Fear and Loathing at Rolling Stone (86 page)

The difference between a ten-goal champion and a wretched, unemployable three goaler is essentially in the diet. The best and the brightest on the high-goal circuit eat only the hearts of wild animals, while the three goalers live on horse meat. But none of them will talk about it . . .

And why should they? Many things are known in the sweaty gray world of the polo stables, but the truth is rarely spoken. The rigid code of omertà is what holds the sport together.

II

The magazine sent me an assistant, a tall, jittery young man named Tobias, who picked me up at the airport. “Welcome to New York,” he said. “I have a present for you.” He handed me a large gift-wrapped box containing a hideous blow-up doll named Teri, according to the information on the box—which also said she had a “real-life
vibrating
vagina” and a “luscious-lipped deep open mouth.” There were other special features and a stern warning not to exceed her maximum 275-pound weight limit, or she might explode and disappear.

“You should see her tits,” Tobias said. “They are bigger than Ginger Baker’s head.” He grinned idiotically and made a spastic jack-off motion, then loaded Teri onto the cart with all my other luggage. She was
going to be part of our lives now. I knew she would be with us for a while, for good or ill. “Our car is right out in front,” said Tobias. “I’ll have it brought up. The hotel is not far, and I am a very skilled driver. I like to drive fast.”

Everything he said turned out to be a lie, but I was not surprised. I sensed there was something deeply wrong with him. He had no idea where the car was, and I sat on the curb for an hour and a half while he searched for the Lincoln, roaming alone through the bowels of the huge parking garage.

It was another tortured hour before we got back to the hotel, and we managed to check in without incident.

“You will never drive again,” I said to him. “There is something wrong with you. Don’t ever touch this wheel again. From now on, I’m driving.”

I was introduced to the manager as Dr. Franklin, the famous author and world-renowned polo zealot. I asked him at once for a $2,000 cash advance. “My man Tobias will handle the details,” I said. “Let me know when it’s done. I’ll be over there in the bar.”

“No problem, Doctor,” he said. “I’ll take care of everything.” He nodded across the lobby at the elevated bar. “You just go over there and make yourself at home. I’ll call Hugo and tell him you’re coming.”

He seemed to be snickering at me, but I ignored it.

“You’ll like Hugo,” he added. “He’s one of our local characters. He’s Swiss.”

It was another lie. One look at the ugly brute of a bartender told me that he was something far worse than a Swiss. He looked like a violent hunchback from the mountains of Transylvania.

I greeted him warmly nonetheless; I tried to pretend he was normal. “Welcome home,” he said quietly. “I knew you were coming; now we’ll get to know each other.”

I laughed nervously, assuming he was joking, and avoided his sinister gaze.

“Never mind,” I said. “I’ve changed my mind.” I picked up my satchel and left quickly. His eyes followed me all the way to the elevator. I felt a twinge of The Fear.

When I got to the suite, I found Tobias struggling to blow up the sex doll. I quickly slapped it away from him and gave the thing to the
bellboy. “This is a four-star hotel,” I told him. “Get this bitch inflated and bring her back immediately.” I smiled and gave him a $100 bill. “Remember me,” I said with a fine smile. “I will need many things.”

I looked forward to spending time at the Garden City Hotel watching football and meeting surreptitiously with emissaries from the Jimmy Carter for President Committee. They would come and go quietly, mingling with the pimps and dancers and the hard-core polo crowd.

The Garden City Hotel had a shady reputation in the old days, but now it’s like a morgue. Frank Sinatra used to hang out here, and so did W. Averell Harriman. The place is full of ghosts, many of them burned alive in a series of disastrous fires that have plagued this hotel since it was built in 1874.

Yet the game went on; they all played polo: William Vanderbilt, John Pierpont Morgan, Lillian Russell, Billy Rose. Garden City was the Aspen of the Twenties, a pastoral outpost of greed, wealth, rudeness, and women who refused to wear panties. Scott Fitzgerald, no doubt, brooded in this bar just as I am today. The place has always reeked of death, from equine fever in the 1920s to human brain death in the Nineties . . . Even today there are wild boys in the elevators, cradling rubber blow-up dolls in their arms, chatting amiably with the night porters. It’s a wonderful place to stay if you’re dead . . . I had the time of my life. The Garden City Hotel is a fiery tomb of magic, mystery, and myth. You want fun, Bubba? This is the place to be.

The polo tournament had been running every other day for two weeks on Long Island and also at the Greenwich Polo Club, in Connecticut—only ten miles away by water across the ominous gray currents of the Sound. I thought of Jay Gatsby standing on his lawn and staring across the water at the green light at the end of Daisy’s dock . . . But the Garden City Hotel is a long way from Gatsby country, and Daisy doesn’t hang out here anymore. Long Island has changed drastically since Gatsby’s time. Garden City was a rural hamlet back then, and when it was originally built, the hotel was so hard to reach by horse carriage from Manhattan that it seemed as far away as Cuba.

By the turn of the century, it had become a fashionable spa for the rich and famous. Teddy Roosevelt lived nearby in Oyster Bay and was
often seen in the hotel bar, haranguing the local gentry to come on up to his place for a quick game of polo. But Teddy would not recognize the place now. It has burned to the ground three times and is now in its fourth incarnation. There is a disco instead of a carriage house, and Joey Buttafuoco has replaced Gatsby as the resident celebrity manqué.

By the time I got there, a rash of shocking upsets had thrown the championship up for grabs. Most of the foreigners had been humbled, and my homeboys had emerged as one of the strongest challengers. Four teams were still unbeaten going into the final week, and Aspen was one of them. They were whores, of course, and only one of them had ever set foot in the Aspen area—and that was the wily patron, Doug Matthews. But that is the way of polo, and I was the only one who seemed disturbed by it.

But not for long. I was beginning to learn that there was no need to be bothered by certain things. It is a different world, and the only way to accept it is to accept it completely . . . I was shocked at first to learn that the official headquarters of the tournament, the legendary Meadowbrook Polo Club, no longer existed except as an eerie shell of its former self. The grounds were still beautiful, and the deserted clubhouse was still elegant, but there were no polo fields, no polo ponies, no caviar brunches, no smirking, bankrupt aristocrats strutting around the terrace with half-naked Spanish courtesans on their arms. “It’s a parking lot now,” said club president Al Bianco Sr. when I inquired, “but we still call it the polo field.”

It didn’t faze me. “Of course,” I said. “Good show. Now let us retire to the bar and have a mint julep.”

“There is no bar,” he said. “But I know a nice Italian place over in Levittown. You must come and be my guest.”

“You’re too kind,” I said, “but I’ll have to take a rain check. I have a film crew waiting back at the hotel. I have to run.”

“What a pity,” he said. “We’ll see you tomorrow at the game?”

“You bet,” I said. “We will kick ass. Those goddamn Argies are about to get what they came for. My homeboys can’t lose!”

He blanched and looked away, then he pulled a plastic hip flask out of his coat and drank deeply. “What do you mean by that?” he finally asked, fixing me with a nervous smile.

“You know what I mean,” I said. “I didn’t come here to lose, Buster. You want to put your money where your mouth is?”

He stared down at his hands for a long moment, then shook his head. “I didn’t hear that,” he said. “I’ll see you tomorrow at the game. Thanks for stopping by.”

“The pleasure was all mine,” I replied. “We are champions.”

I walked across the lobby to the darkness of the Polo Lounge, which appeared to be empty. I sat down at the bar and picked up a crumpled copy of the
Sporting News
, which was open to the Dog Pages. Across the room was a big-screen Sony TV, which was tuned to the dog-racing channel. I slapped my hand on the bar and called for whiskey. I hate dog racing, and the sight of it made my mood foul. I reached into the pocket of my silk shooting jacket and pulled out a small ball of hashish, which I quickly ate.

I heard a noise behind me, and then a hand touched my shoulder. “Pardon me,” said a man’s voice, “are you here for the polo games?”

“You bet,” I replied. “This is the big one. It’s now or never.”

“Who are you with?” he asked.

“Aspen Polo,” I said. “My homeboys. We are undefeated. Nobody can stop us.”

He nodded thoughtfully but said nothing. He was still standing slightly behind me, so shrouded in darkness that I could barely see his reflection in the mirror behind the bar. It made me nervous. For all I knew, he was a cop or maybe a professional pickpocket. But when he sat down on the stool next to me, I saw a finely dressed gray-haired man who looked like he might own a few polo ponies himself. He was wearing what appeared to be a black cashmere tuxedo jacket and patent leather boots. He was an elderly gent with deep-set eyes and a suave patrician presence—as if he’d just come back from a garden party at the old Gatsby place. I was impressed. We shook hands, and he introduced himself as Averell Harriman.

I recognized the name and felt edgy for a moment because I knew he was lying: the real Averell Harriman had been dead for quite a few years—but I smiled and shook his hand anyway. Why not? I thought. We all use borrowed names from time to time.

A minor problem arose when I accidentally signed Doug Matthews’ name to a receipt for the $1,000 tip I’d given to the three hotel porters. The manager brought it to me in the bar, where I was enjoying a professional conversation with my new friend. “Why are you bothering me?” I said as I scrawled my initials on the check. “We’re all on the same team anyway. There’s plenty more where that came from.”

Harriman was something of a historian, also a political buff. We knew some of the same people—but not many. He knew my friend George McGovern, for instance, and also Richard Nixon, but he didn’t know Keith Richards or James Carville, my partners in the blood business . . . So what? I thought. I like this man. He knows things. Never mind that he looks one hundred years old. He is whiskey gentry, he is one of us.

Hugo the Swiss bartender appeared, and I asked him to get that goddamn dog racing off the TV. “Punch up the news,” said Harriman. “Let’s see what’s developed in Haiti. I own a home there.”

“Good luck,” said the bartender. “You’ll never see it again.”

Harriman lashed out and hit him with a polo whip that had been concealed in his boot. “Shut up, Hugo! Get back where you belong.” He waved the weapon at him again, and Hugo cringed. Harriman hit him again, popping the whip sharply across his back.