fell on the duck-boards, screaming. "No! Please! No!"

''You shot him," I said. "You warned him first, then you killed him."

"What?"

I rattled the handful of 9mm auto casings I'd picked off the floor. "You shot him," I said. "These are your bullets."

"What?" He was wall-eyed with shock and confusion.

I walked around the bar and got a cold Heineken out of the cooler. "Where's your weapon?" I asked him. I knew he had a SM #59 behind the bar; he'd showed it to me several times since we'd been there.

"Fuck you," he snapped. "It's right here —and it's cleanF' He lifted the 9mm auto out of the cash-register drawer and held it up to show me.

I took it from him and fired two shots into Colonel Evans' body. The noise almost bhnded me, and Frank went down to his knees with a groan.

I wiped off the gun with a wet bar towel and handed it back to him . . . but he backed away.

"Here," I said. "It's loaded. Take it."

He backed farther away from me, so I put the gun down on the bar. "You better do it now," I said. "I'm going back to the room." I smiled as I walked away. "You're a lawyer," I said. "You know how to handle a witness. . . ."

His eyes were wild and bright. "No!" he said finally—still crouching away from the gun. "No! I didn't!"

I shrugged and walked out to the parking lot. The sun was hot and nobody else was around the office as I passed and went into the trees to keep out of sight on my way to the room. The door was locked, but it opened before I could use my key ... the girl was standing there in the dark hallway, wearing a blue string bikini and looking about thirteen years old.

"Gene's gone to Cuba," she said calmly. "He said he'd call on the radio." I nodded and put the chain on the door, then I hung out the DO NOT DISTURB flag and turned on the TV.

"Call room service," I said. "We need food and whiskey."

She shook her head and sat down on the bed beside me. "What happened?" she said. "Gene wouldn't tell me."

"Frank will," I said; and just as I said it the phone rang.

"How's your boat running?" he asked.

"Fine," I said. "We'll need club sandwiches and a quart of gin . . . and some tonic; I have limes and ice on the boat."

There was no response for a moment, then he said, "Okay . . . nobody knows; we just dump him . . . right?"

"Why not?" I said.

"I'll bring him down to the dock in my van," he said. "He's all wrapped up."

"That's good," I said. "Maybe he went swimming—we'll go look for him."

"Sure," he said. "We'll check the Gulf Stream first—see you in twenty minutes."

I hung up and watched the girl grind on the Deering. She took a long hit and then passed it over to me.

"Where's Steve?" I said finally after the fire had cooled in my head.

"Cuba," she said. "They both went. ..." She lay down beside me on the bed and I put my arm around her. "We're going for a ride out to the blue water," I told her. "You and me and Frank—somebody died and we have to bury it."

I felt her shudder against me. We lay there in silence for a while and then she whispered, ''Who died?"

"Never mind," I said. "We're into the chute on this one."

''We?'' she said.

I smiled. "That's right." I said—"We."

She stood up and walked over to look at the boat. "Jesus!" she muttered. "I knew that son of a bitch would kill somebody.''

"He didn't," I said. "The dopers did it."

She wandered around the room for a while and I could hear her mind working.

The phone rang again and I quickly picked it up.

"You ready?" Frank asked.

"Never mind," I said. "Just put the stuff in my boat, then go back to the bar and get real drunk."

"What? Are you crazy? You'll never find that channel alone!"

"Don't worry," I said. "I won't be alone."

"What?" he shouted. "I told you—nobody else knowsr

"Right," I said. "That's why we'll do it ourselves."

''Who?'' he screamed.

"Calm down. Jocko," I said. "We're all friends here—you do your business and I'll do mine."

"You bastard," he hissed. "You're worse than Skinner."

"Maybe," I said. "What time is the game tonight?"

There was a long silence and then I heard him say, very faintly— "It's delayed—eleven o'clock."

"Okay," I said. "We'll be there."

"We?"

"Yeah," I said, "and if you see that welshing bastard Evans, tell him to bring moneyf'

"What?"

"He owes me," I said.

"God damn!'' he said after a long pause. "You bastards are all Cubans, aren't you?"

Key West, 1980

LETTER TO RALPH STEADMAN

June 30, 1981 Dear Ralph,

Enclosed please find some pages I did in Kona, and a photograph suitable for framing.

Your letter of 24/6 arrived today, along with the book on shark care, which I suspect we can use. . . . And I also like your notion of the Cro-Magnon man reemerging on the point of a new Ice Age, both ahead and behind his time. Which is a serious trick to pull off, as you know, and it has given me no end of trouble, in both the personal and the professional arenas. Few people are comfortable with this concept, and even fewer can live with it. Thank God I have at least one smart friend Hke you.

But there is one thing I feel you should know, Ralph, before you take your theory any further: / am Lono.

Yeah. That's me, Ralph. I am the one they've been waiting for all these years. Captain Cook was just another drunken sailor who got lucky in the South Seas.

Or maybe not—and this gets into religion and the realm of the mystic, so I want you to listen carefully; because you alone might understand the full and terrible meaning of it.

A quick look back to the origins of this saga will raise, I'm sure, the same inescapable questions in your mind that it did in mine, for a while. . . .

Think back on it, Ralph—how did this thing happen? What mix of queer and (until now) hopelessly confused reasons brought me to Kona in the first place? What kind of awful power was it that caused me— after years of refusing all (and even the most lucrative) magazine assignments as cheap and unworthy—to suddenly agree to cover the Honolulu marathon for one of the most obscure magazines in the history of publishing? I could have gone off with a plane-load of reporters to roam the world with Alexander Haig, or down to Plains for a talk with Jimmy Carter. There were many things to write, for many

people and many dollars—but I spurned them all, until the strange call came from Hawaii.

And then I persuaded you, Ralph—my smartest friend—not only to come with me, but to bring your whole family halfway around the world from London, for no good or rational reason, to spend what might turn out to be the weirdest month of our lives on a treacherous pile of black lava rocks called The Kona Coast . . . and then to come back again six months later, at your own expense, for something as dumb and silly as the Jackpot Fishing Tournament.

Strange, eh?

But not really. Not when I look back on it all and finally see the pattern . . . which was not so clearly apparent to me then as it is now, and that's why I never mentioned these things to you in Kona. We had enough problems, as I recall, without having to come face to face with the Genuinely Weird. Merely getting on and off the island required thousands of dollars and hundreds of man hours; and the simple act of sending a packet from Kona to Portland, Oregon, was a full-time job for both of us, for three or four days.

And then, when you came back, the massive shame and humiliation we suffered at the hands of those fools made us both too crazy to talk about what I was only then beginning to understand was the real reason for it all . . . and in fact I failed to see it clearly, myself, until last night.

I had known, of course, from the start. But the idea was not acceptable. . . .

I am Lono. And you're not. . . . Indeed, and that explains a lot of things, eh?

Right. It tells us all we need to know about this goddamn maddening story that has driven at least thirteen people to madness and despair, since it started. Think of all the editors, agents, and realtors who tried to get a grip on it, along with all the bartenders, fishermen, and even the innocent, who went down on this gig, for reasons they will never understand . . . and, yes, think also of our good friends and loved ones.

It was not an easy thing for me to accept the fact that I was born 1,700 years ago in an ocean-going canoe somewhere off the Kona coast of Hawaii, a prince of royal Polynesian blood, and lived my first life as King Lono, ruler of all the islands.

According to our missionary journalist, James Ellis, I "governed Hawaii during what may in its chronology be called the Fabulous

Age. . . . Until I became offended with my wife, and murdered her; but afterward lamented the act so much as to induce a state of mental derangement. In this state I traveled through all the islands, boxing and wrestling with everyone I met. ... I subsequently set sail in a singularly shaped canoe for Tahiti, or a foreign country. After my departure I was deified by my countrymen, and annual games of boxing and wrestling were instituted in my honor."

How's that for roots?

What?

Don't argue with me, Ralph. You come from a race of eccentric degenerates; I was promoting my own fights all over Hawaii 1,500 years before you people even learned to take a bath.

And, besides, this is the story. I don't know music, but I have a good ear for the high white sound . . . and when this Lono gig flashed in front of my eyes about thirty-three hours ago, I knew it for what it was. My body trembled, my eyes rolled back in my head, and I said, "Yes! Tell me more!"

And then I thought. You bitch! It's about time!

Suddenly, the whole thing made sense. It was like seeing the Green Light for the first time. I immediately shed all religious and rational constraints, and embraced the New Truth with all my heart.

Many things happened after you left, Ralph, and that is why I am writing you, now, from what appears to be my new home in The City; so make note of the address:

c/o Haleokeawe City of Refuge Kona Coast, Hawaii

You remember the Haleokeawe, Ralph—it's the hut where you told me they were keeping King Kam's bones; the place where you dared to cHmb over the wall and pose in the yard for some Polaroid shots, like the buggering fool you are and always will be. . . .

What?

Did I say that?

Well . . . yeah, I did . . . but never mind these idle jabs, Ralph; you weren't there when the deal went down.

The trouble began on the day I caught the fish—or, more specifically, it began when I came into the harbor on the flying bridge of the Humdinger and started bellowing at the crowd on the dock about "filthy drunken sons of missionaries" and "lying scum" and "doomed pigfuckers" and all those other things I mentioned in my last update letter.

What I didn't tell you, old sport, is that I was also screaming "I am Lono!" in a thundering voice that could be heard by every Kanaka on the whole waterfront, from the Hilton to the King Kam—and that many of these people were deeply disturbed by the spectacle.

I don't know what got into me, Ralph; I didn't mean to say it—at least not that loud, with all those natives listening. Because they are superstitious people, as you know, and they take their legends seriously. Which is understandable, I think, in the minds of people who still shudder (and quake) at the memory of what happened when they bungled Lono's last visit.

That was in 1778 when some unwashed English bastard traveling under the name of "Captain Cook" arrived in the islands and caused such Angst und Wagling among the natives that they finally killed him, for reasons they still can't properly explain. All they know for sure is that his death touched off a terminal shit train of grief, death, and perversion that has endured for 200 years.

They are still not sure about Cook's credentials, but they know what happened after they killed him and they don't want to make that kind of mistake again. If history has taught us anything at all about what happens to primitive tribes who fail to recognize the second coming of a long-lost God, it is the absolute necessity of taking a very long look at all strangers, no matter how strange and brutal they might seem at first glance.

Nobody makes quick judgments out here, Ralph—which accounts, I think, for the native tradition of greeting all strangers with flower leis and nervous cries of "Aloha." That is why these Kanakas are so friendly and polite on the surface, and so savage underneath. Ever since they killed the Captain and ate his heart for the power that was in it, things have not gone well for them. First came the missionaries, then syphilis, and finally a dose of raw capitalism that changed the face of the islands forever. The grandchildren of King Kamehameha The Great, wherever they are, no longer control their own fates. They live on the outskirts of town, catching fish or growing marijuana for a living, and the one thing they know is that Lono will return someday—and when he does, they don't want to hurt him. One more mistake like the last one could finish off the whole race.

So it was not surprising, in retrospect, that my King Kong-style arrival in Kailua Bay on a hot afternoon in the spring of 1981 had

a bad effect on the natives. The word traveled swiftly, up and down the coast, and by nightfall the downtown streets were crowded with people who had come from as far away as South Point and the Waipio Valley to see for themselves if the rumor was really true—that Lono had, in fact, returned in the form of a huge drunken maniac who dragged fish out of the sea with his bare hands and then beat them to death on the dock with a short-handled Samoan war club.

By noon the next day these rumors of native unrest had reached our friends in the real estate bund, who saw it as the *'last straw," they said later, and reached a consensus decision to get me out of town on the next plane. This news was conveyed to me by Bob Mardian at the bar of the Kona Inn, which he owns. "These guys are not kidding," he warned me. "They want to put you in Hilo Prison." He glanced nervously around the bar to see who was Hstening, then grasped my arm firmly and leaned his head close to mine. "This is serious/' he whispered. "I've got three waiters who won't come to work until you're gone."

"Gone?" I said. "What do you mean?"

He stared at me, drumming his fingers on the bar. "Look," he said finally. "You've gone too far this time. It's not funny anymore. You're fucking with their religion. The whole town is stirred up. The realtors had a big meeting today, and they tried to blame it on me."

I called for another brace of margaritas—which Mardian declined, so I drank both of them while I listened. (It was the first time I'd ever seen Mardian take anything seriously.)

"This Lono thing is dangerous," he was saying. "It's the one thing they really believe in."

I nodded.

"I wasn't here when it happened," he went on, "but it was the first thing I heard about when I got off the plane—Lono is back, Lono is back." He laughed nervously. "Jesus, we can get away with almost anything out here—but not that.'"

The bar was quiet. People were staring at us. Mardian had obviously been chosen.

Get out of this town by noon You're coming on way too soon And we never really liked you, Anyway."

—John Prine

Indeed. They never liked us, Ralph, despite all the money we gave them. And when the natives started calling me Lono, they decided to make their move. That article we did on the Marathon was not received warmly in Kona, and the real reason they invited us back for the tournament was to turn our minds around and convince us to write something nice about the place. So they could unload their property on the millions of rich dopers who would naturally flock to Kona, after reading our book.

They thought they could use us, Ralph. I feel sick just thinking about it. Ex-Captain Steve doesn't realize he admitted this to me, but he did. The realtors took up a collection to pay off any charter captain on the island who could catch me a fish, and thus put a cork in my mouth. Steve lied all the way to the end—and if it hadn't been for Lono, we'd have been in serious trouble. I was not eager to publish a lightweight collection of half-connected vignettes that would have left me wide open for a savage beating from the critics.

But I think I can go with this one. By the time I finish whipping on those lying bastards, they will have to close the airport for lack of traffic.

Thank God I brought the big white rock back with me—on your advice, of course—to change my luck and pull the story together, which it did. There is still a lot of work to do, but now it seems worth doing. Selah.

Okay, I want to finish this and get it mailed off. The story ends with me living in that hut at the City of Refuge to which I was forced to flee after the realtors hired thugs to finish me off. (But they killed a local haole fisherman instead, by mistake.) This is true—on the day before I left, thugs beat a local fisherman to death and left him either floating face down in the harbor, or strangled to death with a brake cable and left in a Jeep on the street in front of the Hotel Manago. (News accounts of the murder varied widely.)

That's when I got scared and took off for The City. I came down the hill at ninety miles an hour and drove the car as far as I could out on the rocks, then I ran hke a bastard for the Haleokeawe—over the fence like a big kangaroo, kick down the door, then crawl inside and start screaming '7 am LONO" at my pursuers, a gang of hired thugs and realtors who were turned back by native Park Rangers.

They can't touch me now, Ralph. I am in here with a battery-powered typewriter, two blankets from the Bali Kai, my miner's headlamp, a kitbag full of speed and other vitals, and my fine Samoan war club. Laila brings me food and whiskey twice a day, and the natives

send me women. But they won't come into the hut—for the same reason nobody else will—so I have to sneak out at night and fuck them out there on the black rocks. We scream a lot, but . . .

So what? It's not a bad life. I like it in here. But I can't leave, because they're waiting for me out there by the parking lot. The natives won't let them come any closer. They killed me once, and they're not about to do it again.

Because I am Lono, and as long as I stay in The City those lying swine can't touch me. I want a telephone installed, but Steve won't pay the deposit until Laila gives him 600 more dollars for bad drugs.

Which is No Problem, Ralph; no problem at all. I've already had several seven-figure offers for my life story, and every night around sundown I crawl out and collect all the joints, coins, and other strange offerings thrown over the stake fence by natives and others of my own kind.

So don't worry about me, Ralph. I've got mine. But I would naturally appreciate a visit, and perhaps a bit of money for the odd expense here and there. The place comes rent-free, but I have to pay for the whiskey.

It's a queer life, for sure, but right now it's all I have. Last night, around midnight, I heard somebody scratching on the thatch and then a female voice whispered, "When the going gets weird, the Weird turn pro."

"That's right!" I shouted. "I love you!"

There was no reply. Only the sound of this vast and bottomless sea, which talks to me every night, and makes me smile in my sleep.

Hunter

LETTER TO KEN KESEY

December 12, '81 Mobile

Dear Ken,

If you thought the air was bad in China, you should smell Mobile in the rain at four-thirty on a cold Saturday morning. I just got back from the Waffle House across the bay, where I spent about two hours eating steakburgers and reading your Beijing piece in 7?wMAimg . . . and drinking a hell of a lot of coffee, because a man with no hair and short pants can't just hang around a Waffle House on the edge of Mobile Bay at four o'clock in the morning without running up a tab, especially when he's laughing a lot and ducking outside in the rain every once in a while to hunker down in a big red Cadillac car for a drink of good whiskey and a few whacks of rotten cocaine. . . .

Risky business, all in all. You want to get down under the dashboard for that kind of action, and lock the electric doors. The parking lot of a Waffle House on Interstate 10 is a bad place to get weird, and it's even worse if you keep coming back inside and reading the same goddamn magazine and make the waitress jumpy by laughing out loud every few minutes and smacking the orange countertop and smoking Dunhill cigarettes in a holder. . . .

Jesus Christ, that was a hell of a long article. I kept thinking I could finish it off with maybe just one more whack of Wild Turkey and two more quick snorts—but the fucker kept on going, like a thing I might have written myself, and when I finally finished the bastard I tipped that fishhead bitch five dollars and drove like a bastard across the bridge, eight miles in five minutes.

It was the most fun I've had in a while, and a really fine piece of writing. I'm going to have a word with Perry about the unfortunate slip into damaging personal libel, with regard to my own persona and future earning power, but I figure that's something we can settle out of court. An ounce should cover it, I think. . . .

Anyway, it's good to see that you're finally beginning to learn something from the fine example I've been trying to provide, for lo these

many years. And never mind those jack-offs who keep saying you'll never make it as a sportswriter. Fuck those people. You just keep at it, Ken, and someday you'll be like me.

Okay, see you next time I get up there into Rape Country . . . and meanwhile, write just a little more often. I could use a few more good nights in the Waffle House. That was/wn, man. If the piece had gone on for a few more pages, I'd have ripped the apron off that fishhead woman and fucked her right there on the stove.

Hello to Babbs and the family. And tell Perry that I'm into serious training for London. By the time I get through with those dilettante limey bastards, they'll wish they were back in Dunkirk. . . .

But, until then, you've set a new standard, and it gives me real pleasure to salute it.

Your friend. Hunter

LAST MEMO FROM THE NATIONAL AFFAIRS DESK

Therearealot of ways to get finally and completely out of political journalism—and a lot of good reasons, for that matter—but it is not quite as easy as it seems. The journalism part is easy to dump, and until about three hours ago I thought I had more or less done that. There is no money in it, for one thing, unless you want to spend the rest of your life on television and never knowing from one day to the next when some freakish shift in the Nielsen ratings or a sudden change in network management might end your career forever. A bald spot, a double chin, even a giddy decision to wear a pink shirt on camera can finish you off just as quick as getting drunk—or even being totally sober and innocent and getting punched by some drunk in a public

place. Nobody needs an anchorman who gets named in a paternity suit or . . .

Right. And we can get back to these hazards, etc., later if necessary. But they are not really pertinent in my case. I made a conscious decision about five years ago to get out of both politics and journalism, if only because I'd been personally and intensely involved in both of them for twenty years—everything from the Alliance for Progress in Peru and Brazil to the Free Speech Movement in Berkeley and getting gassed in the Pump Room in Chicago to the Black Panthers and the Drug Revolution and Fishing Rights for Indians to four presidential campaigns and ten years on the road with Richard Nixon. And then two wild years of Watergate and even having my life and medical insurance cut off while I was flying at 37,000 feet across the Pacific to cover the last days of the Vietnam War.

So I have done politics, folks. And I have been right most of the time. Or maybe just crazy, but it didn't really matter at the time, and I didn't really care. There was no time to worry about whether I was right or wrong about Ed Muskie or Richard Nixon or even Sonny Barger. There were too many deadhnes, and barely enough time to write, much less think. It was like a twenty-year war, and at one point I got so involved—after a quick little beating at the corner of Michigan and Balboa by a Chicago cop with a three-foot billyclub—that I came back home and ran for sheriff of Aspen on the Freak Power ticket, one of the most savage and unnatural political campaigns in the history of American politics, a genuinely radical experiment that came within four percentage points of winning over the Democratic incumbent and beat the Republican challenger by something like thirty-three points.

After that I decided that almost anything was possible, once you understood the machinery—even running for president, or at least senator—and one of the key points I want to make in this screed is that my involvement with poUtical journalism was always more political than journalistic. Somewhere between Chicago in 1968 and Watergate in '74, I became dangerously comfortable with the notion that journalism was an honorable means to a valid end, or maybe vice versa.

And then hubris set in—which is a long story, and there is no point in rehashing it now, except to say that I got myself so deeply involved in presidential politics by the summer of 1976 Time magazine devoted two whole pages to a full-bore assault on everything I stood for (except Jimmy Carter, the dark-horse peanut farmer candidate for the Dem-

ocratic nomination that I had picked, more as a gambler and a poHtician than a journaHst, about a year before Time saw him coming).

Okay, and so much for that, too. History will absolve me on the Carter question, I think, and not even the most confidential files or internal advisory memos in the Time Inc. morgue will ever come close to the weird and occasionally heinous truth of my personal involvement with the Carter campaign. Those silly hacks devoted more space to a vicious personal assault on me than they ever used on MussoHni—two facing pages in the issue that appeared during the week of the Democratic National Convention in New York.

It made my life difficult and I had to lay a bit low for most of the convention, but if they had done their work as well as I did mine that year, I would still be locked up, etc ... .

Indeed, and so much for that. We can get into the criminal, and carnal, aspects of the thing later, if necessary—but it is 5:55 on a snowy, cold morning in the Rockies right now and I want to get this thing done before the morning network news comes on—because I have been watching the news on a TV satellite dish all night in a log cabin in an abandoned logging camp 10,000 feet up in a snowstorm at the end of a treacherous jeep road and on my way back down the mountain about an hour ago, creeping through a blizzard at ten or fifteen miles an hour in my ancient and honorable Volvo, I had time to reflect on the nature of the news we'd been watching, and I think I finally came on a way to get out of both journaHsm and politics forever.

I have a whole legal pad full of my notes on the news of yesterday's astonishing and unprecedented assault on the U.S. Embassy in Lebanon—total destruction, fifty dead and one hundred wounded, with many more buried in the rubble and nobody to blame for it except some mysterious gang of presumably Arab fanatics called the "Moslem Holy War."

There were endless films of mangled bodies being carried out of the burning rubble on stretchers—a sight that not many people in my generation or anybody else alive today has ever seen, on TV or even in newsreels. I could call New York and get some people scanning files for examples of previous attacks on U.S. Embassies, if I thought it was really necessary—but I don't, and that is not the point of this screed anyway. What I want to do here is record my own perceptions and conclusions before the morning TV news comes on. In an hour 'The CBS Morning News," 'The Today Show" and "Good Morning, America" will be all over my screen with the capsule commentaries

and distilled judgments of hundreds of TV wizards and political experts who have been working all night long, just as I have, to make some kind of sense of the thing. And I want to get my own thoughts on paper before I get overrun by theirs, for good or ill.

If I can get the wisdom of the desk on the mojo wire or even read into the ear of some shockproof Western Union operator before dawn, I will do it—just to make sure my own views of the incident will be on record before I get any input from the networks. Maybe they will agree with me, but probably not. And one of the first rules of survival in political journalism is to make sure—absolutely sure—that at least one other reputable newspaper or network or even some vaguely maverick but half-credible political columnist or wizard or correspondent agrees with you—especially when you are about to call the president of the United States a treacherous liar and a cynical monster beyond the wildest dreams of Richard Nixon.

And I have usually followed this rule in the past, or at least been nervously aware of it when I didn't, but this time I mean to violate and ignore it with a vengeance, if only as a scientific experiment. I am, after all, a Doctor, and I have a legitimate interest in the question of whether or not twenty-five years without sleep might alter or perhaps even warp in some way the ability of a good ole boy from Kentucky to fully comprehend the meaning of a major, fast-breaking news story as on the brink of 1984 it unfolds between midnight and dawn on a system that brings in sixty-six TV channels all at once with at least nine of them tracking the Embassy bombing story on a live minute-to-minute basis reminiscent of a presidential assassination story with anchormen clearly confused and no explanation at all for a genuinely monumental political move on the U.S.— nobody blows up a U.S. Embassy. It is one of those things that is simply not done. I remember watching TV film of the '68 Tet assault on the American Embassy in Saigon with Richard Nixon in a room at the Holiday Inn in Manchester, New Hampshire. It appeared on the evening news, with no warning, while we were having a drink and talking about something else—and Nixon went half mad with rage at the very idea of such a thing, much less the televised reality of a few dozen gooks in black pajamas actually firing weapons into the U.S. Embassy compound. There were no immediate reports of American casualties, but the mere sight of foreigners crazy enough to assault Our Embassy drove Nixon into a frenzy, as if we were witnessing the end of the civilized world as we knew it. A thing like that had not happened since the time of the first Roosevelt, and even then they were punished with the same kind of

terrible ferocity that Harry Truman visited on the Japs for bombing Pearl Harbor. It was unthinkable, to Nixon, no matter what he said later in his memoirs, that anybody would physically attack a U.S. Embassy. I remember that moment very clearly, and in truth I was almost as shocked as he was. The incident, a mere firecracker compared to what happened yesterday in Lebanon, blew George Romney out of the race for the GOP nomination almost overnight and confused Nelson Rockefeller's long-awaited challenge so totally that Nixon was able to walk away with New Hampshire and ultimately the White House. It sent his staff into a convulsion of all-night rewrites and rescheduUng of speeches and focus, all of it based on the fearful notion that America could not, should not, and in fact would not tolerate an insult of that magnitude. It raised serious questions about our status as Number One, and what followed was two years of the most savage and relentless bombing of any nation in the history of warfare. Laos and Cambodia were bombed back to the Stone Age—as recently defeated presidential candidate Barry Goldwater had been mocked and brutally beaten for even suggesting four years earlier—just for being in the same neighborhood with people who would dare to attack the Embassy of the number-one nation in the world, and at least half of those 55,000 white crosses from Maine to California were a direct consequence of that insult, etc.

So it was not without a keen and profoundly morbid sense of curiosity that kept me and Cromwell locked into the TV news all night—mainly waiting to see who was going to get blamed for an outrage so awful and massive (a whole Embassy destroyed, hundreds killed or wounded) as to snap the mind of Richard Nixon just as surely as if Pittsburgh had been suddenly blown up Hke Hiroshima by a nuclear warhead fired from some unknown base for unknown reasons by some queer Muslim sect that nobody had ever heard of.

My first thought, after scanning enough channels to be sure that the thing had actually happened, was Ye fucking gods, the bastards have done it now. Whoever put that bomb in the Embassy made sure that the U.S. can't get out of the Middle East, peacefully or any other way . . . and sure enough, here came Sen. John Tower (R-Tex) saying that every American Embassy in the world would be in danger and *'the U.S. will lose its power in the world if this act is ignored."

"Well," I said to Cromwell, who was frantically switching channels and satellites. "A lot of people are going to die for this one. Here we are in the middle of extremely delicate 'peace talks' designed to get

both US and the Israelis out of Lebanon and somehow calm the place down, and somebody blows up the whole goddamn embassy."

"Who?" he asked.

"I don't know," I said. ''But if there's one man in the world who had better have a good alibi for every minute of where he was last night, I'd say it would be Muammar el-Qaddafi. If somebody is going to pay for this—and somebody will—Qaddafi is the only Arab in the world that we can hit without starting World War III, and he's been on thin ice for years anyway. As a gambler, I'd give Muammar about three weeks. He's the only one both crazy enough to do it and safe enough to punish."

Cromwell nodded and hit the scanner again. Somewhere outside in the blizzard I could hear the low grinding noise of the big white dish changing positions as he went from Comsat One to Comsat Two and back. Constant news, mounting casualties, still no hint of an explanation for one of the most flagrant and warlike attacks on not just the reality but the whole myth and image of any world power since the rape of Nanking.

Whoever rolled that pickup full of what CNN said was i6o pounds of explosives was into some very serious business, extreme escalation. The only thing close to it in recent memory was the seizure of the American Embassy and eighty-nine hostages by Iranian fanatics in 1979, a breach of traditional diplomatic assumptions that made the whole world nervous.

You can spend twenty-five hours a day in political journalism for twenty years or even forty without ever expecting to witness the crazed seizure of an American Embassy, much less the total destruction of one in a hypersensitive de facto war zone. Not even Muammar el-Qaddafi would be dumb enough to do a thing like that. It is off the board, a whole new set of rules.

I was trying to explain this to Cromwell—the sheer magnitude and craziness of the thing—when something Hke three minutes later I heard another profoundly original notion erupt from the tube. The president of the United States, according to The Wall Street Journal, had publicly written off the ''Jewish vote" in his campaign for reelection in 1984.

"Wait a minute," I said. "That's impossible. Nobody running for president—not even some weird mix of Washington and Lincoln and Eisenhower and Franklin D. Roosevelt—would even think about saying a thing like that, and certainly not to The Wall Street Journal. We must have heard wrong. Let's hit another channel. In the past three minutes I've been forced to confront two of the strangest things I've

ever even thought about in twenty years of even Ustening to crazy people in bars, much less The Wall Street Journal and the press secretary for the Israeli government back to back."

But it was true. It took awhile to run it down, and even to run it all down—and as it turned out, the Journal was giving Reagan every possible benefit of the doubt, by attributing his alleged dismissal of the Jewish vote in '84 by attributing it to King Hussein of Jordan and/ or other unnamed Washington sources and generally writing the whole thing off to madness and pohtics and gossip. . . . But one thing the Journal didn't mention was a secret White House memo. Reagan's pollster Richard Wirthlin showed him a poll losing 94 percent of the Jewish vote (up from 6 percent)—due to economics and Mideast priorities—so they have decided to try to make him be perceived as a peacemaker instead of pandering to special interest groups. On Thursday Reagan told Hussein he could win without the Jewish vote.

Woody Creek, 1985

MEMO FROM THE SPORTS DESK

Dear David,

I am watching the fat people dance on television, right now: Channel 23 out of Aspen, "The Morning Stretch," blonde women in zebra-skin bodysuits dancing and stretching, aerobics, physical fitness—which The Desk has always strongly endorsed. Nobody is against physical fitness, or even this goddamn relentless barrage of fat people dancing on television; you can get these programs twenty-four hours a day if you have a satellite earth station, and about twenty hours a day with the cable.

And I don't mean to hurry along, here ... I could tell you about

the Ron Harris Aerobicise films that I used to watch on TV in Mobile and which affected me very profoundly, at the time. But I think we can save that for later. The TV has suddenly come alive with news of U.S. Marines being killed in "a firefight" at the Beirut airport.

I am not sure what this means, precisely, but it interests me. The Beatles are on television now, and a CNN story out of Hollywood says Debbie Reynolds has doomed her career by doing a benefit for AIDS victims. Nobody came, apparently; or at least not the smart people. AIDS is not chic. It is one of those extremely contemporary gigs, like herpes and poison rain, that not everybody wants to discuss. The news is fast these days, and a lot of it makes people nervous. U.S. Marines are fighting to the death in some corner of a Lebanese airport with some enemy army that the State Department can't even name.

What?

Who killed these U.S. Marines? Whom were they fighting when they died?

These questions make me uneasy, David. There is something ugly afoot. It is not normal to get news bulletins about American casualties in some foreign war that not even the president can explain, or wants to. That is a strange thing, and however they finally explain it, it will not be satisfactory. They will blame it on the Druze, or "the rebels" or maybe Qaddafi. wild arab renegades slay marines while jews

WATCH.

Okay. Never mind that. We are business people and we have serious things to discuss. . . . There is money, of course, but so what? I have many receipts—maybe $20o/22oK on file now —and let me assure you, bro, that it is all well spent, like an ever-ripening investment in the condom market. . . . We are on a roll: The Shit Train that I predicted in my memo of last week is now upon us. The Democrats have gone into the tank for good. The party has sold its soul to robot whores from the PACs and local PBA networks who will guarantee the deal to destabilize Hart and nominate Mondale, then sabotage his candidacy by saddling him with a floozy for VP and a personal staff of Judas Goats and Greedheads. . . . Call me quick. —Doc

Woody Creek, 1985

'7Ve been evicted from everyplace I've ever lived except the one where I live now. I finally had to buy that so I wouldn't get evicted,"

May 17, 1985 VIA CERTIFIED MAIL Dear :

As you know, I have spoken with you on the telephone on two occasions recently about the constant disturbances from your tenant who lives below us. We Hstened to the loud music, loud playing of the television, arguing in loud voices, apparent beatings, and a person screaming for approximately one month before I called you to complain about the noise.

During our first discussion you reacted in what I consider to be a very condescending manner when I informed you of the disturbances. I find his disturbances frightening to listen to and the only reason I have not called the Police Department to report the screaming is that once the Police left the house after responding to the call, we would have been left with your tenant as a neighbor.

There is no insulation between where we live and where he lives and when we are sleeping in the upstairs bedroom it sounds as though the arguments and beatings are happening in our living room.

When we had our second discussion about the same subject you told me that he had been told about the noise. However, the situation has not improved. The loud arguments have always occurred at between approximately 3:30 a.m. and 4:30 a.m., with the exception of one evening this week when a loud argument started at 8:15 p.m.

The very worst thing about having this man for a neighbor is the noise and the violence that surround him, but we are also experiencing much difficulty with the parking situation. Whenever he is here we have problems with the huge Jeep he drives being parked in the area in front of the gate. We cannot see clearly enough to safely enter the avenue, assuming that he leaves enough space for us to back the car out.

To sum it all up we are findin^^ life at the house, since this person

moved in, to be intolerable. We spend as little time as possible at the house. We only sleep here (when he keeps quiet enough to allow such sleep). We spend no time at all at the house on weekends, if we can possibly help it. The parking difficulties are a problem. We can only assume, from the fact that nothing has been done by you as the landlord about the unpleasant situation we find ourselves in, that you have very little concern for our comfort at the house. It also appears that nothing you say to your other tenant will change matters in any way.

We have consulted an attorney who has advised us to notify you, by way of this letter, of our last day at the above premises. This letter is also to demand the return of the $4,000.00 security deposit which we paid to your agent.

Very truly yours,

May 23, 1985

VIA CERTIFIED MAIL

Dear :

Enclosed is a copy of a book by your tenant the "author." I am sure you have not read it, otherwise you would never have let this person move into your house. The very best thing about this book is that it can be read from cover to cover in a very short period of time and therefore one does not have to invest much of one's time in reading it.

You will particularly enjoy his descriptions of all the drugs he takes, the weapons he enjoys, and how he likes to damage hotel rooms and leave without paying the bills.

I had told you in our telephone conversations that I had never heard of him and you assured me that he was a very well-known writer. With some difficulty I finally did find a copy of this book. I am amazed at how accurately I described him when I told you that he sounds like a crazy person who is on drugs and more than likely armed. This turns out to be an interesting observation as this is very close to the way he describes himself.

Incidentally, the banging and screaming occurred again last night.

Very truly yours.

Enclosure— Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas by Hunter S. Thompson

Intercepted letters to the landlord complaining about Dr. Thompson's alleged behavior the last time he moved down the mountain— temporarily

THE DUKAKIS PROBLEM:

ANOTHER VICIOUS BEATING

FOR THE NEW WHIGS

Another Dunce, Another Dollar, Another Foul Halloween . . . and, Ye Gods! Another Dead Election Day . . . What Does It All Mean, Dr. Oliver? They Laughed at Thomas Edison and They Killed Old Black Joe . . . Quoth the Raven, "Nevermore."

Something is wrong here. George Bush has done everything wrong—from lying on the record about the Iran-Contra Arms Deal and selecting a giddy little right-wing yo-yo as his running mate to ever being vice-president of the U.S. in the first place.

The worst bet in American politics is an incumbent vice-president with a fool-proof first-class ticket to the Oval Office. ... It is one of those "guaranteed" gigs like "the check is in the mail" that seems to make perfect sense at the time but somehow never works.

The last time anybody beat that jinx was Martin Van Buren in 1836. Ever since then the vice-presidency has been a sinkhole of failure, shame, and humiliation—except when the president died unexpectedly. . . . Which has happened often enough (nine times out of forty) to make the odds on a sitting vice-president taking over the presidency a comfortable five to one bet, but if he has to run for the office and campaign in a general election, the odds go up forty-four to one.

There are damn few people in the politics business who feel more personally menaced by the specter of a George Bush victory in November than I do. ... Or at least than I should, on the evidence of everything I've said about the man and the bedrock worship of the Revenge Ethic in politics. . . .

But I am in the gambling business, for good or ill; it is the business I have chosen, and the only governing rule that we all recognize is: always sit close to an exit and never trust a man who doesn't sweat.

Be ready to run at all times, like Ed Meese, and do a lot of knee bends. . . . Quick eyes, fast hands, and legs like bands of steel. It is

like living in the heart of Saturday night with no music and cheap friends and the knowledge that everything you believe in might turn out to be wrong and crazy by the time the polls close on the first Tuesday in November.

Shit happens, like they say in California, and you don't always need music to play musical chairs. In a business where money always talks and sharks never sleep, and the difference between victory and defeat is winning or losing the most powerful office in the world, never leave home without a fistful of speed and a gold credit card.

Indeed. And so much for wisdom. The business is full of smart fools who won't learn, and on some days I am one of them. I have gone down with more ships than Captain Ahab—and usually for honorable reasons—but I am getting tired of it, and I am getting especially tired of getting out on these seas with dumb bastards who punch holes in the bottom of the boat and call it smart.

The names change and the details vary from one year to another, but the bottom line is consistent. It is Hke taking the Denver Broncos to the Super Bowl every January and watching them get beaten stupid by slower teams with amateur quarterbacks and coaches with one-year contracts.

Nobody can explain it, except as the annual manifestation of an indomitable Will to Lose.

This election is not turning out like it was supposed to. It has been going on for so long that it is hard to remember when it wasn't, but nothing has really happened. The main questions have not even been asked, much less answered, and now as we come creeping down to the wire it is beginning to look like this is really it, that what you see is absolutely what you're going to get. Either way, for good or ill, take it or leave it.

It is a grim thing to face—that one of the nation's highest arts has fallen so low, and there seems to be no cure for it. We are looking at the first presidential election in American history to be decided by less than 50 percent of the eligible voters.

This is taken for granted and nobody seems to be worried about it. The hog is back in the tunnel. There is no more talk about "getting out the vote," and the last Voter Registration Drive was a long time ago—way back in the spring, before either one of the party conventions.

There is no pulse.

That is the nut of it, and on some nights it is a very spooky thing to contemplate. . . .

There is a strange new factor at work in this election, and Mr. Jones is not the only who doesn't know what it is.

On the whole spectrum of poHtics there is none of that angst or anger or urgency that normally comes with a presidential election. Nobody is going crazy in public from traditional motivators like fear and greed and vengeance. There is a blizzard of news, lies, and other thick information coming back from these poor yuppie bastards out there on the campaign trail with their Perrier water and their lap transmitters—but none of it seems to have any meaning to more than one person at a time. . . .

THE UGLY MAN COMETH

The air is uncommonly slow. It is hard to find anybody from coast to coast who feels any real sense of Winning or Losing in this thing. Nobody is afraid. There are no marching songs, none of that high white noise and wild music that comes with the feeling of big risk in the air—"Big Doings," like they say in the hills—when the fat is in the fire and the deal is going down and the only thing for sure is that a lot of people are going to wish that wolves had stolen them from their cradles when the votes get finally counted on election day.

The fun has gone out of it. There is no hum of madness or adventure, no festering backwaters of hate and alienation. . . .

You can't feel properly alienated from a process you never knew, or from a choice you never had. We are raising a whole generation in this country that will never know what it feels like to rise up together and flog a crooked president out of the White House, or to wake up in the morning and know that the name of the U.S. Attorney General is Robert Kennedy, instead of Ed Meese.

There is not much justice in big-time American poHtics—but it happens now and then, and in those moments it is a very elegant thing to see, and no drug can match the high that comes from being a part of it.

All of that is missing in this goddamn dreary mess. The only original voice in this leveraged buyout of an election was Jesse Jackson's, and the last person who had any real fun on the '88 campaign trail was Gary Hart.

DUKAKIS UBER ALLES

What happened to the Big Debate—the Bush-Dukakis showdown that the political wizards said was going to decide the whole election in one stroke?

Well . . . shucks. The answer is "not much."

The Great Debate turned out to be a false alarm, more or less. It meant nothing, it solved nothing, it decided nothing, it addressed nothing, and it was nothing. ... A clean sweep, except for a frantic ripple effect that petered out before noon the next day, when the Ronald Reagan Show hit the United Nations and the tabloids hit the supermarkets with a front-page headline that said:

FOUND ON MARS—A STATUE OF ELVIS

When I saw it I went Hmp with a shock of recognition. It was one of those sudden fiery instants that Herman Melville had in mind when he said, '^Genius all over the world stands hand in hand, and one shock of recognition runs the whole circle round."

True headline junkies are a rare breed, almost extinct, and our art is a very fragile thing. Dying, in fact—a dying art, arcane to the point of perversion, with only a few practitioners.

But I like to think I am one of them, and when I saw that elvis/ MARS head, I felt a high flash in my spine.

The headline was so good that it made the story redundant. ... It was a masterpiece of the headline-writing art: it told the whole story in six words so sharp and loaded that the article itself became redundant, except to mystics and libel lawyers.

Nobody else cared. Only those of us in the headHne trade, but we rarely talk to each other and we know that our art means nothing.

Things are not quite the same in the politics business. The stakes are higher and the talk tends to be a lot looser—but it is the same kind of high-end frequency, like a dog whistle, that normal ears can't hear.

It was a good week for high notes: first came the bizarre elvis on MARS headline, and after that it was Reagan's sudden decision to fly up to New York on Monday morning and deliver his "final, farewell speech" to the entire United Nations assembly.

It came on short notice, they said—but not so short that it couldn't dump most of the Debate stories off the top of the front page and out of the number-one rung on the evening TV news. . . . The debate story was hazy, and it made people nervous to have to read about it; but a breaking story about Dutch doing his swan song at the U.N. had a definite zang to it.

JOHN WAYNE SAYS TEARFUL GOODBYE TO PYGMY PEOPLE

Emotional Farewell at World Forum;

Many Weep Shamelessly as President

Gives $144 Million for World Peace

There was nothing hazy about that one, and for sheer impact it ripped the tits off of that creepy, neurotic Debate story.

In the gray world of professional politics it was recognized for what it was—a move so high and suave that in the end it was not even necessary. . . . But it was there, just in case. If George had faltered badly and turned the Sunday night debate into a nightmare for himself and his people, the Big Man would have been there on Monday morning to cover for him.

It was blue-chip advance work. George could afford the handful of stupid gaffes he blurted out sporadically during the debate. It wouldn't matter, they said. Dutch could always take off for the U.N. a few hours early. It was a lock.

Which was true. George "lost" the debate by a few points, but not by enough to change anything. . . . Dukakis "won," but three days later he was still running five points behind in the polls.

Dukakis is in trouble now. He fired his best shots but George never noticed. He was too busy strutting around the stage Hke Mussolini. His eyes turned to slits and he even winked brazenly at the audience, to let them in on the joke. Nobody knew why he did it, but by that time it didn't matter. He was, after all, the vice-president, and his opponent was running scared. All George has to do now is to hang tough and deny everything. He will be hard to beat now. He is in the catbird seat, with time on his hands and plenty of money and handsome Danny Quayle to take his place, if anything goes wrong.

Veni, Vidi, Vici.

Woody Creek, October 1988

SECRET CABLES TO WILLIE HEARST

RE: GADDAFI

September 2, 1986

Dear Will,

We must get rid of MaCumber. (What? Sp? . . . MacCumber? M'Cumbr? Jesus, this is embarrassing. We shouldn't be hiring people if we can't spell their names. No wonder they can't be trusted.) McCumber has altered the spelling of Muammar el-Qaddafi in my column for something like nineteen straight weeks, and it drives me crazy with rage every time. I have tried to talk to him about it, but he won't listen. Maria says she never trusted him anyway, and now I find out that he has a drinking problem.

Jesus. Where will it end? How many of these goddamn treacherous sots can we afford to keep on the payroll? Get rid of that bastard. He should be humiliated, as a lesson to the others. Have him dragged out of his new office by four huge thugs wearing stockings over their heads and black jumpsuits with the Hearst eagle emblazoned on their backs. Never heard of again. That will settle things down.

Fire him quick and let me know. Thanx,

Hunter

RE: THE COLUMN

September 11, 1987

Dear Will,

I have called you repeatedly, at the office and also at home, but I J never seem to get through. Why is that?

Anyway, I have some things to discuss with you. I have A LIST, in fact. Here it is:

1. I have written Denny Allen at King Features with a strongly worded proposal in re: Traveling Expenses for THE COLUMN— which I will obviously need, in order to leave Woody Creek now and then—to New York, New Hampshire, New Orleans, Nome, Hong Kong, Bangkok, or even Paris.

My proposal is that The Syndicate will guarantee to cover the first $1,000 in travel expenses for any week that I choose to go ANYWHERE FOR CLEARLY PROFESSIONAL REASONS ... and that The Examiner will "guarantee" the next $i,ooo, if necessary.

If I want to go to Cairo, for instance, I would have a guaranteed credit line (or a draw, as they say in the trade) of $2,000—which is a reasonable figure, for most trips (but not all), and anything above $2K per week will be subject to negotiation ... or I might cover it, myself, for my own reasons, pending settlement (with the SFX)—on all legitimate claims above that $2K number.

We have, as I presume you know, reached an unacceptable impasse withregard to the "HST expenses" question. . . . There are none. . . . And not even a vague explanation or response in any way except dead cheap silence whenever I submit any bill at all, at any time, for any reason at all. It has come to the point where I now list my Examiner expense bills on my 1040 forms as "uncollectible debts." And we now have a column that will never be written from anywhere more than 2.1 miles from the Post Office in Woody Creek.

2. PIGS . . . iiyou can't arrange a state-of-the-art Pig Hunt at your place down there on the South Coast, I will arrange it on my own, at Jo Hudson's place just south of the Hot Springs in Big Sur. We have killed many of those filthy black bastards down there, and I suspect we can kill many more. MANY. They are a menace, and they are breeding faster than rabbits. . . .

But if I have to arrange my own Pig Hunt, I won't invite you—and you will hear about it for a lot longer than you'll want to, and I will make sure you get at least one fine, fresh, blood-soaked trophy head right flat on the middle of your desk one bright morning—and then I will write a column about it.

3. I must have some kind of computer access to news and information: The New York Times, Washington Post, and mainly a LEXIS-NEXIS connection. This is absolutely necessary. I can't even presume to compete with other big-time political columnists without a massive and constantly available information base that is at least equal to theirs.

No argument about thiSy eh? Only a matter of money ... so please arrange it and let me know ASAP. I need it. . . . Deduct the cost from my weekly expense tab, if necessary (at least on weeks when I dont travel) and please advise Mr. Severance that if he continues to kick my expense bills into the trash can and assume I won't notice, he is misinformed. ... I am gearing up to a flogging mode on this one, and if I can't get my expenses paid I am going to rip the brains and the flesh of anybody who wants to sign the Refusal Memo.

When the Old Man sent Jack London and Frederic Remington to cover his war in Cuba, I doubt if he told them to pay their own travel and work expenses. We are, after all, professionals. And my name is not Bucky Walters.

4. Where is my $ 11,000 Performance Bonus that was supposed to come with delivery of SFX/hst#ioo? It was never mentioned or even noticed by you or anybody else who just sold me into some kind of "national syndication." . . . And $11,000 is cheap, given that some of the "insider" trade gossip said the looth column bonus would be at least $22,000, or even $33,000.

5. Yeah . . . and so what?

Well ... try this: if you keep loading McCumber with more and more big work (whoops—trying to change ribbons, here; my ancient and honorable IBM Model T got bashed around in the back of the Jeep last week, while I was in the hospital for surgery. It was the Silk Ribbon—continuous model, which never ran out—but it went into the shop for General Repair yesterday, and I will send the repair bill to the Examiner . . .).

And I will expect to have the goddamn thing paid —along with my long-lost "Phoenix Expenses"; my recently submitted "Houston Tracker" (TV/Dish receiver) bill; and whatever other pitifully small amounts that I've dared to send in, for things like paper and ribbons and stamps and other mundane things. ...

/ don't cheat on expenses. Will — and I don't expect to be cheated when I send in legitimate bills for out-of-pocket cash. And especially not by some slit-eyed yuppie who gets his salary paid out of Chronicle ad revenues and wallows (at company expense) in white wine andpesto in the finest high-dollar spots in San Francisco, Sonoma, and Tiburon.

Or even Oakland.

Jesus! Did Arthur Brisbane have to slink around town with a fistful of one-dollar bills and not even a formal Examiner press card to halfway pay for his lunch?

Probably not. The Old Man was a monster, but nobody ever accused him of skimming nickels and dimes off his best writers' expense accounts—and it wasn't his cheapjack accountants who made him a legend in American journaHsm and the highest roller of his time.

Right . . . and all I meant to say here was that if Dave Mac moves to another paper any time soon, I will want to go with him, if the New Boys can buy out my contract. As it were.

And it won't take much, will it? Burgin would snap it up about twenty-nine seconds into the first phone call. . . . And it was Burgin, in fact, who advised me (at the very beginning) to "never let your expenses (for the week) run more than $999. . . . Keep it under four figures,'' he said, '*and you won't have any problem."

Ho, ho . . . probably he was too busy to get to know Mr. Severance, at the time.

But not me, Willy. I got that nickel-and-dime drift a long time ago, and it has never really amused me. My mood is nasty tonight, and with nothing to lose I don't mind saying that it could get nastier very soon. I'll write one more column (or maybe two more) on this no-money, no-expenses, alleged "syndication" basis—but it will not go beyond Halloween.

Yeah. I can handle a few more weeks of this thing, as is—but at midnight on Halloween, I will

What?

Well ... we will have problems beyond our ken. Our gig will turn queer. Ugly things will happen—some of them utterly brainless, like the craziness of an egg-sucking dog suddenly put on a chain that stops him with a terrible throat-jerk, just three feet short of the chicken coop.

Indeed ... let us back off and stare at this thing (for a moment) and then move swiftly and smartly to cure it.

I need information, I want money and expenses from the syndication deal, I must kill pigs—and if I'm going to be a goddamn syndicated columnist on a level that we can put up against anybody else in the nation, / want to be treated like a wizard and a main player and the best political columnist in America or anywhere else.

What the hell, Willy? Give it a whirl. We've done okay so far. Send me the $iiK bonus, all my back expenses, fix my credit line with the syndicate, stop loading McCumber like he was some kind of camel or mule and give him some room to work or even to think like a human

being, and get back to cranking up the paper to where we said we were going, all along or back then, as it were.

Why not? Winning can be fun. And fuck the nickels and dimes. Let's get on with the real business.

OK, Hunter

San Francisco Examiner Columns

How long, O Lord. . . . How long? Where will it end? The only possible good that can come of this wretched campaign is the ever-increasing likelihood that it will cause the Democratic Party to self-destruct. — Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail, 1972

THE NEW DUMB

Sixteen years is plenty of time for even dumb people to learn just about anything they need to, especially when the difference between winning and losing is usually a matter of life or death, professionally, in the business of big-time poHtics. It is a question of enlightened self-interest—learn quick or die.

But there are exceptions, as always, like Joan of Arc, Lyndon LaRouche, and even Gary Hart—which is not really fair in Gary's case; it was not that he couldn't learn, he just had different priorities. They jeered and called him crazy when he quit, but polls taken immediately after the election had him as the Demo front-runner for 1992.

It was the kind of news that nobody wants to hear, like having your pre-marriage blood test handed back to you in a lead bag, or getting a job as the next sheriff of Sicily. . . . Richard Nixon might handle a horror like that, or maybe William Burroughs, but no other names come to mind. Some things are too ugly to even gossip about.

Gary was unavailable for comment on the '92 poll, and his former campaign manager. Bill Dixon, has long since moved to Bangkok. Other Democrats wept openly at the news, but most just stared blankly. "The front-runner for '92?" one asked. "Are you crazy? I'd rather have a truckload of pig entrails dumped in my front yard by some of those tattooed guys from Yakuza."

It is an ancient and honorable method of collecting debts in Japan, but not yet chic in this country. The Yakuza, however, are said to be infiltrating American cities at a rate that will soon make them the second most powerful political organization in this nation, behind only the Republican Party.

The Mafia ranks No. 3—followed by the Roman Cathohc Church, the IRS, the U.S. Congress, and the American Marijuana Growers' Association.

Indeed. There are many rooms in the mansion. James Angelton said that back when the CIA was still a ranking power. . . .

The Democratic Party is not even Hsted in the top twenty, despite a number-four ranking two years ago. It was a shocking plunge.

"The Democrats shouldn't even be listed in the top forty," said political analyst Harold Conrad. "They have become the party of Losers."

That is probably wishful thinking—but at ten to one it might float, even in Las Vegas. The last time a major political party self-destructed was in 1853, when the Whigs went belly-up despite the leadership of Henry Clay, Daniel Webster, and John Quincy Adams. They had ceased to stand for anything except pure politics.

"They refused to learn," says Conrad. "They became the New Dumb, and then they died."

If that is the only issue, the Democrats appear to be doomed. They have not learned anything about presidential politics since i960, and

they have lost five out of the last six elections despite a consistently powerful showing in state and local elections. While Dukakis lost in forty states, the Democratic Party added to its control of Congress with a net gain of five seats in the House and two in the Senate.

The dumb are never with us for long, and there is a lot of evidence to suggest that Republicans learn faster than Democrats. . . . Consider the crude learning experience that fell like a huge snake around the neck of the national Republican Party in 1964, when they were forced to go public as the party of Dumb Brutes and Rich People, and then see themselves flogged in the general election by 16 million votes.

When Gold water was forced to wallow in the horror of public defeat, many experts said he was not wallowing alone, that the whole Republican Party was wallowing with him. The GOP was doomed, hke the Whigs, to a cheap and meaningless fate.

But not for long. Four years later, Richard Nixon came back from the dead and ran the Democrats out of power with a 500,000-vote victory over the wretched arch-liberal, Hubert Humphrey. . . .

It was 1968—the Death Year—and this time it was the Democrats who ran amok. If the campaign had been conducted under the Rules of War—which it was: a civil war—thousands of hate-crazy young Democrats would have been tortured to death by their own kind, or killed in the streets like wild animals. Both Johnson and Humphrey would have been executed for treason.

We were all crazy, that year, and many people developed aggressive attitudes. When I packed my bags for Chicago, there was nothing unusual about including a Bell motorcycle helmet, yellow ski goggles, a new pair of Chuck Taylor All-Stars, and a short billyclub. Packing for Chicago was not like taking off for Club Med.

The Democratic Party has never recovered from that convention. It is a wound that still festers, and these people are not quick healers. They have blown five out of six presidential elections since then, and their only victory came after a criminal Republican president was dragged out of the White House in a frenzy of shame.

It was no big trick to beat Gerald Ford in 1976. He was clearly Nixon's creature, and the GOP was massively disgraced. It was a friendly preacher from Georgia against a gang of crooks. . . . And even then Carter blew a big lead and won by only two points.

Four years later he was crushed by Ronald Reagan, a goofy version of Goldwater, who ruled for two terms and then anointed his successor while Democrats embarrassed themselves once again.

Party Chairman Paul Kirk should be whipped like a red-headed

Stepchild, and the others should be deported to Pakistan. Any major opposition party dominated by shaggy whores and failed dingbats not only cripples the two-party system but insults the whole democracy.

Woody Creek, 1989

FEAR AND LOATHING IN SACRAMENTO

It was just before noon when I walked into Ricci's down on J Street in Sacramento. The lunch crowd was not in yet, but a bunch of the boys were whooping it up down at the dark end of the bar, where they appeared to have a woman cornered in a big leather booth.

It would have passed for a yuppie lunch club anywhere else in the valley, but Sacramento is a political town, and I could see at a glance that Ricci's was a full-on political bar. Most of the gents mauling that woman down there in the booth were wearing neckties, but they had a vaguely seedy look about them, as if they had slept in their suits on a musty couch in some lobbyist's condo with a condom machine in the lobby and rubber palm trees in the elevators. . . . They were unemployed lawyers, pimps, and stockbrokers: Politicians in a word. . . .

I tried to ignore them, but the shrieks and cries of the woman they were passing around like a cheerleader made me jittery.

I watched for a while, then I stood up and eased down the bar to have a better look. The bartender eyed me, but said nothing. None of the wild boys noticed me at first, but when I passed closer to the booth on my way to the men's room the girl suddenly quit everything else she was doing and locked her eyes on me.

It was dark back there, or at least dim, but in the green glow of the EXIT light she seemed to smile like she recognized me and was about to cry out my name.

At first glance she was a stunningly beautiful woman—red hair and long legs in a tight-fitting business suit that looked almost prim, except that the front of her linen skirt was slit straight up to her groin.

Hands were grasping and groping at her; and suddenly, she kicked off her high-heeled Capezios and jumped up on the red leather seat, shrieking and kicking at her tormentors.

It was all in good fun; they were all laughing—but there was a strange high edge on the laughter that made me uneasy ... or maybe it's just me, I thought. I had just averaged 88.26 miles an hour between the Bay Bridge and the Sacramento River in a custom-built 1969 mandarin-red V-8 427 Chevy convertible with a Turbo-Latham supercharger, and it had left me a little tense. My forearms were still vibrating crazily from the roUing vise grip I'd been keeping on the wheel. My fingers were so numb that I had to flex my whole hand a few times before I could lift the margarita glass to my lips.

"Bad business," I said to the bartender. "What's happening down there? A gang rape?"

He flinched, then he smiled professionally and said, "Naw, that's just a bunch of the local hustlers havin' a birthday party. Sorry. I'll tell 'em to hold it down."

"Nonsense," I said. "There's all kinds of rape going on these days. It's normal. We'd be crazy to complain about it." Then I seized him firmly by both shoulders. "But let me ask you something," I said. "Do you remember Kitty Genovese?"

"Not really," he said. "Did she work here?"

I stared at him for a moment. "They stabbed her forty-seven times," I said. "It was in a public place like this and many people watched her being killed by a gang of street thugs. . . . But nobody tried to help her. They just watched. They said they didn't want to interfere in her personal life. . . . Some of them said she looked like she was having a good time."

He shook his head sadly. "Jesus!" he said. "I'm really sorry.'' Then he nodded at my glass. "Are you ready for another one?"

"Sure," I said. "This violence is making me sick."

Just then we heard a burst of wild laughter and breaking glass from inside the ladies' room. The red leather booth was empty.

"You crazy bitch!" the bartender screamed as he ran back and kicked the door open. . . . Seconds later he emerged, dragging the redheaded woman by one arm. "You slut!" he was yeUing. "You're finished in this place. Get out, and stay out!"

He had her almost through the front door when she broke out of

his grip and rushed over to me. "Please help me!" she begged. "Please take me away from here."

I grabbed her by the arm. What the hell? I thought. I'm leaving anyway. We ran outside to where my heavy red convertible was parked next to a fireplug. She jumped into the front seat while I swooped a traffic citation off the front window. "Hurry!" she yelled. "Let's get out of here. I can't be seen with you."

We boomed away from the curb in a long screech of rubber.

The girl was laughing, and I noticed she was sitting pretty high on the seat for somebody who didn't want to be seen with me. Suddenly she reached over and snatched the traffic ticket off my lap. "Don't worry about this thing," she said. "My boyfriend will take care of it," and she stuffed it into her briefcase.

"Wonderful," I said. "He must be a nice guy."

"He is," she chirped. "He's a very powerful man in the capital."

I glanced across at her. We were still rumbling along J Street in first gear, coughing up fuel mist and occasionally backfiring long blasts of flame out of the tailpipe.

"I like this car," she said, as we screeched onto the freeway and the supercharger kicked in.

"Yeah," she said dreamily. "This is more like it. I want to drive fast!"

"Where?" I asked.

"Reno," she said quickly. "Let's go to Reno and get married." She slid across the seat and grasped my leg. Then she sat up higher, and her hair blew straight back in the wind as we eased into the fast lane. At the next exit we passed under a big green sign that said, "Reno—

133-

STRANGE RIDE TO RENO

On the way out of town the car radio said it was 90 below zero in Butte, Montana, on Groundhog Day, which meant thirteen more weeks of winter and deep snow in the Rockies until June. ... It was hideous news, but my fiancee was laughing wickedly.

"Perfect," she exclaimed. "The perfect honeymoon—snowed in for thirteen straight weeks."

I drove for a while and said nothing, just feeUng her breathing and jabbering and vibrating Hke a strange instrument against my ribs as she curled up next to me and punched in a savage Warren Zevon tape—"Lawyers, Guns and Money"—an old tune, mean and crazy, but somehow it was right. ... I felt fine.

It was a good day to be driving fast and happy, booming up the mountain in a hot-rod Chevy with a beautiful girl wrapped around me and headed for some all-night marriage parlor in Reno.

Earlier that morning, I was just another mean drifter speeding across the Bay Bridge in a flashy car with a brown bag full of hundred-dollar bills. . . . Heading east and over the hump to Colorado, fleeing the city and definitely not looking for anything strange—then I'd stopped for lunch and wandered straight through the looking glass. It was free-fall now, like one of those sudden Acid Flashbacks that they've been promising us all these years.

We were almost to Loomis when Jilly remembered that she had left her purse back at the bar in Sacramento. "Goddamnit," she moaned. "We'll have to go back for it. We have to turn around."

"Forget the purse," I said. "I have plenty of money." I reached under the seat and grabbed a fistful of hundreds out of the rumpled lunch bag. "Look at this," I said. "We're richer than Judas."

She shook her head. "No, I need my ID," she said. "You can't get married in Reno without ID."

So what? I thought. From what she'd told me about her boyfriend, I figured he would have his people after us by now—maybe even the highway patrol—for kidnapping.

I had understood from the start that I had some kind of bomb on my hands. It was not like I'd picked up a hitchhiker.

No, this was a very expensive woman—and I had, in fact, grabbed her out of a downtown political bar at lunchtime and run away with her. There were many witnesses, and my car was very visible. . . . And now we were on our way to Reno to get married.

That is not the kind of news any big-time powermonger wants to hear when he gets back from lunch in the governor's dining room: Pardon me, sir, but the whole town is humming with the news about your girlfriend disappearing out of Ricci's with a bald drifter in a hopped-up Chevy convertible with Colorado plates. . . . The phone is ringing off the hook. What should I tell them?

What indeed? And what should / tell them when we are stopped at

a CHP roadblock on the outskirts of Truckee and her boyfriend swoops down in a helicopter and orders men in black suits to beat a confession out of me?

And what would she say? That we had fallen in love at first sight in the midst of an orgy at lunchtime and she had suddenly changed her mind about everything in her life?

Probably not. They would drag me away in steel-mesh animal net and execute me Uke Caryl Chessman. Any story I told would mean nothing, compared to hers. My fate was in her hands.

Feeling crazy has never really worried me. It is an occupational hazard and on some days I even get paid for it—but there are some things that even crazy people can't get away with, and this idea of turning around and driving back to Sacramento to pick up Jilly's birth certificate seemed to be one of them.

"Don't worry about him/' she said. "He's having dinner with some tax lobbyists tonight. I'll just run in and get a Uttle suitcase. It won't take two minutes."

I shrugged and turned around. What the hell? I thought. Buy the ticket, take the ride. There was madness in either direction. And besides, I was beginning to like the girl.

She was a dangerous dingbat with a very pure dedication to the Love and Adventure ethic—but I recognized a warrior when I met one, and on the way down the mountain I knew what Clyde must have felt like when he first met Bonnie.

OMNIA VINCIT AMOR

''We that are true lovers run into strange capers."

— Shakespeare

My heart was full of hate as we zoomed back down the hill to Sacramento, but I couldn't quite put it in focus. George Bush was on the radio, talking to Congress about justice for Puerto Ricans . . . but the sound of his voice was like Lithium Grease in my ears and my fiancee was babbling incessantly about her money-mad brute of a boyfriend. "He watches me Hke a hawk," she was saying. "He cHngs to my back Hke a tick. I can't escape."

I laughed harshly and gave her a hard slap to the throat that caused her eyeballs to roll back in her head. She tried to screech, but no sound came out of her mouth . . . and just as I started to smile I saw her fist right in front of my face and then felt a whack of bone against bone that made me go blind.

There was a crazy look in her eyes for a moment, then she laughed and stretched out on the seat with her head in my lap. ''Let's get some whiskey," she said. 'There's a liquor store up here on the next corner. I can charge there."

We were almost to where she lived, she said, but she wanted to have a few drinks before slipping into the house. "I'm sure he's not there," she said, "but I still feel nervous."

We pulled into the parking lot of the liquor store and she gave me a long kiss before we went inside. The top was down and the bright red Chevy seemed to glow like a rolling bonfire. I felt a little queasy about necking openly under a street hght in her own neighborhood, but she said it didn't matter.

"Who cares?" she giggled. "We're almost newlyweds."

Another wave of queasiness rolled over me, but I ignored it. . . . The store was full of rich-looking men fussing over the fine wine selection, but we went straight to the whiskey rack. It looked like a long night coming up, so I got two liters of Royal Salute, a tall bottle of iio-proof green Chartreuse, and a half-gallon of Chivas for backup.

At the cash register I noticed a tabloid with a big headline saying:

VULTURES ATTACK FUNERAL AND EAT THE CORPSE

It was a heinous story: "Relatives and friends were sickened as they watched the fierce predators tearing away at the flesh of their loved one."

It happened in Poland, where a flock of huge meat-eating birds circled over the cemetery, squawking and croaking ominously as the casket was carried toward the grave—then suddenly swooped down and attacked the six pallbearers so savagely that one man had his scalp clawed off and another lost an eyeball. They panicked and fled, dropping the casket on the street and letting the corpse roll out. Stunned townspeople stood by helplessly, weeping as a horde of bloodthirsty birds carried the corpse away. . . . One relative said the vultures were squabbling hysterically over chunks of loose flesh.

I have always admired Polish journalism. There is a different rhythm to it, a brazenly off-center point of view that allows for unique perceptions. . . . But there was no time for scholarly reflection now: we were out on the boulevard again, driving slowly toward Jilly's house.

It was on a tree-lined street in a high-rent district not far from the Capitol—a brick townhouse with white pillars. I found a dark spot across the street and parked in the half-shadow of a big elm tree, then I felt her tongue in my mouth.

We were making so much noise that I decided to put the top up— which seemed to offend her. "I told you," she snapped. "He's gone. He's sniveling around at one of his goddamn business dinners. That's all he cares about."

"Not Hke us," I said. "We hear the real music."

She slid across the seat and got out. "I'll be right back," she said. "This won't take a minute."

I watched as she pranced gracefully across the lawn in her high-heeled shoes and disappeared through the front door. . . . Well, I thought, this must be what General Mac Arthur had in mind when he made his famous speech about the "Pitfalls of Unrealism."

For the first time all day I realized that this woman was serious. I was about to get married to a total stranger. She had made me drive all the way back here just to get her birth certificate.

I relaxed and turned up the radio. It was George Bush again—a news rehash of his speech about shame in Puerto Rico and the need to strip elderly welfare cheats off the Medicaid dole.

That swine! I thought. He's sleazier than Nixon. . . . Never mind that giddy swill James Baker puts out about how George loves to hum Dylan tunes while racing his Cigarette boat across the waters. . . .

Probably John Tower likes to go out with him. Load up on booze and a gaggle of wild women, then crank up the speakers and make a berserk run on the dock at 90 mph . . . scare the landlubbers into a coma.

Good old George. You can take the boy out of Yale, but you can't take Yale out of the boy. It's the same goatish attitude that got him mixed up with a loose cannon like Oliver North in the first place. Just an ungovernable hunger for life.

Suddenly, I heard a wild outburst of shouting from the direction of Jilly's house. "You drunken bitch!" a man's voice screamed. "You can't get away with this! I'll have you both locked up!" Then I heard

a babble of cursing and her spike heels clattering on the asphalt as she sprinted across the street and jumped into the car.

"Let's go!" she yelled. "He's gone crazy! He grabbed me by the neck!"

The man was still screaming as I hammered the car into gear and roared away from the curb with my lights off. What the hell? I thought. Let's go to Reno.

THE DEATH OF RUSSELL CHATHAM

My fiancee was laughing hysterically as I flogged the car at top speed through the quiet streets of her old neighborhood, with my headlights off and the white canvas top flapping wildly out behind us like a ripped spinnaker. A green mist flared out of her mouth and blew back in her long red hair as she collapsed in the seat and sucked frantically on the bottle of green Chartreuse.

We were going to stop at Ricci's on our way out of town, to pick up her purse. She had managed to grab her birth certificate out of the house, but her boyfriend jumped her before she could pack any clothes.

"He tried to choke me," she said. "He was like a maniac. He bit me." I looked over and saw that her elegant silk blouse was shredded almost down to her waist and the once-stylish slit in the front of her skirt was now a gaping hole.

Going back to Ricci's made me nervous—especially with the berserk screams of her boyfriend still ringing in my ears—but she insisted on getting her purse.

It made sense, at the time. We were gripped in the throes of a very fast day—one of those rare little humdingers that comes along once in a while and scares you all the way out to that delicate point where fear turns into fun. . . . And now I had a partner, a full-bore whacko who was definitely prepared to rumble. And also to prevail.

That is a special attitude which not everybody understands. . . . But I did, and by the time we got to Ricci's I understood our situation well enough to know that my real problem was that I'd fallen in love with this woman, and that the next few minutes or hours or maybe even weeks of our life would be like rolling thunder and far too fast for logic.

I pulled Up in front of Ricci's. The only other car parked nearby was a queer-looking, hump-back truck with huge wheels and black windows. I made a quick U-turn and tucked the convertible in right behind it, trying to stay in the shadows.

It was a Lamborghini Jeep with no color at all—a stainless-steel brute of a machine with six wheels and bulletproof windows and a .50-caliber machine gun mounted behind the cab.

Jilly leaned over and kissed me—then she sHd across the seat and opened the door.

"Don't worry," she whispered. "Dave's working tonight. He's a friend. I trust him completely."

Just then, a huge Japanese gentleman stepped out of the Lamborghini—and Jilly went wild. She leaped back in the car and screamed, "O God! It's them! The Yakuza! They know me. They work for him. "

I slammed the car into low and took off, once again for wherever we were going . . . and the Lamborghini pulled out right behind me.

I knew the Yakuza: they were a gang of tattooed thugs out of Tokyo who got into the Power Business by offering a debt-collection service that included dumping a truckload of pig entrails in the front yard of anybody who owed money.

They made no secret of their skills—if only because they worked.

There are a lot of ways to fend off the bill collector, but getting nasty with people who are about to dump 600 raw swine bladders on your front porch is not one of them.

Jilly was hysterical as the huge Lamborghini pursued us through one red light after another along J Street at 90 mph . . . and I knew they were only in third gear. A recent road test on the "Lambo" said it will do 109 in fourth and 133 on a downhill glass road in fifth. . . .

So I knew we were doomed when the brute came up beside me at no.

On the Road to Reno, 1989

Editor's Note At this point in the editorial process Dr. Thompson was tragically interrupted by a telephone call regarding the horrible death of his longtime friend and spiritual adviser, Russell Chatham, the famous Montana artist.

Thompson went immediately into seclusion after hearing the news and we were forced to suspend publication of Part IV in his long-awaited classic: Jilly and the Night Manager.

The saga will continue whenever Dr. Thompson is able to conquer his grief and write professionally once again.

Close friends say he is ''feeling fine," but doubts remain in the journalistic community about Thompson's ability to shrug off the shock of Chatham's ghastly death.

First reports said the artist was fly-fishing in a river near his home when he was accidentally hooked by a trolling boat and dragged away into deep water—then stabbed to death by members of the boating party who "reeled him in and gaffed him like a big catfish," they said— unaware that they were slaughtering a famous human being.

Meanwhile—at Thompson's crude and disturbing log home in Woody Creek, Colorado—his crafty executive counselor, Semmes Luckett, stunned a hastily called press conference by confirming that Dr. Thompson will be formal executor of Chatham's earthly estate and sole trustee of a bizarre handwritten scroll of ''Personal Be-queathments" by the artist, long known as "profoundly eccentric" and a hillbilly dilettante who somehow accumulated great wealth.

Thompson's fee alone—as executor—will be 22 percent or $22 million, whichever is greater.

Luckett also confirmed that Dr. Thompson will leave "very soon" for an extended tour of Australia.

WfflSKEY BUSINESS

In A RECENT attempt to avoid the hellish clamor of my nine telephones, I became secretive and added a fourth private line, with yet another secret number—which resulted almost immediately in a tragic misunderstanding.

One of the first calls on the new line was a harrowing piece of news about the public murder of my old friend Russell Chatham, the legendary Montana artist, which soon proved to be utterly unfounded

and caused outbursts of hysterical grief among many of his friends and business associates.

The story was so gruesome that only a fiend could have dreamed it. . . . The artist was said to have been seining for gold nuggets in a river near his home, wearing a black-rubber hooded jumpsuit, when he was accidentally hooked by a passing trolling boat and dragged for several miles upriver before he was reeled in and stabbed repeatedly with gaffing hooks and spears by members of the fishing party.

"He fought Hke a two-thousand-pound marUn," one was allegedly quoted as saying, "but he only weighed two hundred pounds. It was scary. We thought we'd hooked one of those goddamn sea monsters that you always hear about. It took us almost an hour to get him into the boat—and then I heard him yelling and snarling in English, which drove us all crazy with fear—and then, O God, the hood slipped back on his head and we saw it was not a fish!"

The origin of the rumor is still a mystery, although many in the art world suspect it was a plot by Korean speculators to drive up the price of Chatham's work—already skyrocketing—and then sell it back for huge profit to grieving friends and market-conscious collectors.

The artist himself was unavailable for comment, except through a battery of tort lawyers who were said, last week, to be busy taking orders for his new series of large oils on dead and dying animals, rendered in miniature against dismal winter backgrounds.

"Russell has gone beyond himself, this time," said one friend. "He is a thousand years old, but he has the heart of a fawn."

The phone rang again just before midnight. Semmes picked it up and muttered something about "decent people being asleep at this hour." A long silence followed, and then I heard him cry out, "Good God almighty!"

"What now?" I asked, as he turned to hand me the phone. I figured it was another whack of bad news.

The blood had drained out of his face and his eyes had narrowed to slits. "You better get some whiskey," he said. "This one is over the line."

I grabbed a bottle of pisco, then took the phone. It was a lawyer from Washington, who said he was part of the Bush transition team and could speak with me only if I swore I would never mention his name. The message he was about to give me, he said, was "Top Secret and extremely volatile."

"How did you get this goddamn phone number?" I shouted. "I've had it for only eight hours."

"It was easy," he said calmly. "There are no secrets—not for us.''

"OK," I said. "What do you want? I'm innocent."

He laughed. "I know that," he said. "That's exactly why I'm calling. We have a job for you."

"Wonderful," I said. "How much does it pay?"

"Never mind that," he said. "This is a crisis. The president is about to dump Tower and he needs another nominee by morning. . . . And you're it," he hissed. "Are you ready to be secretary of defense?"

I felt sick, although it came as no surprise. Revenge is one of the few things in politics that never gets lost in the mail or written off for a dime on the dollar like losers' campaign debts or pledges to help the Poor.

No. Revenge is a timeless mandate in that world inside the Beltway. . . . Ask John Tower. He spent twenty-eight years in Washington, but he never paid his dues. So when he came back to take over the Pentagon, his old buddies in the Senate treated him like a skunk. They called him a sot and a whore-hopper, a walking booze-barrel with three legs. . . .

And now they wanted me.

"You evil bastard!" I shouted. "They'll rip me to shreds."

He chuckled. "Don't worry," he said. "George will defend you all the way to the end. You know how loyal he is—he read that piece you wrote about him being so misunderstood, and he feels he ow^es you something."

Indeed, I thought—a public flogging on national TV, then getting shipped out of Washington in a body bag while the president shakes his head sadly and bemoans the new wave of puritanical hysteria that is wrecking the lives of so many true patriots by dwelling on their vices instead of their virtues. . . .

It was brilliant strategic thinking—a naked pitch for the Whiskey Vote, for the one huge constituency that he will need for reelection in 1992 if the Democrats manage to nominate anybody who seems human: he will have to run against a sitting president who secretly weeps for the boozers he did everything in his power to include in his inner circle, because of their brilliance and their doomed humanism.

I almost felt a lump in my throat. "Remember the cruel purges of '89," they will ask, "when the wild boys were put on trial? Who was it, back then, who came down on the side of Sex, Drugs, and Rock and Roll?"

Ye gods. It was George Bush, the ex-wimp who once ran the War

on Drugs and who refused to give up the one split of wine cooler that he always drinks after dinner. Res Ipsa Loquitor.

Woody Creek, March 6, 1989

I KNEW THE BRIDE WHEN

SHE USED TO ROCK

AND ROLL

Evil days are common in this world, and they always draw blood in one way or another—but there are some days that draw more blood than even a human tick or a pimping bankrupt eunuch from Sacramento can afford to lose.

It is like being caught in a bad surf and banged off the bottom so many times that after a while you start thinking you can actually breathe the salt-water foam that you are thrashing around in when you finally erupt into what looks like real air.

But "there are many Coons in the Wilderness," as the Prophet Booar has said; "and Coons feed Hke vultures and cannibals on failure and broken dreams."

"There are no switchbacks on the road to Truth and Beauty," said Booar, "and there is no path so high or so secret that it will not lead, in the end, to some Final Doorway guarded by a vicious Coon full of Mandrax who will never open the Door."

It is a baleful vision—despite Booar's status as a guru to the financial community—but it is no less baleful than the new wave of rigid Boy in the Bubble zeal that is sweeping the nation today. The fallout is all around us in the form of rubbers, reformers, and

overcrowded jails—but it can be a very nasty tide to go against. The body Nazis are out there, and even the preachers in prison for compound sodomy and child rape are compiHng lists of names.

One of these who will be called soon enough to the tribunals is a hoary political philosopher from Salida, Colorado, named Ed Quillen, who recently published a screed on Morality at the End of the Eighties.

"No one seems to have noticed that the most powerful force in American society these days must be the Purity League," Quillen wrote. "The Purity League believes that people who are not in a state of perfect grace have nothing to contribute. Our society now judges people not by what they do, but by what they don't do. Any mediocrity who can pass a urine test somehow becomes superior to a talent who can't. . . .

"Ray Charles did his most brilliant work during the years he was addicted to heroin. Keith Richards has confessed that he was a total junkie, living from one fix to the next, when "Exile on Main Street" was recorded, and that album has more great loud and dirty rock and roll on it than any dozen recordings by people who could pass blood tests.

"And it isn't just musicians. . . . Do we want to ignore the contributions that were made by William Stewart Halsted to medicine? Sterile operating rooms, thin rubber gloves, residencies for training—most of what we think of as modern surgery was invented by Halsted at Johns Hopkins from 1890 to 1922. During that entire time, Halsted had a morphine habit.

"Should we go without electric lights, phonographs, motion pictures, fluoroscopes, alkaline batteries, and dictating machines? Those were among the inventions of Thomas Edison, a man who slept only two hours a night and gladly endorsed a concoction whose major active ingredient was cocaine.

"Who contributed more to the political structure of America: Jimmy Carter, pure in all things great and small? Or Franklin D. Roosevelt, with his daily nip, his jutting Camel, and his mistresses?"

Last year was not a good one for The Moral Majority and others of the Cleaner Than Thou ilk—but the weight of their sleazy, hypocritical bullshit is still heavy on the scales of our time.

No once-wild "party" in Hollywood or Aspen or even Greenwich Village is complete, these days, without the overweening presence of superwealthy, hard-hitting ex-addicts, "recovering alcoholics," and

beady-eyed fat women who never let you forget that they "used to hang out" with doomed friends and dead monsters like Janis, Jim Morrison, The Stones, or John Belushi, or even me. . . .

They roam the chic anterooms of movies and music and publishing like vengeful golems from some lost and broken Peter Pan world of Sex, Drugs, and Rock and Roll, and other unspeakable tragedies that crippled the lives and crazed the souls of ... 50 many.

Yes, so many. . . .

So many.

Indeed, we were all snapped like matchsticks in that terrible conflagration—and the unexplainable few who survived, somehow, are now like the victims of some drunken golfing foursome that got so wiggy and disgusting by the time they finished the First Nine that God sent a lightning bolt down from the black cloudy heavens to hit them like a bomb while they gamboled Uke maddened sheep on the big wet green on No. 16.

Their flesh and their brains and their precious bodily organs were burned to cinders and black-chalk skeletons that will never again have real strength.

They will walk in the world forever like some strung-out collection of Ming vases that might crack any time they are touched.

Woody Creek, 1989

COMMUNITY OF WHORES

"Just how weird can you have it, brother —

before your love will crack?"

— Mike Lydon, in Ramparts, March 1970

Spring in the Rockies is an ugly time. People get weird and embittered from too many months of winter. Especially in Aspen, where absentee greedheads are taking over the town like a pack of wild dogs, reducing the once proud local population to shame and degradation.

"We are all like whores now," said one ex-rancher who had just sold his land to a combine of Arabs. "First they suck up your land, then they force you to bend over."

Ten years ago, you could run a political campaign in this town for $1,100 and still be accused by your opponent of acting like a Texas-style vote buyer. But things are different now. Aspen is a big-time tourist town, and only two kinds of people live here—the Users and the Used—and the gap between them gets wider every day.

What was once the capital of Freak Power has rolled over and is now a slavish service community of pimps and middlemen where the only real question in poUtics is "How much money do you have?" The prices are so high that even Donald Trump was run out of town when he tried to muscle into the new high-dollar high-rise hotel industry.

"I used to live in a brick ranch house on top of Red Mountain that had four fireplaces and a pond ten feet deep," said the ex-rancher, "but now I live forty miles down valley in a trailer court. Every day, we drive two hours in a traffic jam just to get to work. And when we drive back down valley at night, the cops wait for us in the shadows."

His eyes were like two kiwi fruits jammed into a face gray and swollen with drink. He was a defeated man.

"They took my Ucense a long time ago and I know I'll never get it back. . . . They have us in a vise and it's hopeless."

Most people have given up on politics entirely, but there are still a few diehards who will manage to grab a public office now and then like the sheriff, and the mayor, who was chairman of some sort of campaign committee for Jackson last year. He raised large amounts of money, but it was chicken feed compared to the contributions raised here by Ollie North for his defense.

My friend Cromwell is not running for office this year, but he is deeply involved in the City Council election this week. Cromwell hates greedheads, and his hatred keeps him in politics.

I was feeding the peacocks last week when he called me from the tavern and said he needed help.

"Get down here quick," he said. "I'm in trouble. Bring your cameras. There'll be a fight. And bring that rocket bomb gun. You may have to fire it into the crowd."

When I got down to the tavern I found Cromwell at the far end of the parking lot in the cab of his huge black power wagon drinking whiskey. He was hunkered down, muttering to himself as he carefully

traced the words -— exxon on a tear-gas bomb. He was acting furtive.

"What's wrong with you?" I said. "Who's after you? We'll crush the buggers." I was in a giddy sort of mood, feeling suddenly mean.

Cromwell was gazing across the street at a crowd of giggling jabbering bicycHsts swarming around on the patio.

"Look at those bastards," he snarled. "They're like gold-plated rats. We should round them up Uke sheep and send them to Alaska to clean up that oil spill."

His heart was full of hate and he had a serious attack plan. The beast in him was coming out. I knew he hated bicychsts and everything they stand for. And he was violently mad about the monstrous Exxon oil spill up in Prince William Sound.

I filmed the whole thing, more or less for posterity. But it was really not much. Just a lot of green smoke and people groping around in the fog and screaming at each other about "poison gas" and "call the police."

The bicycle people were bitter about having their lunch meat turned green, but they never got the point. It was a political protest —against them—but the next day a paper quoted one of their spokesmen as saying a maniac did it "to liven the place up."

Cromwell called it a failure and blamed himself for "not strangling one of those yuppie newts" before he herded them all inside and secured the front door—from the outside—with a Harley-Davidson chain lock, after tossing the bomb inside. ... I had already jammed the back door shut with a snow shovel, and by the time I got the Fiooo rolling out in front, thick green smoke was pouring out both windows and the people inside were making a lot of noise as they battered the door open with heavy wooden bar stools.

It was hard to see, but I let the camera roll anyway as the angry mob spilled out. They turned on me after Cromwell fled, so I drove back home and put my new video film on TV, just to see what I had.

The Fiooo had seen a few things that I'd missed: mainly faces, and some were very clear. . . . And then I saw her, moving through the smoke and staring straight into my lens, and she was smiling the same crazy smile that I remembered from the first time I met her.