just 99¢ your likeness will appear, two hundred feet tall, on a screen above downtown Las Vegas. Ninety-nine cents more for a voice message. “Say whatever you want, fella. They’ll hear you, don’t worry about that. Remember you’ll be two hundred feet tall.”
Jesus Christ. I could see myself lying in bed in the Mint Hotel, half-asleep and staring idly out the window, when suddenly a vicious nazi drunkard appears two hundred feet tall in the midnight sky, screaming gibberish at the world: “Woodstock Über Alles!”
We will close the drapes tonight. A thing like that could send a drug person careening around the room like a ping-pong ball. Hallucinations are bad enough. But after a while you learn to cope with things like seeing your dead grandmother crawling up your leg with a knife in her teeth. Most acid fanciers can handle this sort of thing.
But nobody can handle that other trip–the possibility that any freak with $1.98 can walk into the Circus-Circus and suddenly appear in the sky over downtown Las Vegas twelve times the size of God, howling anything that comes into his head. No, this is not a good town for psychedelic drugs. Reality itself is too twisted.
Good mescaline comes on slow. The first hour is all waiting, then about halfway through the second hour you start cursing the creep who burned you, because nothing is happening … and then ZANG! Fiendish intensity, strange glow and vibrations … a very heavy gig in a place like the Circus-Circus.
“I hate to say this,” said my attorney as we sat down at the Merry-Go-Round Bar on the second balcony, “but this place is getting to me. I think I’m getting the Fear.”
“Nonsense,” I said. “We came out here to find the American Dream, and now that we’re right in the vortex you want to quit.” I grabbed his bicep and squeezed. “You must realize,” I said, “that we’ve found the main nerve.”
“I know,” he said. “That’s what gives me the Fear.”
The ether was wearing off, the acid was long gone, but the mescaline was running strong. We were sitting at a small round gold formica table, moving in orbit around the bartender.
“Look over there,” I said. “Two women fucking a polar bear.”
“Please,” he said. “Don’t tell me those things. Not now.” He signaled the waitress for two more Wild Turkeys. “This is my last drink,” he said. “How much money can you lend me?”
“Not much,” I said. “Why?”
“I have to go,” he said.
“Go?”
“Yes. Leave the country. Tonight.”
“Calm down,” I said. “You’ll be straight in a few hours.”
“No,” he said. “This is serious.”
“George Metesky was serious,” I said. “And you see what they did to him.”
“Don’t fuck around!” he shouted. “One more hour in this town and I’ll kill somebody!”
I could see he was on the edge. That fearful intensity that comes at the peak of a mescaline seizure. “OK,” I said. “I’ll lend you some money. Let’s go outside and see how much we have left.”
“Can we make it?” he said.
“Well … that depends on how many people we fuck with between here and the door. You want to leave quietly?”
“I want to leave fast,” he said.
“OK. Let’s pay this bill and get up very slowly. We’re both out of our heads. This is going to be a long walk.” I shouted at the waitress for a bill. She came over, looking bored, and my attorney stood up.
“Do they pay you to screw that bear?” he asked her.
“What?”
“He’s just kidding,” I said, stepping between them. “Come on, Doc–let’s go downstairs and gamble.” I got him as far as the edge of the bar, the rim of the merry-go-round, but he refused to get off until it stopped turning.
“It won’t stop,” I said. “It’s not ever going to stop.” I stepped off and turned around to wait for him, but he wouldn’t move … and before I could reach out and pull him off, he was carried away. “Don’t move,” I shouted. “You’ll come around!” His eyes were staring blindly ahead, squinting with fear and confusion. But he didn’t move a muscle until he’d made the whole circle.
I waited until he was almost in front of me, then I reached out to grab him–but he jumped back and went around the circle again. This made me very nervous. I felt on the verge of a freakout. The bartender seemed to be watching us.
Carson City, I thought. Twenty years.
I stepped on the merry-go-round and hurried around the bar, approaching my attorney on his blind side–and when we came to the right spot I pushed him off. He staggered into the aisle and uttered a hellish scream as he lost his balance and went down, thrashing into the crowd … rolling like a log, then up again in a flash, fists clenched, looking for somebody to hit.
I approached him with my hands in the air, trying to smile. “You fell,” I said. “Let’s go.”
By this time people were watching us. But the fool wouldn’t move, and I knew what would happen if I grabbed him. “OK,” I said. “You stay here and go to jail. I’m leaving.” I started walking fast towards the stairs, ignoring him.
This moved him.
“Did you see that?” he said as he caught up with me. “Some sonofabitch kicked me in the back!”
“Probably the bartender,” I said. “He wanted to stomp you for what you said to the waitress.”
“Good god! Let’s get out of here. Where’s the elevator?”
“Don’t go near that elevator,” I said. “That’s just what they want us to do … trap us in a steel box and take us down to the basement.” I looked over my shoulder, but nobody was following.
“Don’t run,” I said. “They’d like an excuse to shoot us.” He nodded, seeming to understand. We walked fast along the big indoor midway–shooting galleries, tattoo parlors, money-changers and cotton-candy booths–then out through a bank of glass doors and across the grass downhill to a parking lot where the Red Shark waited.
“You drive,” he said. “I think there’s something wrong with me.”
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