Fear and loathing in Las Vegas, and other American stories by Hunter S. Thompson Read Free Book Online

action runs twenty-four hours a day on the main floor, and the circus never ends. Meanwhile, on all the upstairs balconies, the customers are being hustled by every conceivable kind of bizarre shuck. All kinds of funhouse-type booths. Shoot the pasties off the nipples of a ten-foot bull-dyke and win a cotton-candy goat. Stand in front of this fantastic machine, my friend, and for just 99¢ your likeness will appear, two hundred feet tall, on a screen above downtown Las Vegas. Ninety-nine cents more for a voice message. “Say whatever you want, fella. They’ll hear you, don’t worry about that. Remember you’ll be two hundred feet tall.”
    Jesus Christ. I could see myself lying in bed in the Mint Hotel, half-asleep and staring idly out the window, when suddenly a vicious nazi drunkard appears two hundred feet tall in the midnight sky, screaming gibberish at the world:
“Woodstock Über Alles!”
    We will close the drapes tonight. A thing like that could send a drug person careening around the room like a ping-pong ball. Hallucinations are bad enough. But after a while you learn to cope with things like seeing your dead grandmother crawling up your leg with a knife in her teeth. Most acid fanciers can handle this sort of thing.
    But
nobody
can handle that other trip—the possibility that any freak with $1.98 can walk into the Circus-Circus and suddenly appear in the sky over downtown Las Vegas twelve times the size of God, howling anything that comes into his head. No, this is not a good town for psychedelic drugs. Reality itself is too twisted.
    Good mescaline comes on slow. The first hour is all waiting, then about halfway through the second hour you start cursing the creep who burned you, because nothing is happening . . . and then ZANG! Fiendish intensity, strange glow and vibrations . . . a very heavy gig in a place like the Circus-Circus.
    “I hate to say this,” said my attorney as we sat down at the Merry-Go-Round Bar on the second balcony, “but this place is getting
to
me. I think I’m getting the Fear.”
    “Nonsense,” I said. “We came out here to find the American Dream, and now that we’re right in the vortex you want to quit.” I grabbed his bicep and squeezed. “You must
realize,
” I said, “that we’ve found the main nerve.”
    “I know,” he said. “That’s what gives me the Fear.”
    The ether was wearing off, the acid was long gone, but the mescaline was running strong. We were sitting at a small round gold formica table, moving in orbit around the bartender.
    “Look over there,” I said. “Two women fucking a polar bear.”
    “Please,” he said. “Don’t
tell
me those things. Not now.” He signaled the waitress for two more Wild Turkeys. “This is my last drink,” he said. “How much money can you lend me?”
    “Not much,” I said. “Why?”
    “I have to go,” he said.
    “Go?”
    “Yes. Leave the country. Tonight.”
    “Calm down,” I said. “You’ll be straight in a few hours.”
    “No,” he said. “This is serious.”
    “George Metesky was serious,” I said. “And you see what they did to him.”
    “Don’t fuck around!” he shouted. “One more hour in this town and I’ll kill somebody!”
    I could see he was on the edge. That fearful intensity that comes at the peak of a mescaline seizure. “OK,” I said. “I’ll lend you some money. Let’s go outside and see how much we have left.”
    “Can we make it?” he said.
    “Well . . . that depends on how many people we fuck with between here and the door. You want to leave quietly?”
    “I want to leave
fast,”
he said.
    “OK. Let’s pay this bill and get up very slowly. We’re both out of our heads. This is going to be a long walk.” I shouted at the waitress for a bill. She came over, looking bored, and my attorney stood up.
    “Do they
pay
you to screw that bear?” he asked her.
    “What?”

    “He’s just kidding,” I said, stepping between them. “Come on, Doc—let’s go