In 1971, Hunter Thompson first published ‘Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas’ in Rolling Stone. Forty years later, The Daily’s Zach Baron revisits the piece and the town in which it was born, chasing Thompson¹s ghost through crazy desert car races, a dying local economy and a massive and menacing hacker convention known as DEFCON. Here are parts three and four of a four-part series. Click here for parts one and two.
PART III: AMERICAN DREAM
“The American Dream is an assignment to write about the American Dream.” Tautological notes like this one were something I had been doing as a kind of exercise in my iPhone’s notepad throughout this trip. But though “Fear and Loathing” contains plenty of iffy journalism and an unreliable narrator, Thompson’s take on the American Dream in the book is actually quite clear. Perhaps predictably, he never did end up writing his actual American Dream book for Random House. But one reason for that was because after “Fear and Loathing,” there really wasn’t that much left to say.
“Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas” was published in two parts in Rolling Stone, Nov. 11 and Nov. 25, 1971. Random House printed the article in book form the next year. The New York Times initially reacted with skepticism, but then ran a second piece reviewing the novel favorably, calling “Fear and Loathing” the “best book yet written on the decade of dope gone by.”
What Thompson had really done was write the decade’s epitaph. At a moment when hippie truisms about LSD and meditation being a path to enlightenment still ruled, Thompson pinpointed “the essential old-mystic fallacy of the Acid Culture: the desperate assumption that somebody — or at least some force — is tending that Light at the end of the tunnel.” The counterculture of the ’60s, Thompson argued, had maintained a naïve faith that the cosmic forces that seemed to be governing things in those days were fundamentally benevolent. But what if that weren’t the case?
In fact, much of “Fear and Loathing” can be read as a point-by-point repudiation of the psychedelic ’60s dream — from the promise of chemical liberation (Samuel Johnson’s “He who makes a beast of himself gets rid of the pain of being a man” was the book’s epigraph) to the presumed decency of one’s fellow travelers, a presumption easily disproved in “grossly atavistic” Las Vegas, where “they kill the weak and deranged.”
Thompson had lived off the Haight in the ’60s, and written stodgy pieces for the New York Times describing the lingo and ethos of the burgeoning hippie movement there. He had been around Ken Kesey, taken acid with the Jefferson Airplane. In 1968 Thompson covered the catastrophic Democratic National Convention, where he was beaten by cops and disillusioned beyond redemption. By 1971, the year Thompson briefly became Rolling Stone’s chief political correspondent, his hatred of Richard Nixon was pathological. (“The saga of Richard Nixon is The Death of the American Dream,” Thompson later wrote. “He was our Gatsby, but the light on the end of his pier was black instead of green.”)
On March 8, 1971, less than two weeks before he went to Las Vegas to cover the Mint, Thompson watched the tacitly pro-war Joe Frazier deal the draft martyr Muhammad Ali his first-ever professional defeat in a surreal bout at Madison Square Garden. “A very painful experience in every way, a proper end to the sixties,” Thompson wrote in “Fear and Loathing.” He looked around and jotted down what he saw:
“Tim Leary a prisoner of Eldridge Cleaver in Algeria, Bob Dylan clipping coupons in Greenwich Village, both Kennedys murdered by mutants, Owsley folding napkins on Terminal Island, and finally Cassius/Ali belted incredibly off his pedestal by a human hamburger, a man on the verge of death. Joe Frazier, like Nixon, had finally prevailed for reasons that people like me refused to understand — at least not out loud … But that was some other era, burned out and long gone from the brutish realities of this foul year of Our Lord, 1971.”
Thompson’s eulogy for that other era, “burned out and long gone,” is also the finest passage of “Fear and Loathing.” It is as honest and open and idealistic as Thompson ever got in print, and he would later say it was the part of the book of which he was most proud:
“It seems entirely reasonable to think that every now and then the energy of a whole generation comes to a head in a long fine flash, for reasons that nobody really understands at the time,” he wrote.
“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 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 had all 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.”
***
Duke and Gonzo do eventually find what they are looking for. Late in “Fear and Loathing,” in a chapter called “Breakdown on Paradise Blvd.,” the narrative is interrupted by an “editor’s note” explaining that the original manuscript was so “splintered that we were forced to seek out the original tape recording and transcribe it verbatim.” What follows is a hallucinatory dialog between Duke and his attorney as they cruise Paradise Road northeast of Vegas. Eventually they stop at a taco stand, where they ask a waitress and then a cook if either of them knows where the American Dream is. The cook refers them to “the old Psychiatrist’s Club” — a “mental joint, where all the dopers hang out.”
The two men head out in search of the place, but the tape fails again. The editor’s note resumes; though the recording is hard to decipher, “there is a certain consistency in the garbled sounds” indicating “that almost two hours later Dr. Duke and his attorney finally located what was left of the ‘Old Psychiatrist’s Club’ — a huge slab of cracked, scorched concrete in a vacant lot full of tall weeds. The owner of a gas station across the road said the place had ‘burned down about three years ago.’”
It was Thompson’s last love letter to the pre-1968 ’60s, and an unequivocal kiss-off to everything that came after it. The American Dream had been badly neglected, abandoned, lit on fire — Las Vegas and its straightforward brutality were all that was left. A generation’s worth of energy and idealism had come to a head in a “long fine flash”; the reprisal was savage, immediate, and in its own way equally dramatic. The pendulum had swung all the way back the other way.
Boomer nostalgia for this “little parenthesis of light,” in Thomas Pynchon’s phrase, has not aged well for those of us who grew up under its sign. Our parents may have venerated the ’60s, but most of them are stone-cold products of the early ’70s — the era, captured so despairingly in the pages of “Fear and Loathing,” when the forces of order, if not full-blown evil, reasserted control, never to let go again. And while today period pieces from those bright prelapsarian years such as “The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test” might as well depict life on another planet, the eerie thing about reading “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas” in this foul year of Our Lord, 2011, is the dispiriting sense of recognition that runs up the spine.
Not to read his work too much against his biography, but it seems safe to say that Thompson felt that way too. “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas” was in many ways Thompson’s peak as a writer — after that the phrase “fear and loathing” came to represent a franchise (“Fear and Loathing at the Super Bowl”; “Fear and Loathing in Saigon: Interdicted Dispatch from the Global Affairs Desk”; “Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’76: Third Rate Romance, Low Rent Rendezvous”) and the writing — always a contingent, fragile thing for Thompson — ossified with it. Thompson’s uncanny luck at a typewriter hardened into predictable zaniness; the writer’s outsized courage became bluster.
Amid a growing catalog of physical complaints related to a lifetime of drug abuse and alcoholism, Thompson soldiered on, a working journalist to the end. He filed for Rolling Stone, Playboy and ESPN, and released collection after collection of his old letters and old copy. In 2005, in considerable pain, he wrote a brief suicide note, and killed himself at his home in Aspen. He was 67. Rolling Stone ran the note, titled “Football Season Is Over,” in their September issue that year. It read:
“No More Games. No More Bombs. No More Walking. No More Fun. No More Swimming. 67. That is 17 years past 50. 17 more than I needed or wanted. Boring. I am always bitchy. No Fun — for anybody. 67. You are getting Greedy. Act your old age. Relax — This won’t hurt.”
It was the last willful act of a willful man, a violent but voluntary exit from a world he no longer wanted to live in. After 1971 it had been all fear and loathing anyway.
***
“Your attention please. We are currently investigating the alarm system you are hearing.”
We sat among thousands of hackers and security personnel in the Augustus Ballroom at Caesars Palace. Up at the front, Jeff Moss, also known as The Dark Tangent, welcomed us all to the 15th annual Black Hat Technical Security Conference. Arrayed behind Moss were five big screens in a row, and on each of them was some version of the Black Hat logo: either an X-rayed skull in full-brain profile, or a kind of silhouette Bogart in a fedora, trench coat turned up at the neck. Little lightning bolts occasionally shot around inside the skull. Gentle techno played softly over the speakers until Moss took the stage, and then it stopped.
Part of the rationale behind Hunter Thompson covering a National District Attorneys Association narcotics conference was that there was pretty much no other place on the planet Earth more dangerous for him to be. But in 2011, there is arguably no city in the entire country more terrifying than Las Vegas during the week of Aug. 1-7, when the town is full of hackers. These are people who can remotely start the engine of a car using nothing but a cellphone, who can wirelessly disable or — if they want to — fatally overload a diabetic’s insulin pump from up to 150 feet away. That’s the type of mayhem they were demonstrating on panels anyway; one can only imagine what went on in the conference’s off hours.
Black Hat is a corporate outgrowth of a far more anarchic and nonhierarchical hacker convention called DEFCON, celebrating its 19th year, and scheduled to begin at the Rio on Aug. 4, after Black Hat concludes. Moss founded both conferences. The first, DEFCON, grew out of an impromptu gathering of hackers Moss held in Vegas back in 1992. Black Hat came along five years later, when Moss realized that he could pander to the growing corporate IT departments that were desperate for the type of shadowy and sometimes illicit knowledge he and his friends possessed. A DEFCON badge is $150, cash only, paid at the door. Black Hat badges run $1,495 or more in advance and a whopping $2,495 on-site, the assumption being that the companies that send their employees for education at Black Hat can afford to lay out that kind of money without blinking.
There is some attendee overlap, and many of the 6,000-strong Black Hat badge-holders stick around for DEFCON, which stopped counting attendance this year after the first 10,000 — estimates put the final number at as much as twice that. Members of Anonymous and LulzSec — the two “hacktivist” groups famous for pranks such as publicly releasing emails and other theoretically private information belonging to firms like HBGary Federal and Bank of America and taking the CIA’s website offline — were said to be in attendance, as were various law enforcement agents attempting (in vain) to identify and apprehend them.
From the stage, Moss proudly informed us that this was the biggest Black Hat ever, with attendees coming from as far away as Bulgaria, Croatia, Serbia, Vietnam, Costa Rica, Taiwan, Canada, Sweden, Australia, Israel, France, Germany and Japan. It was 9 a.m., and Ramon sat blearily next to me in the auditorium. Fleur, for her part, had opted for an extra few hours of sleep.
Moss is fresh-faced and youthful-looking, has glasses and smooth cheeks, and was appointed in 2009 to the Homeland Security Advisory Council. The keynote speaker, up next, was Cofer Black, a 28-year veteran of the CIA, most recently as director of the agency’s burgeoning Counterterrorism Center. Halfway through the Bush years, he left the government to go work for Blackwater and advised Mitt Romney during Romney’s short-lived 2007-08 presidential bid. In his blue blazer and oxford shirt, stubbly pate and recessed eyes, Black seemed, from a couple hundred feet away, like the perfect avatar for that Cheneyesque species of bureaucrat for whom death and politics are inextricably entwined. Ordering men into violent covert combat in the more obscure parts of Afghanistan, Black would go on to suggest, was a big part of his job at the CIA.
The subject of Black’s keynote was “Perspectives on 9/11 — Ten Years Later and Beyond.” Part of the general theme of Black Hat 2011, it emerged, was that information security is on the verge of becoming a lot more important in this country than it currently is — not unlike counterterrorism, which as a discipline didn’t fully catch on, according to Black, until 9/11. The gist of Black’s speech was that the digital security sector’s own 9/11-type event is coming — “A validation of threat and attack will come into your world,” Black promised the audience — at which point the bureaucratic “clouds will drop away” and “the sunlight” of resources and respect would come pouring in. You could tell Black didn’t know much about computers — what we were witnessing was a kind of battle-weary post-cold-warrior handing off the baton to new blood. “Now it is your turn, whether you know it or not,” he said to the assembled hackers.
“Your attention please. We are currently investigating the alarm system you are hearing.”
The alert notification system at Caesars Palace, a deeply unpleasant thing, began to sound. Guffaws immediately spread across the vast reaches of the Augustus Ballroom. Black was standing there looking peeved; the collision of literal alert systems interrupting talk of theoretical alert systems, not to mention the strong likelihood that this was a prank being pulled by a bored member of the audience — for whom hacking the Caesars Palace security system was probably about as challenging as getting out of bed in the morning — left everyone unsure of how to react.
Eventually Black decided to resume talking over the alarm, which was loud and insistent and which rendered this portion of his speech into a string of half-audible but still terrifying buzzwords: “CYBER ATTACK … NOISE … PHYSICAL DAMAGE … KINETIC RESPONSE … TERRORISM … CYBER … FUTURE … CONFLICT.”
“The cause of the fire alarm signal you just heard has been investigated. Please return to your normal activity.”
Laughter rang out across the big ballroom.
***
Outside the Augustus, the hackers swarmed together. There was an exhibition room, crowded with booths, and booksellers out in the hall. The graphic design of these tomes uniformly involved a lot of dots and dashes and puzzle pieces nestling into other puzzle pieces. The books looked self-published but mostly weren’t. I opened one volume called “The Art of Deception: Controlling the Human Element of Security” and under the heading “Trust: The Key to Deception” began to read: “The more a social engineer can make his contact seem like business as usual, the more he allays suspicion …”
Hackers are big on secrecy. Even here, at the relatively square and corporate Black Hat Technical Security Conference, attendees could choose what their badges read — I was possibly the only person in the building to have made the not terrifically informed decision to put not just my full name but also my institutional affiliation on my badge. Most people were going with a first name, or first name and second initial, max. Later, at DEFCON, the hackers we met used aliases, or simply skipped that part of the introduction entirely. Inside the exhibitor room, paranoia was the reigning concept: “Can you be breached?” was one slogan. “Know where. Know how.”
Most of the major tech and tech security companies come to Black Hat — IBM, BlackBerry, HP, Cisco, Amazon, Symantec and so on. I also noted booths from RedSeal, McAfee, FireHost, BluePoint Security, ManTech, Bit9, VMware, iMPERVA and SecureX — the random capital letter thing is evidently a huge trend in Internet security — before my hand got tired of jotting all the names down.
Just outside the exhibition hall was a booth representing the Federal Reserve Bank. The bank was looking to attract new employees. By way of an enticement, the two women manning the table were giving away small plastic-wrapped samples of shredded U.S. currency that looked from far away like bags of low-grade marijuana. The whole set-up was not exactly confidence-inspiring, from a monetary policy standpoint. Nearby the FBI was also recruiting — “Come on up, ladies, don’t be shy!” the guy behind the booth said to a couple of onlookers. “We’re the FBI, we’re here to help you!”
In “Fear and Loathing,” Duke and his attorney spend all of about five minutes at the National District Attorneys Association conference. Then they stagger out of the ballroom at the Dunes Hotel and proceed to sit at the bar downstairs, planting nightmares about dope fiends and witchcraft in the head of a DA from someplace in Georgia. As with the Midnight Special, my obsequious obedience to my own arbitrary mission — a race for a race, a conference for a conference — was beginning to feel like another kind of reportorial failure. The hungover groomsmen sleeping it off in the hotel rooms upstairs were doing a better job re-enacting “Fear and Loathing” than I was.
Ramon couldn’t stand it in there anymore anyway; there was nothing to photograph, and all up and down the corridor, middle-aged academics were droning on about JavaScript and exploit development, port scans and remote false adjacencies. We wandered out of Caesars, into the blinding sun.
“A little bit of this town goes a very long way,” Thompson wrote in “Fear and Loathing.” “After five days in Vegas you feel like you’ve been here for five years.” Time stretches around this city, and not for the better. Boredom is the real predatory force to be fought off here. Even at noon on the , the surfeit of potential entertainments presented Ramon and me with an unrelenting yes/no dichotomy: Either Celine Dion or the vast, quiet emptiness of the desert, blackjack or sitting alone in our respective hotel rooms, contemplating the void. Walking down Las Vegas Boulevard, I could feel the boredom pushing down on me, punishment for having the temerity to attempt the city’s “sidewalks,” where the barrage of options was loud and the going crowded and unpleasant, a rebuke to the very idea of going outside.
Dazed, we shoved our way down the Strip. Across the street was the Flamingo, Duke and Gonzo’s hideout during their second crack at Las Vegas, the hotel where they imprisoned Lucy, that young, impressionable Montana girl. The orange and pink tail of the iconic Flamingo logo looked queasy under a coat of dirt and grime. The rest of the once-white building had long since gone yellow. Grubby pink neon led us inside.
Thompson stayed here with Oscar Acosta, “Mini-Suite 1150 in the Far Wing.” Ramon and I walked past the horse gamblers being irradiated by the old CRT monitors on which they watched the races. At the elevator bank, two Asian men in full American-flag spandex bodysuits, socks, flip-flops and plastic hats walked nonchalantly past.
We rode up without interference to the 11th floor, and found Room No. 1150, or “11050,” anyway. The stale scent of cigarette smoke had long since been assimilated into the carpets, which sported washed-out palms etched in yellow against a field of puce and brown. A room service tray was wheeled up against the opposite wall. It was quiet, the ceilings low. There was a feeling like whatever adventures might have been had here were just sad, not ennobling or memorable.
But the Flamingo’s been renovated since the early ’70s, and today former Rolling Stone fact-checkers will tell you that Thompson was forever putting non-existent hotel room numbers into his stories. The walls on floor 11 were patterned like yellow tile and lit by neon lights that hurt to look at.
Drawn by a loud noise at the end of the corridor, we pushed through a door marked “Stairwell Exit” and listened to the roar of the cooling fans we found ourselves standing above. We were behind the Flamingo marquee, the entrance to Caesar’s Palace right across the way. We looked around — it was that thing again, searching for a meaningful moment out on a fire escape, awaiting a revelation that would descend in clear, lyrical language as we peered at the true shape of things from our hidden door. Down on the Strip, a family walked by, a mother towing a tiny brown child.
“That girl is going to be a model someday,” Ramon said. “It’s weird when you can tell that young.”
PART IV: i AM DANGEROUS. i AM SEXY. i AM EXCITING. i AM CONFIDENT.
You will have been wondering about the drugs. Did we do them? Did I find myself on Fremont Street, cowering under an awning as a digital projection of Jim Morrison mounted the roof of the pedestrian mall’s 90-foot-tall barrel-vault canopy? Did I walk with many gaits, dragging first one leg and then the other, zig-zagging past blackjack tables and wolfish packs of Midwesterners? Was Caesars Palace where Fleur found her spirit animal, a puffer fish? Did she pet at it through the swank aquarium glass? Did it all end with me on my knees on the plush carpet that cradles the Bellagio Las Vegas, tears streaming down my face as I genuflected to the casino’s super-sized Liberty Bell, surmounted by a mighty eagle that clutched lightning bolts in its talons, the sign under which I grew up in faraway Philadelphia?
Of course not.
***
Thompson wrote to Jim Silberman, his Random House editor, in the summer of 1971, before “Fear and Loathing” had even been published. He was responding to a letter of Silberman’s, which came with a check for expenses — a good part of Thompson’s letters from this year are pretty much devoted entirely to haggling over money with Silberman, Rolling Stone editor Jann Wenner, American Express, Carte Blanche and all the other credit card companies Thompson had burned while in Vegas. Silberman had written and said, “You know it was absolutely clear to me reading Las Vegas I [this is how Thompson referred to the first half of his book before writing the second section] that you were not on drugs …”
Thompson wrote back: “This is true [!], but what alarms me is that Vegas I was a very conscious attempt to simulate drug freakout — which is always difficult, but in reading it over I still find it depressingly close to the truth I was trying to re-create.” He went on to tell Silberman that the editor’s reading of the manuscript so depressed him that to feel better, he “ate a bunch of mescaline” and went on a violent drag race with some buddies. He concluded, “All I ask is that you keep your opinions on my drug-diet for that weekend to yourself … it makes it all the more astounding, that I could emerge from that heinous experience with a story.”
Is it really possible that Thompson wasn’t on drugs at all during the reporting of “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas”?
Writers lie to their editors all the time, of course. Silberman in particular, in Thompson’s voluminous correspondence with him, seems like a guy Thompson wanted to impress. But it is true that on closer inspection, some of the drugs Duke and Gonzo ingest in the book have suspiciously literary effects. How else to explain Adrenochrome, the extract of “adrenaline glands from a living human body,” a substance whose primary effects on Duke in the novel appear to be the rendering of Richard Nixon on Duke’s hotel television screen, the president’s speech “hopeless garbled,” only one word — “Sacrifice … sacrifice … sacrifice…” — audible?
Adrenochrome does exist, though it’s synthetic. There were phone calls I could’ve made to get to the bottom of this, figure out just how intoxicated Thompson had been while he was out living this stuff. But in the end I didn’t. Not because the myth was too precious to deflate. I just couldn’t see how it mattered. Sustained time in Las Vegas is its own narcotic, as dark, hallucinatory and debilitating as any other.
***
“If you manage to miss the f***ing mountain, I will not invite you back.”
Out in the desert, we were getting a safety lesson. Or rather, we were huddled between some parked cars, trying not to look conspicuous, while a group of armed men received a safety lesson. The hackers had arrived in Las Vegas, but before DEFCON was to begin, they had loaded up their ordnance and ammunition and driven west, out past the subdivisions and gas stations and into the scrub, way up into the Spring Mountain hills. A friend, a DEFCON veteran in town for the conference, had tipped us off to this annual rite of inaugurating the conference each year in a hail of bullets.
“It’s really worth seeing,” she’d said, “but the thing is, they hate press.” A female “Dateline NBC” producer had attempted to go undercover at DEFCON in 2007, employing a secret camera, but was lured to an auditorium hall and outed in front of the entire audience. (They called the game “Spot the Undercover Reporter.”) An angry mob pursued her back to her car, heckling her, “To Catch a Predator”-style, until she managed to reach her vehicle and drive off. The video, on YouTube, is not for the faint of heart, or for reporters attempting similarly misguided tasks. That had been back in Las Vegas proper, where the hackers didn’t go around carrying sawed-off shotguns. Not the case here.
“Can you get rid of the coif?” our friend had said, looking me over in the bar the night before. “And, uh, that shirt. And do you have any shoes that aren’t so white and hipster-y?” Fleur, she decided, was all right — a black T-shirt and she’d be fine. Ramon’s resemblance to a Serbian coke dealer couldn’t be helped, but at least he looked vaguely menacing and outside the law. But I was touch and go.
“Reporter Found Dead.” Fleur spitballed headlines in the car. “His friends were forced to dig their own graves.” Even the Aveo looked wrong, its red too bright and optimistic. Once we got off-road, it wasn’t at all clear whether we’d be able to get back on. The shoot wasn’t at a proper range or established spot. It was in a gully in among the hills, miles off State Route 160.
The trip had been full of self-loathing these past days, but this was our first encounter with unfeigned fear. I felt it in my stomach as we rolled into the lot. The people we were joining were in some ways among the deadliest on Earth, adept at weapons both old and new. Their guns were the least of our worries. My browser history was far too checkered for this assignment. My credit score couldn’t take the additional hit. These were men and women who could take their revenge whenever they felt like it. They could disable the Aveo remotely, leave us in the desert if they wanted to, and probably watch the brutal finish via remote camera. Or they could wait years, until I got my first mortgage or crafted an online dating profile, and take it all away with the click of a mouse.
Everyone we’d met so far had been so nice, and here we were on a bright Thursday morning near the California border, betraying their trust.
We watched from our half-hiding spot as the hackers circled up around a man called Deviant, who introduced himself as the organizer of this year’s shoot. They began chanting. “The gun is always loaded,” said a chorus of male voices, over and over again.
“Any questions?” Deviant asked. A burly guy in black raised his hand.
“What do we do if we don’t want our photos taken?”
Deviant brandished a roll of purple duct tape. “A purple X means ‘I do not belong in a photo,’” he said. You could photograph your friends as they fired rounds off into the sand, he said, but if an “X” ended up in the picture, you would be expected to delete it immediately. About three-quarters of the crowd immediately taped up. Over by a white minivan, Ramon, camera draped around his neck, studied the ground.
We’d split up — none of us looked right, really, but together it was obvious, and so we fanned out across the makeshift range separately. In the Aveo, we’d concocted fake names and cover stories — mine was Jeff; my hacker buddy Steve was arriving later in the day — but privacy is paramount among hackers, so no one asked us anything. More than a few of the gunmen looked like they wanted to, though.
After the briefing, the weapons came out: sawed-off shotguns, AK-47s, short-barrel Uzis, Desert Eagles, big revolvers, and, on a blanket, near the ground, a Browning M1919 machine gun. Next to the Browning, a man laid out, piece by piece, a DPMS SASS, a modified AR-10 rifle which, its owner told me, was accurate up to 500 yards, and so was currently being wasted on the range here — a mere 150 yards or so to the rock bluffs and mountain.
We watched as the hackers set up their firing zone, dragging out bits of rebar and chicken wire, old PCs, sofas, traffic lights, wooden crates, and paper targets, including an Osama bin Laden and a couple of lady zombies. There were a few children running around, including a tiny girl with a handgun — it looked like a .22 — holstered at her waist. Most of the adults wore black T-shirts despite the considerable heat, paired with gym or cargo shorts, floppy hats and shades. One guy was wearing a kilt. Several had dyed their hair purple. There were more women than you might guess.
Up and down the line could be heard the metallic snap of rounds sliding into their chambers. Off to the left of the main firing range, three men were busy cobbling together what would reveal itself to be a .50-caliber sniper rifle, about 4 or 5 feet long. This is what U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan use to shatter car engine blocks at great distances and to kill enemies from as far as a mile-and-a-quarter away. Its bullet isn’t much smaller than a classic Coca-Cola glass bottle. When you fire the .50-cal, a great big cloud of dust goes up around the shooter, and the ground shakes.
The all-clear was given, and the shooters raised up as one. The noise was incredible. Out of the rock face down the range, you could see the heavier guns taking their toll on the shale and dirt in the back. Chunks of the bluffs that backstopped the field were flying off, chipped to pieces in a steady fusillade of automatic weapons fire. The sound was all whistles, squeaks and bursts of full-auto mayhem.
By the water jugs, Fleur looked sick.
After a while, a man wheeled a cannon — I don’t know what else to call it — up to the range. A crowd quickly formed around him. The cannon looked handmade, and as we watched, its operator rolled back its weird, short barrel, which was supported by two modified wheelbarrow wheels, and poured gunpowder down its snout. People began shouting “Fire in the hole!,” stepping back to get clear of the thing. The cannon’s owner tied a length of string to a plug halfway down the length of it, and donned ear protection. He looked around. And then, shrugging and stepping back, he pulled the string.
The sound had an almost physical quality to it. The cannon came back a good 2 or 3 feet as most of us bent over in pain from the noise. A big puff of smoke came drifting out of the barrel. Did he hit anything? Was there anything to hit?
“This is everything that’s wrong with America,” Fleur hissed in my ear. And here I had just been thinking that the hackers out here, their pale skin turning red in the sun, were prime examples of the real American individualism of which Thompson had been such an ardent advocate — his heirs in this town, where everyone else was a tourist or a fraternity brother or just waiting for their kids to graduate high school so they could finally get the hell out. Soon Fleur, Ramon and I would return to our comfortable lives in New York City, and these guys would go back to basements with blacked-out curtains, burning their own trash in the backyard and daily microwaving the same brand of frozen pizza. They were weird Americans, and our last line of defense when Copher Black’s online apocalypse finally came. We were just dilettantes in the desert, hoping to survive long enough to get back to our day jobs in midtown Manhattan.
On top of her anger, Fleur was nauseated, she said. Ramon and I had gotten what we needed, my notes jotted covertly in the Aveo between volleys of live fire. We rendezvoused at the car and slid our way over the gravel and out of the lot. Fleur raised her middle finger and aimed it at the last cluster of shooters we saw as I pressed down on the accelerator and turned the wheel back toward Las Vegas.
***
“Fear and Loathing” ends on a funny note. After Duke and Gonzo’s trip to the Old Psychiatrist’s Club, Gonzo decides to leave at dawn; late to the airport, Duke takes their big white Coupe de Ville, their second convertible of the journey, off the freeway and onto the tarmac itself, where Gonzo disembarks behind a van and just barely makes his flight. “I wondered if maybe this kind of thing happened all the time in Vegas,” Duke muses, “cars full of late-arriving passengers screeching desperately across the runway, dropping off wild-eyed Samoans clutching mysterious canvas bags who would spring onto planes at the last possible second and then roar off into the sunrise.”
There is the business with the ape, back at Circus Circus, the furtive flight from a second ruined hotel room, and then, abruptly, the decision to flee the city. Duke finds himself back at the airport, surrounded by cops and district attorneys heading home from their conference. Limping onto the plane, he has one last Bloody Mary, some cigarettes, a grapefruit that he slices up with a big hunting knife that scares his stewardess. On his way home to Aspen, where Thompson lived, Duke cadges some amyl nitrate in the Denver airport pharmacy, then makes for the bar once more, heart “full of joy.”
“I felt like a monster reincarnation of Horatio Alger … a Man on the Move, and just sick enough to be totally confident,” Thompson wrote.
That’s the last line of the book.
At home I had read Thompson’s finale and figured it for one last call-back of the novel’s big idea — another glimpse of an American sick at heart, papering over that knowledge with drugs (or not) and an insane, misguided belief in himself. But I no longer felt so sure. Was the last line of “Fear and Loathing” meant to parody the same baseless American optimism that Thompson so neatly eviscerates elsewhere in “Fear and Loathing”? Or did Thompson on some level mean for his ending to be genuinely happy, the way it feels, the book’s final frame frozen on a man set free by his own self-destructive lunacy?
Duke and Gonzo’s trip, as Thompson summarized it at the book’s beginning, was meant to be “a gross, physical salute to the fantastic possibilities of life in this country.” The idea was optimism in the face of the odds. It’s what Thompson’s gonzo project was about in the end. “What was the story?” Duke asks himself.
“Nobody had bothered to say. So we would have to drum it up on our own. Free enterprise. The American Dream. Horatio Alger gone mad on drugs in Las Vegas. Do it now: pure Gonzo journalism.”
The American Dream was getting in a car and going looking for the American Dream.
***
We reconvened that night at the Rio without Ramon, who had an appointment with a burlesque dancer around midnight in his hotel suite. I missed him already. He had been a valuable ally in this awful city, and we were far from free of it yet. The Rio was DEFCON’s stronghold, and all around us were clots of black-shirted hackers. Down near the convention halls, kids slouched against the walls, surrounded by laptops and makeshift antennae. With these guys around, the casino ATMs were under no circumstances to be used, said our guide. Ditto for the elevators, and the vending machines, and anything else that plugged into a wall.
“Oh, and turn off your phones,” she said. “Unless you want them bricked.”
“Bricked?”
“Like, turned into a useless piece of plastic and circuits.”
“Ah.”
It was like communicating by smoke signal in there, bathroom trips and scouting missions precisely planned and executed, back-up meeting points chosen in case we were separated. It reminded me of the ’90s. With my phone turned off in my pocket, I scribbled notes on cocktail napkins from the Rio’s iBar, writing around the slogans on the margins: “i Am Dangerous. i Am Sexy. i Am Exciting. i Am Confident.”
I felt like none of those things. “You look wrong again,” said our friend. My hair was once again too combed, my shirt too colored, my jeans too Japanese. (“i Am from New York. i Am Minutes Away from Starring in a Humiliating Viral Video.”) What I looked like was a narc. But I had a job to do.
I went down to mingle with the hackers near the conference rooms. I admired their various badges, each signifying something different. A giant skull and crossbones meant serious hackers, I was told, and it seemed plausible, striding around as those guys did with full-blown entourages, lesser factotums laughing at jokes I couldn’t begin to even understand. Others had sheriff’s stars, a cryptic triangle, and — most commonly — the “human” badge, which is what our guide had, a neat titanium circle with a Masonic-looking eye inscribed in its center.
“Excuse me, can I help you?” one of the conference organizers said, picking me out among probably a hundred other people mingling in the Rio atrium.
“Just looking around,” I said.
“This is a private conference, sir.”
He conducted me back up the ramp, to the casino’s main gambling floor.
I was not fooling anybody. There was a T-shirt on sale from a nearby booth: black, boxy, with a pixilated video game figure on the front and the legend “I Fight for the Users” on the back. I bought it, went into the men’s room, took off the collared shirt I had been wearing, and emerged a changed man, or at least like one who didn’t look like he was about to go get a drink with Colonel Sanders. Fleur and our local guide studied me. “Much better,” our friend said. Fleur stuffed the old, offending garment in her bag, and we were ready.
Our guide knew of a hacker party, deep in the complex of convention halls in the back of the Rio. They’d never let us in, even in disguise, she said. But the spirit of hacking is subversion, solving puzzles, finding a way through locked doors. She had an idea. We bypassed a long column of ponytailed men waiting to get in, followed our guide through an egress marked “Do Not Enter.”
We wandered around the guts of the Rio until we heard music. In the back of the party ballroom was a service entrance, and we burst through it with confidence — my first hack. Inside, a giant paper dragon looked down from the ceiling. Tables were arrayed across the room, each with an abstract modified circuit board in place of a centerpiece.
The drinks were free, and so we had a few. A deejay was spinning dance music — wordless techno, drum and bass, rave-y bursts of electronic sound. My shoulders tensed for the LMFAO song that never came. The dance floor was barren, men clustered up against it on all sides. We had a few more drinks. Fleur and our guide took to the floor, began freaking each other without inhibition or reserve.
We danced there for a while. Things got blurrier. Las Vegas was alive with hackers, they were having parties all across town. We only had a few hours left in this city that I had come to loathe, and we would make the most of them.
I woke up the next morning with a pain in my chest. In the bed next to mine, Fleur snored gently. Our planes were due to take off in a few hours, our Vegas odyssey done. My relief, as I idly played with the bandage on my chest, was overwhelming.
Bandage?
I pulled the hotel comforter back, its scent as anonymous as it was the day we arrived. Looking down, I saw a black compress taped on four sides to the upper left part of my chest.
The pole dancers at the Hard Rock. The legend above the door. A Sex Pistols quote jotted on a napkin by the bed: “The only notes that matter come in wads.” The buzz of the tattoo gun.
I remembered now, sort of.
“Oh, we’re definitely shaving you,” the man had said, when I removed my hacker’s T-shirt.
I peeled the tape off. Written in script underneath, right above my heart, was the word “Yes.”
Click here for Parts I and II
zach.baron@thedaily.com
PART III: AMERICAN DREAM
“The American Dream is an assignment to write about the American Dream.” Tautological notes like this one were something I had been doing as a kind of exercise in my iPhone’s notepad throughout this trip. But though “Fear and Loathing” contains plenty of iffy journalism and an unreliable narrator, Thompson’s take on the American Dream in the book is actually quite clear. Perhaps predictably, he never did end up writing his actual American Dream book for Random House. But one reason for that was because after “Fear and Loathing,” there really wasn’t that much left to say.
“Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas” was published in two parts in Rolling Stone, Nov. 11 and Nov. 25, 1971. Random House printed the article in book form the next year. The New York Times initially reacted with skepticism, but then ran a second piece reviewing the novel favorably, calling “Fear and Loathing” the “best book yet written on the decade of dope gone by.”
What Thompson had really done was write the decade’s epitaph. At a moment when hippie truisms about LSD and meditation being a path to enlightenment still ruled, Thompson pinpointed “the essential old-mystic fallacy of the Acid Culture: the desperate assumption that somebody — or at least some force — is tending that Light at the end of the tunnel.” The counterculture of the ’60s, Thompson argued, had maintained a naïve faith that the cosmic forces that seemed to be governing things in those days were fundamentally benevolent. But what if that weren’t the case?
In fact, much of “Fear and Loathing” can be read as a point-by-point repudiation of the psychedelic ’60s dream — from the promise of chemical liberation (Samuel Johnson’s “He who makes a beast of himself gets rid of the pain of being a man” was the book’s epigraph) to the presumed decency of one’s fellow travelers, a presumption easily disproved in “grossly atavistic” Las Vegas, where “they kill the weak and deranged.”
Thompson had lived off the Haight in the ’60s, and written stodgy pieces for the New York Times describing the lingo and ethos of the burgeoning hippie movement there. He had been around Ken Kesey, taken acid with the Jefferson Airplane. In 1968 Thompson covered the catastrophic Democratic National Convention, where he was beaten by cops and disillusioned beyond redemption. By 1971, the year Thompson briefly became Rolling Stone’s chief political correspondent, his hatred of Richard Nixon was pathological. (“The saga of Richard Nixon is The Death of the American Dream,” Thompson later wrote. “He was our Gatsby, but the light on the end of his pier was black instead of green.”)
On March 8, 1971, less than two weeks before he went to Las Vegas to cover the Mint, Thompson watched the tacitly pro-war Joe Frazier deal the draft martyr Muhammad Ali his first-ever professional defeat in a surreal bout at Madison Square Garden. “A very painful experience in every way, a proper end to the sixties,” Thompson wrote in “Fear and Loathing.” He looked around and jotted down what he saw:
“Tim Leary a prisoner of Eldridge Cleaver in Algeria, Bob Dylan clipping coupons in Greenwich Village, both Kennedys murdered by mutants, Owsley folding napkins on Terminal Island, and finally Cassius/Ali belted incredibly off his pedestal by a human hamburger, a man on the verge of death. Joe Frazier, like Nixon, had finally prevailed for reasons that people like me refused to understand — at least not out loud … But that was some other era, burned out and long gone from the brutish realities of this foul year of Our Lord, 1971.”
Thompson’s eulogy for that other era, “burned out and long gone,” is also the finest passage of “Fear and Loathing.” It is as honest and open and idealistic as Thompson ever got in print, and he would later say it was the part of the book of which he was most proud:
“It seems entirely reasonable to think that every now and then the energy of a whole generation comes to a head in a long fine flash, for reasons that nobody really understands at the time,” he wrote.
“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 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 had all 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.”
***
Duke and Gonzo do eventually find what they are looking for. Late in “Fear and Loathing,” in a chapter called “Breakdown on Paradise Blvd.,” the narrative is interrupted by an “editor’s note” explaining that the original manuscript was so “splintered that we were forced to seek out the original tape recording and transcribe it verbatim.” What follows is a hallucinatory dialog between Duke and his attorney as they cruise Paradise Road northeast of Vegas. Eventually they stop at a taco stand, where they ask a waitress and then a cook if either of them knows where the American Dream is. The cook refers them to “the old Psychiatrist’s Club” — a “mental joint, where all the dopers hang out.”
The two men head out in search of the place, but the tape fails again. The editor’s note resumes; though the recording is hard to decipher, “there is a certain consistency in the garbled sounds” indicating “that almost two hours later Dr. Duke and his attorney finally located what was left of the ‘Old Psychiatrist’s Club’ — a huge slab of cracked, scorched concrete in a vacant lot full of tall weeds. The owner of a gas station across the road said the place had ‘burned down about three years ago.’”
It was Thompson’s last love letter to the pre-1968 ’60s, and an unequivocal kiss-off to everything that came after it. The American Dream had been badly neglected, abandoned, lit on fire — Las Vegas and its straightforward brutality were all that was left. A generation’s worth of energy and idealism had come to a head in a “long fine flash”; the reprisal was savage, immediate, and in its own way equally dramatic. The pendulum had swung all the way back the other way.
Boomer nostalgia for this “little parenthesis of light,” in Thomas Pynchon’s phrase, has not aged well for those of us who grew up under its sign. Our parents may have venerated the ’60s, but most of them are stone-cold products of the early ’70s — the era, captured so despairingly in the pages of “Fear and Loathing,” when the forces of order, if not full-blown evil, reasserted control, never to let go again. And while today period pieces from those bright prelapsarian years such as “The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test” might as well depict life on another planet, the eerie thing about reading “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas” in this foul year of Our Lord, 2011, is the dispiriting sense of recognition that runs up the spine.
Not to read his work too much against his biography, but it seems safe to say that Thompson felt that way too. “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas” was in many ways Thompson’s peak as a writer — after that the phrase “fear and loathing” came to represent a franchise (“Fear and Loathing at the Super Bowl”; “Fear and Loathing in Saigon: Interdicted Dispatch from the Global Affairs Desk”; “Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’76: Third Rate Romance, Low Rent Rendezvous”) and the writing — always a contingent, fragile thing for Thompson — ossified with it. Thompson’s uncanny luck at a typewriter hardened into predictable zaniness; the writer’s outsized courage became bluster.
Amid a growing catalog of physical complaints related to a lifetime of drug abuse and alcoholism, Thompson soldiered on, a working journalist to the end. He filed for Rolling Stone, Playboy and ESPN, and released collection after collection of his old letters and old copy. In 2005, in considerable pain, he wrote a brief suicide note, and killed himself at his home in Aspen. He was 67. Rolling Stone ran the note, titled “Football Season Is Over,” in their September issue that year. It read:
“No More Games. No More Bombs. No More Walking. No More Fun. No More Swimming. 67. That is 17 years past 50. 17 more than I needed or wanted. Boring. I am always bitchy. No Fun — for anybody. 67. You are getting Greedy. Act your old age. Relax — This won’t hurt.”
It was the last willful act of a willful man, a violent but voluntary exit from a world he no longer wanted to live in. After 1971 it had been all fear and loathing anyway.
***
“Your attention please. We are currently investigating the alarm system you are hearing.”
We sat among thousands of hackers and security personnel in the Augustus Ballroom at Caesars Palace. Up at the front, Jeff Moss, also known as The Dark Tangent, welcomed us all to the 15th annual Black Hat Technical Security Conference. Arrayed behind Moss were five big screens in a row, and on each of them was some version of the Black Hat logo: either an X-rayed skull in full-brain profile, or a kind of silhouette Bogart in a fedora, trench coat turned up at the neck. Little lightning bolts occasionally shot around inside the skull. Gentle techno played softly over the speakers until Moss took the stage, and then it stopped.
Part of the rationale behind Hunter Thompson covering a National District Attorneys Association narcotics conference was that there was pretty much no other place on the planet Earth more dangerous for him to be. But in 2011, there is arguably no city in the entire country more terrifying than Las Vegas during the week of Aug. 1-7, when the town is full of hackers. These are people who can remotely start the engine of a car using nothing but a cellphone, who can wirelessly disable or — if they want to — fatally overload a diabetic’s insulin pump from up to 150 feet away. That’s the type of mayhem they were demonstrating on panels anyway; one can only imagine what went on in the conference’s off hours.
Black Hat is a corporate outgrowth of a far more anarchic and nonhierarchical hacker convention called DEFCON, celebrating its 19th year, and scheduled to begin at the Rio on Aug. 4, after Black Hat concludes. Moss founded both conferences. The first, DEFCON, grew out of an impromptu gathering of hackers Moss held in Vegas back in 1992. Black Hat came along five years later, when Moss realized that he could pander to the growing corporate IT departments that were desperate for the type of shadowy and sometimes illicit knowledge he and his friends possessed. A DEFCON badge is $150, cash only, paid at the door. Black Hat badges run $1,495 or more in advance and a whopping $2,495 on-site, the assumption being that the companies that send their employees for education at Black Hat can afford to lay out that kind of money without blinking.
There is some attendee overlap, and many of the 6,000-strong Black Hat badge-holders stick around for DEFCON, which stopped counting attendance this year after the first 10,000 — estimates put the final number at as much as twice that. Members of Anonymous and LulzSec — the two “hacktivist” groups famous for pranks such as publicly releasing emails and other theoretically private information belonging to firms like HBGary Federal and Bank of America and taking the CIA’s website offline — were said to be in attendance, as were various law enforcement agents attempting (in vain) to identify and apprehend them.
From the stage, Moss proudly informed us that this was the biggest Black Hat ever, with attendees coming from as far away as Bulgaria, Croatia, Serbia, Vietnam, Costa Rica, Taiwan, Canada, Sweden, Australia, Israel, France, Germany and Japan. It was 9 a.m., and Ramon sat blearily next to me in the auditorium. Fleur, for her part, had opted for an extra few hours of sleep.
Moss is fresh-faced and youthful-looking, has glasses and smooth cheeks, and was appointed in 2009 to the Homeland Security Advisory Council. The keynote speaker, up next, was Cofer Black, a 28-year veteran of the CIA, most recently as director of the agency’s burgeoning Counterterrorism Center. Halfway through the Bush years, he left the government to go work for Blackwater and advised Mitt Romney during Romney’s short-lived 2007-08 presidential bid. In his blue blazer and oxford shirt, stubbly pate and recessed eyes, Black seemed, from a couple hundred feet away, like the perfect avatar for that Cheneyesque species of bureaucrat for whom death and politics are inextricably entwined. Ordering men into violent covert combat in the more obscure parts of Afghanistan, Black would go on to suggest, was a big part of his job at the CIA.
The subject of Black’s keynote was “Perspectives on 9/11 — Ten Years Later and Beyond.” Part of the general theme of Black Hat 2011, it emerged, was that information security is on the verge of becoming a lot more important in this country than it currently is — not unlike counterterrorism, which as a discipline didn’t fully catch on, according to Black, until 9/11. The gist of Black’s speech was that the digital security sector’s own 9/11-type event is coming — “A validation of threat and attack will come into your world,” Black promised the audience — at which point the bureaucratic “clouds will drop away” and “the sunlight” of resources and respect would come pouring in. You could tell Black didn’t know much about computers — what we were witnessing was a kind of battle-weary post-cold-warrior handing off the baton to new blood. “Now it is your turn, whether you know it or not,” he said to the assembled hackers.
“Your attention please. We are currently investigating the alarm system you are hearing.”
The alert notification system at Caesars Palace, a deeply unpleasant thing, began to sound. Guffaws immediately spread across the vast reaches of the Augustus Ballroom. Black was standing there looking peeved; the collision of literal alert systems interrupting talk of theoretical alert systems, not to mention the strong likelihood that this was a prank being pulled by a bored member of the audience — for whom hacking the Caesars Palace security system was probably about as challenging as getting out of bed in the morning — left everyone unsure of how to react.
Eventually Black decided to resume talking over the alarm, which was loud and insistent and which rendered this portion of his speech into a string of half-audible but still terrifying buzzwords: “CYBER ATTACK … NOISE … PHYSICAL DAMAGE … KINETIC RESPONSE … TERRORISM … CYBER … FUTURE … CONFLICT.”
“The cause of the fire alarm signal you just heard has been investigated. Please return to your normal activity.”
Laughter rang out across the big ballroom.
***
Outside the Augustus, the hackers swarmed together. There was an exhibition room, crowded with booths, and booksellers out in the hall. The graphic design of these tomes uniformly involved a lot of dots and dashes and puzzle pieces nestling into other puzzle pieces. The books looked self-published but mostly weren’t. I opened one volume called “The Art of Deception: Controlling the Human Element of Security” and under the heading “Trust: The Key to Deception” began to read: “The more a social engineer can make his contact seem like business as usual, the more he allays suspicion …”
Hackers are big on secrecy. Even here, at the relatively square and corporate Black Hat Technical Security Conference, attendees could choose what their badges read — I was possibly the only person in the building to have made the not terrifically informed decision to put not just my full name but also my institutional affiliation on my badge. Most people were going with a first name, or first name and second initial, max. Later, at DEFCON, the hackers we met used aliases, or simply skipped that part of the introduction entirely. Inside the exhibitor room, paranoia was the reigning concept: “Can you be breached?” was one slogan. “Know where. Know how.”
Most of the major tech and tech security companies come to Black Hat — IBM, BlackBerry, HP, Cisco, Amazon, Symantec and so on. I also noted booths from RedSeal, McAfee, FireHost, BluePoint Security, ManTech, Bit9, VMware, iMPERVA and SecureX — the random capital letter thing is evidently a huge trend in Internet security — before my hand got tired of jotting all the names down.
Just outside the exhibition hall was a booth representing the Federal Reserve Bank. The bank was looking to attract new employees. By way of an enticement, the two women manning the table were giving away small plastic-wrapped samples of shredded U.S. currency that looked from far away like bags of low-grade marijuana. The whole set-up was not exactly confidence-inspiring, from a monetary policy standpoint. Nearby the FBI was also recruiting — “Come on up, ladies, don’t be shy!” the guy behind the booth said to a couple of onlookers. “We’re the FBI, we’re here to help you!”
In “Fear and Loathing,” Duke and his attorney spend all of about five minutes at the National District Attorneys Association conference. Then they stagger out of the ballroom at the Dunes Hotel and proceed to sit at the bar downstairs, planting nightmares about dope fiends and witchcraft in the head of a DA from someplace in Georgia. As with the Midnight Special, my obsequious obedience to my own arbitrary mission — a race for a race, a conference for a conference — was beginning to feel like another kind of reportorial failure. The hungover groomsmen sleeping it off in the hotel rooms upstairs were doing a better job re-enacting “Fear and Loathing” than I was.
Ramon couldn’t stand it in there anymore anyway; there was nothing to photograph, and all up and down the corridor, middle-aged academics were droning on about JavaScript and exploit development, port scans and remote false adjacencies. We wandered out of Caesars, into the blinding sun.
“A little bit of this town goes a very long way,” Thompson wrote in “Fear and Loathing.” “After five days in Vegas you feel like you’ve been here for five years.” Time stretches around this city, and not for the better. Boredom is the real predatory force to be fought off here. Even at noon on the , the surfeit of potential entertainments presented Ramon and me with an unrelenting yes/no dichotomy: Either Celine Dion or the vast, quiet emptiness of the desert, blackjack or sitting alone in our respective hotel rooms, contemplating the void. Walking down Las Vegas Boulevard, I could feel the boredom pushing down on me, punishment for having the temerity to attempt the city’s “sidewalks,” where the barrage of options was loud and the going crowded and unpleasant, a rebuke to the very idea of going outside.
Dazed, we shoved our way down the Strip. Across the street was the Flamingo, Duke and Gonzo’s hideout during their second crack at Las Vegas, the hotel where they imprisoned Lucy, that young, impressionable Montana girl. The orange and pink tail of the iconic Flamingo logo looked queasy under a coat of dirt and grime. The rest of the once-white building had long since gone yellow. Grubby pink neon led us inside.
Thompson stayed here with Oscar Acosta, “Mini-Suite 1150 in the Far Wing.” Ramon and I walked past the horse gamblers being irradiated by the old CRT monitors on which they watched the races. At the elevator bank, two Asian men in full American-flag spandex bodysuits, socks, flip-flops and plastic hats walked nonchalantly past.
We rode up without interference to the 11th floor, and found Room No. 1150, or “11050,” anyway. The stale scent of cigarette smoke had long since been assimilated into the carpets, which sported washed-out palms etched in yellow against a field of puce and brown. A room service tray was wheeled up against the opposite wall. It was quiet, the ceilings low. There was a feeling like whatever adventures might have been had here were just sad, not ennobling or memorable.
But the Flamingo’s been renovated since the early ’70s, and today former Rolling Stone fact-checkers will tell you that Thompson was forever putting non-existent hotel room numbers into his stories. The walls on floor 11 were patterned like yellow tile and lit by neon lights that hurt to look at.
Drawn by a loud noise at the end of the corridor, we pushed through a door marked “Stairwell Exit” and listened to the roar of the cooling fans we found ourselves standing above. We were behind the Flamingo marquee, the entrance to Caesar’s Palace right across the way. We looked around — it was that thing again, searching for a meaningful moment out on a fire escape, awaiting a revelation that would descend in clear, lyrical language as we peered at the true shape of things from our hidden door. Down on the Strip, a family walked by, a mother towing a tiny brown child.
“That girl is going to be a model someday,” Ramon said. “It’s weird when you can tell that young.”
PART IV: i AM DANGEROUS. i AM SEXY. i AM EXCITING. i AM CONFIDENT.
You will have been wondering about the drugs. Did we do them? Did I find myself on Fremont Street, cowering under an awning as a digital projection of Jim Morrison mounted the roof of the pedestrian mall’s 90-foot-tall barrel-vault canopy? Did I walk with many gaits, dragging first one leg and then the other, zig-zagging past blackjack tables and wolfish packs of Midwesterners? Was Caesars Palace where Fleur found her spirit animal, a puffer fish? Did she pet at it through the swank aquarium glass? Did it all end with me on my knees on the plush carpet that cradles the Bellagio Las Vegas, tears streaming down my face as I genuflected to the casino’s super-sized Liberty Bell, surmounted by a mighty eagle that clutched lightning bolts in its talons, the sign under which I grew up in faraway Philadelphia?
Of course not.
***
Thompson wrote to Jim Silberman, his Random House editor, in the summer of 1971, before “Fear and Loathing” had even been published. He was responding to a letter of Silberman’s, which came with a check for expenses — a good part of Thompson’s letters from this year are pretty much devoted entirely to haggling over money with Silberman, Rolling Stone editor Jann Wenner, American Express, Carte Blanche and all the other credit card companies Thompson had burned while in Vegas. Silberman had written and said, “You know it was absolutely clear to me reading Las Vegas I [this is how Thompson referred to the first half of his book before writing the second section] that you were not on drugs …”
Thompson wrote back: “This is true [!], but what alarms me is that Vegas I was a very conscious attempt to simulate drug freakout — which is always difficult, but in reading it over I still find it depressingly close to the truth I was trying to re-create.” He went on to tell Silberman that the editor’s reading of the manuscript so depressed him that to feel better, he “ate a bunch of mescaline” and went on a violent drag race with some buddies. He concluded, “All I ask is that you keep your opinions on my drug-diet for that weekend to yourself … it makes it all the more astounding, that I could emerge from that heinous experience with a story.”
Is it really possible that Thompson wasn’t on drugs at all during the reporting of “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas”?
Writers lie to their editors all the time, of course. Silberman in particular, in Thompson’s voluminous correspondence with him, seems like a guy Thompson wanted to impress. But it is true that on closer inspection, some of the drugs Duke and Gonzo ingest in the book have suspiciously literary effects. How else to explain Adrenochrome, the extract of “adrenaline glands from a living human body,” a substance whose primary effects on Duke in the novel appear to be the rendering of Richard Nixon on Duke’s hotel television screen, the president’s speech “hopeless garbled,” only one word — “Sacrifice … sacrifice … sacrifice…” — audible?
Adrenochrome does exist, though it’s synthetic. There were phone calls I could’ve made to get to the bottom of this, figure out just how intoxicated Thompson had been while he was out living this stuff. But in the end I didn’t. Not because the myth was too precious to deflate. I just couldn’t see how it mattered. Sustained time in Las Vegas is its own narcotic, as dark, hallucinatory and debilitating as any other.
***
“If you manage to miss the f***ing mountain, I will not invite you back.”
Out in the desert, we were getting a safety lesson. Or rather, we were huddled between some parked cars, trying not to look conspicuous, while a group of armed men received a safety lesson. The hackers had arrived in Las Vegas, but before DEFCON was to begin, they had loaded up their ordnance and ammunition and driven west, out past the subdivisions and gas stations and into the scrub, way up into the Spring Mountain hills. A friend, a DEFCON veteran in town for the conference, had tipped us off to this annual rite of inaugurating the conference each year in a hail of bullets.
“It’s really worth seeing,” she’d said, “but the thing is, they hate press.” A female “Dateline NBC” producer had attempted to go undercover at DEFCON in 2007, employing a secret camera, but was lured to an auditorium hall and outed in front of the entire audience. (They called the game “Spot the Undercover Reporter.”) An angry mob pursued her back to her car, heckling her, “To Catch a Predator”-style, until she managed to reach her vehicle and drive off. The video, on YouTube, is not for the faint of heart, or for reporters attempting similarly misguided tasks. That had been back in Las Vegas proper, where the hackers didn’t go around carrying sawed-off shotguns. Not the case here.
“Can you get rid of the coif?” our friend had said, looking me over in the bar the night before. “And, uh, that shirt. And do you have any shoes that aren’t so white and hipster-y?” Fleur, she decided, was all right — a black T-shirt and she’d be fine. Ramon’s resemblance to a Serbian coke dealer couldn’t be helped, but at least he looked vaguely menacing and outside the law. But I was touch and go.
“Reporter Found Dead.” Fleur spitballed headlines in the car. “His friends were forced to dig their own graves.” Even the Aveo looked wrong, its red too bright and optimistic. Once we got off-road, it wasn’t at all clear whether we’d be able to get back on. The shoot wasn’t at a proper range or established spot. It was in a gully in among the hills, miles off State Route 160.
The trip had been full of self-loathing these past days, but this was our first encounter with unfeigned fear. I felt it in my stomach as we rolled into the lot. The people we were joining were in some ways among the deadliest on Earth, adept at weapons both old and new. Their guns were the least of our worries. My browser history was far too checkered for this assignment. My credit score couldn’t take the additional hit. These were men and women who could take their revenge whenever they felt like it. They could disable the Aveo remotely, leave us in the desert if they wanted to, and probably watch the brutal finish via remote camera. Or they could wait years, until I got my first mortgage or crafted an online dating profile, and take it all away with the click of a mouse.
Everyone we’d met so far had been so nice, and here we were on a bright Thursday morning near the California border, betraying their trust.
We watched from our half-hiding spot as the hackers circled up around a man called Deviant, who introduced himself as the organizer of this year’s shoot. They began chanting. “The gun is always loaded,” said a chorus of male voices, over and over again.
“Any questions?” Deviant asked. A burly guy in black raised his hand.
“What do we do if we don’t want our photos taken?”
Deviant brandished a roll of purple duct tape. “A purple X means ‘I do not belong in a photo,’” he said. You could photograph your friends as they fired rounds off into the sand, he said, but if an “X” ended up in the picture, you would be expected to delete it immediately. About three-quarters of the crowd immediately taped up. Over by a white minivan, Ramon, camera draped around his neck, studied the ground.
We’d split up — none of us looked right, really, but together it was obvious, and so we fanned out across the makeshift range separately. In the Aveo, we’d concocted fake names and cover stories — mine was Jeff; my hacker buddy Steve was arriving later in the day — but privacy is paramount among hackers, so no one asked us anything. More than a few of the gunmen looked like they wanted to, though.
After the briefing, the weapons came out: sawed-off shotguns, AK-47s, short-barrel Uzis, Desert Eagles, big revolvers, and, on a blanket, near the ground, a Browning M1919 machine gun. Next to the Browning, a man laid out, piece by piece, a DPMS SASS, a modified AR-10 rifle which, its owner told me, was accurate up to 500 yards, and so was currently being wasted on the range here — a mere 150 yards or so to the rock bluffs and mountain.
We watched as the hackers set up their firing zone, dragging out bits of rebar and chicken wire, old PCs, sofas, traffic lights, wooden crates, and paper targets, including an Osama bin Laden and a couple of lady zombies. There were a few children running around, including a tiny girl with a handgun — it looked like a .22 — holstered at her waist. Most of the adults wore black T-shirts despite the considerable heat, paired with gym or cargo shorts, floppy hats and shades. One guy was wearing a kilt. Several had dyed their hair purple. There were more women than you might guess.
Up and down the line could be heard the metallic snap of rounds sliding into their chambers. Off to the left of the main firing range, three men were busy cobbling together what would reveal itself to be a .50-caliber sniper rifle, about 4 or 5 feet long. This is what U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan use to shatter car engine blocks at great distances and to kill enemies from as far as a mile-and-a-quarter away. Its bullet isn’t much smaller than a classic Coca-Cola glass bottle. When you fire the .50-cal, a great big cloud of dust goes up around the shooter, and the ground shakes.
The all-clear was given, and the shooters raised up as one. The noise was incredible. Out of the rock face down the range, you could see the heavier guns taking their toll on the shale and dirt in the back. Chunks of the bluffs that backstopped the field were flying off, chipped to pieces in a steady fusillade of automatic weapons fire. The sound was all whistles, squeaks and bursts of full-auto mayhem.
By the water jugs, Fleur looked sick.
After a while, a man wheeled a cannon — I don’t know what else to call it — up to the range. A crowd quickly formed around him. The cannon looked handmade, and as we watched, its operator rolled back its weird, short barrel, which was supported by two modified wheelbarrow wheels, and poured gunpowder down its snout. People began shouting “Fire in the hole!,” stepping back to get clear of the thing. The cannon’s owner tied a length of string to a plug halfway down the length of it, and donned ear protection. He looked around. And then, shrugging and stepping back, he pulled the string.
The sound had an almost physical quality to it. The cannon came back a good 2 or 3 feet as most of us bent over in pain from the noise. A big puff of smoke came drifting out of the barrel. Did he hit anything? Was there anything to hit?
“This is everything that’s wrong with America,” Fleur hissed in my ear. And here I had just been thinking that the hackers out here, their pale skin turning red in the sun, were prime examples of the real American individualism of which Thompson had been such an ardent advocate — his heirs in this town, where everyone else was a tourist or a fraternity brother or just waiting for their kids to graduate high school so they could finally get the hell out. Soon Fleur, Ramon and I would return to our comfortable lives in New York City, and these guys would go back to basements with blacked-out curtains, burning their own trash in the backyard and daily microwaving the same brand of frozen pizza. They were weird Americans, and our last line of defense when Copher Black’s online apocalypse finally came. We were just dilettantes in the desert, hoping to survive long enough to get back to our day jobs in midtown Manhattan.
On top of her anger, Fleur was nauseated, she said. Ramon and I had gotten what we needed, my notes jotted covertly in the Aveo between volleys of live fire. We rendezvoused at the car and slid our way over the gravel and out of the lot. Fleur raised her middle finger and aimed it at the last cluster of shooters we saw as I pressed down on the accelerator and turned the wheel back toward Las Vegas.
***
“Fear and Loathing” ends on a funny note. After Duke and Gonzo’s trip to the Old Psychiatrist’s Club, Gonzo decides to leave at dawn; late to the airport, Duke takes their big white Coupe de Ville, their second convertible of the journey, off the freeway and onto the tarmac itself, where Gonzo disembarks behind a van and just barely makes his flight. “I wondered if maybe this kind of thing happened all the time in Vegas,” Duke muses, “cars full of late-arriving passengers screeching desperately across the runway, dropping off wild-eyed Samoans clutching mysterious canvas bags who would spring onto planes at the last possible second and then roar off into the sunrise.”
There is the business with the ape, back at Circus Circus, the furtive flight from a second ruined hotel room, and then, abruptly, the decision to flee the city. Duke finds himself back at the airport, surrounded by cops and district attorneys heading home from their conference. Limping onto the plane, he has one last Bloody Mary, some cigarettes, a grapefruit that he slices up with a big hunting knife that scares his stewardess. On his way home to Aspen, where Thompson lived, Duke cadges some amyl nitrate in the Denver airport pharmacy, then makes for the bar once more, heart “full of joy.”
“I felt like a monster reincarnation of Horatio Alger … a Man on the Move, and just sick enough to be totally confident,” Thompson wrote.
That’s the last line of the book.
At home I had read Thompson’s finale and figured it for one last call-back of the novel’s big idea — another glimpse of an American sick at heart, papering over that knowledge with drugs (or not) and an insane, misguided belief in himself. But I no longer felt so sure. Was the last line of “Fear and Loathing” meant to parody the same baseless American optimism that Thompson so neatly eviscerates elsewhere in “Fear and Loathing”? Or did Thompson on some level mean for his ending to be genuinely happy, the way it feels, the book’s final frame frozen on a man set free by his own self-destructive lunacy?
Duke and Gonzo’s trip, as Thompson summarized it at the book’s beginning, was meant to be “a gross, physical salute to the fantastic possibilities of life in this country.” The idea was optimism in the face of the odds. It’s what Thompson’s gonzo project was about in the end. “What was the story?” Duke asks himself.
“Nobody had bothered to say. So we would have to drum it up on our own. Free enterprise. The American Dream. Horatio Alger gone mad on drugs in Las Vegas. Do it now: pure Gonzo journalism.”
The American Dream was getting in a car and going looking for the American Dream.
***
We reconvened that night at the Rio without Ramon, who had an appointment with a burlesque dancer around midnight in his hotel suite. I missed him already. He had been a valuable ally in this awful city, and we were far from free of it yet. The Rio was DEFCON’s stronghold, and all around us were clots of black-shirted hackers. Down near the convention halls, kids slouched against the walls, surrounded by laptops and makeshift antennae. With these guys around, the casino ATMs were under no circumstances to be used, said our guide. Ditto for the elevators, and the vending machines, and anything else that plugged into a wall.
“Oh, and turn off your phones,” she said. “Unless you want them bricked.”
“Bricked?”
“Like, turned into a useless piece of plastic and circuits.”
“Ah.”
It was like communicating by smoke signal in there, bathroom trips and scouting missions precisely planned and executed, back-up meeting points chosen in case we were separated. It reminded me of the ’90s. With my phone turned off in my pocket, I scribbled notes on cocktail napkins from the Rio’s iBar, writing around the slogans on the margins: “i Am Dangerous. i Am Sexy. i Am Exciting. i Am Confident.”
I felt like none of those things. “You look wrong again,” said our friend. My hair was once again too combed, my shirt too colored, my jeans too Japanese. (“i Am from New York. i Am Minutes Away from Starring in a Humiliating Viral Video.”) What I looked like was a narc. But I had a job to do.
I went down to mingle with the hackers near the conference rooms. I admired their various badges, each signifying something different. A giant skull and crossbones meant serious hackers, I was told, and it seemed plausible, striding around as those guys did with full-blown entourages, lesser factotums laughing at jokes I couldn’t begin to even understand. Others had sheriff’s stars, a cryptic triangle, and — most commonly — the “human” badge, which is what our guide had, a neat titanium circle with a Masonic-looking eye inscribed in its center.
“Excuse me, can I help you?” one of the conference organizers said, picking me out among probably a hundred other people mingling in the Rio atrium.
“Just looking around,” I said.
“This is a private conference, sir.”
He conducted me back up the ramp, to the casino’s main gambling floor.
I was not fooling anybody. There was a T-shirt on sale from a nearby booth: black, boxy, with a pixilated video game figure on the front and the legend “I Fight for the Users” on the back. I bought it, went into the men’s room, took off the collared shirt I had been wearing, and emerged a changed man, or at least like one who didn’t look like he was about to go get a drink with Colonel Sanders. Fleur and our local guide studied me. “Much better,” our friend said. Fleur stuffed the old, offending garment in her bag, and we were ready.
Our guide knew of a hacker party, deep in the complex of convention halls in the back of the Rio. They’d never let us in, even in disguise, she said. But the spirit of hacking is subversion, solving puzzles, finding a way through locked doors. She had an idea. We bypassed a long column of ponytailed men waiting to get in, followed our guide through an egress marked “Do Not Enter.”
We wandered around the guts of the Rio until we heard music. In the back of the party ballroom was a service entrance, and we burst through it with confidence — my first hack. Inside, a giant paper dragon looked down from the ceiling. Tables were arrayed across the room, each with an abstract modified circuit board in place of a centerpiece.
The drinks were free, and so we had a few. A deejay was spinning dance music — wordless techno, drum and bass, rave-y bursts of electronic sound. My shoulders tensed for the LMFAO song that never came. The dance floor was barren, men clustered up against it on all sides. We had a few more drinks. Fleur and our guide took to the floor, began freaking each other without inhibition or reserve.
We danced there for a while. Things got blurrier. Las Vegas was alive with hackers, they were having parties all across town. We only had a few hours left in this city that I had come to loathe, and we would make the most of them.
I woke up the next morning with a pain in my chest. In the bed next to mine, Fleur snored gently. Our planes were due to take off in a few hours, our Vegas odyssey done. My relief, as I idly played with the bandage on my chest, was overwhelming.
Bandage?
I pulled the hotel comforter back, its scent as anonymous as it was the day we arrived. Looking down, I saw a black compress taped on four sides to the upper left part of my chest.
The pole dancers at the Hard Rock. The legend above the door. A Sex Pistols quote jotted on a napkin by the bed: “The only notes that matter come in wads.” The buzz of the tattoo gun.
I remembered now, sort of.
“Oh, we’re definitely shaving you,” the man had said, when I removed my hacker’s T-shirt.
I peeled the tape off. Written in script underneath, right above my heart, was the word “Yes.”
Click here for Parts I and II
zach.baron@thedaily.com
