"No, this is not a good town for psychedelic drugs. Reality itself is too twisted." Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas----------------------------
It is a fact undisputed that some great moments in history are defined much more by context than by the actual events taking place.
Some kid playing the national anthem on his guitar may not in itself seem like an act of great import. When the kid is Jimi Hendrix, though, and the rock alien’s fucked up helter skelter rendition is ringing out over a field of hundreds of thousands of hippie space cadets at Woodstock, with the late sixties maelstrom of race riots, state murder and the bloodbath of Vietnam going on around it…well, then the “Star Spangled Banner” is made to really mean something.
When Whoregina hoisted up her dress and pissed all over a Ferrari in the parking lot of the Mirage casino with a head full of mushrooms and MDMA, it was a similar scenario.
A petite blond crouched back on her palms in one of the most prestigious and, therefore gaudy casinos in Vegas giving it full jets with a Camel light drooping from the side of her mouth is not a political statement. It’s Art, motherfucker.
But what drew us to such debauchery? The answer is complex and undoubtedly relates to some basic flaw in our hardwiring that most likely goes back to an incident in childhood.
For the purposes of this story, let’s just say it started a few hours earlier in the parking lot of the Taco Mexico. Our hobo friends had left us (see last entry) and the sun was setting in an ostentatious blaze of chimney red and orange out to the west and we decided to prep ourselves for the night ahead. Whoregina had bought the drugs in New York, a serious collection but we weren’t deluding ourselves, it was not anywhere near on a par with the Good Doctor…That’s fine though, do you know why? Because we’re standing on the shoulder of a giant here. And in any case, Thompson’s heroics were the product of a different time. The never-ending “War on Drugs” that Richard Nixon’s abysmal and corrupt administration dreamed up and which sucked so much of the joy and free-spiritedness out of the alternative lifestyle was not yet up and running when “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas” came out. The National District Attorney Association’s anti-drugs convention his alter ego, Raoul Duke, attends in the book twisted on mescaline was just the tip of a relentlessly cold iceberg that has only grown more ridiculous and stifling with the passage of years. But that’s why we’re here. Trying to unpick ourselves from that onerous nonsense, trying to live outside the narrow confines of received pronounciation; recapture Thompson’s ribald sense of fun and theatre, and project it into all our futures. And we did too. At least this night.
We took the mushroom chocolate first right there in the parking lot, and drove to the Mirage to where we’d reserved tickets for the Cirque du Soleil Beatles extravaganza “Love.” As the performance began we ate some MDMA. Cirque du Soleil is an entertainment troupe formed by a couple of hippies from Quebec that uses dance, ballet, theatre and acrobatics to create mind-blowing spectacles. On mushrooms and MDMA the mix is beyond intoxicating. Sweating, pinned back in my seat by some invisible force, my eyes agape; I took deep, deep breaths to temper the burst of emotions pouring over me. Harrison had me in tears, whilst Lennon scared the shit out of me – “I am he, as you are he, as you are me, and we are all together.” Holy shit! The collective unconscious. I can’t get into that shit with a fat broad from Texas sat in front of me munching pop corn….don’t want to get in her mindspace; sucking me into an unholy vortex of Fox news headlines and hair lacquer.
Finally it ended and we collapsed back like we’d just had ringside seats for the crucifixion. What do we do now?
Whoregina was sure she had the answer: “There’s only one thing we can do after that. We drive out to the desert and spend the rest of the night looking at stars.”
“Yes, yes, yes.” But no…We had forseen this moment. A wave of panic when confronted with somewhere as sordid and barbarous as Vegas; and suddenly you’re driving into the night searching for a star, a point of light, something pure among all this debauchery. As always though, the importance was to maintain. Not to be cowed by finding ourselves flailing for footing in the belly of the beast. After all, we have a mission to complete, boxes to tick on the Thompson tourist trail – the famous old casino Circus Circus for a start, which he described as “what the whole hip world would be doing on a Saturday night if the Nazis had won the war.”
“Ok. I can only see one way round this one. We go to the car, snort a shitload of coke and then drink ourselves stupid in that fascist hell hole.”
I reflected a moment -- it was the only way. The blissful paradise world we’d created needed obliterating in spectacular fashion; fired out of a cannon into a bloody gore of decadence and depravity.
“Ok, but I need a cigarette.”
Just then a theatre attendant appeared beside us looking expectant.
“Yes. What do you want? Have you got a cigarette?”
“Err, you have to leave.”
“Why? What have we done?” It’s that blimp from Texas, I thought. Somehow I’ve managed to upset her Chakras, a sort of psychic rape that got the bitch spooked and ratting to the staff. Or maybe I just salivated on her by accident…I do that sometimes.
I look closer and see the attendant is dressed as “Lovely Rita, Meter Maid.” Dear god, I’ve entered Lennon’s unconscious. What has that mad Scouse bastard got in stall for me next? What dark recesses of the ex-Beatles mindscape will I confront now? Spooning with Peter Sutcliffe in Hamburg? Getting the shits at the Maharishi’s ashram in India? As long as it’s not Yoko’s hairy bush I think handle it…
“No. We need to close. I mean, if it was up to me you could hang out here all night but it’s the last show of the night and the cleaners got to do a sweep,” she smiled so sweetly it was sinister. It did at least bring me to my senses. When I looked around I noticed for the first time the whole place was empty.
We pulled our shades down and walked out into the casino, among the melee of roulette wheels and gaudy carpets (they design them that way so you look up the whole time, notice all those lovely, ripe fruit machines). We traced our steps back to the parking lot via an atrium filled with tropical rainforest and fat people.
In the lot we found the car and as I was clambering into its relative safety I heard Whoregina call me.
Good God. What was it now?
“Down here dipshit.”
I heard the gurgle of water before I saw her. “It’s a Ferrari.”
“That’s a fast car.”
“The plates say California. Hopefully some Hollywood assholes.”
The rest of the night acted out like a bull with a lit firecracker strapped to its tail. In the car we did the coke, rode up and down the “Strip” listening to the Happy Mondays with the top down, did more coke, danced naked in a car park, did more coke, drank shots in the Circus Circus. We managed to get back to the room without killing ourselves or anyone else and with the faint light of dawn creeping in we closed our eyes on the madness. RIP dear Mr Thompson.
No comments:
Post a Comment