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Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas :: Thompson Hunter S.
Страница: 165 из 255You evil bastard! This is your work! You’d better take careof me, Lord… because if you don’t you’re going to have me on your hands.
12. Hellish Speed… Grappling with the California Highway Patrol… Mano a Mano on Highway 61
Tuesday, 12:30 P.M… Baker, California… Into the Ballantine Ale now, zombie drunk and nervous. I recognize this feeling: three or four days of booze, drugs, sun, no sleep and burned out adrenalin reserves - a giddy, quavering sort of high that means the crash is coming. But when? How much longer? This tension is part of the high. The possibility of physical and mental collapse is very real now
… but collapse is out of the question; as a solution or even a cheap alternative, it is unacceptable.
Indeed. This is the moment of truth, that fine and fateful line between control and disaster - which is also the difference between staying loose and weird on the streets, or spending the next five years of summer mornings playing basketball in the yard at Carson City.
No sympathy for the devil; keep that in mind. Buy the ticket, take the ride… and if it occasionally gets a little heavier than what you had in mind, well… maybe chalk it off to forced consciousness expansion: Tune in, freak out, get eaten. It’s all in Kesey’s Bible… The Far Side of Reality.
And so much for bad gibberish; not even Kesey can help me I have just had two very bad emotional experiences - with the California Highway Patrol and another with a phantom hitchhiker who may or may not have been who I thought it was - and now, feeling right on the verge of a bad psychotic episode, I am hunkered down with my tape machine in a “beer bar” that is actually the back room of a huge Hardware Barn - all kinds of plows and harnesses and piled - up fertilizer bags, and wondering how it all happened.
About five miles back I had a brush with the CHP. Not stopped or pulled over: nothing routine. I always drive properly. A bit fast, perhaps, but always with consummate skill and a natural feel for the road that even cops recognize. No cop was ever born who isn’t a sucker for a finely - executed hi - speed Controlled Drift all the way around one of those cloverleaf freeway interchanges.
Few people understand the psychology of dealing with a highway traffic cop. Your normal speeder will panic and immediately pull over to the side when he sees the big red light behind him… and then we will start apologizing, begging for mercy.
This is wrong. It arouses contempt in the cop - heart.
12. Hellish Speed… Grappling with the California Highway Patrol… Mano a Mano on Highway 61
Tuesday, 12:30 P.M… Baker, California… Into the Ballantine Ale now, zombie drunk and nervous. I recognize this feeling: three or four days of booze, drugs, sun, no sleep and burned out adrenalin reserves - a giddy, quavering sort of high that means the crash is coming. But when? How much longer? This tension is part of the high. The possibility of physical and mental collapse is very real now
… but collapse is out of the question; as a solution or even a cheap alternative, it is unacceptable.
Indeed. This is the moment of truth, that fine and fateful line between control and disaster - which is also the difference between staying loose and weird on the streets, or spending the next five years of summer mornings playing basketball in the yard at Carson City.
No sympathy for the devil; keep that in mind. Buy the ticket, take the ride… and if it occasionally gets a little heavier than what you had in mind, well… maybe chalk it off to forced consciousness expansion: Tune in, freak out, get eaten. It’s all in Kesey’s Bible… The Far Side of Reality.
And so much for bad gibberish; not even Kesey can help me I have just had two very bad emotional experiences - with the California Highway Patrol and another with a phantom hitchhiker who may or may not have been who I thought it was - and now, feeling right on the verge of a bad psychotic episode, I am hunkered down with my tape machine in a “beer bar” that is actually the back room of a huge Hardware Barn - all kinds of plows and harnesses and piled - up fertilizer bags, and wondering how it all happened.
About five miles back I had a brush with the CHP. Not stopped or pulled over: nothing routine. I always drive properly. A bit fast, perhaps, but always with consummate skill and a natural feel for the road that even cops recognize. No cop was ever born who isn’t a sucker for a finely - executed hi - speed Controlled Drift all the way around one of those cloverleaf freeway interchanges.
Few people understand the psychology of dealing with a highway traffic cop. Your normal speeder will panic and immediately pull over to the side when he sees the big red light behind him… and then we will start apologizing, begging for mercy.
This is wrong. It arouses contempt in the cop - heart.