Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas

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

Not that they didn't deserve it: No doubt they all Got What Was Coming To Them. All those pathetically eager acid freaks who thought they could buy Peace and Understanding fot three bucks a hit. But their failure is ours, too.

What Leary took down with him was the central illusion of a whole life-style that he helped to create… a generation of permanent cripples, failed seekers, who never understood the essential old-mystic fallacy of the Acid Culture: the desperate assumption that somebody-or at least some force-is tending that Light at the end of the tunnel.

This is the same cruel and paradoxically benevolent bullshit has kept the Catholic

Church going for so many centuries. It is also the military ethic… a blind faith in

some higher and wiser "authority." The Pope, The General, The Prime Minister… all the

way up to "God."

One of the crucial moments of the Sixties came on that day when the Beatles cast their lot with the Maharishi. It was like Dylan going to the Vatican to kiss the Pope's ring.

First "gurus." Then, when that didn't work, back to Jesus. And now, following Manson's primitive/instinct lead, a whole new wave of clan-type commune Gods like Mel Lyman, ruler Avatar, and What's His Name who runs "Spirit and Flesh."

Barger never quite got the hang of it, but he'll never iw how close he was to a king-hell breakthrough. The An- blew it in 1965, at the Oakland-Berkeley line, when they acted on Barger's hardhat, con-boss instincts and attacked the front ranks of an anti-war march. This proved to be an historic schism in the then Rising Tide of the Youth Movement of the Sixties. It was the first open break between the Greasers and the Longhairs, and the importance of that break can be read in the history of SDS, which eventually destroyed in the doomed effort to reconcile the interests of the 'working class biker/dropout types and the upper/mid Berkeley/student activists.

Nobody involved in that scene, at the time, could possibly have foreseen the Implications of the Ginsberg/Kesey failure to pursuade the Hell's Angels to join forces with the radical Left from Berkeley. The final split came at Altamont, four years later, but by that time it had long been clear to everybody except a handful of rock industry dopers and the national press. The orgy of violence at Altamont merey dramatized the problem. The realities were already fixed; the illness was understood to be terminal, and the energies of The Movement were long since aggressively dissipated by the rush to self-preservation.

Ah; this terrible gibberish. Grim memories and bad flash backs, looming up through the time/fog of Stanyan Street… no solace for refugees, no point in looking back. The question, as always, is now…?

I was slumped on my bed in the Flamingo, feeling dangerously out of phase with my surroundings. Something ugly was about to happen. I was sure of it. The room looked like the site of some disastrous zoological experiment involving whiskey and gorillas. The ten-foot mirror was shattered, but still hanging together - bad evidence of that afternoon when my attorney ran amok with the coconut hammer, smashing mirror and all the lightbulbs.

We'd replaced the lights with a package of red and blue Christmas tree lights from Safeway, but there was no hope of saving the mirror. My attorney's bed looked like a burned- rat's nest. Fire had consumed the top half, and the rest a mass of wire and charred stuffing. Luckily, the maids had’nt come near the room since that awful confrontation on Tuesday.

I been asleep when the maid came in that morning. We’d forgotten to hang out the "Do Not Disturb" sign… so she wandered into the room and startled my attorney, who kneeling, stark naked, in the closet, vomiting into his shoes… thinking he was actually in the bathroom, and then suddenly looking up to see a woman with a face like Mickey Rooney staring down at him, unable to speak, trembling with fear and confusion.

She was holding that mop like an axe-handle," he said "So I came out of the closet in a kind of running crouch, vomiting, and hit her right at the knees… it was pure instinct; I thought she was ready to kill me… and then, she screamed, that's when I put the icebag on her mouth.”