Fear and Loathing at Rolling Stone (41 page)

I finished the ale and dropped the empty bottle into a huge spittoon full of blue gravel. Two elderly women standing next to me looked disgusted, but I ignored them and wandered over to the door of the world-renowned Poodle bar and cocktail lounge. It was almost empty. An imitation Glenn Miller band was playing the “Tennessee Waltz,” but nobody was dancing. Three nights ago, the Poodle had been so crowded that it was difficult to get through the door. Every high-powered hotrod journalist in the western world had made the scene here last week. At least that’s what Sally Quinn told me, and she knows about things like that.

I went back to the elevators and found one ready to go. The sight of my ale bottle in the spittoon reminded me of Nixon again . . . Who else might be in on that deal? I picked a
Miami Herald
off a stack in the rear of the elevator, then handed the matron $1.

“Twenty-five cents,” she said briskly, bringing the car to a stop at my floor . . . but before she could hand me the change I stepped out and waved back at her. “Nevermind,” I said. “I’m rich.” Then I hurried down the hall to my room and bolted the door.

The game had already started, but there was no score. I dumped my ale bottles in the Styrofoam cooler, then opened one and sat down to watch the action and brood on Nixon’s treachery. But first I concentrated on the game for a while. It is hard to understand how somebody else thinks unless you can get on their wavelength: get in tune with their patterns, their pace, their connections . . . and since Nixon is a known football addict, I decided to get my head totally into the rhythm of this exhibition game between the Rams and Kansas City before attempting the jump into politics.

Very few people understand this kind of logic. I learned it from a Brazilian psychiatrist in the Mato Grosso back in 1963. He called it “Rhythm Logic,” in English, because he said I would never be able to pronounce it in the original Jibaro. I tried it once or twice, but the Jibaro language was too much for me—and it didn’t make much difference anyway. I seemed to have an instinct for Rhythm Logic, however, so I
picked it up very quickly. But I have never been able to explain it, except in terms of music, and typewriters are totally useless when it comes to that kind of translation.

In any case, by the end of the first quarter I felt ready. By means of intense concentration on
every detail
of the football game, I was able to “derail” my own inner brain waves and re-pattern them temporarily to the inner brain wave rhythms of a serious football fanatic. The next step, then, was to bring my “borrowed” rhythms into focus on a subject quite different from football—such as presidential politics.

In the third and final step, I merely concentrated on a pre-selected problem involving presidential politics, and attempted to solve it subjectively . . . although the word “subjectively,” at this point, had a very different true meaning. Because I was no longer reasoning in the rhythms of my own inner brain waves, but in the rhythms of a football addict.

At that point, it became almost unbearably clear to me that Richard Nixon had in fact sold the Republican Party down the tube in Miami. Consciously, perhaps, but never quite verbally. Because the rhythms of his own inner brain waves convinced his conscious mind that in fact he had no choice. Given the safe assumption that the most important objective in Richard Nixon’s life today is minimizing the risk of losing the 1972 election to George McGovern, simple logic decreed that he should bend all his energies to that end, at all costs. All other objectives would have to be subjugated to Number One.

By halftime, with the Rams trailing by six, I had established a firm scientific basis for the paranoid gibberish I had uttered, an hour or so earlier, while standing in the hotel driveway and talking with Bobo the night-pimp. At the time, not wanting to seem ignorant or confused, I had answered his question with the first wisdom capsule that popped into my mind . . . But now it made perfect sense, thanks to Rhythm Logic, and all that remained were two or three secondary questions, none of them serious.

The pervasive sense of gloom among the press/media crowd in Miami was only slightly less obvious than the gungho, breast-beating arrogance of the Nixon delegates themselves. That was the real story of the convention: the strident, loutish confidence of the whole GOP machinery, from
top to bottom. Looking back on that week, one of my clearest memories is that maddening “FOUR MORE YEARS!” chant from the Nixon Youth gallery in the convention hall. NBC’s John Chancellor compared the Nixon Youth cheering section to the Chicago “sewer workers” who were herded into the Stockyards convention hall in Chicago four years ago to cheer for Mayor Daley. The Nixon Youth people were not happy with Chancellor for making that remark on camera. They complained very bitterly about it, saying it was just another example of the “knee-jerk liberal” thinking that dominates the media.

But the truth is that Chancellor was absolutely right. Due to a strange set of circumstances, I spent two very tense hours right in the middle of that Nixon Youth mob on Tuesday night, and it gave me an opportunity to speak at considerable length with quite a few of them . . .

What happened, in a nut, was that I got lost in a maze of hallways in the back reaches of the convention hall on Tuesday night about an hour or so before the roll-call vote on Nixon’s chances of winning the GOP nomination again this year . . . I had just come off the convention floor, after the Secret Service lads chased me away from the First Family box where I was trying to hear what Charleton Heston was saying to Nelson Rockefeller, and in the nervous wake of an experience like that, I felt a great thirst rising . . . so I tried to take a shortcut to the Railroad Lounge, where free beer was available to the press; but I blew it somewhere along the way, ended up in a big room jammed with Nixon Youth workers, getting themselves ready for a “spontaneous demonstration” at the moment of climax out there on the floor . . . I was just idling around in the hallway, trying to go north for a beer, when I got swept up in a fast-moving mob of about two thousand people heading south at good speed, so instead of fighting the tide, I just let myself be carried along to wherever they were going . . .

Which turned out to be the “Ready Room,” in a far corner of the hall, where a dozen or so people wearing red hats and looking like smalltown high-school football coaches were yelling into bullhorns and trying to whip this herd of screaming sheep into shape for the “spontaneous” demonstration, scheduled for 10:33 PM.

It was a very disciplined scene. The red-hatted men with the bullhorns did all the talking. Huge green plastic “refuse” sacks full of helium
balloons were distributed, along with handfuls of New Year’s Eve party noisemakers and hundreds of big cardboard signs that said things like: “Nixon Now!”. . . “Four More Years!” . . . “No Compromise!”

Most of the signs were freshly printed. They looked exactly like the “We Love Mayor Daley” signs that Daley distributed to his sewer workers in Chicago in 1968: red and blue ink on a white background . . . but a few, here and there, were hand-lettered, and mine happened to be one of these. It said, “Garbage Men Demand Equal Time.” I had several choices, but this one seemed right for the occasion.

Actually, there was a long and active time lag between the moment when I was swept into the Ready Room and my decision to carry a sign in the spontaneous demonstration. What happened in that time lag was that they discovered me early on, and tried to throw me out—but I refused to go, and that’s when the dialogue started. For the first ten minutes or so I was getting very ominous Hells Angels flashbacks—all alone in a big crowd of hostile, cranked-up geeks in a mood to stomp somebody—but it soon became evident that these Nixon Youth people weren’t ready for that kind of madness.

Our first clash erupted when I looked up from where I was sitting on the floor against a wall in the back of the room and saw Ron Rosenbaum from the
Village Voice
coming at me in a knot of shouting Nixon Youth wranglers. “No press allowed!” they were screaming. “Get out of here! You can’t stay!”

They had nailed Rosenbaum at the door—but, instead of turning back and giving up, he plunged into the crowded room and made a bee-line for the back wall, where he’d already spotted me sitting in peaceful anonymity. By the time he reached me, he was gasping for breath and about six fraternity/jock types were clawing at his arms. “They’re trying to throw me out!” he shouted.

I looked up and shuddered, knowing my cover was blown. Within seconds, they were screaming at me, too. “You crazy bastard,” I shouted at Rosenbaum. “You
fingered
me! Look what you’ve done!”

“No press!” they were shouting. “OUT! Both of you!”

I stood up quickly and put my back to the wall, still cursing Rosenbaum. “That’s right!” I yelled. “Get that bastard out of here! No press allowed!”

Rosenbaum stared at me. There was shock and repugnance in his eyes—as if he had just recognized me as a lineal descendant of Judas Iscariot. As they muscled him away, I began explaining to my accusers that I was really more of a political observer than a journalist. “Have
you
run for office?” I snapped at one of them. “No! I thought not, goddamn it! You don’t have the look of a man who’s been to the wall. I can see it in your face!”

He was taken aback by this charge. His mouth flapped for a few seconds, then he blurted out: “What about
you
? What office did
you
run for?”

I smiled gently. “Sheriff, my friend. I ran for sheriff, out in Colorado—and I lost by just a hair. And it was the
liberals
who put the screws to me! Right! Are you surprised?”

He was definitely off balance.

“That’s why I came here as an
observer
,” I continued. “I wanted to see what it was like on the inside of a
winning
campaign.”

It was just about then that somebody noticed my “press” tag was attached to my shirt by a blue and white McGovern button. I’d been wearing it for three days, provoking occasional rude comments from hotheads on the convention floor and various hotel lobbies—but this was the first time I’d felt called upon to explain myself. It was, after all, the only visible McGovern button in Miami Beach that week—in Flamingo Park or anywhere else—and now I was trying to join a spontaneous Nixon Youth demonstration that was about to spill out onto the floor of the very convention that had just nominated Richard Nixon for reelection, against McGovern.

They seemed to feel I was mocking their efforts in some way . . . and at that point the argument became so complex and disjointed that I can’t possibly run it all down. It is enough to say that we finally compromised: if I refused to leave without violence, then I was damn well going to have to carry a sign in the spontaneous demonstration—and also wear a plastic red, white, and blue Nixon hat. They never came right out and said it, but I could see they were uncomfortable at the prospect of all three network TV cameras looking down on their spontaneous Nixon Youth demonstration and zeroing in—for their own perverse reasons—on a weird-looking, thirty-five-year-old speed freak with half his hair burned
out from overindulgence, wearing a big blue McGovern button on his chest, carrying a tall cup of “Old Milwaukee” and shaking his fist at John Chancellor up in the NBC booth—screaming: “You dirty bastard! You’ll
pay
for this, by God! We’ll rip your goddamn teeth out! KILL! KILL! Your number just came up, you Communist son of a bitch!”

I politely dismissed all suggestions that I remove my McGovern button, but I agreed to carry a sign and wear a plastic hat like everybody else. “Don’t worry,” I assured them. “You’ll be proud of me. There’s a lot of bad blood between me and John Chancellor. He put acid in my drink last month at the Democratic Convention, then he tried to humiliate me in public.”

“Acid? Golly, that’s terrible! What kind of acid?”

“It felt like Sunshine,” I said.

“Sunshine?”

“Yeah. He denied it, of course—But hell, he
always
denies it.”

“Why?” a girl asked.

“Would
you
admit a thing like that?” I said.

She shook her head emphatically. “But I wouldn’t do it, either,” she said. “You could
kill
somebody by making them drink acid—why would he want to kill
you
?”

I shrugged. “Who knows? He eats a lot of it himself.” I paused, sensing confusion . . . “Actually, I doubt if he really wanted to kill me. It was a hell of a dose, but not
that
strong.” I smiled. “All I remember is the first rush: it came up my spine like nine tarantulas . . . drilled me right to the bar stool for two hours; I couldn’t speak, couldn’t even blink my eyes.”

“Boy, what kind of acid does that?” somebody asked.

“Sunshine,” I said. “Every time.”

By now several others had picked up on the conversation. A bright-looking kid in a blue gabardine suit interrupted: “Sunshine acid? Are you talking about LSD?”

“Right,” I said.

Now the others understood. A few laughed, but others muttered darkly, “You mean John Chancellor goes around putting LSD in people’s drinks? He takes it himself? . . . He’s a dope addict? . . .”