Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas   ::   Thompson Hunter S.

Innes told a neighbor last Saturday, the day after he first took the drug, that his eyes were bothering him and that he could not read.

Wednesday night police said Innes seemed to be in a deeply depressed state and so impervious to pain that he did not scream when he pulled out his eyes.

2. Another Day, Another Convertible… Another Hotel Full of Cops

2. Another Day, Another Convertible… Another Hotel Full of Cops

The first order of business was to get rid of the Red Shark. It was too obvious. Too many people might recognize it, especially the Vegas police; although as far as they knew, the thing was already back home in L.A. It was last seen running at top speed across Death Valley on Interstate 15. Stopped and warned in Baker by the CHP… then suddenly disapeared…

The last place they would look for it, I felt, was in a rental - car lot at the airport. I had to go out there anyway, to meet my attorney. He would be arriving from L.A. in the late afternoon.

I drove very quietly on the freeway, gripping my normal instinct for bursts of acceleration and sudden lane changes - trying to remain inconspicuous - and when I got there I parked the Shark between two old Air Force buses in a “utility lot” about half a mile from the terminal. Very tall buses. Make it hard as possible for the fuckers. A little walking never hurt anybody.

By the time I got to the terminal I was pouring sweat. But nothing abnormal. I tend to sweat heavily in warm climates.clothes are soaking wet from dawn to dusk. This worried at first, but when I went to a doctor and described my normal daily intake of booze, drugs and poison he told me to come back when the sweating stopped. That would be the danger point, he said - a sign that my body’s desperately overworked flushing mechanism had broken down completely. “I have great faith in the natural processes,” he said. “But in your case… well… I find no precedent. We’ll just have to wait and see, then work with what’s left.”

I spent about two hours in the bar, drinking Bloody Marys for the V - 8 nutritional content and watching the flights from L.A. I’d eaten nothing but grapefruit for about twenty hours and my head was adrift from its moorings.

You better watch yourself, I thought. There are limits to what the human body can endure. You don’t want to break down and start bleeding from the ears right here in the terminal. Not in this town. In Las Vegas they kill the weak and deranged.

I realized this, and kept quiet even when I felt symptoms of a terminal blood - sweat coming on. But this passed.