Fear and Loathing at Rolling Stone Read online

  Acid is a relatively complex drug, in its effects, while mescaline is pretty simple and straightforward—but in a scene like this, the difference was academic. There was simply no call, at this conference, for anything but a massive consumption of Downers: reds, grass, and booze, because the whole program had apparently been set up by people who had been in a Seconal stupor since 1964.

  Here were more than a thousand top-level cops telling each other “we must come to terms with the drug culture,” but they had no idea where to start. They couldn’t even find the goddamn thing. There were rumors in the hallways that maybe the Mafia was behind it. Or perhaps the Beatles. At one point somebody in the audience asked Bloomquist if he thought Margaret Mead’s “strange behavior,” of late, might possibly be explained by a private marijuana addiction.

  “I really don’t know,” Bloomquist replied. “But at her age, if she did smoke grass, she’d have one hell of a trip.”

  The audience roared with laughter at this remark.

  My attorney was downstairs at the bar, talking to a sporty-looking cop about forty whose plastic name-tag said he was the DA from someplace in Georgia. “I’m a whiskey man, myself,” he was saying. “We don’t have much problem with drugs down where I come from.”

  “You will,” said my attorney. “One of these nights you’ll wake up and find a junkie tearing your bedroom apart.”

  “Naw!” said the Georgia man. “Not down in my parts.”

  I joined them and ordered a tall glass of rum, with ice.

  “You’re another one of these California boys,” he said. “Your friend here’s been tellin’ me about dope fiends.”

  “They’re everywhere,” I said. “Nobody’s safe. And sure as hell not in the South. They like the warm weather.”

  “They work in pairs,” said my attorney. “Sometimes in gangs. They’ll climb right into your bedroom and sit on your chest, with big bowie knives.” He nodded solemnly. “They might even sit on your wife’s chest—put the blade right down on her throat.”

  “Jesus God almighty,” said the southerner. “What the hell’s goin’ on in this country?”

  “You’d never believe it,” said my attorney. “In L.A. it’s out of control. First it was drugs, now it’s witchcraft.”

  “Witchcraft? Shit, you can’t mean it!”

  “Read the newspapers,” I said. “Man, you don’t know trouble until you have to face down a bunch of these addicts gone crazy for human sacrifice!”

  “Naw!” he said. “That’s science fiction stuff!”

  “Not where we operate,” said my attorney. “Hell, in Malibu alone, these goddamn Satan-worshippers kill six or eight people every day.” He paused to sip his drink. “And all they want is the blood,” he continued. “They’ll take people right off the street if they have to.” He nodded. “Hell, yes. Just the other day we had a case where they grabbed a girl right out of a McDonald’s hamburger stand. She was a waitress. About sixteen years old . . . with a lot of people watching, too!”

  “What happened?” said our friend. “What did they do to her?” He seemed very agitated by what he was hearing.

  “Do?” said my attorney. “Jesus Christ, man. They chopped her goddamn head off right there in the parking lot! Then they cut all kinds of holes in her and sucked out the blood!”

  “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 abo
ut what we’d told him.

  __ __ __ __

  The Campaign Trail: ’72

  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.

  On more specific fronts, I’m already gearing down to make “The Real Nixon” VORTEX/Washington #2 (that name is off the top of my head & might not last, but let’s use it for now as a sort of working title. It conveys a certain amount of urgency & bogus drama that fits in nicely with the activist side of this gig.). From here on in, it’s going to be hard to defend the notion that I’m here to merely write a column.