Fear and Loathing at Rolling Stone (16 page)

After ten minutes of standing in line behind this noisy little asshole and his friends, I felt the bile rising. Where did this
cop
—of all people—get the nerve to argue with anybody in terms of Right & Reason? I had
been there
with these fuzzy little shitheads—and so, I sensed, had the desk clerk. He had the air of a man who’d been fucked around, in his time, by a fairly good cross-section of mean-tempered rule-crazy cops . . .

So now he was just giving their argument back to them: it doesn’t matter who’s right or wrong, man . . . or who’s paid his bill & who hasn’t . . . what matters right now is that for the first time in my life I can work out on a pig. “Fuck you,
officer
, I’m in charge here, and I’m telling you we don’t have room for you.”

I was enjoying this whipsong, but after a while I felt dizzy, bad nervous, and my impatience got the better of my amusement. So I stepped around the Pig and spoke directly to the desk clerk. “Say,” I said, “I hate to interrupt, but I have a reservation and I wonder if maybe I could just sort of slide through and get out of your way.” I smiled, letting him know I’d been digging his snake-bully act on the cop party that was now standing there, psychologically off-balance and staring at me like I was some kind of water-rat crawling up to the desk.

I looked pretty bad: wearing old Levi’s and white Chuck Taylor
All-Star basketball sneakers . . . and my ten-peso Acapulco shirt had long since come apart at the shoulder seams from all that road-wind. My beard was about three days old, bordering on standard wino trim, and my eyes were totally hidden by Sandy Bull’s Saigon-mirror shades.

But my voice had the tone of a man who
knows
he has a reservation. I was gambling on my attorney’s foresight . . . but I couldn’t pass a chance to put the horn into a cop:

. . . and I was right. The reservation was in my attorney’s name. The desk clerk hit his bell to summon the bag boy. “This is all I have with me, right now,” I said. “The rest is out there in that White Cadillac convertible.” I pointed to the car that we could all see parked just outside the front door. “Can you have somebody drive it around to the room?”

The desk clerk was friendly. “Don’t worry about a thing, sir. Just enjoy your stay here—and if there’s anything you need, just call the desk.”

I nodded & smiled, half watching the stunned reaction of the cop crowd right next to me. They were stupid with shock. Here they were arguing with every piece of leverage they could command, for a room they’d already
paid for
—and suddenly their whole act gets sideswiped by some crusty drifter who looks like something out of an upper-Michigan hobo jungle. And he checks in with a handful of
credit cards
! Jesus! What’s happening in this world?

What indeed? The bag boy grinned. The desk clerk grinned. And the cop crowd eyed me nervously. They had just been blown off the track by a style of freak they’d never seen before. I left them there to ponder it, fuming & bitching at the gates of some castle they would never enter.

Getting Down to Business . . . Opening Day at the Drug Conference

“On behalf of the prosecuting attorneys of this country, I welcome you.”

We sat in the rear fringe of a crowd of about 1,500 in the main ballroom of the Dunes Hotel. Far up in front of the room, barely visible from the rear, the executive director of the National District Attorneys Association—a middle-aged, well-groomed, successful GOP businessman type named Patrick Healy—was opening their Third National
Institute on Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs. His remarks reached us by way of a big, low-fidelity speaker mounted on a steel pole in our corner. Perhaps a dozen others were spotted around the room, all facing the rear and looming over the crowd . . . so that no matter where you sat or even tried to hide, you were always looking down the muzzle of a big speaker.

This produced an odd effect. People in each section of the ballroom tended to stare at the nearest voice-box, instead of watching the distant figure of whoever was actually talking far up front on the podium. This 1935 style of speaker placement totally depersonalized the room. There was something ominous and authoritarian about it. Whoever set up that sound system was probably some kind of sheriff’s auxiliary technician on leave from a drive-in theater in Muskogee, Oklahoma, where the management couldn’t afford individual car speakers and relied on ten huge horns, mounted on telephone poles in the parking area.

But the best technicians available to the National DAs convention in Vegas apparently couldn’t handle it. Their sound system looked like something Ulysses S. Grant might have rigged up to address his troops during the siege of Vicksburg. The voices from up front crackled with a fuzzy, high-pitched urgency, and the delay was just enough to keep the words disconcertingly out of phase with the speaker’s gestures.

“We must come to terms with the Drug Culture in this country . . . country . . . country! . . .” These echoes drifted back to the rear in confused waves. “The reefer butt is called a ‘roach’ because it resembles a cockroach . . . cockroach . . . cockroach . . .”

“What the fuck are these people talking about?” my attorney whispered. “You’d have to be crazy on acid to think a joint looked like a goddamn cockroach!”

I shrugged. It was clear that we’d stumbled into a prehistoric gathering. The voice of a “drug expert” named Bloomquist crackled out of the nearby speakers: “. . . about these flashbacks, the patient never knows; he thinks it’s all over and he gets himself straightened out for six months . . . and then, darn it, the whole trip comes back on him.”

Gosh darn that fiendish LSD! Dr. E. R. Bloomquist, MD, was the keynote speaker, one of the big stars of the conference. He is the author of a paperback book titled
Marijuana
, which—according to the
cover—“tells it like it is.” (He is also the inventor of the roach/cockroach theory . . .)

According to the book jacket, he is an “Associate Clinical Professor of Surgery (Anesthesiology) at the University of Southern California School of Medicine” . . . and also “a well known authority on the abuse of dangerous drugs.” Dr. Bloomquist “has appeared on national network television panels, has served as a consultant for government agencies, was a member of the Committee on Narcotics Addiction and Alcoholism of the Council on Mental Health of the American Medical Association.” His wisdom is massively reprinted and distributed, says the publisher. He is clearly one of the heavies on that circuit of second-rate academic hustlers who get paid anywhere from $500 to $1,000 a hit for lecturing to cop-crowds.

Dr. Bloomquist’s book is a compendium of stale bullshit. On
page 49
he explains the “four states of being” in the cannabis society: “Cool, Groovy, Hip & Square”—in that descending order. “The square is seldom if ever cool,” says Bloomquist. “He is ‘not with it,’ that is, he doesn’t know ‘what’s happening.’ But if he manages to figure it out, he moves up a notch to ‘hip.’ And if he can bring himself to approve of what’s happening, he becomes ‘groovy.’ And after that, with much luck and perseverence, he can rise to the rank of ‘cool.’ ”

Bloomquist writes like somebody who once bearded Tim Leary in a campus cocktail lounge and paid for all the drinks. And it was probably somebody like Leary who told him with a straight face that sunglasses are known in the drug culture as “tea shades.”

This is the kind of dangerous gibberish that used to be posted, in the form of mimeographed bulletins, in Police Dept. locker rooms.

Indeed:

Know Your Dope Fiend. Your Life May Depend On It!
You will not be able to see his eyes because of Tea-Shades, but his knuckles will be white from inner tension and his pants will be crusted with semen from constantly jacking off when he can’t find a rape victim. He will stagger and babble when questioned. He will not respect your badge. The Dope Fiend fears nothing. He will attack, for no reason, with every weapon at his command—including yours.
Beware.
Any officer
apprehending a suspected marijuana addict should use all necessary force immediately. One stitch in time (on him) will usually save nine on you. Good luck.

“The Chief.”

“If you don’t know, come to learn . . . if you know, come to teach.”

—motto on invitations to National DAs convention in Vegas,

April 25–29, 1971

The first session—the opening remarks—lasted most of the afternoon. We sat patiently through the first two hours, although it was clear from the start that we weren’t going to
learn
anything, and it was equally clear that we’d be crazy to try any
teaching
. It was easy enough to sit there with a head full of mescaline and listen to hour after hour of irrelevant gibberish . . . There was certainly no
risk
involved. These poor bastards didn’t know mescaline from macaroni.

I suspect we could have done the whole thing on acid . . . except for some of the people; there were faces and bodies in that group who would have been absolutely unendurable on acid. The sight of a 344-pound police chief from Waco, Texas, necking openly with his 290-pound wife (or whatever woman he had with him) when the lights were turned off for a Dope Film was just barely tolerable on mescaline—which is mainly a sensual/surface drug that exaggerates reality, instead of altering it—but with a head full of acid, the sight of two fantastically obese human beings far gone in a public grope while a thousand cops all around them watched a movie about the “dangers of marijuana” would not be emotionally acceptable. The brain would reject it: the medulla would attempt to close itself off from the signals it was getting from the frontal lobes . . . and the middle-brain, meanwhile, would be trying desperately to put a different interpretation on the scene, before passing it back to the medulla and the risk of physical action.

Acid is a relatively
complex
drug, in its effects, while mescaline is pretty simple and straightforward—but in a scene like this, the difference was academic. There was simply no call, at this conference, for anything
but a massive consumption of Downers: reds, grass, and booze, because the whole program had apparently been set up by people who had been in a Seconal stupor since 1964.

Here were more than a thousand top-level cops telling each other “we
must
come to terms with the drug culture,” but they had no idea where to start. They couldn’t even
find
the goddamn thing. There were rumors in the hallways that maybe the Mafia was behind it. Or perhaps the Beatles. At one point somebody in the audience asked Bloomquist if he thought Margaret Mead’s “strange behavior,” of late, might possibly be explained by a private marijuana addiction.

“I really don’t know,” Bloomquist replied. “But at her age, if she did smoke grass, she’d have one hell of a trip.”

The audience roared with laughter at this remark.

My attorney was downstairs at the bar, talking to a sporty-looking cop about forty whose plastic name-tag said he was the DA from someplace in Georgia. “I’m a whiskey man, myself,” he was saying. “We don’t have much problem with drugs down where I come from.”

“You will,” said my attorney. “One of these nights you’ll wake up and find a junkie tearing your bedroom apart.”

“Naw!” said the Georgia man. “Not down in
my
parts.”

I joined them and ordered a tall glass of rum, with ice.

“You’re another one of these California boys,” he said. “Your friend here’s been tellin’ me about dope fiends.”

“They’re everywhere,” I said. “Nobody’s safe. And sure as hell not in the South. They like the warm weather.”

“They work in pairs,” said my attorney. “Sometimes in gangs. They’ll climb right into your bedroom and sit on your chest, with big bowie knives.” He nodded solemnly. “They might even sit on your
wife’s chest
—put the blade right down on her throat.”

“Jesus God almighty,” said the southerner. “What the hell’s
goin’ on
in this country?”

“You’d never believe it,” said my attorney. “In L.A. it’s out of control. First it was drugs, now it’s witchcraft.”

“Witchcraft? Shit, you can’t mean it!”

“Read the newspapers,” I said. “Man, you don’t know trouble until
you have to face down a bunch of these addicts gone crazy for human sacrifice!”

“Naw!” he said. “That’s science fiction stuff!”

“Not where
we
operate,” said my attorney. “Hell, in Malibu alone, these goddamn Satan-worshippers kill six or eight people
every day
.” He paused to sip his drink. “And all they want is the
blood
,” he continued. “They’ll take people right off the
street
if they have to.” He nodded. “Hell, yes. Just the other day we had a case where they grabbed a girl right out of a McDonald’s hamburger stand. She was a waitress. About sixteen years old . . . with a lot of people watching, too!”

“What happened?” said our friend. “What did they
do
to her?” He seemed very agitated by what he was hearing.

“
Do
?” said my attorney. “Jesus Christ, man. They chopped her goddamn head off right there in the parking lot! Then they cut all kinds of holes in her and sucked out the blood!”