Fear and loathing in Las Vegas, and other American stories (13 page)

I was enjoying this whipsong, but after a while I felt dizzy, bad nervous, and my impatience got the better of my amusement. So I stepped around the Pig and spoke directly to the desk clerk. “Say,” I said, “I hate to interrupt, but I have a reservation and I wonder if maybe I could just sort of slide through and get out of your way.” I smiled, letting him know I’d been digging his snake-bully act on the cop party that was now standing there, psychologically off-balance and staring at me like I was some kind of water-rat crawling up to the desk.

I looked pretty bad: wearing old Levis and white Chuck Taylor All-Star basketball sneakers . . . and my ten-peso Acapulco shirt had long since come apart at the shoulder seams from all that road-wind. My beard was about three days old, bordering on standard wino trim, and my eyes were totally hidden by Sandy Bull’s Saigon-mirror shades.

But my voice had the tone of a man who
knows
he has a reservation. I was gambling on my attorney’s foresight . . . but I couldn’t pass a chance to put the horn into a cop:

. . . and I was right. The reservation was in my attorney’s name. The desk-clerk hit his bell to summon the bag-boy. “This is all I have with me, right now,” I said. “The rest is out there in that white Cadillac convertible.” I pointed to the car that we could all see parked just outside the front door. “Can you have somebody drive it around to the room?”

The desk-clerk was friendly. “Don’t worry about a thing, sir. Just enjoy your stay here—and if there’s anything you need, just call the desk.”

I nodded and smiled, half-watching the stunned reaction of the cop-crowd right next to me. They were stupid with shock. Here they were arguing with every piece of leverage they could command, for a room they’d already
paid for
—and suddenly their whole act gets side-swiped by some crusty drifter who looks like something out of an upper-Michigan hobo jungle. And he checks in with a handful of
credit cards!
Jesus! What’s happening in this world?

I gave my bag to the boy who scurried up, and told him to bring a quart of Wild Turkey and two fifths of Bacardi Anejo with a night’s worth of ice.

Our room was in one of the farthest wings of the Flamingo. The place is far more than a hotel: It is a sort of huge underfinanced Playboy Club in the middle of the desert. Something like nine separate wings, with interconnecting causeways and pools—a vast complex, sliced up by a maze of car-ramps and driveways. It took me about twenty minutes to wander from the desk to the distant wing we’d been assigned to.

My idea was to get into the room, accept the booze and baggage delivery, then smoke my last big chunk of Singapore Grey while watching Walter Cronkite and waiting for my attorney to arrive. I needed this break, this moment of peace and refuge, before we did the Drug Conference. It was going to be quite a different thing from the Mint 400. That had been an
observer
gig, but this one would need
participation
—and a very special stance: At the Mint 400 we were dealing with an essentially simpatico crowd, and if our behavior was gross and outrageous . . . well, it was only a matter of degree.

But this time our very
presence
would be an outrage. We would be attending the conference under false pretenses and dealing, from the start, with a crowd that was convened for the stated purpose of putting people like us in jail. We
were
the Menace—not in disguise, but stone-obvious drug abusers, with a flagrantly cranked-up act that we intended to push all the way to the limit . . . not to prove any final, sociological point, and not even as a conscious mockery: It was mainly a matter of life-style, a sense of obligation and even duty. If the Pigs were gathering in Vegas for a top-level Drug Conference, we felt the drug culture should be represented.

Beyond that, I’d been out of my head for so long now, that a gig like this seemed perfectly logical. Considering the circumstances, I felt totally meshed with my karma.

Or at least I was feeling this way until I got to the big grey door that opened into Mini-Suite 1150 in the Far Wing. I rammed my key into the knob-lock and swung the door open, thinking, “Ah, home at last!” . . . but the door
hit
something, which I recognized at once as a human form: a girl of indeterminate age with the face and form of a Pit Bull. She was wearing a shapeless blue smock and her eyes were angry . . .

Somehow I knew that I had the right room. I wanted to think otherwise, but the vibes were hopelessly right . . . and she seemed to know, too, because she made no move to stop me when I moved past her and into the suite. I tossed my leather satchel on one of the beds and looked around for what I knew I would see . . . my attorney . . . stark naked, standing in the bathroom door with a drug-addled grin on his face.

“You degenerate pig,” I muttered.

“It can’t be helped,” he said, nodding at the bulldog girl. “This is Lucy.” He laughed distractedly. “You know—like Lucy in the sky with diamonds . . .”

I nodded to Lucy, who was eyeing me with definite venom. I was clearly some kind of enemy, some ugly intrusion on her scene . . . and it was clear from the way she moved around the room, very quick and tense on her feet, that she was sizing me up. She was ready for violence, there was not much doubt about that. Even my attorney picked up on it.

“Lucy!” he snapped. “Lucy! Be cool, goddamnit! Remember what happened at the airport . . . no more of that, OK?” He smiled nervously at her. She had the look of a beast that had just been tossed into a sawdust pit to fight for its life . . .

“Lucy . . . this is my
client;
this is Mister Duke, the famous journalist. He’s
paying
for this suite, Lucy. He’s on
our
side.”

She said nothing. I could see that she was not entirely in control of herself. Huge shoulders on the woman, and a chin like Oscar Bonavena. I sat down on the bed and casually reached into my satchel for the Mace can . . . and when I felt my thumb on the Shoot button I was tempted to jerk the thing out and soak her down on general principles, I desperately needed
peace,
rest, sanctuary. The last thing I wanted was a fight to the finish, in my own hotel room, with some kind of drug-crazed hormone monster.

My attorney seemed to understand this; he knew why my hand was in the satchel.

“No!” he shouted. “Not here! We’ll have to move out!”

I shrugged. He was twisted. I could see that. And so was Lucy. Her eyes were feverish and crazy. She was staring at me like I was something that would have to be rendered helpless before life could get back to whatever she considered normal.

My attorney idled over and put his arm around her shoulders. “Mister Duke is my
friend”
he said gently. “He loves artists. Let’s show him your paintings.”

For the first time, I noticed that the room was full of artwork—maybe forty or fifty portraits, some in oil, some charcoal, all more or less the same size and all the same face. They were propped up on every flat surface. The face was vaguely familiar, but I couldn’t get a fix on it. It was a girl with a broad mouth, a big nose and extremely glittering eyes—a demoniacally sensual face; the kind of over-stated, embarrassingly dramatic renderings that you find in the bedrooms of young female art students who get hung up on horses.

“Lucy paints portraits of Barbra Streisand,” my attorney explained. “She’s an artist up in Montana . . .” He turned to the girl. “What’s that town where you live?”

She stared at him, then at me, then back at my attorney again. Then finally she said, “Kalispel. Way up north. I drew these from TV.”

My attorney nodded eagerly. “Fantastic,” he said. “She came all the way down here just to give all these portraits to Barbra. We’re going over to the Americana Hotel tonight, and meet her backstage.”

Lucy smiled bashfully. There was no more hostility in her. I dropped the Mace can and stood up. We obviously had a serious case on our hands. I hadn’t counted on this: Finding my attorney whacked on acid and locked into some kind of preternatural courtship.

“Well,” I said, “I guess they’ve brought the car around by now. Let’s get the stuff out of the trunk.”

He nodded eagerly. “Absolutely, let’s get the stuff.” He smiled at Lucy. “We’ll be right back. Don’t answer the phone if it rings.”

She grinned and made the one-finger Jesus freak sign. “God bless,” she said.

My attorney pulled on a pair of elephant-leg pants and a glaze-black shirt, then we hurried out of the room. I could see he was having trouble getting oriented, but I refused to humor him.

“Well . . .” I said. “What are your plans?”

“Plans?”

We were waiting for the elevator.

“Lucy,” I said.

He shook his head, struggling to focus on the question. “Shit,” he said finally. “I met her on the plane and I had all that acid.” He shrugged. “You know, those little blue barrels. Jesus, she’s a
religious
freak. She’s running away from home for something like the fifth time in six months. It’s terrible. I gave her that cap before I realized . . . shit, she’s never even had a
drink!
”

“Well,” I said, “it’ll probably work out. We can keep her loaded and peddle her ass at the drug convention.”

He stared at me.

“She’s perfect for this gig,” I said. “These cops will go fifty bucks a head to beat her into submission and then gang-fuck her. We can set her up in one of these back-street motels, hang pictures of Jesus all over the room, then turn these pigs loose on her . . . Hell, she’s strong; she’ll hold her own.”

His face was twitching badly. We were in the elevator now, descending into the lobby. “Jesus Christ,” he muttered. “I knew you were sick, but I never expected to hear you actually
say
that kind of stuff.”

He seemed stunned.

I laughed. “It’s straight economics. This girl is a
god-send!”
I fixed him with a natural Bogart smile, all teeth . . . “Shit, we’re almost broke! And suddenly you pick up some muscle-bound loony who can make us a grand a day.”

“No!” he shouted. “Stop
talking
like that!” The elevator door opened and we walked toward the parking lot.

“I figure she can do about four at a time,” I said. “Christ, if we keep her full of acid that’s more like
two grand
a day; maybe
three.
”

“You filthy bastard!” he sputtered. “I should cave your fucking head in!” He was squinting at me, shielding his eyes from the sun. I spotted the Whale about fifty feet from the door. “There it is,” I said. “Not a bad looking car, for a pimp . . .”

He groaned. His face reflected the struggle that I knew he was having, in his brain, with sporadic acid rushes: Bad waves of painful intensity, followed by total confusion. When I opened the trunk of the Whale to get the bags, he got angry. “What the hell are you
doing?
” he snapped. “This isn’t Lucy’s car.”

“I know,” I said. “It’s mine. This is
my
luggage.”

“The fuck it is!” he shouted. “Just because I’m a goddamn lawyer doesn’t mean you can walk around stealing stuff right in front of me!” He backed away. “What the hell is
wrong
with you? We’ll never beat a rap like this.”

After much difficulty, we got back to the room and tried to have a serious talk with Lucy. I felt like a Nazi, but it had to be done. She was not
right
for us—not in this fragile situation. It was bad enough if she were only what she appeared to be—a strange young girl in the throes of a bad psychotic episode—but what worried me far more than that was the likelihood that she would probably be just sane enough, in a few hours, to work herself into a towering Jesus-based rage at the hazy recollection of being picked up and seduced in the Los Angeles International Airport by some kind of cruel Samoan who fed her liquor and LSD, then dragged her to a Vegas hotel room and savagely penetrated every orifice in her body with his throbbing, uncircumcised member.

I had a terrible vision of Lucy crashing into Barbra Streisand’s dressing room at the Americana and laying this brutal story on her. That would finish us. They would track us down and probably castrate us both, prior to booking . . .

I explained this to my attorney, who was now in tears at the idea of sending Lucy away. She was still powerfully twisted, and I felt the only solution was to get her as far as possible from the Flamingo before she got straight enough to remember where she’d been and what happened to her.

Lucy, while we argued, was lying on the patio, doing a charcoal sketch of Barbra Streisand. From memory this time. It was a full-faced rendering, with teeth like baseballs and eyes like jellied fire.

The sheer intensity of the thing made me nervous. This girl was a walking bomb. God only knows what she might be doing with all that mis-wired energy right now if she didn’t have her sketch pad. And what was she going to do when she got straight enough to read
The Vegas Visitor,
as I just had, and learn that Streisand wasn’t due at the Americana for another three weeks?