Buy the ticket, take the ride
---Hunter s. Thompson---
Thompson’s magnum opus shoots like a .357 magnum bullet through your brain from the moment you fix your sane eyes on the opening lines: ‘We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold’. You suddenly find yourself in Bat Country and in the company of one Raoul Duke (Thompson’s fictional doppelganger), a journalist and his “Samoan” attorney Dr. Gonzo (Thompson’s real attorney Oscar Zeta Acosta). Together these drugged drivers are taking you to Las Vegas to cover the Mint 400, a dirt-track motorcycle race under a contract with Sports Illustrated and while there additionally locate the American Dream. That’s the plan, anyway.
Right from the start, Raoul makes it clear that you are not hitching along for just any other ride, this is an expedition to the American Dream and the necessary supplies have been taken care of. These consist of, ‘two bags of grass, seventy-five pellets of mescaline, five sheets of high-powered blotter acid, a salt shaker half full of cocaine, and a whole galaxy of multi-coloured uppers, downers, screamers, laughers and also a quart of tequila, a quart of rum, a case of Budweiser, a pint of raw ether and two dozen amyls’
Why so much you ask yourself.
He reads your mind, ‘Not that we needed all that for the trip, but once you get locked into a serious drug-collection, the tendency is to push it as far as you can.’
Right.
Soon these two mind-expansion goons start sampling their supplies and in the process, scare away a young hitch-hiker they’d picked up. Las Vegas was approaching; the Devil’s advocate speaks up, ‘As your attorney I advise you to drive at top speed.’
And the American Dream draws closer.
Once in Las Vegas, things don’t go as planned. The drugs took grip in the desert but now their minds were in a submissive-hold and wrestling with reality. Everything and everyone is washed in a clean wave of paranoia. Drug and dream, event and recollection, purpose and delinquency…these things become indistinguishable and the whole physical and intangible universe seems nothing but a huge foe. They somehow manage to check into their rooms and go around town drinking and smoking and toking and snorting and fuming and consuming and chewing. ‘Tooling along the main drag on a Saturday night in Las Vegas, two good old boys in a fireapple - red convertible . . . stoned, ripped, twisted . . . Good People.’
The Mint 400 turns out to be a disaster the next day with Duke quitting the mindless event in his sustained stoned state. Duke and Dr. Gonzo continue their binge with ether seasoning which sees them thrown out of clubs. The combined effect of all these drugs gets Dr. Gonzo in a seizure with getting delirious and psychosomatic with a knife. Duke steps out to get away from this ugly reality that is only amplified by his own drug-intake and goes to park the car. When he returns, Gonzo has gobbled up all the acid and demands music while he is sits in his own throne of the Universe (bathtub). Gonzo has gone bonkers in his catatonic despair and it takes some effort to get him to quietly reside in the bathroom.
Duke finally gets to relax away from the nightmare in the bathroom and has time for a little re-collection and reminiscence. It is here that he gave what has come to be known as the “Wave Speech” and what Thompson himself recons to be the finest thing he ever wrote:
Strange memories on this nervous night in Las Vegas. Five years later? Six? It seems like a lifetime, or at least a Main Era — the kind of peak that never comes again. San Francisco in the middle sixties was a very special time and place to be a part of. Maybe it meant something. Maybe not, in the long run . . . but no explanation, no mix of words or music or memories can touch that sense of knowing that you were here and alive in that corner of time and the world. Whatever it meant . . .
History is hard to know, because of all the hired bullshit, but even without being sure of "history" it seems entirely reasonable to think that every now and then the energy of a whole generation comes to a head in a long fine flash, for reasons that nobody really understands at the time — and which never explain, in retrospect, what actually happened. My central memory of that time seems to hang on one or five or maybe forty nights — or very early mornings — when I left the Fillmore half-crazy and, instead of going home, aimed the big 650 Lightning across the Bay Bridge at a hundred miles an hour wearing L. L. Bean shorts and a Butte sheepherder's jacket . . . booming through the Treasure Island tunnel at the lights of Oakland and Berkeley and Richmond, not quite sure which turn-off to take when I got to the other end (always stalling at the toll-gate, too twisted to find neutral while I fumbled for change) . . . but being absolutely certain that no matter which way I went I would come to a place where people were just as high and wild as I was: No doubt at all about that. There was madness in any direction, at any hour. If not across the Bay, then up the Golden Gate or down 101 to Los Altos or La Honda. . . . You could strike sparks anywhere.
There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning. And that, I think, was the handle — that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we didn't need that. Our energy would simply prevail. There was no point in fighting — on our side or theirs. We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave.
So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark — that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back.
The next morning he awakens to find Dr. Gonzo gone and leaves the hotel-room in panic lest he be billed. However, the crazies unite later to cover a story in another hotel. The story this time is commissioned by Rolling Stone magazine and Duke is asked to cover a Drugs Convention. This ironical meeting of two cultures: the drug culture and the Narcs, is something for which Fear and loathing in Las Vegas will be remembered for well. Here are Duke and Gonzo, freaks of nature and shameless trippers and druggies and here too are the ‘pigs’ that think a marijuana butt is called a ‘roach’ because it resembles a cockroach. Dr. Gonzo wins the argument hands down when he says, ‘you’d have to be crazy on acid to think a joint looked like a goddamn cockroach’ and anyone who has smoked a reefer would readily agree. One for the team. The pair leave the conference and soon, individually, leave the damned Sin City as well.
Even if you think I have spoiled most of the book for you…you’d be surprised if you pick up a copy and read it yourself. The fact is, books like these are not based on plots or ideas or confrontations or terrorist plots or direction of any sort. There is only the following of words after words till they combine to paint a picture. This is what Gonzo journalism is; the writer tries to immerse himself not in a plot but in the plot. The Dr. Gonzo in the mind-bending tale is a vehicle of Thompson’s unique gonzo voice and his best accomplice in finding a meaning in the hopelessness of the dope decade. Though the book may seem, superficially, to be nothing more than a stoner anecdote the tone of the book can never be duplicated by any other writer. Thompson was a man who wrote what he lived and this saga too is a only partly fictional and composed during an actual excursion to Las Vegas with Acosta. Drugs are not the theme of the book; only the realm.
The bigger picture that Thompson wanted to paint here was the dream of America in the midst of the counter-culture traffic of the 1960s. Their original endeavour at chasing down the Dream leads to nothing because America in that period was a country completely divided between hippies and pigs, war protesters and war supporters, consumerism and individualism…in short, it was a country assaulted with the irony of capitalism and democracy. In this kingdom of fear and little hope…the only road out is the road to excess.
‘Some may never live but the crazy never die.’
Hunter S. Thompson
1937-2005
R.I.P
Fear and loathing in Las Vegas movie trailer
No comments:
Post a Comment