Fear and Loathing at Rolling Stone(58)

But he couldn’t find his friend. “Just a bunch of pansies from CBS and the New York Times, hanging around the bar,” he said. “I took a few bites out of that crowd and they faded fast—just ran off like curs. But what the shit can you expect from people like that? Just a bunch of low-life ass-kissers who get paid for hanging around with politicians.”

Just for the quick hell of it, I’d like to explain, or at least insist—despite massive evidence to the contrary—that this geek we met in the lobby of the Ramada Inn and who scared the shit out of everybody when he got on Muskie’s train the next day for the run from Palm Beach to Miami, was in fact an excellent person, with a rare sense of humor that unfortunately failed to mesh, for various reasons, with the prevailing humors on Muskie’s “Sunshine Special.”

Just how he came to be wearing my press badge is a long and tangled story, but as I recall it had something to do with the fact that “Sheridan” convinced me that he was one of the original ranking Boohoos of the Neo-American Church and also that he was able to rattle off all kinds of obscure and pithy tales about his experiences in places like Millbrook, the Hog Farm, La Honda, and Mike’s Pool Hall in San Francisco . . .

. . . which would not have meant a hell of a lot if he hadn’t also been an obvious aristocrat of the Freak Kingdom. There was no doubt about it. This bastard was a serious, king-hell crazy. He had that rare weird electricity about him—that extremely wild & heavy presence that you only see in a person who has abandoned all hope of ever behaving “normally.”

All of which is basic to any understanding of what happened on the Muskie campaign train—and which also explains why his “up-top friend” (who WWD later identified as Rich Evans, one of Muskie’s chief tacticians) was not immediately available to take care of his old buddy, Pete Sheridan—who was fresh out of jail on a vagrancy rap, with no place to sleep and no transportation down to Miami except the prospect of hanging his thumb out in the road and hoping for a ride.

“To hell with that,” I said. “Take the train with us. It’s the presidential express—a straight shot into Miami and all the free booze you can drink. Why not? Any friend of Rich’s is a friend of Ed’s, I guess—but since you can’t find Rich at this hour of the night, and since the train is leaving in two hours, well, perhaps you should borrow this little orange press ticket, just until you get aboard.”

“I think you’re right,” he said.

“I am,” I replied. “And besides, I paid thirty dollars for the goddamn thing and all it got me was a dozen beers and the dullest day of my life.”

He smiled, accepting the card. “Maybe I can put it to better use,” he said.

Which was true. He did—and I was subsequently censured very severely, by other members of the campaign press corps, for allowing my “credentials” to fall into foreign hands. There were also ugly rumors to the effect that I had somehow conspired with this monster “Sheridan”—and also with Jerry Rubin—to “sabotage” Muskie’s wind-up gig in Miami, and that “Sheridan’s” beastly behavior at the train station was the result of a carefully laid plot by me, Rubin, and the International Yippie brain trust.



This theory was apparently concocted by Muskie staffers, who told other reporters that they had known all along that I was up to something rotten—but they tried to give me a break, and now look what I done to ’em. Planted a human bomb on the train.

A story like this one is very hard to spike, because people involved in a presidential campaign are so conditioned to devious behavior on all fronts—including the press—that something like that fiasco in the Miami train station is just about impossible for them to understand except in terms of a conspiracy. Why else, after all, would I give my credential to some booze-maddened jailbird?

Well . . . why indeed?

Several reasons come quickly to mind, but the main one could only be understood by somebody who has spent twelve hours on a train with Ed Muskie and his people, doing whistle-stop speeches through central Florida.

We left Jacksonville around nine, after Muskie addressed several busloads of black teenagers and some middle-aged ladies from one of the local union   halls who came down to the station to hear Senator Muskie say, “It’s time for the good people of America to get together behind somebody they can trust—namely me.”

After that, we went down to Delano—about a two-hour run—where Muskie addressed a crowd of about two hundred white teenagers who’d been let out of school to hear the candidate say, “It’s about time the good people of America got together behind somebody they can trust—namely me.”