Fear And Loating In Las Vegas Part 14

>My attorney left at dawn. We almost missed the first flight to LA. because I couldn't find the airport. It was less than thirty minutes from the hotel. I was sure of that. So we left the Flamingo at exactly seven-thirty . . . but for some reason we failed to make the turnoff at the stoplight in front of the Tropicana. We kept going straight ahead on the freeway, that parallels the main airport runway, but on the opposite from the terminal . . . and there is no way to get across legally.

"G.o.dd.a.m.nit! We're lost!" my attorney was shouting. What are we doing out here on this G.o.dforsaken road? The airport is right over there!" He pointed hysterically across the tundra.

"Don't worry," I said. "I've never missed a plane yet." I smiled as the memory came back. "Except once in Peru," I added. "I was already checked out of country, through customs, but I went back to the bar to chat with this Bolivian cocaine dealer . . . and all of a sudden I heard those big 707 engines starting up, so I ran out to the runway and tried to get aboard but the door was right behind the engines and they'd already rolled the ladder away. s.h.i.+t, those afterburners would have fried me like bacon . . . but I was completely out of my head: I was desperate to get aboard.

"The airport cops saw me coming, and they gathered into a knot at the gate. I was running like a b.a.s.t.a.r.d, straight at them. The guy with me was screaming: 'No! It's too late! Don't try it!'

"I saw the cops waiting for me, so I slowed down like maybe I'd changed my mind . . . but when I saw them relax, I did a quick change of pace and tried to run right over the b.a.s.t.a.r.ds." I laughed. "Jesus, it was like running full bore into a closet full of gila monsters. The f.u.c.kers almost killed me. All I remember is seeing five or six billyclubs coming down on me at the same time, and a lot of voices screaming: 'No! No! It's suicide! Stop the crazy gringo!'

"I woke up about two hours later in a bar in downtown Lima. They'd stretched me out in one of those half-moon leather booths. My luggage was all stacked beside me. No body had opened it . . . so I went back to sleep and caught the first flight out, the next morning."

My attorney was only half listening. "Look," he said, "I'd really like to hear more about your adventures in Peru, but not now. Right now all I care about is getting across that G.o.d d.a.m.n runway."

We were flas.h.i.+ng along at good speed. I was looking for an opening, some kind of access road, some lane across the run way to the terminal. We were five miles past the last stop light and there wasn't enough time to turn around and go back to it.

There was only one way to make it on time. I hit the brakes and eased the Whale down into the gra.s.sy moat between the two freeway lanes. The ditch was too deep for a head-on run, so I took it at an angle. The Whale almost rolled, but I kept the wheels churning and we careened up the opposite bank and into the oncoming lane. Fortunately, it was empty. We came out of the moat with the nose of the car up in the air like a hydroplane.. . then bounced on the freeway and kept on going into the cactus field on the other side. I recall running over a fence of some kind said dragging it a few hundred yards, but by the time w e got to the runway way we were under control . . . screaming along about 60 miles an in low gear, and it looked like a wide-open run all the to the terminal.

My only worry was the chance of getting crushed like a roach by an incoming DC-8, which we probably wouldn't see until it was right on top of us. I wondered if they could see us in the tower. Probably so, but why worry? I kept the thing floored. There was no point in turning back now.

My attorney was hanging onto the dashboard with both nds. I glanced over and saw fear in his eyes. His face appeared to be grey, and I sensed he was not happy with this move, but we were going so fast across the runway - then cactus, then runway again - that I knew he understood our situation: We were past the point of debating the wisdom of is move; it was already done, and our only hope was to get the other side.

I looked at my skeleton-face Accutron and saw that we had three minutes and fifteen seconds before takeoff. "Plenty of time," I said. "Get your stuff together. I'll drop you right next the plane." I could see the big red and silver Western jetliner about 1000 yards ahead of us . . . and by this time we were skimming across smooth asphalt, past the incoming runway.

"No!" he shouted. "I can't get out! They'll crucify me. I'll have to take the blame!"

"Rediculous," I said. "Just say you were hitchhiking to the airport and I picked you up. You never saw me before. s.h.i.+t, thos town is full of white Cadillac convertibles . . . and I plan to go through there so fast that n.o.body will even glimpse the G.o.dd.a.m.n license plate."

We were approaching the plane. I could see pa.s.sengers but so far n.o.body had noticed us . . . approaching from this unlikely direction. "Are you ready?" I said.

"Why not? But for Christ's sake, let's do it fast! He was scanning the loading area, then he pointed: "Over there!" he said. "Drop me behind that big van. Just pull in behiond it ad I'll jump out where they can't see me, then you can make a run for it."

I nodded. So far, we had all the room we needed. No sign of alarm or pursuit. I wondered if maybe this kind of thing hap pened all the time in Vegas-cars full of late-arriving pa.s.sengers screeching desperately across the runway, dropping off wild-eyed Samoans clutching mysterious canvas bags who would sprint onto planes at the last possible second and then roar off into the sunrise.

Maybe so, I thought. Maybe this kind of thing is standard procedure in this town I swung in behind the van and hit the brakes just long enough for my attorney to jump out. "Don't take any guff from these swine," I yelled. "Remember, if you have any trouble you can always send a telegram to the Right People."

He grinned. "Yeah . . . Explaining my Position," he said. "Some a.s.shole wrote a poem about that once. It's probably good advice, if you have s.h.i.+t for brains." He waved me off.

"Right," I said, moving out. I'd already spotted a break in the big hurricane fence-and now, with the Whale in low gear, I went for it. n.o.body seemed to be chasing me. I couldn't understand it. I glanced in the mirror and saw my attorney climbing into the plane, no sign of a struggle . . . and then I was through the gate and out into the early morning traffic on Paradise Road.

I took a fast right on Russell, then a left onto Maryland Parkway . . . and suddenly I was cruising in warm anonym ity past the campus of the University of Las Vegas . . . no tension on these faces; I stopped at a red light and got lost, for a moment, in a sunburst of flesh in the cross-walk: fine sinewy thighs, pink mini-skirts, ripe young nipples, sleeveless blouses, long sweeps of blonde hair, pink lips and blue eyes- all the hallmarks of a dangerously innocent culture.

I was tempted to pull over and start mumbling obscene en treaties: "Hey, Sweetie, let's you and me get weird. Jump into this hotdog Caddy and we'll flash over to my suite at the Flamingo, load up on ether and behave like wild animals in my private, kidney-shaped pool .."

Sure we will, I thought. But by this time I was far down the parkway, easing into the turn lane for a left at Flamingo Road. Back to the hotel, to take stock. There was every reason to believe I was heading for trouble, that I'd pushed my luck a bit far. I'd abused every rule Vegas lived by-burning locals, abusing the tourists, terrifying the help.

The only hope now, I felt, was the possibility that we'd gone to such excess, with our gig, that n.o.body in a position to bring the hammer down on us could possibly believe it. Particularily not since we'd signed in with the Police Conference. When you bring an act into this town, you want to bring it in heavy. Don't waste any time with cheap shucks and misde minors. Go straight for the jugular. Get right into felonies.

The mentality of Las Vegas is so grossly atavistic that a really ma.s.sive crime often slips by unrecognized. One of my neighbors recently spent a week in the Vegas jail for "vagrancy." He's about twenty years old: Long hair, Levi jacket, napsack - an out-front drifter, a straight Road Person. Totally harmless; he just wanders around the country looking whatever it was that we all thought we'd nailed down in in the Sixties-sort of an early Bob Zimmerman trip.

On a trip from Chicago to L.A., he got curious about Vegas and decided to have a look at it. Just pa.s.sing through, strolling and digging the sights on the Strip . . . no hurry, why rush? He was standing on a street-corner near the Circus Circus, watching the multi-colored fountain, when the cop-cruiser pulled up.

Wham. Straight to jail. No phone call, no lawyer, no charge. "They put me in the car and took me down to the station." he said. "They took me into a big room full of people to take off all my clothes before they booked me. I was standing in front of a big desk, about six feet tall, with a cop sitting behind it and looking down at me like some kind of medieval judge.

"The room was full of people. Maybe a dozen prisoners; twice that many cops, and about ten policewomen. You had to walk out in the middle of the room, then take everything out of your pockets and put it up on the desk and then strip naked-with everybody watching you.

"I only had about twenty bucks, and the fine for vagrancy was twenty-five, so they put me over on a bench with the peo ple who were going to jail. n.o.body ha.s.sled me. It was like an a.s.sembly line.

"The two guys right behind me were longhairs. Acid people. They'd been picked up for vagrancy, too. But when they started emptying their pockets, the whole room freaked. Between them, they had $130,000, mostly in big bills. The cops couldn't believe it. These guys just kept pulling out wads of money and dumping it up there on the desk-both of them naked and kind of hunched over, not saying anything.

"The cops went crazy when they saw all that money. They started whispering to each other; s.h.i.+t, there was no way they could hold these guys for 'vagrancy."' He laughed. "So they charged them with 'suspicion of evasion of income taxes.'

"They took us all to jail, and these two guys were just about nuts. They were dealers, of course, and they had their stash back in their hotel room-so they had to get out before the cops found out where they were staying.

"They offered one of the guards a hundred bucks to go out and get the best lawyer in town . . . and about twenty minutes later there he was, yelling about habeas corpus and that kind of s.h.i.+t . . . h.e.l.l, I tried to talk to him myself, but this guy had a one-track mind. I told him I could make bail and even pay him something if they'd let me call my father in Chicago, but he was too busy hustling for these other guys.

"About two hours later he came back with a guard and said 'Let's go.' They were out. One of the guys had told me, while they were waiting, that it was going to cost them $30,000 . . . and I guess it did, but what the h.e.l.l? That's cheap, compared to what would have happened If they hadn't got themselves sprung.

"They finally let me send a telegram to my old man and he wired me 125 bucks . . .but it took seven or eight days. I'm not sure how long I was in there, because the place didn't have any windows and they fed us every twelve hours . . . You lose track of time when you can't see the sun.

"They had seventy-five guys in each cell-big rooms with a bowl out in the middle. They gave you a pallet when came in, and you slept wherever you wanted. The guy next to me had been in there for thirty years, for robbing a gas station.

"When I finally got out, the cop on the desk took another twenty-five bucks out of what my father sent me, on top of what I owed for the vagrancy fine. What could I say? He just took it. Then he gave me the other $75 and said they had a cab waiting for me outside, for the ride to the airport . . . and when I got in the cab the driver said, 'We're not making any stops, fella, and you'd better not move until we get to the terminal.'

"I didn't move a G.o.dd.a.m.n muscle. He'd have shot me. I'm sure of that. I went straight to the plane and I didn't say a word to anybody until I knew we were out of Nevada. Man, it's one place I'll never go back to."

11. Fraud? Larcent? Rape? . . . A Brutal Connection with the Alice from Room Service >I was brooding on this tale as I eased the White Whale into Flamingo parking lot. Fifty bucks and a week in jail for standing on a corner and acting curious . . . Jesus, what kind of incredible penalties would they spew out on me? I eked off the various charges-but in skeleton, legal-lan re form they didn't seem so bad: Rape? We could surely beat that one. I'd never even coveted the G.o.dd.a.m.n girl, much less put my hands on her flesh. Fraud? Larceny? I could always offer to "settle." Pay it off. Say I was sent out here by Sports Ill.u.s.trated and then drag the Time. Inc. lawyers into a nightmare lawsuit. Tie them up for years with a blizzard of writs and appeals.

Attach all their a.s.sets in places like Juneau and Houston, then constantly file for change of venue to Quito, Nome and Aruba . . . keep the thing moving, run them in circles, force them into conflict with the accounting department:

TIME SHEET FOR ABNER H. DODGE,.

CHIEF COUNSEL.

Item $44,066.12. . . Special outlay, to wit: We pursued the defendant, R. Duke, throughtout the Western Hemosphere and finally brought him to bay in a village on the north sh.o.r.e of an island known as Culebra in the Caribbean, where his attorney obtained a ruliong that all further proceedings should be conducted in the language of the Carib tribe. We sent three men to Berlitz for this purpose, but nineteen hours before the date scheduled for opening arguments, the defendant fled to Colombia, where he established residence in a fis.h.i.+ng village called Guajira near the Venezuelan border, where the official language of jurisprudence is an obscure dialect known as "Guajiro." After many monthe we were able to establish 3urls- diction in this place, but by that time the defendant had moved his residence to a virtually inaccessible port at the headwaters of the Amazon River, where he cultivated powerful connec tions with a tribe of headhunters called '"Jibaros." Our stringer in Manaus was dispatched upriver, to locate and hire a native attorney conversant in Jibaro, but the search has been hampered by serious communications problems. There is in fact grave concern, in our Rio office, that the widow of the aforementioned Manaus stringer might obtain a ruinous judgment-due to bias in local courts-far larger than any thing a jury in our own country would consider reasonable or even sane.

Indeed. But what is sane? Especially here in "our own country"-in this doomstruck era of Nixon. We are all wired into a survival trip now. No more of the speed that fueled the Sixties. Uppers are going out of style. This was the fatal flaw in Tim Leary's trip. He crashed around America selling "con sciousness expansion" without ever giving a thought to the grim meat-hook realities that were lying in wait for all the people who took him too seriously. After West Point and the Priesthood, LSD must have seemed entirely logical to him . . . but there is not much satisfaction in knowing that he blew it very badiy for himself, because he took too many oth ers down with him.

Not that they didn't deserve it: No doubt they all Got What Was Coming To Them. All those pathetically eager acid freaks who thought they could buy Peace and Understanding fot three bucks a hit. But their failure is ours, too.

What Leary took down with him was the central illusion of a whole life-style that he helped to create . . . a generation of permanent cripples, failed seekers, who never understood the essential old-mystic fallacy of the Acid Culture: the desperate a.s.sumption that somebody-or at least some force-is tending that Light at the end of the tunnel.

This is the same cruel and paradoxically benevolent bulls.h.i.+t has kept the Catholic Church going for so many centuries. It is also the military ethic . . . a blind faith in some higher and wiser "authority." The Pope, The General, The Prime Minister . . . all the way up to "G.o.d."

One of the crucial moments of the Sixties came on that day when the Beatles cast their lot with the Maharis.h.i.+. It was like Dylan going to the Vatican to kiss the Pope's ring.

First "gurus." Then, when that didn't work, back to Jesus. And now, following Manson's primitive/instinct lead, a whole new wave of clan-type commune G.o.ds like Mel Lyman, ruler Avatar, and What's His Name who runs "Spirit and Flesh."

Barger never quite got the hang of it, but he'll never iw how close he was to a king-h.e.l.l breakthrough. The An- blew it in 1965, at the Oakland-Berkeley line, when they acted on Barger's hardhat, con-boss instincts and attacked the front ranks of an anti-war march. This proved to be an historic schism in the then Rising Tide of the Youth Movement of the Sixties. It was the first open break between the Greasers and the Longhairs, and the importance of that break can be read in the history of SDS, which eventually destroyed in the doomed effort to reconcile the interests of the 'working cla.s.s biker/dropout types and the upper/mid Berkeley/student activists.

n.o.body involved in that scene, at the time, could possibly have foreseen the Implications of the Ginsberg/Kesey failure to pursuade the h.e.l.l's Angels to join forces with the radical Left from Berkeley. The final split came at Altamont, four years later, but by that time it had long been clear to everybody except a handful of rock industry dopers and the national press. The orgy of violence at Altamont merey dramatized dramatized the problem. The realities were already fixed; the illness was understood to be terminal, and the energies of The Movement were long since aggressively dissipated by the rush to self-preservation. the problem. The realities were already fixed; the illness was understood to be terminal, and the energies of The Movement were long since aggressively dissipated by the rush to self-preservation.

Ah; this terrible gibberish. Grim memories and bad flash backs, looming up through the time/fog of Stanyan Street . . . no solace for refugees, no point in looking back. The question, as always, is now now . . .? . . .?

I was slumped on my bed in the Flamingo, feeling dangerously out of phase with my surroundings. Something ugly was about to happen. I was sure of it. The room looked like the site of some disastrous zoological experiment involving whiskey and gorillas. The ten-foot mirror was shattered, but still hanging together - bad evidence of that afternoon when my attorney ran amok with the coconut hammer, smas.h.i.+ng mirror and all the lightbulbs.

We'd replaced the lights with a package of red and blue Christmas tree lights from Safeway, but there was no hope of saving the mirror. My attorney's bed looked like a burned- rat's nest. Fire had consumed the top half, and the rest a ma.s.s of wire and charred stuffing. Luckily, the maids had'nt come near the room since that awful confrontation on Tuesday.

I been asleep when the maid came in that morning. We'd forgotten to hang out the "Do Not Disturb" sign . . . so she wandered into the room and startled my attorney, who kneeling, stark naked, in the closet, vomiting into his shoes . . . thinking he was actually in the bathroom, and then suddenly looking up to see a woman with a face like Mickey Rooney staring down at him, unable to speak, trembling with fear and confusion.

She was holding that mop like an axe-handle," he said "So I came out of the closet in a kind of running crouch, vomiting, and hit her right at the knees . . . it was pure instinct; I thought she was ready to kill me . . . and then, she screamed, that's when I put the icebag on her mouth."

I remembered that scream . . . one of the most terrifiying sounds I'd ever heard. I woke up and saw my attorney grappling desperately on the floor right next to my bed with what appeared to be an old woman. The room was full of electric noise. The TV set, hissing at top volume on a nonexistent channel. I could barely hear the woman's cries as she struggled to get the icebag away from her face . . . but she was no match for my attorney's naked bulk, and he finally managed to pin her in a corner behind the TV set, clamping his hands on her throat while she babbled I . . . "Please . . . please . . . I'm only the maid, I did'nt mean mean anything..." anything..."

I was out of bed in a flash, grabbing my wallet and waving the gold Policemen's Benevolent a.s.sn. press badge in front of her face."You're under arrest!" I shouted.

"No!" she groaned. "I just wanted to clean up!"

My attorney got to his feet, breathing heavily. "She must have used a pa.s.s key," he said. "I was polis.h.i.+ng my shoes in the closet when I noticed her sneaking in-so I took her." He was trembling, drooling vomit off his chin, and I could see at a glance that he understood the gravity of this situation. Our behavior, this time, had gone far past the boundaries of private kinkiness. Here we were, both naked, staring down at a terrified old woman - a hotel employee - stretched out on the floor of our suite in a paroxysm of fear and hysteria. She would have to be dealt with.

"What made you do it?" I asked her. "Who paid you off?"

"n.o.body!" she wailed. "I'm the maid!"

"You're lying!" shouted my attorney. "You were after the evidence! Who put youup to this - the manager?"

"I work for the hotel," she said. "All I do is clean up the rooms."

I turned to my attorney. "This means they know what we have," I said. "So they sent this poor old woman up here to steal it."

"No!" she yelled. "I don't know what you're talking about!"

"Bulls.h.i.+t!" said my attorney. "You're just as much a part of it as they are."

"Part of what?"

"The dope ring," I said. "You must know what's going on in this hotel. Why do you think we're here?"

She stared at us, trying to speak but only blubbering. "I know you're cops," she said finally. "But I thought you were just here for that convention. I swear! All I wanted to do was clean up your room. I don't know anything about dope!"

My attorsey laughed. "Come on, baby. Don't try to tell us you never heard of the Grange Gorman."

"No!" she yelled. "No! I swear to Jesus I never heard of that stuff!"

My attorney seemed to think for a moment, then he leaned to help the old lady to her feet. "Maybe she's telling the he said to me. "Maybe she's not part of it."

"No! I swear I'm not!" she howled.

"Well .. ." I said. "In that case, maybe we won't have to put her away . . . maybe she can help."

"Yes!" she said eagerly. "I'll help you all you need! I hate dope dope!"

"So do we, lady," I said.

"I think we should put her on the payroll," said my attorney. "Have her checked out, then line her up for a Big One each month, depending on what she comes up with."

The old woman's face had changed markedly. She no longer seemed disturbed to find herself chatting with two naked men, one of whom had tried to strangle her just a few moments earlier.

"Do you think you could handle it?" I asked her.

"What?"

"One phone call every day," said my attorney. "Just tell us what you've seen." He patted her on the shoulder. "Don't worry if it doesn't add up. That's our problem."

She grinned. "You'd pay me for that?"

"You're d.a.m.n right," I said. "But the first time you say anything about this, to anybody anybody - you'll go straight to prison for the rest of your life." - you'll go straight to prison for the rest of your life."