Fear and Loathing at Rolling Stone(9)

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The Next Assignment . . .


Hunter’s next story for the magazine was an investigation into the Los Angeles Police Department’s involvement in the murder of Ruben Salazar, a Chicano activist and Los Angeles Times columnist. It’s during this time that Hunter first began working with Oscar Zeta Acosta, a local Chicano civil rights lawyer he’d met a few years earlier. Acosta, dubbed the “Brown Buffalo” by Hunter, would soon become better known as Dr. Gonzo in “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.” (Hunter and Oscar’s first trip together to Las Vegas was taken so the two could discuss the Salazar case in a secure location.) He became Hunter’s attorney and aide de camp, wrote occasionally for Rolling Stone, and cultivated an office presence both feared and respected by other staffers.

Undated early ’71 letter from JSW to HST

746 Brannan Street

San Francisco 94103

Dear Hunter:

Thanks for the letter and the rambling unfinished excerpts. Of course I agree with you that nothing should be done with them other than our private inspection. Selah. However, the obvious point is that we should have some sort of propaganda to coincide with the next election, either a pre-election look at the issues and the candidates (!) (did I say that?) or an election-time fire-sucking tract, or an immediate post-election review of the trauma. What are your thoughts on this?

Finally, Vietnam or the Mexicans versus the L.A.P.D.: Which would you prefer to do? I’d rather have you go to Los Angeles as you’re already backgrounded in it, and I think I can get Michael Herr to Vietnam for us for his final major take.

Letter from HST to JSW

Jan 27 ’71

Owl Farm

Woody Creek, Colorado

Dear Jann . . .

We might be better off using some photos & captions (along with my letter—the one you mentioned running) along with a postscript & forecast (by me) that would tie that last election to the one coming up. I’ve begun to feel very guilty about losing that one—mainly because so many people all over the country were apparently looking to Aspen for a breakthrough. It’s amazing to realize how many completely different kinds of people read that Aspen piece in the 10/1 issue. I’ve had letters from all over the fucking world. Anyway—we decided just tonight that [Ned] Vare will probably run for Mayor in the Spring & we’ll need at least $2500 to pull it off properly. (At the moment, on the strength of a $250 donation from [RS board member] Arthur Rock’s tall Houston girlfriend, Mary, we’re mounting an eleventh-hour legal maneuver to postpone the election until November) ... but we figure to lose this, so our real point is to mobilize the freaks ahead of the May election, so that when the postponement move fails we’ll have our act together & ready for the showdown. And it will be the showdown, the final act if we lose—or a fine reprieve for Freak Power if we can put Vare over.

Also, I’d like to get something put together in the way of an Aspen article by then—even if it has to be just that letter. Personally, & especially since I’m still writing about that election, I’d prefer something larger. I think the story is lost unless we can tie it to national politics in some way; and I don’t mean just the article, but the whole Freak Power concept. Oscar Acosta, for instance, was shocked to find that only a handful of the freak-voters in Aspen bothered to vote for the Raza Unida candidates—which was our fault, for not pushing it more, but it blew Oscar’s idea of forging a union   of some kind between Chicanos & freak-anglos. What has to be done, I think, is a massive expansion of that “freak” concept—which I spent about half the campaign trying to do (see enc.), but a lot of people refuse to see that to be a freak in Nixon’s America is actually the only honorable way to go . . .

And so much for that, too. The mention of Acosta brings up your notion of a Chicano story in LA ... and that looks like a natural, I guess, except that I just about used up my white journalist’s credit down there on that Scanlan’s story, which Hinckle eventually killed & replaced with his own lead editorial in the “current” issue. So it might be extremely difficult for me to spend any productive time down there unless I really leaned on Oscar ... and I guess I could do that, but the prospect doesn’t make me real happy. I probably have as much or more access to the story down there as any gabacho journalist, but before I got into it I’d have to know more about what you wanted & it might also be a good idea to lay the whole gig on Oscar before we start—because without him I wouldn’t go near that story. And even with him, it might be a problem.