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

I jerked the AC cord out of the tape/radio and moved out of the bathroom very quickly ... the machine kept on playing, but now it was back on its own harmless battery power. I could hear the beat cooling down as I moved across the room to my kitbag and fetched up the Mace can ...just as my attorney ripped the bathroom door open and started out. His eyes were still unfocused, but he was waving the blade out in front of him like a man who meant to cut something.

“Mace!” I shouted. “You want this?” I waved the Mace bomb in front of his watery eyes.

He stopped, “You bastard!” he hissed. “You’d do that, wouldn’t you?”

I laughed, still waving the bomb at him. “Why worry? You’ll like it. Shit, there’s nothing in the world like a Mace high - forty-five minutes on your knees with the dry heaves, gasping for breath. It’ll calm you right down.”

He stared in my general direction, trying to focus. “You cheap honky sonofabitch,” he muttered. “You’d do it, wouldn’t you?”

“Why not?” I said. “Hell, just a minute ago you were asking me to kilt you! And now you want to kill me! What I should do, goddamn it, is call the police!”

He sagged. “The cops?”

I nodded. “Yeah, there’s no choice. I wouldn’t dare go to sleep with you wandering around in this condition—with a head full of acid and wanting to slice me up with that god-damn knife.”

He rolled his eyes for a moment, then tried to smile.

“Who said anything about slicing you up?” he mumbled. I just wanted to carve a little Z on your forehead—nothing serious.”

He shrugged and reached for a cigarette of the TV set,

I menaced him again with the Mace can. “Get back in that tub,” I said. “Eat some reds and try to calm down. Smoke some grass, shoot some smack—shit, do whatever you have to do, but let me get some rest.”

He shrugged and smiled distractedly, as if everything I’d said made perfect sense.

“Hell yes,” he said very earnestly. “You really need some sleep. You have towork tomorrow.” He shook his head sadly and turned back toward the bathroom. “God damn! What a bummer.” He waved me off. “Try to rest,” he said. “Don’t let me keep you up.”

I nodded, and watched him shuffle back into the bathroom—still holding the blade, but now he seemed unaware of it. The acid had shifted gears on him; the next phase would probably be one of those hellishly intense introspection night mares. Four hours or so of catatonic despair; but nothing physical, nothing dangerous. I watched the door close behind him, then I quietly slid a heavy, sharp-angled chair up in front of the bathroom knob and put the Mace can beside the alarm clock.

The room was very quiet. I walked over to the TV set and turned it on to a dead channel—white noise at maximum decibels, a fine sound for sleeping, a powerful continuous hiss to drown out everything strange.

8. “Genius ’Round the Wand Stands Hand in Hand, and One Shock of Recognition Runs the Whole Circle ’Round” — Art LinkIetter

I live in a quiet place, where any sound at night means some thing is about to happen: You come awake fast-thinking, what does that mean?

Usually nothing. But sometimes ...it’s hard to adjust to a city gig where the night is full of sounds, all of them comfortably routine. Cars, horns, footsteps ...no way to relax; so drown it all out with the fine white drone of a cross-eyed TV set. Jam the bugger between channels and doze off nicely.

Ignore that nightmare in the bathroom. Just another ugly refugee from the Love Generation, some doom-struck gimp who couldn’t handle the pressure. My attorney has never been able to accept the notion—often espoused by reformed drug abusers and especially popular among those on probation—that you can get a lot higher without drugs than with them.

And neither have I, for that matter. But I once lived down the hill from Dr.-on-Road, Names deleted at insistence of publisher’s lawyer) a former acid guru who later claimed to have made that long jump from chemical frenzy to preternatural consciousness. One fine afternoon in the first rising curl of what would soon become the Great San Francisco Acid Wave I stopped by the Good Doctor’s house with the idea of asking him (since he was even then a known drug authority) what sort of advice he might have for a neighbor with a healthy curiosity about LSD.

I parked on the road and lumbered up his gravel driveway, pausing enroute to wave pleasantly at his wife, who was working out in the graden ...pruning carrots, or whatever ...humming while she works, some tune I fail to recognize.

Humming. Yes ...but it would be nearly ten years before I would recognize that sound for what it was: like Ginsberg far gone in the Om,—was trying to humm me off. That was no old lady out there in that garden; it was the good doctor himself—and his humming was a frantic attempt to block me out of his higher consciousness.