Fear and Loathing Made Easy

I imagine my deliverance coming in the form of a bottle of Klonopin I find in my pocket and take with me into the bathroom. Going out on a handful of ’90’s designer drugs, frothing at the mouth and thinking of pigeons and insects, millions of insects; fade to black, maybe white as a final electrical surge jolts through my occipital lobe in one last desperate bid, on the image of Piccadilly Circus as I saw it, chasing pigeons as Underworld’s “Born Slippy” pulses through my head. As such my prayers go unanswered, and we are only at the half-way point. When we boarded, and I plopped down, I instantly went through a Rolodex in my head and settled on the Ramones. I was going to do it. I was actually going to stand up and start screeching out “I Wanna Be Sedated!” I thought the better of it and sank further in my seat.

Billy Corgan wailing in my ear isn’t helping. In a desperate bid for entertainment I almost get into a swedge w/ the bloke in front of me who keeps tilting his seat back; two sweaty half-formed men taking potshots, jabbing a’ each other up ’n down the aisles like a human version of Amores Perros. Look at me. At this point I look like a Ralph Steadman sketch. Sweat lashes off me.

The clouds outside my window, they’re the kind killed Buddy Holly. I’m borderline breaking down, George Clinton is screaming “free you mind and your ass will follow! The Kingdom of Heaven is within!” and I’m muttering along, almost like a mantra and maybe this is how the Manson chicks felt when Charlie gave ’em that Merry Pranksters shit, fresh from the Owsley Stanley pipeline.

The plane managed to land, skeleton at the controls, a place called the Twilight Zone...

Help me Dr. Octagon, I’m on my way out.

A Taxi sputters up to the curb and I throw the door open to be greeted by a gaping hole and the cheap cement it opens onto. The cabbie stares at me through the side mirror.

“You gettin’ in?”

I place the suit case next to me on the backseat, shut the door and lift my legs, propping them against the back of the cabbie’s seat. I have my hand firmly on my case to prevent it from sliding around and alternate between looking at up the sights through the window and past the highways – mostly peeling billboards, and palm trees with leaves reaching up just over the barricades - and down at the blur of concrete gliding past.

“You could at least put down at net. Or something.”

“Tha’s a good idea!”  

I ring the bell at check-in and the clerk, a pygmy, pops up. I guess kinda like Steve freakin’ Buscemi in that Cohen brothers movie. And like that Cohen brothers movie, he acts as bellboy too.

He waddles on his stubby legs, carrying my case and jangling the room key.  

The Immoral Mr. Teas – that’s his name – “The Immoral Mr. Teas” –

“Like the Russ Meyer movie?” He ignores me when I ask him that –

was sunbathing on the deck, his trunks the same dark red flesh color as him. He didn’t just have a beer gut, he had the whole beer keg hanging down over his cock. Sunglasses he never took off. Straw hat capping off a face too ovaloid for the rest of his body.

At first I thought we got the wrong room. Then Hervé Villechaize here explains that, because of my parsimoniousness, I was stuck sharing the room with this sun-tanned abomination.

I sat in a swivel and turned to face the small desk the room came with. The double doors open, an ocean breeze ruffled the page I’d stuck into the Smith-Corona – same typewriter Lester Bangs used – while I bang out this story. National Lampoon’s Fear and Loathing. Sounds fitting.

Teas is out, no doubt terrorizing local bar waitresses with his fabled uncut Harry Reems windmilling about.

Another night, Teas takes me out drinking in a canteen not far from the plasterboard shack that guide books still classify as a hotel.

He orders that tequila these rubes drink with the worm in them – in most cases, a moth larva. A shot for him, and I get the shot with the drowned worm in it. I wasn’t even looking when I took the shot and only after I’d swallowed did the sick fuck point it out.

“Eh?”

“Very horrorshow, comrade.”

I jot all this down. He looks over my shoulder.

“It’s Mezcal you blind bastard, not freakin’ tequila.”

He then explains the difference and I politely nod.

I still have no clue.

I think the morning after the next is when Teas took me to see the execution. This small Latin American joint, the closest we still have to a banana republic this side of the 21st century - though with blow instead of fruits, a pygmy-sized Pablo instead of Sam the Banana Man, a single, holistic cartel in place of United Fruit – still had policies borrowed and left over from Augusto Pinochet’s tenure down in Chile.

Ten little Che’s, all in a row.

Feuer Frei!

Ten little corpses doused in lye.

Guerrilleros Heroicos es Muertos.

Write that down.

Teas ordered the bartender to mix us a couple Pisco Sours. That was last night or some other night.

I could go for one now, I tell Teas.

He tells us he could make them, but that he can’t be arsed.

He lazily makes us a pitcher of Caipirinha and we take it out onto the beach.

Night surf.

We finish off half the pitcher and slowly sing “Nightswimming”, fumbling the words as we try to remember Michael Stipe’s lyrics.

Less than 24 hours later, I see this guy get a glass bottle upside the head. We’re at the same dirty canteena we are most nights at that point. Someone hits the jukebox and this guy gets up from the table where he’s drinking with his buddies and starts doin’ the Jean-Claude dance from Kickboxer. We’re all applauding. Then, the table next to his is flipped over and these two putas are at each other’s throats. Spanish Muscles-from-Brussels over there tries to get in the middle only to wind up needing stitches after they pick shards out of his scalp an hour later.   

I saw a man die today. Another one. This one went the full Pinochet.

We crowded a grassy area off to the side of a helipad. They ushered a bald-headed communista into a chopper, already whirling and kicking up blades of grass. It ascended – I ask Teas standing next to me and he guesses maybe ’tween seven and nine-thousand feet. Then we watch a shape plummet, smashing into the pavement a few dozen yards away from us.

...Teas dragged me to a whorehouse, only for us to stop a block away, watching as it got raided.

...A trabajo chopping sugar cane with a cane knife collapses after a snake pops out between the stalks and fangs him.

...Beachgoer - Girl – dragged out to sea by a rip tide. I didn’t stick around to watch the rescue.  

...All the Pisco Sours you can drink. No worms, too.  

Tuesday. I don’t think I saw anything as dramatic as Tiananmen Square, but I think I came close. A tank about to roll over a crowd of protestors before they dispersed.

Wednesday. Saw Teas chatting with a girl leading a donkey by a leash. They went off together, all three of them. Let strangers stay strangers.

Thursday. Today, I had a slim piece; then I had a thick piece. Well, some of that’s true. One outta two ain’t bad.

Friday. TV. Teas rocking in a corner of our room, bloodshot eyes. Praying he doesn’t molest me.  

Saturday thru Sunday – the lost weekend. Bats! Bats comin’ out the walls! Was that the movie with Ray Milland?

The following Tuesday, I thumb through a copy of Cosmo. Used.

A small brush fire. Teas sez: eh, we’re on the coast. Where’s it gonna go?

Stay up into the early morning hours watching The Wages of Fear and its American remake Sorcerer.

When later we get plastered, we bullshit about driving a truck over a rope bridge, like in the William Friedkin movie. We realize that wouldn’t work. We try a Jeep instead.

Thursday? – Teas didn’t really die. But we attended his funeral anyway. Me as myself, Teas as his twin, Deas. We shake hands with mourners and funeral crashers. Closed casket. A simple pine box, already hammered shut. “Wild Horses” plays. We lower the wood into the earth. There. That should satisfy Teas’ loan sharks.

We hit up a betting parlor on the way to the hotel. Now it’s Deas’ turn at crippling debt.

Another lost weekend, partially reconstructed. This is the last one.

Wednesday night and Thursday morning; watch a Lethal Weapon marathon on TV, all dubbed in Spanish. Fight off Teas’ advances. He sleeps on the beach. Tries to get back in during the night by way of the French doors on the deck. Breaks the wooden railing falling backwards after I karate kick his ass outta the room.

Thursday morning. More crap on TV. Quick breakfast followed by a mad dash to the airport.   

Departure Time.

On the tarmac, I eye de plane! suspiciously.

“Can that bird even fly?”

“It’s as fit for the air as Titanic was for water.”

I opt to charter a fishing vessel instead, in the end taking two weeks to island hop across the Caribbean and Gulf of Mexico.

And all this is mostly true.

Mostly.

At least, it happened to someone.   

If this is the worst travelogue ever written by man, woman, or communist - so be it. I’m glad it is. That’s what I tell myself: I’m glad it is. I’m glad this is the worst, most irresponsibly asinine Gonzo piece ever written.

Hunter Thompson and his lawyer got hammered in Vegas to find the American dream. You go to the place where the wave crashed – where Peter Fonda finally said “Well, we blew it, didn’t we?” - and at just the right spot, if you flip over the right rock, you’ll find Nixon - alive and well - waving at you. I brave the places where the white man fears to tread to score. Barbiturates. Women. Colonial instinct.  

That goddam worm doesn’t make you hallucinate. That’s just a lie rubes will tell you.

And there’s a stark contrast between Tequila and Mezcal. So I’m told.