San Francisco in the middle sixties was a very special time and place to be a part of. Five years later? Six? It seems like a lifetime, or at least a Main Era-the kind of peak that never comes again. Strange memories on this nervous night in Las Vegas. I walked over to the TV set and turned it on to a dead channel-white noise at maximum decibel, a fine sound for sleeping, a powerful continuous hiss to drown out everything strange. But they're real And, sweet Jesus, there are a hell of a lot of them-still screaming around these desert-city crap tables at four-thirty on a Sunday morning-still humping the American Dream, that vision of the Big Winner somehow emerging from the last minute pre-dawn chaos of a stale Vegas casino. Who are these people? These faces? Where do they come from? They look like caricatures of used-car dealers from Dallas. Now off the escalator and into the casino, big crowds still tight around the crap tables. No, this is not a good town for psychadelic drugs. Most acid fanciers can handle this sort of thing.īut nobody can handle that other trip- the possibility that any freak with $1.98 can walk into 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. 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. A thing like that could send a drug person careening around the room like a ping pong ball. He who makes a beast of himself gets rid of the pain of being a man. Hunter s thompson Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas

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