Fear and Loathing at Rolling Stone (65 page)

The fat spic for all seasons was jailed once again, this time on what the press called a “high-speed drug bust.” Oscar called a press conference
in jail and accused the cops of “planting” him—but not even his bodyguards believed him until long after the attendant publicity had done them all so much damage that the whole “Brown Power Movement” was effectively stalled, splintered, and discredited by the time
all
charges, both arson and drugs, were either dropped or reduced to small print on the back of the blotter.

I am not even sure, myself, how the cases were finally disposed of. Not long after the “high-speed drug bust,” as I recall, two of his friends were charged with murder one for allegedly killing a smack dealer in the barrio, and I think Oscar finally copped on the drug charge and pled guilty to something like “possession of ugly pills in a public place.”

But by that time his deal had already gone down. None of the respectable Chicano pols in East L.A. had ever liked him anyway, and that “high-speed drug bust” was all they needed to publicly denounce everything Left of
huevos rancheros
and start calling themselves Mexican-American again. The trial of the Biltmore Five was no longer a do-or-die cause for La Raza, but a shameful crime that a handful of radical dope fiends had brought down on the whole community. The mood on Whittier Boulevard turned sour overnight, and the sight of a Brown Beret was suddenly as rare as a cash client for Oscar Zeta Acosta—the ex-Chicano lawyer.

The entire ex-Chicano political community went as public as possible to make sure that the rest of the city understood that they had known all along that this dope-addict
rata
who had somehow been one of their most articulate and certainly their most radical, popular, and politically aggressive spokesmen for almost two years was really just a self-seeking publicity dope freak who couldn’t even run a bar tab at the Silver Dollar Cafe, much less rally friends or a following. There was no mention in the Mexican-American press about Acosta’s surprisingly popular campaign for sheriff of L.A. County a year earlier, which had made him a minor hero among politically hip Chicanos all over the city.

No more of that dilly-dong bullshit on Whittier Boulevard. Oscar’s drug bust was still alive on the Evening News when he was evicted from his apartment on three days’ notice and his car was either stolen or towed away from its customary parking place on the street in front of his driveway. His offer to defend his two friends on what he later assured me
were absolutely valid charges of first degree murder were publicly rejected. Not even for free, they said. A dope-addled clown was worse than no lawyer at all.

It was dumb gunsel thinking, but Oscar was in no mood to offer his help more than once. So he beat a strategic retreat to Mazatlán, which he called his “other home,” to lick his wounds and start writing the Great Chicano Novel. It was the end of an era! The fireball Chicano lawyer was on his way to becoming a half-successful writer, a cult figure of sorts—then a fugitive, a freak, and finally either a permanently missing person or an undiscovered corpse.

There are not many gypsies on file at the Missing Persons Bureau—and if Oscar was not quite the classic gypsy, in his own eyes or mine, it was only because he was never able to cut that high-tension cord that kept him forever attached to his childhood home and hatchery. By the time he was twenty years old, Oscar was working overtime eight days a week at learning to live and even think like a gypsy, but he never quite jumped the gap.

Although I was born in El Paso, Texas, I am actually a small-town kid. A hick from the sticks, a Mexican boy from the other side of the tracks. I grew up in Riverbank, California; Post Office Box 303; population 3969. It’s the only town in the entire state whose essential numbers have remained unchanged. The sign that welcomes you as you round the curve coming in from Modesto says The City of Action.

We lived in a two-room shack without a floor. We had to pump our water and use kerosene if we wanted to read at night. But we never went hungry. My old man always bought the pinto beans and the white flour for the tortillas in one-hundred-pound sacks which my mother used to make dresses, sheets, and curtains. We had two acres of land which we planted every year with corn, tomatoes, and yellow chiles for the hot sauce. Even before my father woke us, my old ma was busy at work making the tortillas at five a.m. while he chopped the logs we’d hauled up from the river on the weekends.

Riverbank is divided into three parts, and in my corner of the world there were only three kinds of people: Mexicans, Okies, and
Americans. Catholics, Holy Rollers, and Protestants. Peach pickers, cannery workers, and clerks. We lived on the West Side, within smelling distance of the world’s largest tomato paste cannery.

The West Side is still enclosed by the Santa Fe Railroad tracks to the east, the Modesto-Oakdale Highway to the north, and the irrigation canal to the south. Within that concentration only Mexicans were safe from the neighborhood dogs, who responded only to Spanish commands. Except for Bob Whitt and Emitt Brown, both friends of mine who could cuss in better Spanish than I, I never saw a white person walking the dirt roads of our neighborhood.

—Oscar Acosta,
The Autobiography of a Brown Buffalo
, 1972

Oscar Zeta Acosta—despite any claims to the contrary—was a dangerous thug who lived every day of his life as a stalking monument to the notion that a man with a greed for the Truth should expect no mercy and give none . . .

. . . and that was the difference between Oscar and a lot of the merciless geeks he liked to tell strangers he admired: class acts like Benito Mussolini and Fatty Arbuckle.

When the great scorer comes to write against Oscar’s name, one of the first few lines in the Ledger will note that he usually lacked the courage of his consistently monstrous convictions. There was more mercy, madness, dignity, and generosity in that overweight, overworked, and always overindulged brown cannonball of a body than most of us will meet in any human package even three times Oscar’s size for the rest of our lives—which are all running noticeably leaner on the high side, since that rotten fat spic disappeared.

He was a drug-addled brute and a genuinely fiendish adversary in court or on the street—but it was none of
these
things that finally pressured him into death or a disappearance so finely plotted that it amounts to the same thing.

What finally cracked the Brown Buffalo was the bridge he refused to build between the self-serving elegance of his instincts and the self-destructive carnival of his reality. He was a Baptist missionary at a leper colony in Panama before he was a lawyer in Oakland and East L.A., or a
radical-chic author in San Francisco and Beverly Hills . . . But whenever things got tense or when he had to work close to the bone, he was always a missionary. And that was the governing instinct that ruined him for anything else. He was a preacher in the courtroom, a preacher at the typewriter, and a flat-out awesome preacher when he cranked his head full of acid.

That’s LSD-25, folks—a certified “dangerous drug” that is no longer fashionable, due to reasons of extreme and unnatural heaviness. The CIA was right about acid: some of their best and brightest operatives went over the side in the name of Top Secret research on a drug that was finally abandoned as a far too dangerous and unmanageable thing to be used as a public weapon. Not even the sacred minnock of “national security” could justify the hazards of playing with a thing too small to be seen and too big to control. The professional spook mentality was far more comfortable with things like nerve gas and neutron bombs.

But not the Brown Buffalo—he ate LSD-25 with a relish that bordered on worship. When his brain felt bogged down in the mundane nuts-and-bolts horrors of the Law or some dead-end manuscript, he would simply take off in his hot rod Mustang for a week on the road and a few days of what he called “walking with the King.” Oscar used acid like other lawyers use Valium—a distinctly unprofessional and occasionally nasty habit that shocked even the most liberal of his colleagues and frequently panicked his clients.

I was with him one night in L.A. when he decided that the only way to meaningfully communicate with a judge who’d been leaning on him in the courtroom was to drive out to the man’s home in Santa Monica and set his whole front lawn on fire after soaking it down with ten gallons of gasoline . . . and then, instead of fleeing into the night like some common lunatic vandal, Oscar stood in the street and howled through the flames at a face peering out from a shattered upstairs window, delivering one of his Billy Sunday–style sermons on morality and justice.

The nut of his flame-enraged text, as I recall, was this mind-bending chunk of eternal damnation from Luke 11:46—a direct quote from Jesus Christ:

“And he said, Woe unto you also, ye lawyers, for ye lade men with
burdens grievous to be borne, and ye yourselves touch not the burdens with one of your fingers.”

The Lawn of Fire was Oscar’s answer to the Ku Klux Klan’s burning cross, and he derived the same demonic satisfaction from doing it.

“Did you see his face?” he shouted as we screeched off at top speed toward Hollywood. “That corrupt old fool! I
know
he recognized me, but he’ll never admit it! No officer of the court would set a judge’s front yard on fire—the whole system would break down if lawyers could get away with crazy shit like this.”

I agreed. It is not my wont to disagree with even a criminally insane attorney on questions of basic law. But in truth it never occurred to me that Oscar was either insane or a criminal, given the generally fascist, Nixonian context of those angry years.

In an era when the vice president of the United States held court in Washington to accept payoffs from his former vassals in the form of big wads of $100 bills—and when the president himself routinely held secretly tape-recorded meetings with his top aides in the Oval Office to plot illegal wiretaps, political burglaries, and other gross felonies in the name of a “silent majority,” it was hard to feel anything more than a flash of high, nervous humor at the sight of some acid-bent lawyer setting fire to a judge’s front yard at four o’clock in the morning.

I might even be tempted to justify a thing like that—but of course
it would be wrong
. . . And my attorney was Not a Crook, and, to the best of my knowledge, his mother was just as much “a saint” as Richard Nixon’s.

Indeed. And now—as an almost perfect tribute to every icepick ever wielded in the name of Justice—I want to enter into the permanent record, at this point, as a strange but unchallenged fact that Oscar Z. Acosta was never disbarred from the practice of law in the state of California—and ex-president Richard Nixon
was
.

There are
some
things, apparently, that not even lawyers will tolerate; and in a naturally unjust world where the image of “Justice” is honored for being blind, even a blind pig will find an acorn once in a while.

Or maybe not—because Oscar was eventually hurt far worse by professional ostracism than Nixon was hurt by disbarment. The Great Banshee screamed for them both at almost the same time—for entirely different reasons, but with ominously similar results.

Except that Richard Nixon got rich from his crimes, and Oscar Acosta got killed. The wheels of Justice grind small and queer in this life, and if they seem occasionally unbalanced or even stupid and capricious in their grinding, my own midnight guess is that they were probably fixed from the start. And any judge who can safely slide into full-pension retirement without having to look back on anything worse in the way of criminal vengeance than a few scorched lawns is a man who got off easy.

There is, after all, considerable work and risk—and even a certain art—to the torching of a half-acre lawn without also destroying the house or exploding every car in the driveway. It would be a lot easier to simply make a funeral pyre of the whole place and leave the lawn for dilettantes.

That’s how Oscar viewed arson—anything worth doing is worth doing well—and I’d watched enough of his fiery work to know he was right. If he was a King-Hell Pyromaniac, he was also a gut politician and occasionally a very skilled artist in the style and tone of his torchings.

Like most lawyers with an IQ higher than sixty, Oscar learned one definition of Justice in law school, and a very different one in the courtroom. He got his degree at some night school on Post Street in San Francisco, while working as a copy boy for the Hearst
Examiner
. And for a while he was very proud to be a lawyer—for the same reasons he’d felt proud to be a missionary and lead clarinet man in the leper colony band.

But by the time I first met him in the summer of 1967, he was long past what he called his “puppy love trip with the law.” It had gone the same way of his earlier missionary zeal, and after one year of casework at an East Oakland “poverty law center,” he was ready to dump Holmes and Brandeis for Huey Newton and a Black Panther style of dealing with the laws and courts of America.