Fear and Loathing at Rolling Stone(30)

He nodded, but I could see that his mind was not on his work. He was staring at our name tags. “Are you guys with that police convention upstairs?” he said finally.

“We sure are, my friend,” said the Georgia man with a big smile.

The bartender shook his head sadly. “I thought so,” he said. “I never heard that kind of talk at this bar before. Jesus Christ! How do you guys stand that kind of work?”

My attorney smiled at him. “We like it,” he said. “It’s groovy.”

The bartender drew back; his face was a mask of repugnance.

“What’s wrong with you?” I said. “Hell, somebody has to do it.”

He stared at me for a moment, then turned away.

“Hurry up with those drinks,” said my attorney. “We’re thirsty.” He laughed and rolled his eyes as the bartender glanced back at him. “Only two rums,” he said. “Make mine a Bloody Mary.”

The bartender seemed to stiffen, but our Georgia friend didn’t notice. His mind was somewhere else. “Hell, I really hate to hear this,” he said quietly. “Because everything that happens in California seems to get down our way, sooner or later. Mostly Atlanta, but I guess that was back when the goddamn bastards were peaceful. It used to be that all we had to do was keep ’em under surveillance. They didn’t roam around much . . .” He shrugged. “But now, Jesus, nobody’s safe. They could turn up anywhere.”

“You’re right,” said my attorney. “We learned that in California. You remember where Manson turned up, don’t you? Right out in the middle of Death Valley. He had a whole army of sex fiends out there. We only got our hands on a few. Most of the crew got away; just ran off across the sand dunes, like big lizards . . . and every one of them stone naked, except for the weapons.”

“They’ll turn up somewhere, pretty soon,” I said. “And let’s hope we’ll be ready for them.”

The Georgia man whacked his fist on the bar. “But we can’t just lock ourselves in the house and be prisoners!” he exclaimed. “We don’t even know who these people are! How do you recognize them?

“You can’t,” my attorney replied. “The only way to do it is to take the bull by the horns—go to the mat with this scum!”

“What do you mean by that?” he asked.

“You know what I mean,” said my attorney. “We’ve done it before, and can damn well do it again.”

“Cut their goddamn heads off,” I said. “Every one of them. That’s what we’re doing in California.”

“What?”

“Sure,” said my attorney. “It’s all on the Q.T., but everybody who matters is with us all the way down the line.”

“God! I had no idea it was that bad out there!” said our friend.

“We keep it quiet,” I said. “It’s not the kind of thing you’d want to talk about upstairs, for instance. Not with the press around.”

Our man agreed. “Hell no!” he said. “We’d never hear the goddamn end of it.”

“Dobermans don’t talk,” I said.

“What?”

“Sometimes it’s easier to just rip out the backstraps,” said my attorney. “They’ll fight like hell if you try to take the head without dogs.”

“God almighty!”

We left him at the bar, swirling the ice in his drink and not smiling. He was worried about whether or not to tell his wife about it. “She’d never understand,” he muttered. “You know how women are.”

I nodded. My attorney was already gone, scurrying through a maze of slot machines toward the front door. I said good-bye to our friend, warning him not to say anything about what we’d told him.





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The Campaign Trail: ’72


The idea of Hunter covering the 1972 presidential campaign for the magazine—from the early primaries on through Election Day—had been bandied about for months. Hunter’s admiration for George McGovern (and contempt for McGovern’s Democratic rivals, including Hubert Humphrey and Ed Muskie) was obvious, and rather than hiding it, he and Rolling Stone intended to capitalize on it. Hunter and Jann—heavily stoned on pot—had an early meeting with McGovern’s campaign manager, Frank Mankiewicz, to secure the campaign’s cooperation and Hunter’s access to its strategy and planning. Once Hunter and his assistant, Rolling Stone associate editor Timothy Crouse, joined up with the usual campaign press crew, though, they found themselves the target of the entrenched journalists’ snickers, if not outright ridicule. The publication of Hunter’s first stories from the campaign trail—filed via the first primitive fax machine in use, which Hunter dubbed the “Mojo Wire”—changed all that, but just to be sure, Hunter instructed Crouse to keep a separate notebook, noting every quirk, weirdness, and character weakness of their mainstream media cohorts. That notebook eventually became Crouse’s classic The Boys on the Bus. As to Hunter’s own campaign book: Mankiewicz famously dubbed it the “least factual, most accurate” account of the ’72 election.