Kingdom of Fear (45 page)

It was a LaSalle sedan, as I recall, a slick-looking brute with a powerful straight-eight engine and a floor-mounted gearshift, maybe a 1939 model. We never got it started, because the battery was dead and gasoline was scarce. There was a war on. You had to have special coupons to buy five gallons of gas, and the coupons were tightly rationed. People hoarded and coveted them, but nobody complained, because we were fighting the Nazis and our tanks needed all the gasoline for when they hit the beaches of Normandy.

Looking back on it now, I see clearly that the reason we drove down to the West End to visit my grandmother every other Sunday was to con her out of her gas coupons for the LaSalle. She was an old lady and she didn’t need any gasoline. But her car was still registered and she still got her coupons every month.

So what? I would do the same thing myself, if my mother had gasoline and I didn’t. We
all
would. It is the Law of Supply and Demand—and this is, after all, the final messy year of the American Century, and people are getting nervous. Hoarders are coming out of the closet, muttering darkly about Y2K and buying cases of Dinty Moore’s Beef Stew. Dried figs are popular, along with rice and canned hams. I, personally, am hoarding bullets, many thousands of them. Bullets will always be valuable, especially when yr. lights go out and your phone goes dead and your neighbors start running out of food. That is when you will find out who your friends are. Even close family members will turn on you. After the year 2000, the only people who’ll be safe to have as friends will be dead people.

HST, March 1998

. . .

I used to respect William Burroughs because he was the first white man ever busted for marijuana in my time. William was the Man. He was the victim of an illegal police raid at his home at 509 Wagner Street in Old Algiers, a low-rent suburb across the river from New Orleans, where he was settling in for a while to do some shooting and smoke marijuana.

William didn’t fuck around. He was serious about everything. When the Deal went down William was There, with a gun. Whacko!
BOOM.
Stand back. I
am
the Law. He was my hero a long time before I ever heard of him.

But he was
Not
the first white man to be busted for weed in my time. No. That was Robert Mitchum, the actor, who was arrested three months earlier in Malibu at the front door of his hideaway beach house for possession of marijuana and suspicion of molesting a teenage girl in 1948. I remember the photos: Mitchum wearing an undershirt & snarling at the cops with the sea rolling up and palm trees blowing.

Yessir, that was my boy. Between Mitchum and Burroughs & Marlon Brando & James Dean & Jack Kerouac, I got myself a serious running start before I was 20 years old, and there was no turning back. Buy the ticket, take the ride.

So welcome to
Thunder Road,
Bubba. It was one of those movies that got a grip on me when I was too young to resist. It convinced me that the only way to drive was at top speed with a car full of whiskey, and I have been driving that way ever since, for good or ill.

The girl in the photos with Mitchum looked about 15 years old & she was also wearing an undershirt, with an elegant little nipple jutting out. The cops were trying to cover her chest with a raincoat as they rushed through the door. Mitchum was also charged with Sodomy and Contributing to the Delinquency of a Minor.

I was having my own troubles with police in those years. We stole cars and drank gin and did a lot of fast driving at night to places like Nashville & Atlanta & Chicago. We needed music on those nights, and it usually came on the radio—on the 50,000-watt clear-channel stations like WWL in New Orleans and WLAC in Nashville.

That is where I went wrong, I guess—listening to WLAC & driving all night across Tennessee in a stolen car that wouldn’t be reported for
three days. That is how I got introduced to the Howlin’ Wolf. We didn’t know him, but we liked him & we knew what he was talking about. “I Smell a Rat” is a pure rock & roll monument to the axiom that says “There is no such thing as Paranoia.” The Wolf could kick out the jams, but he had a melancholy side to him. He could tear your heart out like the worst kind of honky-tonk. If history judges a man by his heroes, like they say, then let the record show that Howlin’ Wolf was one of mine. He was a monster.

Music has always been a matter of energy to me, a question of Fuel. Sentimental people call it Inspiration, but what they really mean is Fuel.

I have always needed fuel. I am a serious consumer. On some nights I still believe that a car with the gas needle on empty can run about fifty more miles if you have the right music very loud on the radio. A new high-end Cadillac will go ten or fifteen miles faster if you give it a full dose of “Carmelita.” This has been proven many times. That is why you see so many Cadillacs parked in front of truck stops on Highway 66 around midnight. These are Speed Pimps, and they are loading up on more than gasoline. You watch one of these places for a while & you see a pattern: A big fast car pulls up in front of the doors and a wild-looking girl gets out, stark naked except for a fur coat or a ski parka, and she runs into the place with a handful of money, half-crazy to buy some flat-out guaranteed driving music.

It happens over & over, and sooner or later you get hooked on it, you get addicted. Every time I hear “White Rabbit” I am back on the greasy midnight streets of San Francisco, looking for music, riding a fast red motorcycle downhill into The Presidio, leaning desperately into the curves through the eucalyptus trees, trying to get to the Matrix in time to hear Grace Slick play the flute.

There was no piped-in music on those nights, no headphones or Walkmans or even a plastic windscreen to keep off the rain. But I could hear the music anyway, even when it was five miles away. Once you heard the music done right, you could pack it into yr. brain & take it anywhere, forever.

Yessir. That is my wisdom and that is my song. It is Sunday and I am making new rules for myself. I will open my heart to spirits and pay more attention to animals. I will take some harp music and drive down to the Texaco station, where I can get a pork taco and read a
New York Times.
After that, I will walk across the street to the Post Office and slip my letter into her mailbox.

. . .

KNOW YOUR DOPE FIEND. YOUR LIFE MAY DEPEND ON IT! You will not be able to see his eyes because of Tea-Shades, but his knuckles will be white from inner tension and his pants will be crusted with semen from constantly jacking off when he can’t find a rape victim. He will stagger and babble when questioned. He will not respect your badge. The Dope Fiend fears nothing. He will attack, for no reason, with every weapon at his command—including yours. BEWARE. Any officer apprehending a suspected marijuana addict should use all necessary force immediately. One stitch in time (on him) will usually save nine on you. Good luck.

(Ralph Steadman)

Going to Hollywood is a dangerous high-pressure gig for most people, under any circumstances. It is like pumping hot steam into thousands of different-size boilers. The laws of physics mandate that some will explode before others—although all of them will explode sooner or later unless somebody cuts off the steam.

I love steam myself, and I have learned to survive under savage and unnatural pressures. I am a steam freak. Hollywood is chicken feed to me. I can take it or leave it. I have been here before, many times. On some days it seems like I have lived at the Château Marmont for half my life. There is blood on these walls, and some of it is mine. Last night I sliced off the tips of two fingers and bled so profusely in the elevator that they had to take it out of service.

But nobody complained. I am not just liked at the Château, I am well liked. I have important people thrown out or blacklisted on a whim. Nobody from the Schwarzenegger organization, for instance, can even get a drink at the Château. They are verboten. There is a ghastly political factor in doing any business with Hollywood. You can’t get by without five or six personal staff people—and at least one personal astrologer.

I have always hated astrologers, and I like to have sport with them. They are harmless quacks in the main, but some of them get ambitious and turn predatory, especially in Hollywood. In Venice Beach I ran into a man who claimed to be Johnny Depp’s astrologer. “I consult with him constantly,” he told me. “We are never far away. I have many famous clients.” He produced a yellow business card and gave it to me. “I can do things for you,” he said. “I am a player.”

I took his card and examined it carefully for a moment, as if I couldn’t quite read the small print. But I knew he was lying, so I leaned toward him and slapped him sharply in the nuts. Not hard, but very quickly, using the back of my hand and my fingers like a bullwhip, yet very discreetly.

He let out a hiss and went limp, unable to speak or breathe. I smiled casually and kept on talking to him as if nothing had happened. “You filthy little creep,” I said to him. “I
am
Johnny Depp!”

Outside on the boulevard I saw a half-naked girl on roller skates being
mauled by two dogs. They were Great Danes, apparently running loose. Both had their paws on her shoulder, and the gray one had her head in its mouth. But there was no noise, and nobody seemed to notice.

I grabbed a fork off the bar and rushed outside to help her, giving the bogus astrologer another slap in the nuts on my way out. When I got to the street, the dogs were still mauling the girl. I stabbed the big one in the ribs with my fork, which sank deep into the tissue. The beast yelped crazily and ran off with its tail between its legs. The other one quickly released its grip on the girl’s head and snarled at me. I slashed at it with the fork, and that was enough for the brute. It backed off and slunk away toward Muscle Beach.

I took the girl back to the Buffalo Club and applied aloe to her wounds. The astrologer was gone, and we had the lounge to ourselves. Her name was Anita, she said, and she had just arrived in L.A. to seek work as a dancer. It was the third time in ten days she’d been attacked by wild dogs on the Venice boardwalk, and she was ready to quit L.A., and so was I. The pace was getting to me. I was not bored, and I still had work to do, but it was definitely time to get out of town. I had to be in Big Sur in three days, and then to a medical conference in Pebble Beach. She was a very pretty girl, with elegant legs and a wicked kind of intelligence about her, but she was also very naïve about Hollywood. I saw at once that she would be extremely helpful on my trip north.

I listened to her for a while, then I offered her a job as my assistant, which I badly needed. She accepted, and we drove back to the Château in Depp’s Porsche. As we pulled up the ramp to the underground garage, the attendants backed off and signaled me in. Depp’s henchmen had left word that nobody could touch the car except me. I parked it expertly, barely missing a red BMW 840Ci, and we went up the elevator to my suite.

I reached for my checkbook, but it was missing, so I used one of Depp’s that I’d found in the glove compartment of his car. I wrote her a healthy advance and signed Depp’s name to it. “What the hell?” I said to her. “He’s running around out there with my checkbook right now, probably racking up all kinds of bills.”

That was the tone of my workdays in Hollywood: violence, joy, and constant Mexican music. At one club I played the bass recorder for several hours with the band. We spent a lot of time drinking gin and
lemonade on the balcony, entertaining movie people and the ever-present scribe from
Rolling Stone
magazine . . .

You bet, Bubba, I was taking care of business. It was like the Too Much Fun Club. I had the Cadillac and a green Mustang in the garage, in addition to the Carrera 4 Porsche, but we could only drive one of them up the coast. It was an uptown problem.

Finally it got to be too much, so we loaded up the Northstar Cadillac and fled. Why not? I thought. The girl had proved to be a tremendous help, and besides, I was beginning to like her.

. . .

The sun was going down as we left Malibu and headed north on 101, running smoothly through Oxnard and along the ocean to Santa Barbara. My companion was a little nervous about my speed, so I gave her some gin to calm her down. Soon she relaxed against me, and I put my arm around her. Rosanne Cash was on the radio, singing about the seven-year ache, and the traffic was opening up.

As we approached the Lompoc exit, I mentioned that Lompoc was the site of a federal penitentiary and I once had some friends over there.

“Oh?” she said. “Who were they?”

“Prisoners,” I said. “Nothing serious. That’s where Ed was.”

She stiffened and moved away from me, but I turned up the music and we settled back to drive and watch the moon come up. What the hell? I thought. Just another young couple on the road to the American Dream.

Things started to get weird when I noticed Pismo Beach coming up. I was on the cell phone with Benicio Del Toro, the famous Puerto Rican actor, telling him about the time I was violently jailed in Pismo Beach and how it was making me nervous to even pass a road sign with that name on it. “Yeah,” I was saying, “it was horrible. They beat me on the back of my legs. It was a case of mistaken identity.” I smiled at my assistant, not wanting to alarm her, but I saw that she was going into a fetal crouch and her fingers were clutching the straps of her seat belt.