Fear and Loathing at Rolling Stone (17 page)

“God
almighty
!” the Georgia man exclaimed . . . “And nobody
did
anything?”

“What
could
they do?” I said. “The guy that took the head was about six-seven and maybe three hundred pounds. He was packing two Lugers, and the others had M-16s. They were all veterans . . .”

“The big guy used to be a major in the Marines,” said my attorney. “We know where he lives, but we can’t get near the house.”

“Naw!” our friend shouted. “Not a major!”

“He wanted the pineal gland,” I said. “That’s how he got so big. When he quit the Marines he was just a
little guy
.”

“O my god!” said our friend. “That’s horrible!”

“It happens every day,” said my attorney. “Usually it’s whole families. During the night. Most of them don’t even wake up until they feel their heads going—and then, of course, it’s too late.”

The bartender had stopped to listen. I’d been watching him. His expression was not calm.

“Three more rums,” I said. “With plenty of ice, and maybe a handful of lime chunks.”

He nodded, but I could see that his mind was not on his work. He was staring at our name tags. “Are you guys with that police convention upstairs?” he said finally.

“We sure are, my friend,” said the Georgia man with a big smile.

The bartender shook his head sadly. “I thought so,” he said. “I never heard that kind of talk at this bar before. Jesus Christ! How do you guys
stand
that kind of work?”

My attorney smiled at him. “We
like
it,” he said. “It’s groovy.”

The bartender drew back; his face was a mask of repugnance.

“What’s wrong with you?” I said. “Hell,
somebody
has to do it.”

He stared at me for a moment, then turned away.

“Hurry up with those drinks,” said my attorney. “We’re thirsty.” He laughed and rolled his eyes as the bartender glanced back at him. “Only
two
rums,” he said. “Make mine a Bloody Mary.”

The bartender seemed to stiffen, but our Georgia friend didn’t notice. His mind was somewhere else. “Hell, I really hate to hear this,” he said quietly. “Because everything that happens in California seems to get down our way, sooner or later. Mostly Atlanta, but I guess that was back when the goddamn bastards were
peaceful
. It used to be that all we had to do was keep ’em under surveillance. They didn’t roam around much . . .” He shrugged. “But now, Jesus,
nobody’s
safe. They could turn up anywhere.”

“You’re right,” said my attorney. “We learned that in California. You remember where Manson turned up, don’t you? Right out in the middle of Death Valley. He had a whole
army
of sex fiends out there. We only got our hands on a few. Most of the crew got away; just ran off across the sand dunes, like big lizards . . . and every one of them stone naked, except for the weapons.”

“They’ll turn up somewhere, pretty soon,” I said. “And let’s hope we’ll be ready for them.”

The Georgia man whacked his fist on the bar. “But we can’t just lock ourselves in the house and be prisoners!” he exclaimed. “We don’t even know who these people are! How do you
recognize
them?

“You can’t,” my attorney replied. “The only way to do it is to take the bull by the horns—go to the mat with this scum!”

“What do you mean by that?” he asked.

“You
know
what I mean,” said my attorney. “We’ve done it before, and can damn well do it again.”

“Cut their goddamn heads off,” I said. “Every one of them. That’s what we’re doing in California.”

“
What
?”

“Sure,” said my attorney. “It’s all on the Q.T., but everybody who
matters
is with us all the way down the line.”

“God! I had no idea it was that bad out there!” said our friend.

“We keep it quiet,” I said. “It’s not the kind of thing you’d want to talk about upstairs, for instance. Not with the press around.”

Our man agreed. “Hell no!” he said. “We’d never hear the goddamn end of it.”

“Dobermans don’t talk,” I said.

“What?”

“Sometimes it’s easier to just rip out the backstraps,” said my attorney. “They’ll fight like hell if you try to take the head without dogs.”

“God almighty!”

We left him at the bar, swirling the ice in his drink and not smiling. He was worried about whether or not to tell his wife about it. “She’d never understand,” he muttered. “You know how women are.”

I nodded. My attorney was already gone, scurrying through a maze of slot machines toward the front door. I said good-bye to our friend, warning him not to say anything about what we’d told him.

__ __ __ __

The idea of Hunter covering the 1972 presidential campaign for the magazine—from the early primaries on through Election Day—had been bandied about for months. Hunter’s admiration for George McGovern (and contempt for McGovern’s Democratic rivals, including Hubert Humphrey and Ed Muskie) was obvious, and rather than hiding it, he and
Rolling Stone
intended to capitalize on it. Hunter and Jann—heavily stoned on pot—had an early meeting with McGovern’s campaign manager, Frank Mankiewicz, to secure the campaign’s cooperation and Hunter’s access to its strategy and planning. Once Hunter and his assistant,
Rolling Stone
associate editor Timothy Crouse, joined up with the usual campaign press crew, though, they found themselves the target of the entrenched journalists’ snickers, if not outright ridicule. The publication of Hunter’s first stories from the campaign trail—filed via the first primitive fax machine in use, which Hunter dubbed the “Mojo Wire”—changed all that, but just to be sure, Hunter instructed Crouse to keep a separate notebook, noting every quirk, weirdness, and character weakness of their mainstream media cohorts. That notebook eventually became Crouse’s classic
The Boys on the Bus.
As to Hunter’s own campaign book: Mankiewicz famously dubbed it the “least factual, most accurate” account of the ’72 election.

Undated letter from HST to JSW

Jann . . .

Tonight I went into a huge 24-hr drugstore—one of a big chain around the DC area (“Drug Fair”)—and when I asked the bearded clerk if they carried
RS
he said, “No, unfortunately.”

“Why not?” I said.

He shrugged. “I get
mine
in the mail,” he replied. “Who
handles
it? We could probably sell a lot of them here, but nobody’s pushing it.”

So . . . that’s FYI. DRUG FAIR, a chain of big all day & nite general store supermarkets that cater to a hell of a lot of potential
RS
readers. We have to break out of this widespread assumption that
RS
is an Underground, special interest “music rag.” If
RS
is such a powerful goddamn “capitalist” operation (inre: Your Editorial), we might as well
act
like capitalists, instead of just talking about it . . . which means that if you want to
sell
something, you first have to make it available.

I’ve been here about 10 days now, constantly checking newsstands, & I’ve yet to find a single copy for sale. This is a definite bummer. I got thrown out of a fucking
rock club
tonight, despite Dan Greene’s angry shouting about “What kind of asshole would keep an editor of
Rolling Stone
out of a music club just because he’s wearing Levi’s?” The doorman thought Greene was saying I was one of the Rolling Stones. “Look, fella,” he said. “The rule here is No Levi’s; I wouldn’t give a damn if you were Mick Jaegger [
sic
]—you couldn’t come in here wearing denims.”

I’m thinking of taking the fucker to court, on grounds of financial discrimination . . . but in the meantime, we have to consider the fact that this doorman at one of the main downtown rock clubs (Ventura 21) has never even
heard
of
Rolling Stone
, much less seen it. And that’s more your fault than his.

OK . . . that’s it for now. I don’t know what that useless fucking distributor does with those “2500 copies” he claims to be putting out for sale here, but he’s sure as hell keeping them out of all the places where
I
go . . . and
all
of these places carry
Penthouse
. It’s everywhere . . . along with the
National Enquirer
, the
Sporting News, Midnight, Sexology
, etc. Whoever distributes
Rolling Stone
in the Washington DC area should have his scrotum torn off. (Savage Henry said that, & you should probably warn the fucker that Mr. Henry might be stopping by to see him one of these nights unless he gets the goddamn book on the racks.) I’ll load pro football player Dave Meggessey up on chemicals and send
him
over to check the books. A monster like
that, full of mescaline, makes “My Attorney” seem like a bloodless cipher. He even scares
me
.

Selah . . .

HST

Undated ’71 letter from JSW to HST

Hunter:

Re: Washington D.C. Gig

One thing I hate about political columns, etc., is that they are totally depersonalized; you never have a sense of the author, his point of view as a human being, who he is, etc., etc. [
Washington Post
writer Nicholas] von Hoffman and [
New York Herald Tribune
columnist Joseph] Alsop come closest to being real, but still not enough. That’s why the first arrival/coming/D.C.-the-city-and-what-it’s-like-joining-the-press-corps are excellent introductory things.

On the problem of D.C. distribution, apparently it’s the next issue that the big push starts with, which is why you haven’t seen much of it around.
Rolling Stone
staffer Peter Howard is coming down there himself on Dec 14 or so to personally supervise the fixing it up, and also he is under instructions to fucking lose money if necessary to get the goddamned thing out. Or, Savage Henry comes a-knocking.

Third column should be the Youth Vote. Let’s presume the fucker exists; to question the matter at all would be foolish. To convince them, naturally we use
RS
in several ways, one of which is by excellent political coverage & reassembling certain facts. Also, when you start making your calls on Larry O’Brien, et al., they’ll start to get the idea. Anyway, this column should explore the candidates’ attitudes toward the youth vote, what the press and the columnists and professionals have been saying, how the
press (a la that [Nat] Hentoff piece & apparently there was a good long
NYT
piece a few weeks ago and a
National Observer
piece, too) has been treating it, & you should talk to Lowenstein, etc. [Thomas] Braden once did a column on Lowenstein which was good and had good math in it. We don’t need 23,000,000 votes, only a million or so as swing voters . . . then you’ve got all those facts being gathered by that girl at that Election news or something. There’s also an outfit called the Youth Citizenship League that gathers this stuff . . . all registration by kids is heavily Democratic, and then we can throw in some of our philosophy—we’ll talk about this.

Other matters:

1) Enclosed is a primary map. Please send me a memo on which ones are the important ones and which ones you want to/plan to cover, obviously N.H., Ill., Wisconsin, Mass., Calif., N.Y., Florida (?) . . . anyway, let’s get together on a quick rundown of this. We have to discuss type of coverage, and which candidates to go with or what angle to do in each one, since they can get to be repetitive, etc.

2) Tim Crouse is available and anxious to work on some political things, so he can pick up some stories that you don’t have the time for—for example, I thought I’d put him on the road with McCloskey for three days in N.H. after Xmas. Also, he can do some other Washington stories—like the Justice Dept. or the economist (which, by the way, is a reference to the guy who was thrown out of the Bureau of Labor Statistics for refusing to reinterpret, and he was young, and no one talked to him). I’d like to put Crouse on some of these kind of stories, possibly. This obviously we must also talk about.

Letter from HST to JSW

Nov 18 ’71

Jann . . .

I’m interrupting VORTEX/Washington #1 to whip off this quick note inre: timing, deadlines, priorities, etc. What I’ve written so far is a slag heap of spotty gibberish with no real subject at all, and it suddenly occurs to me that I’d rather miss an issue than send something bad and/or useless.

It never occurred to me that so many media people in Washington would know who I was. I went into the city room of the
Wash/Star
today, to cash a check (my checks are totally worthless here & I have no cash), and suddenly found myself socked into a long Q&A session that eventually became a formal interview for a series the
Star
is doing on “Intellectuals & Sports.” None of these people had even read the Vegas stuff; their interest stemmed entirely from the HA book & two things in
Scanlan’s
. As it happens, the spts ed. of the
Star
just came from the
SF Examiner
& is staffing his whole section with freaks. (See attached memo for two gratis subscriptions.) He offered the facilities of his office for anything I needed: phones, typewriters, work, etc.—so I now have a second office.

There are so many things happening that I can’t even sleep. Coming out of Woody Creek into this scene has jacked me into a brutal adrenaline trip—compounded by the shock of finding myself treated like a public figure of sorts. Given this odd visibility factor, I suspect the new fact of a
RS
“bureau” in DC will soon be viewed more as a lobby gig than a news organization . . . because I’m already locked into the idea that I’m here to write a column with one hand and whip up a giant anti-Nixon Youth Vote with the other. There’s no escaping it; my history is too public—so for christ’s sake let’s
create
that vote. We have a tremendous amount of latent sympathy (& potential energy) among young heads in the media. They seem puzzled at the idea that
RS
is “getting into politics,” but they all seem to like it. Shit, today I got my first Job Application, which I’ll forward as soon as I xerox it. Within a
month or so, I suspect we’ll be needing that extra room in
New York Post
bureau reporter Tony Prisendorf’s office—more for a political hq. than anything journalistic, and now that I think on that I suspect we should be pretty careful. The point, however, is that a hell of a lot of people seem to want to “help” me. Too many, I think, but at this point I don’t want to turn anybody off.