After ten minutes of standing in line behind this noisy little asshole and his friends, I felt the bile rising. Where did this cop—of all people—get the nerve to argue with anybody in terms of Right & Reason? I had been there with these fuzzy little shitheads—and so, I sensed, had the desk clerk. He had the air of a man who’d been fucked around, in his time, by a fairly good cross-section of mean-tempered rule-crazy cops . . .
So now he was just giving their argument back to them: it doesn’t matter who’s right or wrong, man . . . or who’s paid his bill & who hasn’t . . . what matters right now is that for the first time in my life I can work out on a pig. “Fuck you, officer, I’m in charge here, and I’m telling you we don’t have room for you.”
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 Levi’s 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 & 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 sideswiped 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?
What indeed? The bag boy grinned. The desk clerk grinned. And the cop crowd eyed me nervously. They had just been blown off the track by a style of freak they’d never seen before. I left them there to ponder it, fuming & bitching at the gates of some castle they would never enter.
Getting Down to Business . . . Opening Day at the Drug Conference
“On behalf of the prosecuting attorneys of this country, I welcome you.”
We sat in the rear fringe of a crowd of about 1,500 in the main ballroom of the Dunes Hotel. Far up in front of the room, barely visible from the rear, the executive director of the National District Attorneys Association—a middle-aged, well-groomed, successful GOP businessman type named Patrick Healy—was opening their Third National Institute on Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs. His remarks reached us by way of a big, low-fidelity speaker mounted on a steel pole in our corner. Perhaps a dozen others were spotted around the room, all facing the rear and looming over the crowd . . . so that no matter where you sat or even tried to hide, you were always looking down the muzzle of a big speaker.
This produced an odd effect. People in each section of the ballroom tended to stare at the nearest voice-box, instead of watching the distant figure of whoever was actually talking far up front on the podium. This 1935 style of speaker placement totally depersonalized the room. There was something ominous and authoritarian about it. Whoever set up that sound system was probably some kind of sheriff’s auxiliary technician on leave from a drive-in theater in Muskogee, Oklahoma, where the management couldn’t afford individual car speakers and relied on ten huge horns, mounted on telephone poles in the parking area.
But the best technicians available to the National DAs convention in Vegas apparently couldn’t handle it. Their sound system looked like something Ulysses S. Grant might have rigged up to address his troops during the siege of Vicksburg. The voices from up front crackled with a fuzzy, high-pitched urgency, and the delay was just enough to keep the words disconcertingly out of phase with the speaker’s gestures.