The Enduring, Unscalable Sadness of Chapter Eight of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas

Every now and then the energy of a whole generation comes to a head in a flash, for reasons that nobody really understands at the time—and which never explain, in retrospect, what actually happened.

It's weird to re-read Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas every ten years, which I do, not out of ritual or obligation but because it seems to reoccur in my mental frame around that time, as by osmosis.

When I was a teenager, I thought raging down the highway with a spectacular drug collection and no regard for common sanity seemed tremendous. I really didn't understand a lot of the nomenclature, or even the action—“sporting editor,” “raw ether,” “One Toke Over the Line”—these were not in my teenage vernacular. I did understand the humor of pouring beer on your chest “to facilitate the tanning process.” I think I was nominally straight edge in some scene-adjacent way that is lost to history, but the trunk full of drugs intrigued me. Because Raoul Duke and his attorney seemed prepared. My father was a safety engineer at Underwriters Laboratories. Raoul Duke was a Doctor of Journalism. It seemed to scan.

When I was in my twenties, I was not straight edge. And good thing too, because some of those scenes and circumstances would not be easily metabolized sober. Nothing with me, just ambient stuff. I’ll admit: I hung with a rock ‘n’ roll crew. I had consumed alcohol. Drugs, I can’t remember—maybe. I was in Topeka in a van trying to get back to graduate school in Indiana, before my final Masters’ presentation. You have good questions—but do I have good answers? What really resonated with me then is the circulating bar at Circus-Circus—I don’t want to recap too much, but Duke and his attorney are trying to flee the scene, and rightly so. The attorney asks the waitress: “Do they pay you to screw that bear?” Time to move out, but the bar is in motion—its gimmick is that it circles like a baggage claim. This was my life at 25.

In my thirties, I had arrived at some serious conclusions about my hopes and aspirations and locked into some incipient professional success and started a band and got married and a lot of good things were happening. Still, in re-reading, I did envy the drug car. So much of the crucial insight Thompson provided about the youth movement came from the fact that he was several years older than the herd—born in ’37, an unthinkably geriatric thirty-one during the Summer of Love. He was like Cameron Crowe writing Fast Times at Ridgemont High. He was spying on them and speculating. He was really a beatnik.

I see now I will never get over chapter eight, which heedlessly cashiers all of Thompson’s exhaustively-won bravado, in a soul-baring elegy that sneaks its way weirdly between the screwball antics and legal recitations and reads like John Milton, the lost paradise of his most deeply-felt dream. I will personally stand on the late F. Scott Fitzgerald’s desk in my cowboy boots, frightening everybody and call this passage the single most crucial meditation on American possibility and privilege of the post-Robber Baron years:

“There was madness in any direction at any hour. If not across the Bay, then up the Golden Gate or down 101 to Los Altos or La Honda… You could strike sparks anywhere. There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning…

And that, I think, was the handle—that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of the Old and Evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we didn’t need that. Our energy would simply prevail. There was no point in fighting—on our side or theirs. We all had the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave….

So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark—that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back.”

It’s difficult to hear a self-styled, stout-hearted man reveal himself in that way, but of course what else could a one-time racehorse reporter do but allow that the wager had been laundered and the bank permanently insolvent? We think right now is terrifying—and it is—but remember that public discourse was mostly a conversation between William F. Buckley and Gore Vidal in the ’70s. Talk about a highwire act. The 1970s. I’ve had people ask me, why do I fixate so much on this stuff? Which they mean: the disillusion and dissolution of the Hippie Dream and the wild national trauma to follow. I don’t know, man. Why don’t you?