Fear and Loathing at Rolling Stone(57)

Both the Washington Star and Women’s Wear Daily reported essentially the same tale: a genuinely savage person had boarded the train in West Palm Beach, using a fraudulent press pass, then ran amok in the lounge car—getting in “several fistfights” and finally “heckling the Senator unmercifully” when the train pulled into Miami and Muskie went out on the caboose platform to deliver what was supposed to have been the climactic speech of his triumphant whistle-stop tour.

It was at this point—according to press reports both published & otherwise—that my alleged friend, calling himself “Peter Sheridan,” cranked up his act to a level that caused Senator Muskie to “cut short his remarks.”

When the “Sunshine Special” pulled into the station at Miami, “Sheridan” reeled off the train and took a position on the tracks just below Muskie’s caboose platform, where he spent the next half hour causing the senator a hellish amount of grief—along with Jerry Rubin, who also showed up at the station to ask Muskie what had caused him to change his mind about supporting the War in Vietnam.

Rubin had been in Miami for several weeks, making frequent appearances on local TV to warn that “Ten Thousand naked hippies” would be among those attending the Democratic National Convention at Miami Beach in July. “We will march to the convention center,” he announced, “but there will be no violence—at least not by us.”

To questions regarding his presence in Florida, Rubin said he “decided to move down here, because of the climate,” and that he was also registered to vote in Florida—as a Republican. Contrary to the rancid suspicions of the Muskie staff people, Sheridan didn’t even recognize Rubin, and I hadn’t seen him since the Counter-Inaugural Ball, which ran opposite Nixon’s inauguration in 1969.

When Rubin showed up at the train station that Saturday afternoon to hassle Muskie, the senator from Maine was apparently the only person in the crowd who didn’t know who he was. His first response to Rubin’s heckling was, “Shut up, young man—I’m talking.”

“You’re not a damn bit different from Nixon,” Rubin shouted back . . .

And it was at this point, according to compiled press reports and a firsthand account by Monte Chitty of the University of Florida Alligator, that Muskie seemed to lose his balance and fall back from the rail.

What happened, according to Chitty, was that “the Boohoo reached up from the track and got hold of Muskie’s pants leg—waving an empty glass through the bars around the caboose platform with his other hand and screaming: ‘Get your lying ass back inside and make me another drink, you worthless old fart!’”

“It was really embarrassing,” Chitty told me later on the phone. “The Boohoo kept reaching up and grabbing Muskie’s legs, yelling for more gin . . . Muskie tried to ignore him, but the Boohoo kept after him and after awhile it got so bad that even Rubin backed off. He was acting just like he did the night before—only six times worse.”

“The Boohoo,” of course, was the same vicious drunkard who had terrorized the Muskie train all the way from Palm Beach, and he was still wearing a press badge that said “Hunter S. Thompson—Rolling Stone.”

Chitty and I had met him the night before, about two thirty, in the lobby of the Ramada Inn where the press party was quartered. We were heading out to the street to look for a sandwich shop, feeling a trifle bent & very hungry . . . and as we passed the front desk, here was this huge wild-eyed monster, bellowing at the desk clerk about “All this chicken-shit” and “All these pansies around here trying to suck up to Muskie” and “Where the fuck can a man go in this town to have a good time, anyway?”

A scene like that wouldn’t normally interest me, but there was something very special about this one—something abnormally crazy in the way he was talking. There was something very familiar about it. I listened for a moment and then recognized the Neal Cassady speed-booze-acid rap—a wild combination of menace, madness, genius, and fragmented coherence that wreaks havoc on the mind of any listener.

This is not the kind of thing you expect to hear in the lobby of a Ramada Inn, and especially not in West Palm Beach—so I knew we had no choice but to take this man along with us.

“Don’t mind if I do,” he said. “At this hour of the night I’ll fuck around with just about anybody.”

He had just got out of jail, he explained as we walked five or six blocks through the warm midnight streets to a twenty-four-hour hamburger place called the Copper Penny. Fifteen days for vagrancy, and when he’d hit the bricks today around four he just happened to pick up a newspaper and see that Ed Muskie was in town . . . and since he had this friend who “worked up-top,” he said, for Big Ed . . . well, he figured he’d just drift over to the Ramada Inn and say hello.