Slaughterhouse 34

Start Time: 10:33 PM
End Time: 11:59 PM
Word Count: 723 (not counting intro)

“Write a review of an event or story from your life from the perspective/voice of Hunter Thompson.”

Wow. First off, the intro doesn’t count.

My first exposure to the writing of Hunter Thompson was when I was about 14, through a collection of his newspaper columns he’d written for the San Francisco Examiner in the mid-80s, entitled “Generation of Swine: Tales Of Shame and Degradation in the Eighties,” individual lines of which I can still remember. At that time he was writing a mad pastiche of politics, football, and human interest stories. I think at the time he was working as night manager at the O’Farrell Theater in San Francisco, “the Carnegie Hall of public sex in America,” for a forthcoming book, The Night Manager.

I didn’t realize what “Gonzo” was. I knew a little about the Uncle Duke character in “Doonesbury,” and I remembered a Time magazine back page article showing him in the plaid flannel coat, picturing him shooting a typewriter and mentioning burning a Christmas tree in a fireplace.

It was the summer after high school that I discovered “Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas: A Savage Journey Into The Heart of The American Dream,” which about 98% of 18-year-olds pick up along with a Hendrix album, a Jim Morrison haircut, and an experimental attitude towards drugs. I spent the next few years after that reading nearly everything of his I could get my hands on. Everything the campus bookstore offered, I got. I’ve deliberately left some of it out there, because there’s one thing about reading Hunter Thompson: you, too, think that you should be able to throw yourself into any situation and find its essential truth through loutish behavior and two-fisted use of dangerous substances. And if you fancy yourself a writer type, you think, shit, I can do this.

And, being the impressionable young man that I was, I thought that I could. Some of the stuff from then was almost unintelligible, and these were the days of Vivarin and Ultra Pep-Back and chocolate covered espresso beans from Gloria Jean’s in the morning at my new job, Hunter and writing and Sominex at the end of the night.

In a wild bout of insecurity and overdramatization in my early 20s, I set everything I’d written up to then on fire. (Here’s a handy tip: ashes fly around a barbecue if you open the lid to watch, and you’re no less insecure after you set a ream or so of paper on fire.) Most of it deserved its fate, and in none of it did I write something as good as this:

“I remembered the girl. We’d had a problem with her on the elevator a few hours earlier: my attorney had made a fool of himself.
“You must be a rider,” she’d said. “What class are you in?”
“Class?” He snapped. “What do you mean?”
“What do you ride?” she asked with a quick smile. “We’re filming the race for a TV series – maybe we can use you.”
“Use me?”
Mother of God, I thought. Here it comes. The elevator was crowded with race people: it was taking a long time to get from floor to floor. By the time we’d stopped at Three, he was trembling badly. Five more to go…
““I ride the big ones!” he shouted suddenly. “The really big fuckers!”
I laughed, trying to defuse the scene. “The Vincent Black Shadow,” I said. We’re with the factory team.”
This brought a murmur of rude dissent from the crowd. “Bullshit,” somebody behind me muttered.
“Wait a minute!” my attorney shouted…and then to the girl: “Pardon me, lady, but I think there’s some kind of ignorant chicken-sucker in this car who needs his face cut open.” He plunged his hand into the pocket of his black plastic jacket and turned to face the people crowded into the rear of the elevator. “You cheap honky faggots,” he snarled. Which one of you wants to get cut?”

-Hunter Thompson, “Fear and Loathing In Las Vegas”

(I just opened my copy of Fear and Loathing to type that, the edition that has Generation of Swine as well, and not only did I find a note regarding a change to my Econ 121 schedule on one of the front pages, I saw a Post-It note in my ex-wife’s handwriting with three of my old phone numbers on it. I remember giving her the book early on, when we’d met up again. Wow, indeed.)

When Thompson committed suicide in 2005, I was saddened, but not devastated. His recent work had demonstrated that he had found a more lucrative life in being the cartoon character than the man who typed the Great Gatsby twice, for practice. I was a little wistful at the disappearance of that little writerly fantasy of standing there in his kitchen, reading his work aloud to him as he wondered if you could get the rhythm right, the cadence, betting on football and watching three satellite dishes in the middle of the Aspen night.

There’s a room in heaven where he and Warren Zevon and Artie Mitchell and Oscar Acosta and Ernest Hemingway and William Faulkner and F. Scott Fitzgerald are hanging out, and I imagine Ed Turner and Ed Bradley stop by every once in a while, just like they’d pop up in Generation of Swine, and the laughter is copious and the line for just a glimpse is probably thousands deep, and maybe I’ll get to elbow my way to the front to check it out.

Mahalo, Doc.

We were knee deep in booze at this point, somehow Certain that the next drink would be the discovery that we had been waiting our whole lives to find. Brian was leading the experiment.

“Fuck, this is terrible.”
“What’d you order?”
“Amaretto and cream.”

Christ, I thought, that doesn’t even make sense. Watching Logic get the better of our twisted little plan to try as many drinks as possible was discouraging.
It was 9 in the morning on a Sunday in Las Vegas, and that meant Football, on more screens than most of these rubes could count and nothing but nonstop speedy Action. The betting would be frenzied, and we had our share of action involved as well. We were the grist of the sports book, the people who think they have the slightest fucking idea what they’re doing.

The plan was to watch ALL of the games at once, darting our eyes back and forth like pinballs on fire to catch every play, fortifying ourselves with as many twisted chemicals as they would feed us for free. The sports book, the hotel, all of Vegas adored us. We were the tourists of their dreams: young, suffused in hubris and solid gold credit risks.

Ken looked on silently, taking it all in. Mark’s eyes were moving to glassy on the other side of his glasses. I had been fortified by a breakfast consisting of nothing but eight strips of bacon and Coca-Cola, shooting a savage look through bloodshot eyes at a senior citizen clutching her hands around a two-for-one coupon to the Fabulous Oz Buffet. With next to no sleep for my third day in a row at this point, I wasn’t in the mood for her grandmotherly gaze at my ignorance of the nutritional pyramid. Somewhere beyond the stubble and the pupils like rhesus monkeys, she declined to comment further.

We hunkered down for the first half, feeling like we were at a control panel for NASA. The yardage, the scores, everything up to the second, tearing through the games like crack addled mice, before DirectTV would stroll along a decade later and figure out this is what football should be about, not your fucking AFLAC trivia or the soul-crushing huddles and analysis by self-serving chuckleheads such as Dan Dierdorf.

They brought gin, beer, vodka, tequila, all manner of house-pour spirits in any combination we could think up. My stomach contemplated getting violently ill but hung on. By the second half, we had decided that we would be ill-served by such concepts as sunlight or doing anything outdoors. And travel proved entirely unnecessary; we were getting all of the action we needed right here.

In Chicago, I’d seen the crazed atavistic frenzy that was the Board of Trade open outcry pits; men hollering quotes for commodities through purple faces, a building that had a defibrillator since the Seventies, all with the sheer naked ambition towards getting Rich. The men had it here, too – cigars with baseball caps indoors, proclaiming loyalties and concealing baldness. And as quick as a flashbulb, a genuine Frenzy broke out.

The 1-15 Jets were going to beat the fucking spread. Mother of babbling Christ. Left and right, parlays that would have covered tuition were being driven to ruin. The Eagles were playing like winos and were headed to the playoffs that year, and held a one point lead. The spread favored them by 6 and they led, 21-20.

Cazart! A last-second interception! The bald, the fat, the unathletic, the doomed – they rose as one to cheer on the Eagles cornerback who’d intercepted the ball, headed for the end zone with less than a minute left! Hope! Payday! Redemption! GO! GO! GO! He was tackled at the 1, and that stone brute of a running back, Ricky Watters, would no doubt pound it into the end zone and deliver salvation to the wretches beneath the cathode ray masses at the MGM.

But the Eagles had a one point lead with less than a minute left.

I lingering sense of doom enveloped the masses. “NO!” a paunchy man shrieked as they took a knee. The Eagles would win but not cover.

We examined each other carefully, ensuring that none of us had been ensnared in Fortune’s trap. Then we began giggling hysterically, searching for Truth, Desire, and another free drink…